Humans received a God-given freedom to choose between a lifestyle that fosters life on this planet or that leads to death for the earth and its inhabitants. In the words of Deuteronomy 30:19: “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”
The international Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 summoned all nations to assume responsibility for the proper care of the earth. This challenge demands a return to the Bible to see whether we have understood its teaching concerning the role of human beings in God’s creation.
One text immediately leaps to our attention. The Genesis creation story announces God’s decision to create the human species in “the image of God” (Genesis 1:26–27). The resolution was accompanied by a mandate: “Let them have dominion” over non-human creatures. And God’s blessing empowered human beings to carry out this command.
“God blessed them and said to them: ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28, NIV).
At first glance, this text is problematic in our time of environmental pollution and population explosion. In his widely published 1967 essay, Lynn White, Jr. maintained that the Jewish-Christian tradition, which has dominated the West, bears “a huge burden of guilt” for the ecological crisis. In sharp contrast to other religions, including that of native Americans, Christianity “not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.” White did not discuss the issue of population expansion (“filling the earth”); he maintained with considerable force, however, that the mandate to “subdue the earth” has become a warrant for a tyrannical domination of our environment.1
The verbs translated “rule” or “subdue” do suggest forceful action, but here they do not necessarily imply tyrannical domination or “the lay of the land” to cite the double-edged title of Annette Kolodny’s book.2 Divine approval of violence is out of place in the context of Genesis 1, which portrays a “peaceable kingdom” in which humans and animals coexist harmoniously. Not until the Flood, according to the biblical narrative, was this primeval peace modified by limited divine permission to slaughter animals for food, though with proper reverence for life—animal and especially human (Genesis 9:1–7).
Some guidance for the interpretation of God’s granting humans dominion over other living creatures (Genesis 1:26–28) is given within the Bible itself: the magnificent eighth psalm. Looking up into the night skies, where the stars flash like a carpet of jewels and the moon reigns in queenly splendor, an inspired poet is moved to wonder that the creator of this vast universe pays any attention to human beings at all. Even more overwhelming, however, is the wonder that the creator has elevated this tiny, ephemeral creature to a high role in God’s cosmic administration—up toward the level of the “heavenly beings” or “angels” that compose God’s heavenly council.
“Yet you have placed them slightly below heavenly beings,
And with honor and majesty have crowned them.
You have given them dominion over your handiwork,
Everything you have put in subjection to them:
Sheep and oxen all together,
wild beasts also,
Birds of the air and fish of the sea,
Everything that courses through the waterways.”
Psalms 8:3–6 (author’s translation)
There are striking affinities between this excerpt from Psalm 8 and Genesis 1:26, even though the expression “image of God” is not used in the psalm. In both passages we find the notion of God’s heavenly court. In Genesis 1:26 God says, “Let us make humankind in our image.” In both passages human beings are commissioned to exercise dominion, and non-human creatures are listed. There is, however, one major difference. In the psalm there is no suggestion that human dominion is based upon a divine blessing that empowers men and women to multiply and subdue the earth. Rather, human dominion is the consequence of God’s elevation of humanity to a royal role—“crowned with honor and majesty,” terms that are used of an earthly king (Psalms 45:4f.; 110:3). God has “caused him to rule,” language that is also used of a reigning monarch (Isaiah 19:4; Micah 5:2). And God has put everything under his feet, like booty (see Psalm 2:8). In this poetic view, humanity is invested with a royal splendor that raises it above the animal level into the sphere of God’s cosmic rule. But men and women are not autonomous beings, at liberty to do whatever they please. Crowned as kings and queens, they are commissioned to exercise their God-given role wisely and benevolently so that God’s dominion over the earth may be manifest in their actions.
When viewed in the light of Psalm 8, the creation story of Genesis 1 is a call to responsibility. To be sure, we do not find there the poetic motif of the coronation of human beings as God’s royal representatives. Nevertheless, the verb “rule” in Genesis 1:26 is used elsewhere of the king (Psalm 110:2, “rule in the midst of your foes” and Psalm 72:8, “May he have 010dominion from sea to sea”). Moreover, scholars point out that in texts from ancient Babylonia and Egypt the motif of “image of God” is used of the reigning monarch. As one scholar observes, “In the ancient Near East, the king imaged or ‘re-presented’ his divine patron in heaven by acting for the god, thus resembling the god in a dynamic rather than a static way.”3 In that same way, in Genesis, human beings are commissioned to exercise royal dominion over the earth on behalf of God, the creator-king. And good monarchs do not exploit or tyrannize their realm but administer the God-given law wisely, upholding justice and peace in society.4
In the biblical primeval history (Genesis 1–11) no limits seem to be placed on the growth of the population. The catastrophe of the Flood is understood as God’s judgment upon human violence and corruption (Genesis 6:11–12), not as a way of reducing the population. This is quite a different view than that of the Atrahasis epic, which dates from the 17th century B.C. In this long Babylonian poem—which was probably well known at the time of the composition of the biblical primeval history—the gods send a great flood to annihilate humankind since all other means of controlling the propagation of the species have failed. This document apparently reflects a world in which overpopulation was a problem.5
When you stop to think of it, it is strange—at least when viewed from our present ecological crisis—that the biblical account places no limits on population growth. The divine blessing given in Genesis 1:28 enables human beings to do two things: to populate the earth and to subdue it. The fish are given a blessing to multiply and fill the waters (Genesis 1:22). No such blessing is given to the land animals. The blessing is reserved for the supreme earthling, ’adam (“human being”). Population growth is related to the exercise of human dominion over the earth.
My study leads me to conclude that the command “be fruitful and multiply” cannot be transposed into our situation simply and without qualification. Other things have to be taken into consideration, such as the original social and cultural setting of the text and above all other theological perspectives given in the Bible. Human beings, made in the image of God, are given the intelligence and ability to rise above the animal level and bring the propagation of the species under control. And above all, they have the God-given freedom to choose between a lifestyle that leads to continued life on the planet or one that leads to death for the earth and its inhabitants. They can hear and respond to the great imperative of Deuteronomy 30:19: “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” This subject invites further exploration and study.
The international Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 summoned all nations to assume responsibility for the proper care of the earth. This challenge demands a return to the Bible to see whether we have understood its teaching concerning the role of human beings in God’s creation. One text immediately leaps to our attention. The Genesis creation story announces God’s decision to create the human species in “the image of God” (Genesis 1:26–27). The resolution was accompanied by a mandate: “Let them have dominion” over non-human creatures. And God’s blessing empowered human beings to carry out this […]
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Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 155 (1967), pp. 1204–1207.
2.
Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). Written from a Freudian perspective.
3.
Richard J. Clifford, S.J., “The Bible and the Environment,” paper presented to a conference on “Preserving the Creation: Environmental Theology and Ethics,” Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., April 1992.
4.
See further my 1971 essay, “Human Dominion Over Nature,” in Biblical Studies in Contemporary Thought, ed. Miriam Ward, R.S.M. (Greeno, Hadden & Co., 1975), pp. 27–45.
5.
The Atrahasis myth is summarized and discussed by Norbert Lohfink, S.J. “The Future: Biblical Witness to the Ideal of a Stable World,” in Great Themes from the Old Testament (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1982), pp. 183–201.
