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Today — the First Sunday after Pentecost — is Trinity Sunday.
It is often said that more heresy is preached on this particular day than any other day of the Christian year! Far too many naive sermonizers have sought to explain the mystery of the Trinity to their congregations and ended up with a theological mess on their hands.
Part of the tradition for the day in liturgical churches is reading the entire chapter of Genesis 1. That’s because of the specific verses below — Genesis 1:26-31 in which God uses the plural to refer to God’s own self: “Let us make humankind in our image.” Although it is theologically anachronistic (and probably inappropriate as well!) to find this passage as evidence of a trinitarian God, that’s exactly what generations of Christian thinkers have done.
I’m content to let the incomprehensibility of the Trinity remain with poets and philosophers. So, instead, I’m musing today on God as the Creator — and the meaning of a single word in this much-misused text: dominion.
Genesis 1:26-2:3
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.
This week, I spent a few hours binge-watching the new Amazon Prime documentary, Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets. The series unpacks the popularity — and downfall — of the Duggar family and their television reality show, “19 Kids and Counting.”
The Duggars are fundamentalist Christians who take the words “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” literally. They don’t practice birth control. Instead, they believe that the godly are called to have as many children as is biologically possible to fulfill the mandate to “have dominion” over the world by out-populating non-believers, liberals, and infidels. Their show was eventually cancelled when it was discovered that their eldest son, Josh (who, for a time, worked in Christian right politics at the Family Research Council in Washington, DC), had sexually abused his sisters. Josh Duggar would later be convicted on child pornography charges and is now serving a twelve-year prison sentence.
The documentary, however, didn’t just focus on this one family. Instead, it placed the Duggars in context of a larger world of right-wing Christianity — linking them to the Institute of Basic Life Principles — a movement founded by Bill Gothard that emphasized large families, obedience and submission, physical discipline for children, homeschooling, and conservative politics. Gothard’s ideas have influenced millions of Christians in conservative churches (including the church I attended as a high school student).
Gothard popularized God’s “umbrella,” a hierarchy of orderly creation where men have dominion over women; and parents held dominion over children.
This vision extended from the godly home to making a godly society — where righteous believers would exercise dominion over the world. The Duggars were and still are deeply involved in IBLP — as are many of their political allies in Arkansas (their home state) like their close associates, Mike Huckabee and his family (Sarah Huckabee Sanders is currently the governor of Arkansas).
Dominion. There’s that word. Indeed, the Duggars embrace and practice a form of dominionism seeking to institute biblical law on the nation — a commission drawn by its adherents directly from Genesis 1:28. That is a theological foundation of Christian nationalism.
“Dominion” has long been problematic even before its current political associations. In western Christianity, “dominion” has often been interpreted as power, mastery, rule, and authority over others in a hierarchical society. Dominion has been used to justify all sorts of religious crusades, pogroms, and genocides. It was twinned with “dominate,” inspiring the power-hungry with a biblical justification to conquer all the earth’s resources and peoples. After all, the scriptures say to “subdue” — as in to “hold in bondage” — creation.
Jewish writers have been more thoughtful with this text than Christians, emphasizing that “dominion” must be exercised within the whole of creation — not separate from it or as exploitation. As Christian ethicist Larry Rasmussen points out regarding Jewish interpretation of this text, “It is humble participation with God in ongoing creation as a totally interrelated reality, accompanied with a high sense of moral responsibility for consequences. We are shomrei adama — guardians of earth.”
Custodians. Stewards. Co-creators. Partners. Indeed, the words translated “exercise dominion over” might be better translated as “exercise mastery among.” As Hebrew scholars note, “among” doesn’t mean to rule but implies to wander around with — such as a shepherd among his flock. “Dominion” is ultimately a communal concept, human beings — male and female with no distinction of role — tend, care for, keep, guard, and minister with God and within creation itself for the sake of the earth.
Genesis 1 is about community and relationship, not domination and power. There is an order, but it is not hierarchical. Rather, it is a harmony of interrelatedness, responsible care, and shared creativity. The chapter does not end with some regal, victorious God on a throne, like a military conquerer. The story of creation is finished with God’s delight in God’s own work — with the rest of sabbath, the day of trust and gratitude. Genesis 1 depicts a dominion of sabbath. And that’s the human task — to invite the rest of creation — the fish and birds and all living things — into this dominion, “subduing” creation to sabbath.
What would it mean to exercise a dominion that binds all of creation to sabbath?
This “dominion” of relationship, creativity, and sabbath is about as far from Christian dominionism as is possible to get theologically.
The Duggars and their collaborators are only the latest example of a long, sad history of misusing “dominion” in service of their own power. They seek to dominate creation and community instead of recognizing that ours is a “dominion” of mutual participation and wholeness. We need the earth and each other.
So much damage has been done by twisting a word.
For every work (or act) of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.
First, (not in time, but merely in order of enumeration) there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning:
and this the image of the Father.
Second, there is the Creative Energy (or Activity) begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter:
and this is the image of the Word.
Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.
And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work,
whereof none can exist without the other:
and this is the image of the Trinity.
— Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
INSPIRATION
O God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers the animals to whom thou gavest the earth as their home in common with us.
We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of humankind with ruthless cruelty so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to thee in song, has been a groan of travail.
May we realize that they live not for us alone but for themselves and for thee, and that they love the sweetness of life.
— Basil of Caesarea, c. 360
If created life shares in the uncreated life of God through the all-pervasive presence of the Spirit, then we humans, bonded to one another and the rest of nature, must respect the mystery of life and acknowledge the dignity of all creatures. In our co-existence with the rest of nature, we may understand ourselves in various ways — as the present trustees of the tiny speck of creation called Earth, as servants of the Spirit and the earth, as the priests of creation, as its tillers and keepers, as co-creators, or as that portion of nature come to consciousness of itself in creation’s own on-going life. But in all cases, we ought to let our understanding be informed by the knowledge that we belong to the community of all created life; let our whole orientation be governed by deep respect for this community of ability to the Spirit, one another, and the rest of the biotic community. We wield an awesome collective power to affect all life in fundamental and unprecedented ways and we pray for a humble and contrite spirit in its use. May the Giver of Life give us life and the attitude of prayer, that we might be worthy participants in sustaining the only creation we know.
— World Council of Churches, Kuala Lumpur report, 1990
It’s striking that in Genesis 1 what we know of God, really the only things that we know of God, is that God creates and God values what God has made. God sees it as good, but that can also be translated, “God saw how beautiful it was.” And I think there’s almost an element of surprise, of delight, that, you know, we know from our own smaller creations. And so God is, in a sense, the first appreciator of the world, the first one to see that it is beautiful.
— Ellen Davis
I go in pilgrimage
Across an old fenced boundary
To wildness without age
Where, in their long dominion,
The trees have been left free.
They call the soil here “Eden”; slants and steeps
Hard to stand straight upon
Even without a burden.
No more a perfect garden,
There’s an immortal memory that it keeps.
I leave work’s daily rule
And come here to this restful place
Where music stirs the pool
And from high stations of the air
Fall notes of wordless grace,
Strewn remnants of the primal Sabbath’s hymn.
And I remember here
A tale of evil twined
With good, serpent and vine
And innocence of evil’s stratagem.
I let that go a while,
For it is hopeless to correct
By generations’ toil,
And I let go my hopes and plans
That no toil can perfect.
There is no vision here but what is seen:
White bloom nothing explains.
But a mute blessedness
Exceeding all distress,
The fresh light stained a hundred shades of green.
Uproar of wheel and fire
That has contained us like a cell
Opens and lets us hear
A stillness longer than all time
Where leaf and song fulfill
The passing light, pass with the light, return,
Renewed, as in rhyme.
This is no human vision
Subject to our revision;
God’s eye holds every leaf as light is worn.
Ruin is in place here:
The dead leaves rotting on the ground,
The live leaves in the air
Are gathered in a single dance
That turns them round and round.
The fox cub trots his almost pathless path
As silent as his absence.
These passings resurrect
A joy without defect,
The life that steps and sings in ways of death.
— Wendell Berry
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I went to a week-long (I think) Gothard seminar when I was a teenager. I'm still damaged by it, and I'm now 67. You'd think I'd be over it, but, alas. I hated it at the time, and still do. My sister took me and thought it was wonderful.
Interesting to note that, whatever is intended by "dominion" over the other animals in Genesis 1:28f, it does not extend to killing them for food; in this passage, the alimentary dispensation for all animals (including humans) is explicitly vegetarian. Killing other animals for food is finally countenanced by God only in the Noachic dispensation (Gen. 9), and then only as a concession to the insatiability of our animal appetites: "for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth" (8:21). Still, the idealistic vision of universal vegetarianism (however biologically implausible) emerges again in the Isaian oracle of the wolf lying down with the lamb, and the lion eating straw like the ox (Is. 11:6ff). On these and related Judaeo-Christian perspectives regarding interspecies ethics, see (if interested) https://www.academia.edu/45012966/Beyond_Stewardship_Judaeo_Christian_Alternatives_to_Dominionism