Liberating Scripture to Liberate the Planet (Rev. Brooks Berndt)
Liberating Scripture to Liberate the Planet
Excerpted from a chapter in Cathedral on Fire: A Church Handbook for the Climate Crisis.
by Brooks Berndt
Amid the climate crisis, particular interpretations of the Bible have served as a perfumed costume to conceal and disguise greed and grotesquerie. A couple of stories crystallized this for me. While waiting to speak at an environmental event last year, a professor at a local university told me of a most peculiar experience he had teaching a course. As part of his work for a university program dedicated to energy research, he invited a prominent coal mining CEO to a graduate-level seminar. For the visit, his sharp and highly informed students prepared themselves with an array of arguments to rebut the climate denialism they fully expected to confront. The actual encounter, however, went different than they had anticipated. The executive gave heartfelt declarations of how his corporation was doing the will of God. The students did not know how to respond. Words escaped them.
Almost a week after hearing this story, I found myself speaking to a group of church youth about climate change at a retreat center in Ohio. One youth arrived with a passionate zeal to disabuse me of my ideas about the relationship of fossil fuels to climate change. From the very beginning, he argued that God gave us fossil fuels, so that we—humanity—could use them.
Notably, at the time of this incident, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) espoused a similar view, stating that the burning of fossil fuels provided a divine opportunity to be blessed, not cursed. The Bible is typically cited as giving credence to this view, and the scripture cited comes from the verse in Genesis in which God instructs Adam and Eve to “subdue” the Earth and have “dominion” over it (Genesis 1:28). These few words are interpreted to mean that the natural world around us exists principally for our benefit, and thus, we can do with it whatever we want. One could say that the implicit view is that in relationship to all of creation we are to be like tyrants with narcissistic egos. We become two-year-olds in charge of the candy store, struck with wonder by the bounty before us, ready to consume as we please.
What is fascinating is that declarations of divine mandates to rule over creation are stated as if such pronouncements end the conversation about how we are to ethically produce energy and other goods. God ordained it and thus the argument is over—even if the argument justifies the mass suffering of millions which would hardly seem the desire of a loving God. But what if there is a different way of reading Genesis and considering our role within creation? What if being human—with all our unique traits and abilities—does not mean that we have a unique license to wantonly rule over creation but rather that we have a unique responsibility to care for creation?
As is often the case with scripture that is used for abusive reasons, the verse from Genesis has a different meaning when considered in its original context and when one pauses to consider how to best translate and transplant ancient words into a modern time. The beginning of Genesis is not a blueprint for a timeless political platform. Rather, as the renowned scholar of Hebrew scriptures Walter Brueggemann notes, the beginning of Genesis is a “liturgical poem.” With grand language about the cosmos, a community gives voice to the awe and wonder evoked by the goodness of God’s creation as they experienced it. To transpose this ancient rendering of an experience to the modern world of oil rigs and coal plants is religious fraud and malpractice in its most evident form.
In the opening of Genesis, God is in the business of creating a world of harmonious order and goodness. As a majestic and divine gardener, God is bringing life into existence. So when Genesis declares that humans are made in the image of God, this is the image we are carrying. We are the gardeners seeking to cultivate and sustain a harmonious creation. This suggests the assumption of responsibility.
Imagine the meaning and import of this for your congregation today. Imagine that on Sunday morning, your pastor stands before everyone and announces that the congregation has received an amazingly generous gift and that after worship all are invited to go on a field trip for the public revealing of this gift. When the service concludes, the congregation files onto a bus together. As you sit in your seat, your pastor explains from the front of the bus that a generous benefactor has donated to the church a new plot of land on prime real estate. Your entire congregation is headed there now to look at it.
When you arrive, you discover that the lot gifted to you all has grown completely wild. From a conservationist perspective, wild can sometimes be a good thing, but in this case, the members of your church learn that the generous benefactor has gifted this land with the idea that the congregation will turn it into a community garden for the benefit of the surrounding neighborhood. In other words, in receiving this wonderful plot of land, the members of the church are asked to be its caretakers and gardeners. Upon exiting the bus, each of you is handed a pair of gloves and a gardening tool—a trowel, a rake, a weed whacker—and you all get to work.
This imagined scenario points to the meanings our verse from Genesis held in its original context. When the scripture speaks of subduing the earth and having dominion over it, think of this generously gifted plot of land. Do not confuse “dominion” with “domination,” as scholar Leah Schade and others have pointed out. In this context, dominion is about a responsibility entrusted to us by God. Likewise, do not think of subduing as the act of a conquering army but as the work required to make the land fruitful and abundant for the food that sustains us.
This image of a community garden is more than a quaint metaphor. It relates to our first calling to work and care for the garden which some have argued is better translated as serving and preserving the garden. Indeed, the theologian Norman Wirzba has argued that from the biblical perspective it is more accurate to say that we are to be servants of creation rather than stewards of creation, which has a more managerial connotation. Acting as servants of creation is the exact opposite of being narcissistic tyrants over creation. It means that we are not principally focused on our own interests. Instead, we are fundamentally about the interests of others and of our surrounding world.
In our world, we could say that there are two kinds of peak experiences. There is the kind where you elbow and fight your way to the top of a self-serving, self-aggrandizing hierarchy. There is nothing spiritual about this survival-of-the-fittest, winner-take-all peak. But then there is another kind of peak experience. It is about finding ultimate fulfillment, meaning, and purpose. It is about finding a life of service and caretaking in the garden of God’s creation.
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Before becoming the United Church of Christ Minister for Environmental Justice in 2015, Rev. Brooks Berndt served for eight years as the pastor of First Congregational UCC in Vancouver, Washington. While there, he became active in two environmental campaigns that were ultimately successful: transitioning the state of Washington away from its only coal plant and preventing the establishment of the largest marine oil terminal in the country in Vancouver. As the Minister for Environmental Justice, Berndt led the way in the issuing of the UCC’s 2020 report, “Breath to the People: Sacred Air and Toxic Pollution”, which identifies 100 of the nation’s super polluters and how their toxic emissions threaten communities and children, especially in places such as Houston, Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, and Ohio’s Lake Erie coast. Berndt writes and edits an environmental justice newsletter called The Pollinator, while co-hosting monthly Creation Justice Webinars which have featured everyone from the climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe to Senator Cory Booker. To order a copy of Brooks’ book, Cathedral on Fire, visit this link.
This piece is part of our Spring 2022 collection, Dominionism, guest edited by Rev. Dr. Dan De Leon, UCC.
