The Old Testament and the Environment
THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE ENVIRONMENT
James Harding
Lecture at the University of Otago, Wednesday August 15, 2007
Introduction
In his 1905 work The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, Max Weber made the following comment, which anticipates one part of the vast environmental crisis which our world is currently facing, and associates it, ultimately, with the religious roots of the ideology that underpinned the growth of global capitalism: ‘[W]hen asceticism moved out of the monastic cells and into working life, and began to dominate innerworldly morality, it helped to build that mighty cosmos of the modern economic order (which is bound to the technical and economic conditions of mechanical and machine production). Today this mighty cosmos determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business but of every individual who is born into this mechanism, and may well continue to do so until the day that the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed’.1 In this lecture, I want to offer a few reflections on the contribution that an engagement with the Old Testament might make to the construction of a Christian response to our current global change-induced environmental crisis. It is important, however, to avoid three basic pitfalls. The first pitfall is to adopt a facile attitude of blame towards the scriptural heritage of Judaism and Christianity, linking the roots of our environmental crisis with the effective history of texts such as the first creation account in Genesis 1. The second pitfall is precisely the opposite of this, which is the equally facile assumption that Scripture constitutes the panacea for all the ills of the contemporary oikoumene [inhabited world], particularly in the spheres of social and environmental (in)justice. The third pitfall is that of making too firm a distinction between the theologies of the Old Testament (which in its Protestant form is co-extensive with the Tanakh of Judaism) and those of the New, a distinction that can too easily take a heavily supersessionist form that pits the loving and relevant god of the New Testament against the capriciously vengeful and irrelevant god of the Old. Whether we like it or not, they are the same god.
But before going any further, it is worth clarifying why we should be engaging with the Bible at all in this context. There are two main reasons. The first is the place of the Bible in society. On the one hand, whether we are aware of it or not, the Bible has helped to shape the way we look at the world, by virtue of the fact that it is part of the cultural capital of the West. On the other hand, it has a privileged position in a variety of communities of faith that helps to determine the way members of such communities of faith make their decisions and conduct their lives. Despite the often misleading rhetoric of pluralism, secularism, or a church-state divide in societies such as ours, this is a point that should not be ignored. As the home schooling scenes in the disturbing recent film Jesus Camp illustrate, some conservative Christians with a deep reverence for the Bible have been keen to reject scientific evidence for the human contribution to global warming. At the same time, other conservative Christians with an equally deep reverence for the Bible, such as supporters of the Evangelical Climate Initiative,2 have been deeply supportive of attempts to stem the damaging human contribution to global warming. Given the impact that such groups have sought to make on public policy, particularly in the United States, the value that they acknowledge the Bible to have is reason enough to take the Bible seriously, regardless of whether we ourselves have a confessional attachment to it.
The second reason is more confessionally based. If an authentically Christian voice is to be offered by theologians that might contribute in some way to addressing the situation in which we find ourselves, it must be shaped by the language and thought of the Bible, in conversation with other sources and norms of Christian theology. Having said this, however, it must also be stressed that to make the question of “The Old Testament and the Environment” a purely cerebral one, confined within the ivory tower of academic theology, would be morally bankrupt. Nor should we need the sanction of the Bible to respond in a morally adequate way to the deleterious consequences of global change.
At the same time as recognising the worth of engaging the Bible in responding to global change, we also need to acknowledge the sheer otherness of the biblical texts. The use of the Bible among Christians sometimes amounts to a taming, a domestication of a collection of texts whose origins are far removed from us in time, space, and language. The Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Old Testament, and their subsequent translations into Greek, Syriac, and Latin, take us back to a world we can scarcely recognize, that of the Jewish and Christian communities of the Eastern Mediterranean from the neo-Babylonian empire of the sixth century BCE to the crumbling Roman empire of the early fifth century CE. We simply do not view the world in the ways that the authors, editors, and earliest interpreters of Genesis, Isaiah, and Job did. Furthermore, the books of the Old Testament represent a variety of theological positions that often sit awkwardly with one another. Little is to be gained by trying to make this collection of texts more theologically uniform. There is no such thing as a single biblical position on a contemporary issue such as global change, though biblical voices may be drawn fruitfully into contemporary conversations on this matter. Rolf Knierim has helpfully summarized the process of developing a coherent biblical theology: ‘… biblical thinking is first of all concerned with the understanding of the relationship of the biblical texts within the total Bible itself. This relationship is not self-evident. It has always required and continues to require an understanding on behalf of the Bible itself which we ourselves must bring to the Bible through the process of our own thinking’.3 With this in mind, I would like to explore two broad issues that may be relevant to our situation. The first is the interrelationship between God, human beings, and Earth. On this issue I am primarily interested in what the prophetical books have to offer. The second is in a sense a subset of this, namely the place of human beings in the cosmos, On this issue I am more interested in the voices of Genesis, the Psalms, and Job.
God, humans, and Earth
Although the Bible opens with an account of creation, Israel’s god is only occasionally associated with creation elsewhere. It is not so much the fact of God’s creative activity as the nature of his relationship with creation that emerges most strongly. Thus in Exod 34:6-7 Israel’s god reveals himself in the following terms: ‘The LORD, the LORD! A God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; yet he does not remit all punishment, but visits the iniquity of parents upon children and children’s children, upon the third and fourth generations’. (cf. JPS) These attributes exhibit a tension between magnanimity and judgement in the character of God. It is the merciful attributes that are emphasised when this revelation is alluded to elsewhere in the Bible (e.g. Jon 4:2; Joel 2:13; Pss 25:4-11; 86:15). But both magnanimous and judgemental qualities relate to the fundamental justice of Israel’s god. Where God is rendered as creator, for example in Genesis, Deutero-Isaiah, and Job, we cannot separate God’s creative activity from God’s justice, and the fact that Exod 34:6-7 occurs in the context of the making of a covenant between God and Israel suggests that God’s people, who according to Gen 1:26-27 are made in the divine image, are somehow to embody the justice of God and to be called to account when they do not.
God’s justice is a major factor in the messages of the four prophetical books of the Masoretic canon. At several points in these books, particularly in the book of the Twelve, God is rendered by means of a theophany, an account of the terrifying appearance of God in nature. It is implied that such theophanies exhibit God’s righteous anger against those who have offended him. Consider the following examples, the first from the earliest prophetical book, that attributed to the eighth century BCE ‘prophet’4 Amos: ‘I saw my lord standing by the altar, and he said: Strike the capitals so that the thresholds quake, and make an end of the first of them all … It is my lord GOD of hosts, at whose touch the earth trembles and all who dwell on it mourn, and all of it swells like the Nile and subsides like the Nile of Egypt, who built his chambers in heaven and founded his vault on the earth, who summons the waters of the sea and pours them over the land – his name is the LORD’ (Amos 9:1, 5-6, cf. JPS).
Clearly natural disasters are considered here to be the outworking of God’s retributive justice. There is an implied theodicy here, inasmuch as a terrible series of natural disasters are reconciled with a belief in a righteous god by seeing these disasters as just retribution wreaked by a righteous god against a complacent people who had refused to listen to the warnings given by his prophet. In the final form of Amos, this theophany is apparently understood to be a prophecy that was fulfilled in an earthquake two years later (Amos 1:1), thus combining the ideas of God as manifest in creation and God as manifest in, and in control of human history. Likewise, in Micah we read the following: ‘[L]et my lord GOD be your accuser – my lord from his holy abode. For lo! The LORD is coming forth from his dwelling place, he will come down and stride upon the heights of the earth. The mountains shall melt under him and the valleys burst open – like wax before fire, like water cascading down a slope. All this is for the transgression of Jacob, and for the sins of the house of Israel’ (Mic 1:2b-5a, cf. JPS). Similarly in Nahum we read the following, directed, according to the book’s superscription, against the wicked Ninevites upon whom God apparently showed disproportionate mercy in the book of Jonah: ‘The LORD is a passionate, avenging God; the LORD is vengeful and fierce in wrath. The LORD takes vengeance on his enemies, he rages against his foes. The LORD is slow to anger and of great forbearance, but the LORD does not remit all punishment. He travels in whirlwind and storm, and clouds are the dust on his feet. He rebukes the sea and it dries up, and he makes all rivers fail; Bashan and Carmel languish, and the blossoms of Lebanon wither. The mountains quake because of him, and the hills melt. The earth heaves before him, the world and all that dwell therein. Who can stand before his wrath? Who can resist his fury? His anger pours out like fire, and rocks shatter because of him. The LORD is good to [those who hope in him], a haven on a day of distress; he is mindful of those who seek refuge in him. And with a sweeping flood he makes an end of her place and chases his enemies into darkness’ (Nah 1:2-8, cf. JPS).
Again, there is no doubt here that God is in control of both nature (explicitly) and history (implicitly), and that the natural world is the sphere in which his irresistible justice is made manifest. It is an illustration of the kind of scenario that obtains in the flood story of Genesis 6-8, in which God regrets that he has made a humankind that is so prone to evil, and dissolves creation with catastrophic consequences for everyone and everything apart from Noah, his family, and a selection of birds and beasts.
To take these examples as the only voice of Scripture, however, or to attempt to make a direct correlation between the theologies reflected in these texts and the situation we are now facing is somewhat problematic, to say the least. This can be illustrated by some reactions to recent catastrophes in the natural world. In the wake of the Asian Tsunami on Boxing Day 2004, responses from individuals from various faith traditions saw in this horror the work of a righteous god offended by his creatures. In the aftermath of the tsunami, it was reported that Free Presbyterian minister John MacLeod was suggesting that the tsunami was God’s retribution against “pleasure seekers” ignoring the sabbath.5 Similarly, the claim was made in a Moroccan Islamic newspaper that the tsunami was divine retribution provoked by South Asia’s sex tourism industry.6 On the face of it, such attitudes are entirely consonant with passages such as that from Micah quoted above. But there are several problems. First, biblical texts such as Job and Ecclesiastes, together with texts from Jeremiah, Jonah, Habakkuk, Lamentations and the Psalms that represent our earliest evidence for the Jewish protest tradition, all question the ability of human beings to read divine retribution into situations of human suffering without further ado. Second, if we uncritically adopt the theologies represented by Amos, Micah, and Nahum, we might reach the conclusion that the righteous god of the prophets is about to make the world uninhabitable (for both righteous and unrighteous) as a result of human sin. This might imply that human beings have not themselves caused damage to the Earth, but that God is rendering the Earth increasingly uninhabitable because we have offended him. This also points to a risk with reading prophecies of the new heaven and new earth in Isa 65-66. In these texts a new creation is promised, akin to the new creation fashioned by God after the flood. But to hope in a new heaven and a new earth without living responsibly in relation to our fellow human beings and the natural world here and now would be fatuous in the extreme.
Some of the prophetical books hint at an organic relationship between God, human beings, and the natural world. In the early chapters of Jeremiah, which seem to betray the influence of the earlier prophet Hosea, there seems to be a triangular relationship between the just God, human beings who are responsible for fulfilling their obligations under the covenant with this god, and the condition of the natural world. If Judah sins, the just and inevitable retribution for that sin is made manifest in the state of the land. For example, in Jer 3:2-3 we read: ‘Look up to the bare heights, and see: Where have they not lain with you? You waited for them on the roadside like a bandit in the wilderness. And you defiled the land with your whoring and your debauchery. And when the showers were withheld and the late rains did not come, you had the brazenness (lit. ‘forehead’, metzach) of a street woman, you refused to be ashamed’ (cf. JPS). Judah’s sin here defiles the land, a notion familiar also from Leviticus. The natural world reacts, as in the Elijah narratives of 1 Kings, by disrupting the weather system so that it ceases to be beneficial to humans dependent on the land for their food and livelihood. There seems to be a slight tension in Jeremiah between texts such as this, where the land appears to react automatically to Judah’s sin, and other texts in which God uses the natural world as an instrument by means of which to inflict retribution on his sinful people. Slightly further on in this vast and complex book, we read the following, which links the harmful disruption of the natural order with God’s just punishment of Judah’s sins in the sphere of social relationships. ‘[T]his people has a wayward and defiant heart; they have turned aside and gone their way. They have not said to themselves, ‘Let us revere the LORD our God, who gives the rain, the early and late rain in season, who keeps for our benefit the weeks appointed for harvest’. It is your iniquities that have diverted these things, your sins have withheld the bounty from you. For among my people are found wicked men … They have become fat and sleek; they pass beyond the bounds of wickedness, and they prosper. They will not judge the case of the orphan, nor give a hearing to the plea of the needy. Shall I not punish such deeds – says the LORD – shall I not bring retribution on a nation such as this?’ (Jer 5:23-26a, 28-29, cf. JPS). Human life is not atomised here. Human beings are responsible to one another, and by means of that responsibility they are answerable to God. In this passage, the understanding is that situations in human society where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and where the legal system is abused, are not only an affront to other people and by extension to God, but break the fragile threads that bind God, humans, and the Earth together, with the result that the properties of the natural world that are of benefit to humans are withdrawn.
Jeremiah is among the most theologically rich works in the Old Testament, and a Christianity that places a high priority on issues of social and environmental (in)justice might be tempted to find at least a superficial appeal in passages such as this. But two related problems arise from this passage that give grounds for caution. First, the underlying retributive logic is that human sin leads to divine retribution, but as the divine criticism of Job’s friends highlights, this is an inversion of the actual process by which the meaning of human suffering is perceived. Job’s friends infer from his decrepit condition that he must have sinned, and the righteous God must be responsible. The reader knows this isn’t true, assuming she started reading in ch. 1 and not ch. 3. If, then, we read Job alongside Jeremiah, we should be cautious about accepting the prophet’s interpretation of events without further ado. Second, in Jer 5:24 the poet quotes an imaginary righteous people of Judah attributing to God the qualities of the natural world that are beneficial to humans. That is, Jeremiah’s ideal Judah believed that the natural order functioned not simply for its own sake, nor because of God’s sheer joy in his creation, but for the benefit of humans. In Jer 18, the book of Jeremiah offers a resounding defence of divine freedom in the parable of the potter and the clay, but in this passage Jeremiah’s ideal Judah has bound God by his perceived obligations to his creation. This creates a theological and anthropological conundrum. Does the natural world exist for the benefit of humans? Is God bound in any sense by obligations to his creation that outweigh his sovereign freedom? What, at root, is the place of human beings in the cosmos? At this point, we turn to passages in Genesis, Psalms, and Job that offer threads out of which an answer might be woven.
Humans in the cosmos
What is the place of human beings in the cosmos, according to the books of the Old Testament? There are three obvious places to look: the creation accounts in Genesis, Psalm 8, and the closing chapters of Job, particularly Job 38:1-42:6. All these texts are polyvalent, both when taken on their own and, even more, when taken in their immediate literary context and in the context of the biblical canon.
Genesis 1:1-2:3 gives an account of the creation of the heavens and the earth and everything in them. The syntax of Gen 1:1-3 is ambiguous enough to suggest both the notion of creatio ex nihilo [creation out of nothing] and, more likely, the rather mysterious notion that God fashioned the heavens and the earth out of a pre-existing, timeless, formless and perhaps malevolent void (tohu vabhohu). When we come to the creation of humans on the sixth day, the text is again ambiguous enough to suggest both an imperious domination of the land by humans, and the more pastoral notion of humans being delegated the divine responsibility of caring for a creation that otherwise would be unable to tend itself. Humans are created here in the divine image, but that is open to multiple construals, and in a Christian conversation must ultimately be drawn into conversation with Christology. Two avenues of reading should be considered: do we see humans as the pinnacle of creation, with delegated divine power over the created order, or do we see humans as subordinate both to God and to a divinely ordained structure of time, that reaches its fulfilment not with the creation of humans on the sixth day, but with the sabbath rest of God on the seventh? Do humans have the power to dispense as they wish with the natural world, or have they been delegated the authority to tend the natural world for their benefit, for the benefit of the natural world (the fact that in Gen 1:29-30 humans and other living creatures have to share the same resources may be suggestive), and in subservience to the creator? The text doesn’t answer these questions unequivocally for us. If we read Genesis 1 in conversation with the garden story that follows, humans have chosen the option of discerning for themselves the difference between good and bad, rather than leaving that option up to the God who created them. We should judge what our proper place is in the cosmos based on the consequences for the environment of placing humans in a position of power or service in relation to it, acknowledging that our judgements are necessarily imperfect, but that we are responsible for them.
The second story of creation, which differs in origin from the first but has now been brought into creative conversation with it, nuances the picture of humans we get from Gen 1:26-28. In this story, humans are dependent on both the earth, out of which they have been created, and on God, on whom they depend for the breath of life. Adam, the human, is charged with tending his master’s landscaped garden, his paradeisos [paradise], as the Septuagint has it. The humans are dependent on their surroundings, not superior to them. Other animals are made to be Adam’s helpers, suggesting co-operation as much as mastery, though after a brief experiment Adam and God conclude that animals don’t fulfil this function quite as well as another human would.
The same ambivalence over the place of humans in the created order that we find in Gen 1:26-28 is present in Psalm 8, from the Greek version of which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews wove aspects of his Christology. The psalm is a hymn of praise to God as creator, and in verses 4-9 we read: ‘When I behold the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you set in place, what are humans that you have been mindful of them, mortals that you have taken note of them, that you have made them little less than God(s), and adorned them with glory and majesty; you have made them master over your handiwork, laying the world at their feet, sheep and oxen, all of them, and wild beasts, too; the birds of the heavens, the fish of the sea, whatever travels the path of the seas’ (JPS adapted). The risk in this psalm is that the accent will fall on the place of humans in dominion over the natural world, rather than on the psalmist’s awed humility before the ineffable vastness of the cosmos. This awed humility is something that humans urgently need to revisit, yet the psalm does not compel the reader to place the accent here, and does not resolve for us the fundamental tensions it contains. In Job, however, the words of this psalm are inverted, so that if we read the book of Job as the advocatus Diaboli [devil's advocate] of the canon, the anthropology of Psalm 8 is undermined and humans presented instead as sub-microscopic plankton in God’s goldfish bowl, minute specks of such mind-boggling triviality that any god worthy of the title shouldn’t bother to pay attention to them: ‘What are humans, that you make much of them, that you fix your attention upon them? If I have sinned, what have I done to you, watcher of humanity? Why make of me your target, and a burden to myself?’ (Job 7:17, 20, JPS adapted).
Reading this passage from Job 7 should alert us not so much to the potential discrepancy between the power and justice of God, as in Job, but to the potentially tragic consequences of human hubris, of acting in relation to our social and ecological environments as if we are more significant in the cosmos than we actually are.
No passage of Scripture, however, puts the place of human beings in the cosmos in perspective as rigorously as the withering divine speeches in Job (38:1-41:26), and Job’s withered, yet not undefiant response (42:1-6). In the dialogue of the book Job fantasises about putting the supposedly righteous God on trial for using his vast power to punish him unjustly and disproportionately. This culminates with Job’s defiant oath of innocence in Job 31, which calls forth the young Elihu’s precocious defence of God’s righteousness against a human being who has the conceit to challenge it (Job 32-37). When God finally appears, he brushes aside Job’s challenge (or possibly Elihu’s defence) in Job 38:2, and proceeds to bully Job into submission for calling his management of the cosmos into question.
‘Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?
Speak if you have understanding’ (Job 38:4, JPS).
To question God’s justice implies not only that human beings have the knowledge to understand the ways of the Almighty and that they have the right to determine the terms according to which creatures should relate to their creator, but that human beings and their concerns are at the centre of God’s universe. The content of the divine speeches calls this assumption into question.
‘Who cut a channel for the torrents
And a path for the thunderstorms,
To rain down on uninhabited land,
On the wilderness where no-one is,
To saturate the desolate wasteland,
And make the crop of grass sprout forth?’ (Job 38:25-27, cf. JPS).
God’s concerns encompass the entirety of the cosmos here, and are not bound by the human need to know that God treats them justly. In consequence, the divine speeches render the quest to grasp the justice of God futile, and implicitly announce the end of both theodicy and anthropocentrism. Our concerns are not central to the cosmos, nor does the cosmos function on the basis of our wants and desires.
Now the book of Job is ambiguous, polyvalent, and darkly ironic by turns, and it cannot be concluded without question that the divine speeches represent the theology of the human author of Job, still less of the putative divine author of Holy Scripture. And when Job is given the last word of the poetic section of the book in Job 42:1-6 he accepts his insignificance, though he is not necessarily happy about his lot. Similarly, the disgruntled (anti-)prophet Jonah has little choice but to accept that the God of Israel revealed in Exod 34:6-7 is at least as interested in the amoral animals and children of Nineveh as he is in proving himself to be righteous before a disobedient Israelite. Both texts, Job and Jonah, hint at the responsible position humans should take in the context of our environment.
Where do we stand?
Our environment neither exists nor functions on our terms, nor is it ours to dispose with as we please. The earth does not exist solely for our benefit. In Job, God sends rain on ground where no-one lives and takes great pride his hippopotamus and his crocodile. In Jonah, God creates a plant for Jonah then kills it by sending a worm, and has at least as much concern for the cows and sheep of Nineveh as for the prophet. These are, of course, not the only voices in the Old Testament on the subject of the place of human beings in the cosmos, but they may be the ones that put the others in enough perspective to allow us to use Scripture as a basis for living responsibly in the world. They may invite us to look beyond ourselves long enough to care for the people around us who are less fortunate than we are, to take an interest in the species in the non-human world who are threatened as a result of our self-centredness, and to be concerned with an environment that doesn’t exist for our benefit but that is nevertheless vulnerable to our carelessness.
1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings (trans. and ed. P. Baehr and G. Wells; London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 120-121.
2 http://www.christiansandclimate.org/
3 R. Knierim, The Task of Old Testament Theology: Substance, Method and Cases (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1995), p. xii.
4 Cf. Amos 7:10-15!
5 http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42837
6 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4219755.stm
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