From Dominion to Collaboration

December 13, 2020 • Third Sunday of Advent
Reading: Genesis 1:26-31 (New Revised Standard Version)
Rev. Jeff Wells, Church of the Village (NYC)

If you have been reading my messages to the congregation this week, you know that I have had “dominion” on my mind. The theme of today’s worship can be boiled down to this: humanity desperately needs to move away from lording it over the earth and using all of its resources only for our own benefit and moving to a conscious posture of collaboration and community with the rest of the natural world. Check out the two pieces I wrote this week. [1] 

For much of Christian history, the passage from the Book of Genesis that Alfida just read has been frequently interpreted to mean that God gave human beings the mandate to dominate, subdue, and exploit the rest of God's creation. This dangerous myth of “dominion” has led, in part, to the terrible mass extinction crisis and climate crisis from which the whole earth and all of its inhabitants are now suffering. Of course, the Bible is not solely at fault for the current disasters we face, but it has certainly contributed and even now is often implicitly and sometimes explicitly used to justify individual and societal actions that harm the atmosphere, water, and land on which all life depends. And, let’s confess, that many centuries, most expressions of Christianity have failed to confront the devastating effects of industrialization and globalization that have brought us to this place. 

Yet if, as Genesis states, God intended to “make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…." and believing, as we do, that God loves every microbe, fungi, insect, plant, and animal just as much as God loves humans, then surely God calls us not to “dominion” but to loving collaboration with the whole of the creating-evolving natural order we inhabit. I want to explain that term “creating-evolving order” because I have not used it before. What I mean that phrase is that the ecosystems, our planet, and the whole universe in which we exist are not simply “created,” nor only evolved. God is a creative God who lures, invites, and tries to influence our decisions and directions and does the same with all elements of the universe. At the same time, God does not dictate or determine the evolutionary process. Thus, we can say, we exist in a creating-evolving order. 

The dominion mandate in Genesis has frequently gotten the most attention, yet there is a rich and broad tradition in the Bible that presents the relationship of human beings to the rest of “creation” in ways that are much closer to the sense of community and collaboration I am advocating. Even the passage in Genesis can be and understood in other ways. 

In fact, along with the growth of the modern environmental movement that arose in the 1960s, there has been a movement to re-frame the term “dominion” in the Book of Genesis as God's call for human stewardship and responsible care for creation. So, for example, in 1972, the United Methodist Church first added a section called “The Natural World” to the denomination’s Social Principles that emphasized stewardship. The most recent draft of the Social Principles goes further to state, "We affirm that all creation belongs to God and is a manifestation of God’s goodness and providential care. Human beings, nonhuman animals, plants, and other sentient and non sentient beings participate in the community of creation, and their flourishing depends on the care of all God’s creation." [2] The 2015 encyclical letter from Pope Francis titled, “Laudato Si’ – On care for Our Common Home” criticizes “excessive anthropocentrism” and says forthrightly, “Instead, our ‘dominion’ over the universe should be understood more properly in the sense of responsible stewardship.”

Yet, these and similar proclamations do not go far enough because, in them, human stewardship – though presented as more benevolent than dominion – remains based on supremacy of the human species and mastery over the rest of nature. I am convinced we need to re-envision our role as moving beyond caring for nature to being in community with the air, land, water, microbes, fungi, plants, animals, and ecosystems. 

Our extinction and climate crises are not a newly-recognized problem. Way back in 1964, author and activist Rachel Carson wrote, “We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one less traveled by – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.” [3]

We have no more time to waste and half measures won’t save us. A report released on December 3 by the Center for Biological Diversity titled, “The Last Decade to Save the Planet,” argues that humanity has just ten years (and maybe less) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent. That’s a huge goal and a very short time frame. Yet, as the report states, “If we do not act boldly, right now, the impacts of climate change will be severe and make our planet nearly uninhabitable.” [4]

When I was growing up, a question I so often heard asked was, “Is there life on other planets?” For a long time now, that question has been superseded by this one: “Will there be life on earth if we keep going the way we have been?” I am not referring just to climate change (although that is a huge and imminent danger. On top of that, the earth’s human population went from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 7.8 billion this year and is projected to grow to almost 10 billion by 2050. According to writer Lee Van Ham, human beings are using resources at a rate that would require five planet Earths to be sustainable. [5]

We humans have failed miserably in caring for one another, so why should God entrust the care of the whole of the evolved natural order to us? No other species practices genocide. No other species pollutes the air, water, and land the way we do. No other species deliberately destroys forest habitats. Trees and all of the life they support could get along fine without human beings, but we cannot survive without them. So, while we may be the species with the greatest cognitive capacity, we have to wonder if we are actually the cleverest in the scheme of things.    

So what can we do? How do we build community with the earth, fungi, trees, animals? How do we learn to live in such a way that the whole creating-evolving order can survive and flourish? Recently, I attended a training workshop on intercultural competency, which highlighted four tools necessary for that work. It occurred to me that they are equally applicable to our task of moving humanity to join the community of the creating-evolving natural order. They are the four “E”s: Exposure, Experience,

Education, and Empathy. 

Exposure: we need to increase our contact with other species and parts of nature.

Experience: our exposure will lead to transformative experiences that build our relationships with other species and parts of nature. 

Education: We need to develop new skills, knowledge, and ways of thinking that increase our ability to be in community with the creating-evolving world around us. 

Empathy: We have to learn to be in communion with and understand other species and elements of the natural world from their perspective. As scientist Stephen Jay Gould once said, “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well – for we will not fight to save what we do not love.”

Because of the pandemic, which pushed me to live in rural Pennsylvania for the past nine months, I have regained my connection with nature in a deeper way than any time in my adult life. At 63 years old, I am finally learning the names of trees and snakes. I am learning to recognize, more intimately, the changes in the seasons and their impact on the behaviors of plants, insects, birds, and mammals. Just watching the water flow and the water level rise and fall over most of a year has been a revelation. I am also experiencing the effects of climate change in new ways as I have seen, over the past four years, warmer winters and less snowfall. This is not a Doctor Doolittle “talk to the animals” scenario. And you don’t have to live in the country to experience these things. I have had very deep experiences of connection to nature birdwatching in the Ramble or hiking the North Woods in Central Park.   

As people of faith and as followers of Jesus, we can help to undermine and replace the myth of human “dominion” with a Biblical understanding and a theology that moves us toward collaboration and community with the earth, all of the living beings that inhabit it, and with the whole of the universe. 

The best thing I read in preparing for this sermon is the chapter on “The Community of Creation” by Catholic theologian, Elizabeth Johnson. Her book is called, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love and I highly recommend it. As she puts it, we need a “paradigm of the community of creation, based on the understanding that humans and other living beings, for all their differences, form one community woven together by the common thread of having been created by God.” [6] This perspective is strikingly similar to the view of John Wesley in a sermon written in the 1700s that we heard at the beginning of worship: 

“God is in all things, and…we are to see the Creator in the glass of every creature;…we should use and look upon nothing as separate from God…but, with a true magnificence of thought, survey heaven and earth, and all that is therein, as contained by God in the hollow of his hand, who by his intimate presence holds them all in being, who pervades and actuates the whole created frame, and is, in a true sense, the soul of universe.”

This illustrates a remarkable tilt toward the idea of a community of creation on the part of Wesley in the years just before the first industrial revolution.

Of course, moving from dominion to collaboration and community with nature is not the only or perhaps even the most important thing we can do as people of faith. God also calls us to study and learn as much as we can about what brought us to this crisis and what needs to be done to turn the tide. We need to sound the alarm among our family, friends, co-workers, and legislative representatives at every level of government. We will need to get masses of people into the streets. And we need to practice the four “E”s. Let’s build community with the creating-evolving order we inhabit. Let’s be collaborators!

Please join me in a spirit of prayer: 

Luring and Loving God, help us to grasp the terrible crisis humans have created and struggle 
with all our might to slow and reverse the consequences of our failures to act earlier. 
Bring us to the realization that you love the microbes, fungi, plants, insects, and animals just as much as you love us.
Lead us back into community with creation as you always intended. The ship is sinking.
We are already in the lifeboats. Help us to save all that we can. 

In the way of Jesus. Amen.

(c) 2020 Jeff Wells
All rights reserved.

[1] See Pastor Jeff’s piece on Dec. 9 in The Resistance Prays:
https://us16.campaign-archive.com/?u=91e9acea941a467cb79dbda1b&id=6d589e976e
To subscribe, go to: https://www.theresistanceprays.org.
Read Pastor Jeff’s reflection from Dec. 10, “God Save Us from ‘Dominion Over’” at:
https://mailchi.mp/5b4d71377688/god-save-us-from-dominion-over

[2] UM Social Principles 2020, https://umcsocialprinciples2021.org/translations.
[3] Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1964)
[4] “The Last Decade to Save the Planet,” available at: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3-wagtail.biolgicaldiversity.org/documents/50_Critical_Environmental_Reforms_to_Transform_the_Federal_Government.pdf
[5] Lee Van Ham, From Egos to Eden: Our Heroic Journey to Keep Earth Livable (San Diego: One Earth Publishing, 2017)

[6] Elizabeth A. Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love. Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

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