As we weigh the "Lynn White thesis" that the "dominion clause" (Genesis 1:26, 28) has made
Christianity uniquely anthropocentric and so uniquely destructive of the
living environment in "Religion and Ecology," I usually have students read through the creation accounts in the first two chapters of Genesis. This is inevitably exciting since everyone's heard about these texts but few have read them in all their strange glory; for most students it's news even that there are two accounts!
This year I split them up. We read the first (Genesis 1:1-2:3) on Tuesday, with Lynn White's eponymous essay and Mari Joerstad's account of personalistic forces in Genesis 1. Today we read the second (2:4-25), with a retrieval of Genesis 1-2 by Mmapula Diana Kebaneilwe, an ecowomanist theologian from Botswana, and a queer reckoning with the narrative exclusions of Lynn White's argument. Taking time over them this way led to many more discoveries - for me, too. Everyone knows (well...) that in Genesis 1 God creates humanity in his image, "male and female" (1:27), whereas in the better known rendering of Genesis 2 the LORD God creates the man first, and the woman later as a helper - from his rib. But somehow I'd forgotten that the woman is created only after the man is offered every sort of animal companion, created for this purpose out of the same ground.
In the account of Genesis 1 the animals are of course created before humans. For that matter, in the Genesis 2 account, even the trees are created after the man is (2:8-9)! The second account is not just patriarchal but profoundly anthropocentric. None of the animist moments Joerstad identifies in Genesis 1 has a correlate in Genesis 2. The patriarchal dominionist view White critiques helps itself to bits of both accounts - those which maximize the distance between man and everything else, beginning with woman. Man is created to rule the rest of creation - a creation in need of rule. Forgotten are all the parts which suggest that humanity was part of an ecosystem, a tiller of soil, a steward of creation.
What other stories might one tell if one paid attention to the other parts? Kebaneilwe's essay does this, focusing on Genesis 1's insistence that each of God's creations was good, indeed very good. Nothing is deemed good in Genesis 2's account, but there is "It is not good that the man should be alone" (2:18). From Genesis 1 we should have learned that no one human being alone can be the image of God (the image was plural!), certainly not one kind of human in contrast to another! Thinking this through, Kebaneilwe arrives at a dazzling hope.
Students had not noticed the absence of the good in Genesis 2 but some spotted what seemed to them a suspicious absence of evil in Genesis 1. Zeroing in on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (2:9), the one the eating from which would introduce death into the world (2:17), they theorized that God got bored while resting on the seventh day, introducing evil, death, knowledge, gender hierarchy. But this was all for the best, one student suggested, because you can't have good without evil.
This idea, as you may know, is one of my all-time pet peeves and I let loose. One of the most baneful and consequential mistakes of western thought has been the idea that you can't have good without evil, or even know it! Genesis 1 is all about the obvious goodness of good, and it's in that joyous discovery that Kebaneilwe finds the hope for an end to oppression. You don't need contrast of that sort; goods complement each other, as when humans are "created in God's image, male and female"! Our problem is that we don't trust our experiences of goodness; we lose track of our natural attunement to the world, we make evil necessary! And once that idea is in place, complementary relations like those of the male and female human, or the human and the other creations, become unrecognizable, distorted into hierarchical, even qualitative oppositions!!
I think I got a little carried away; the class seemed a little stunned! I'm sure we'll return to this, perhaps when we wander into Daoism in a few weeks...
This year I split them up. We read the first (Genesis 1:1-2:3) on Tuesday, with Lynn White's eponymous essay and Mari Joerstad's account of personalistic forces in Genesis 1. Today we read the second (2:4-25), with a retrieval of Genesis 1-2 by Mmapula Diana Kebaneilwe, an ecowomanist theologian from Botswana, and a queer reckoning with the narrative exclusions of Lynn White's argument. Taking time over them this way led to many more discoveries - for me, too. Everyone knows (well...) that in Genesis 1 God creates humanity in his image, "male and female" (1:27), whereas in the better known rendering of Genesis 2 the LORD God creates the man first, and the woman later as a helper - from his rib. But somehow I'd forgotten that the woman is created only after the man is offered every sort of animal companion, created for this purpose out of the same ground.
18 Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” 19 So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20 The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. (NRSV)
In the account of Genesis 1 the animals are of course created before humans. For that matter, in the Genesis 2 account, even the trees are created after the man is (2:8-9)! The second account is not just patriarchal but profoundly anthropocentric. None of the animist moments Joerstad identifies in Genesis 1 has a correlate in Genesis 2. The patriarchal dominionist view White critiques helps itself to bits of both accounts - those which maximize the distance between man and everything else, beginning with woman. Man is created to rule the rest of creation - a creation in need of rule. Forgotten are all the parts which suggest that humanity was part of an ecosystem, a tiller of soil, a steward of creation.
What other stories might one tell if one paid attention to the other parts? Kebaneilwe's essay does this, focusing on Genesis 1's insistence that each of God's creations was good, indeed very good. Nothing is deemed good in Genesis 2's account, but there is "It is not good that the man should be alone" (2:18). From Genesis 1 we should have learned that no one human being alone can be the image of God (the image was plural!), certainly not one kind of human in contrast to another! Thinking this through, Kebaneilwe arrives at a dazzling hope.
I believe that we should concern ourselves with the questions of “what does goodness mean?” What does it imply and what is its significance with regard to the relationship between the creator himself and all of his creation? Further still, what is the significance of the said goodness with regard to the relationship between human beings themselves, as male and female as well as between human beings and the rest of creation: animals, plants, land and seas, birds and everything that exists? There is something that needs attention in the idea of an overall good creation. That is, there will be liberation for all of creation if human beings could ponder the view that in “all things” there is divine goodness as suggested by the creator at the end of every creative activity as suggested by Gen 1-2. (Mmapala Diana Kebaneilwe, "The good creation: An ecowomanist reading of Genesis 1-2," Old testam. essays 28/3 (2015): 694-703, 701)
Students had not noticed the absence of the good in Genesis 2 but some spotted what seemed to them a suspicious absence of evil in Genesis 1. Zeroing in on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (2:9), the one the eating from which would introduce death into the world (2:17), they theorized that God got bored while resting on the seventh day, introducing evil, death, knowledge, gender hierarchy. But this was all for the best, one student suggested, because you can't have good without evil.
This idea, as you may know, is one of my all-time pet peeves and I let loose. One of the most baneful and consequential mistakes of western thought has been the idea that you can't have good without evil, or even know it! Genesis 1 is all about the obvious goodness of good, and it's in that joyous discovery that Kebaneilwe finds the hope for an end to oppression. You don't need contrast of that sort; goods complement each other, as when humans are "created in God's image, male and female"! Our problem is that we don't trust our experiences of goodness; we lose track of our natural attunement to the world, we make evil necessary! And once that idea is in place, complementary relations like those of the male and female human, or the human and the other creations, become unrecognizable, distorted into hierarchical, even qualitative oppositions!!
I think I got a little carried away; the class seemed a little stunned! I'm sure we'll return to this, perhaps when we wander into Daoism in a few weeks...
