Untitled Sermon

When asking the question stated above in regards to Iain Provan's fourth chapter of his book, Seriously Dangerous Religion, one must break it down into three further questions: what is humanity's place in the created order? What does it mean to be made in the image of God? And what does it mean to be male and female?

The answers to each of these questions will reveal a small slice of what it means to be human according to the biblical witness in the Book of Genesis. Provan does a splendid job of framing these questions in and answering them in his own way throughout the fourth chapter of his book. The goal of this essay is to interact with Provan's thoughts and to push the theological implications a little further.

And Have Dominion...

What is humanity's place in the created order?

Humanity's place within the created order serves as a guideline for understanding its purpose. That is to say, if one understands its role in the pecking order of creation one will have a greater concept of one's identity in creation. For humanity, the relationship with the rest of creation as well as the divine is characterized by exercising a God given responsibility to "have dominion" over God's creation and bearing the image of God within themselves. In it says that "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him." Further, in it says that God told them to "be fruitful and multiply," to "fill the earth and subdue it," and to "have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens" and everything else that move over the earth." These two realities form the bedrock for Genesis' understanding of humanity's relationship between the rest of creation and the divine.

In direct contrast to the biblical witness, Provan argues that in ancient Mesopotamia the "cosmos [came] into being along with and for the benefit of the gods" (78). Thus, the cosmos was for the gods and humans simply found themselves swept up in a narrative much larger than they were. Provan goes on to describe how in the cosmos of the gods, temples and cities were established to reflect the order that the gods were supposed to maintain. Particular to the interest of this study, the temples placed "a cult image [marking] the presence of a particular deity in a particular temple" (78). Furthermore, humanity's role included serving and attending to the cult image in the temple to either please the god or appease the god's anger or indifference.

Provan has done the necessary work to show that in ancient Mesopotamia, "sources consistently portray human beings as having been created to work for the gods - to do 'work that is essential for the continuing existence of the gods... that they have tired of doing for themselves'" (78). In the world of the biblical account of Genesis, men and women existed to serve the gods in a form of "slave labor" and were indeed created as an "afterthought to meet the needs of deity" (78). However, the biblical witness portrays an entirely different picture of humanity. In Genesis, "[humanity] is not created... to meet God's needs. God does not have needs, and his presence in his temple-cosmos does not depend on the satisfaction of any needs" (79). Furthermore, Provan makes the distinction between human's operating as divine caretakers to the cult images of ancient Mesopotamian temples to becoming the divine images in God's temple-cosmos themselves (80). Provan believes this point to be the central thrust behind the author of Genesis' use of the image of God. Indeed, much of what it means to be made in the image of God (discussed more under the second heading of this essay) is that humanity is given an immense responsibility over the temple-cosmos of God if they are named as the very image-bearers of His creation.

And what does this responsibility entail? Lynn White's essay, The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, argues that the current debasement of the environment is the consequence of a Judeo-Christian worldview that believes that "God planned [the creation of the world and particularly Adam as the crown jewel of the created world] explicitly for man's benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes. And, although man's body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made in God's image."[1] For White, Christianity is “the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever seen” and the result is that as a race humanity has exploited nature to serve its progressive goals to the compromise of nature itself. For example,

To be sure, White qualifies his argument by saying that all of the above “may well apply to the medieval West, where in fact technology made spectacular advances.”[2] In his opinion, however, the Greek Orthodox tradition, indeed Greco-Roman mythology altogether, has found salvation in illumination – a clearly intellectual goal. By contrast, the Latin West identified its salvation in moral piety. That is, through “right conduct.”[3] The difference has led the Greek Orthodox religious tradition to value nature as “artistic;” applying the same kind of symbolism that the Hebrew Bible applies to nature and the created order (i.e. observing ants as an expression of hard work rather than scientific study).[4] On the contrary, the Roman Catholic tradition viewed nature as “scientific” and “ceased decoding… physical symbols of God’s communication with man [in nature] and [became an] effort to understand God’s mind by discovering how creation operate.”

However, is White’s thesis that Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever known true?[5] Provan’s writing proves that in the ancient Mesopotamian world, humankind was created not to serve the images of idol-gods but to serve God by serving creation. With Provan’s thesis one might deduct that humankind is accountable to God for any responsibility of dominion they exercise over creation. And I certainly believe this to be true. Further, Simkins argues that, contrary to White, the Hebrew Bible is anything but anthropocentric.[6] Indeed, the account in , which is the only text White chooses to grapple with, presents humankind as the pinnacle of creation; separating humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom and nature as being made in the image of God. However, the picture of humanity in other creation accounts, such as ; ; ; and portray humanity as anything but the crown jewel of creation.[7] For instance, consider how seems to portray humanity as enduing

[1] Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” Science 155: 1203-1207.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] To be sure, Christianity adopted the Hebrew Bible into its own movement. For the purposes of this essay, I will not distinguish the lines between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian faith to clearly. I will, however, deal with the Old Testament text on its basis as an rebuttal to White’s thesis.

[6] Ronald A. Simkins, “The Bible and Anthropocentrism: Putting Humans in Their Place” Dialectical Anthropology, no. 4, 38 (December, 2014): 397-413, p. 399.

[7] Ibid.