Interpretation of Dominion in Creation – a Historical Account Introduction

In a hugely influential passage of Scripture, Genesis 1:28 speaks of a ‘dominion’ (the most usual English translation) over other living creatures given by God to humans at their creation. In Genesis itself, it is clear that humans, while given a special status and responsibility for other creatures, are themselves creatures alongside their fellow-creatures.

Their ‘dominion’ is within the created order, not, like God’s, transcendent above it. Distinguished from their fellow-creatures in some respects, they are also like them in many respects. A crucial issue that will be highlighted in our exploration here of the history of interpretation of this Genesis text is the extent to which interpreters have retained a sense of the horizontal relationship of humans with their fellow-creatures along with the vertical relationship of dominion that

sets them in some sense above other creatures on earth. The loss of the horizontal relationship, in effect treating humans as gods in relation to the world, was, probably the most fateful development in Christian attitudes to the non-human creation. Only with this development did interpretation of Genesis 1:28 take its place in the ideology of aggressive domination of nature that has characterized the modern west.

The word ‘dominion’ easily enough suggests the charge of domination, i.e. of exploitative power by which humans have treated the rest of nature, animate and inanimate, as no more than a resource for human use and material for humans to fashion into whatever kind of world they might prefer to the existing one. Such an attitude has undoubtedly characterized the modern west, and has been essential to the course that the modern scientific and technological enterprise has taken, with vast implications in the economic sphere. It could well be seen as the ideological root of the ecological crisis of recent decades, and those who have tried to pin a major share of responsibility for our contemporary ecological problems on the western Christian tradition (with or without its Israelite and Jewish roots) have often focused especially on the notion of human dominion over nature given in Genesis 1. In this they have followed the lead of the celebrated article, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, by the medieval historian (a specialist in the history of medieval technology) Lynn White, Jr, first published in 1967 and reprinted a number of times since then,[1] hugely influential[2] and still so in spite of the many attempts to refute its central thesis.[3] It is a very brief article, bursting with confident and ill-substantiated generalizations that cry out for more detailed historical investigation. Yet the very simplicity of its provocative thesis has earned it a great deal of attention and has proved a useful stimulus to some of the more detailed historical study that needs to be done[4] if the thesis is to be accepted, rejected or qualified.

White’s central claim was that Christianity, as ‘the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen’, set human beings above nature (sharing, ‘in great measure, God’s transcendence of nature’),[5] dedivinized and de-sacralized nature,[6] and thus made nature into mere raw material for human exploitation (‘no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes’). By contrast with religious attitudes that either reverence nature as divine or place human beings within nature alongside other creatures, the Christian view has robbed nature of any value other than its usefulness to humanity.

Christianity has understood human beings to have been set over the rest of creation by God and given the right and even the duty to subject the whole of nature to human use. This view, based on and appealing to the key biblical text of Genesis 1:26,28, was in White’s view the ideological basis for the arrogant and aggressive domination of nature which has led to the ecological destruction of modern times.[7]

Since the rise of western science and technology, through which this domination of nature has been attempted, dates from the eleventh century, a period in which the traditional Christian view of the world was largely unchallenged in western Europe, White can argue that the modern attempt at technological conquest of nature derives directly from this traditional Christian view.

The thesis – which Wybrow calls ‘the mastery hypothesis’[8] – is not peculiar to White, whose original contribution was probably only his association of it with the late medieval beginnings of modern technological development, his own specialist area, whereas other versions of the thesis tend to see at least the ideological impetus for the modern scientific and technological project developing in the early modern period. Essentially the same thesis as White’s had, before White, been argued by Christian theologians and historians[9] who wished to claim that modern science and technology, regarded positively

as the great achievements of the modern age, were the fruit of the Christian world-view. This apologetic approach was part and parcel of a broad Christian theological strategy of justifying modernity – even its secularity – as the product of Christianity. It is ironic that, with the evermore apparent failures of modernity, the same strategy is now adopted by those who blame all the failures and evils of the modern period on Christianity, ignoring the anti-theological trend of modernity at the same time as they are themselves deeply indebted to it.

There have been many responses to White’s thesis[10] and the present chapter is another. Insofar as White made a claim about the meaning of Genesis in its own terms, responses from the perspective of biblical exegesis can fairly be said to have refuted it over and again. But the historical claim about the indebtedness of the modern project of dominating nature to long-standing Christian views of the human relationship to nature is a more complex one and not so easily answered. Our focus in writings will be on the history of the various and changing Christian interpretations of the Genesis idea of human dominion over the world, in an effort to specify how and to what extent interpretation of this idea is implicated in the beginnings and development of the modern scientific- technological project of the domination of nature. To make it clear it must start from the history of interpretation of Genesis 1:28 and associated biblical themes has been much influenced by non-biblical ideas about the human relationship to the rest of nature.

The history of Christian attitudes to the rest of nature and ideas about the human relationship to the non-human creation is a complex subject, on which much detailed research still needs to be done.[11] A focus on the idea of human dominion and interpretation of Genesis 1:28 cannot tell us everything, but the prominence Lynn White and his followers and critics have given to this aspect of the matter is not unjustified.

It is, however, important to keep in view other aspects of Christian thought about creation that could be seen to qualify or moderate what is said about the human dominion as such. We shall therefore keep the latter idea at the centre of attention, but notice also the bearing that other aspects of Christian thought had on it. My argument owes a good deal to previous responses to White and other discussions of the matter, but attempts a further clarification of the historical development.

Jeremy Cohen’s claim that, as a result of his study of Jewish and Christian interpretations of Genesis 1:28 in the patristic and medieval periods, Lynn White’s thesis ‘can now be laid to rest’[12] was a little premature. Not only does much remain to be said about those periods, but also the interpretation of Genesis 1:26,28 in the early modern period (not reached by Cohen’s study)[13] is of crucial importance to the debate.[14] Cameron Wybrow’s important book[15] partly supplies this latter gap in the discussion, but is rather narrowly focused on the exegetical validity of the interpretations of Genesis that gained ground in the early modern period, while underestimating the extent to which medieval theology prepared the ground for, without determining, the early modern development.

The argument will be that White’s historical thesis does contain an important element of truth, but that it fails as a whole because White neglected other elements in the traditional Christian attitude (or attitudes) which significantly balance and qualify the features on which he seized, and because White also neglected the new developments in the understanding of the human relationship to nature that occurred in the early modern period and to which the modern project of aggressive domination of nature can be far more directly linked than it can to the Christian tradition of pre-modern times.

The question of the origins of the contemporary ecological crisis is, of course, a much larger historical question. Answering that question would involve taking account of the modern ideology of progress (to which the ideas we shall discuss contributed only a small ingredient), modern individualism and materialism, industrialization and consumerization, the money economy and globalization – in short, a whole network of factors that characterize modernity.[16] Most of these factors can be understood only as the supersession of Christian ideals, values and practice by post-Christian and secular modes of thought, goals and forms of life. On this broad scale, the search for the origins of the contemporary ecological crisis in Christianity is certainly looking in entirely the wrong direction. But it remains significant that much Christian thought in the modern period went along with major aspects of these developments in modernity and itself gave them Christian justification. The  origins of modernity from an ecological perspective, will throw some light on what can be seen in retrospect at least to have been an ideological co-option of biblical and traditional themes to an alien end.

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[1] Lynn White, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science 155 (1967): pp. 1203-7; reprinted in Western Man and Environmental Ethics (ed. Ian G. Barbour; Reading, Massachusetts/London/Ontario: Addison-Wesley, 1973), pp. 18–30; The Care of Creation (ed R.J. Berry; Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 2000), pp. 31–42.

[2] Although White has subsequently contributed little more to the debate, he is ‘the most cited author in the field of the eco-theological discussion’, according to H. Baranzke and H. Lamberty-Zielinski, ‘Lynn White und das dominium terrae (Gen 1,28b): Ein Beitrag zu einer doppelten Wirkungsgeschichte’, BN 76 (1995): p. 56. On the influence of White’s article in solidifying the view of many environmentalists that the Judeo-Christian religious tradition is the enemy, see the interesting autobiographical comments by Max Oelschlaeger, Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental Crisis (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1994): pp. 22–7. For White’s own later contributions, see Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989): p. 95.

[3] E.g. Bill McKibben, The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994): pp. 34–5. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (2nd edn; Cambridge: CUP, 1994): pp. 27–31, still follows White, even though in his The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and Ecological Imagination (New York/Oxford: OUP, 1993): pp. 207–19, he argued that White’s thesis was mistaken in that the real roots of the ecological crisis lie not in the Christian tradition but in modernity.

[4] See especially Jeremy Cohen, ‘Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It’: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1989); Cameron Wybrow, The Bible, Baconianism, and Mastery over Nature: The Old Testament and its Modern Misreading (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). Also in part responding to White is Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (2nd edn; London: Penguin, 1984), see pp. 22–5.

[5] White, ‘Historical Roots’, p. 25.

[6] The word ‘nature’ is problematic for a number of reasons, not least because, as generally used, it seems to presuppose that humans are not part of nature; see Richard Bauckham, ‘First Steps to a Theology of Nature,’ EvQ 58 (1986): pp. 229–31. But the word is almost impossible to avoid, and will be used in this chapter in its usual sense in this context, referring to the non-human creation (and often limited to this planet).

[7] See also the even more trenchant statement of this case by Arnold Toynbee, ‘The Religious Background of the Present Ecological Crisis,’ in David and Eileen Spring, eds, Ecology and Religion in History (New York: Harper, 1974), pp. 137–49.

[8] Wybrow, Bible, Introduction and passim.

[9] Examples in Wybrow, Bible, Introduction, and Baranzke and Lamberty-Zielinski, ‘Lynn White’, pp. 50–2.

[10] See, e.g. René Dubos, ‘Franciscan Conservation versus Benedictine Stewardship,’ in Western Man (ed. Barbour), pp. 114–36; L.W. Moncrief, ‘The Cultural Basis of Our Environmental Crisis,’ in Western Man (ed. Barbour), pp. 31–42; James Barr, ‘Man and Nature: The Ecological Controversy and the Old Testament’, BJRL 55 (1972): pp. 9–32 (these three articles can also be found in Ecology [ed. Spring], pp. 114–36, 76–90, 48–75); William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York: George Braziller, 1972); John Macquarrie, ‘Creation and Environment’ in Ecology (ed. Spring), pp. 32–47; John Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature: Ecological

Problems and Western Traditions (London: Duckworth, 1974); Udo Krolzik, Umweltkrise – Folge des Christentums? (Stuttgart/Berlin: Kreuz Verlag, 1979); Robin Attfield, ‘Christian Attitudes to Nature’, JHI 44 (1983): pp. 369–86; Richard H. Hiers, ‘Ecology, Biblical Theology, and Methodology: Biblical Perspectives on the Environment’, Zygon 19 (1984): pp. 43–59; Bernhard W. Anderson, ‘Creation and Ecology’, in Creation in the Old Testament (ed. Bernhard W. Anderson; London: SPCK/Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), pp. 1–24; Jeremy Cohen, ‘The Bible, Man, and Nature in the History of Western Thought: A Call for Reassessment’, JR 65 (1985):

pp. 155–72; Cameron Wybrow, ‘The Old Testament and the Conquest of Nature: AFresh Examination’, Epworth Review 17 (1990): pp. 77–88; Wybrow, Bible; Cohen, ‘Be Fertile’; Tim Cooper, Green Christianity (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), pp. 33–8; Robin Attfield, The Ethics of Environmental Concern (2nd edn; Athens,

Georgia/London: University of Georgia Press, 1991), chapters 2–3; Robert Murray, The Cosmic Covenant (London: Sheed & Ward, 1992), pp. 161–6; Stephen R.L. Clark, How to Think about the Earth (London: Mowbray, 1993), pp. 8–19; E. Whitney, ‘Lynn White, Ecotheology and History’, Environmental Ethics 15 (1993): pp. 151–69; Baranzke and Lamberty-Zielinski, ‘Lynn White’; Theodore Hiebert, The Yahwist’s Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel (New York/Oxford: OUP, 1996).

[11] Pioneering surveys are Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967) (an immensely learned and valuable resource); H. Paul Santmire, The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985) (a study of the mainstream theological tradition, which employs a rather questionable interpretative schema).

[12] Cohen, ‘Be Fertile’, p. 5. Unfortunately for our purposes, this book, though initially stimulated by White’s thesis, gives far more attention to the command in Genesis 1:28 to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ than it does to the idea of human dominion.

[13] He makes brief reference to the Protestant Reformers only: ‘Be Fertile’, pp. 306–9.

[14] This is recognized by Gerhard Liedke, Im Bauch des Fisches: Ökologische Theologie (Stuttgart/Berlin: Kreuz Verlag, 1979), pp. 66–8; and (though with less reference to exegesis) Passmore, Man’s Responsibility, pp. 18–23.

[15] Wybrow, Bible; especially Part 3.

[16] The best succinct account of the origins of the ecological crisis is Michael S. Northcott, The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), ch. 2; see also Attfield, Ethics, chapter 1.