God’s Eco-Network of Covenants

We would never think of practicing medicine based on the guidance of the 5th c. B.C.E. Greek “Father of Medicine” Hippocrates. His works now belong to the history, not the practice, of medicine. Not so the Hebrew Bible. Though much of it emerged at roughly the same time as Hippocrates’ On the Physician, many of us still practice our religion based on scripture. For that reason, we must always re-interpret our sacred texts and reform our practice. We must re-boot our biblical interpretation, in Wendell Berry’s words, “in light of the present fact of Creation.”[1] But as it turns out, the Bible isn’t a bad partner in restoring a healthy relationship between the human community and other communities of creation. We’ve just misunderstood it.

It is a sin to interfere with another community’s ability to fulfill its covenant with God. Hills cannot shout for joy if their tops have been sheared off by strip-mining. Fish cannot swarm seas boiled by an ozone-depleted atmosphere. 

As pointed out in Lynn White’s influential 1967 essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” we have too often misunderstood—tragically, devastatingly—the meaning of the mandate in Genesis 1:26 to exercise “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 on the earth.” What this really means is that, since humans are made in God’s image, we have been deputized to treat the earth and all its creatures and features with the same care that their Creator, who marks every sparrow’s fall, has modeled. What this does not mean is that humans are free to act as the apex predators in the jungle of life. 

A Parliament of Phyla

In a recent major work of eco-theology, The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Mari Joerstad of the Vancouver School of Theology writes about recovering what she calls “a new animism.” For the last two centuries, Euro-American anthropologists imagined that religion evolved in stages from a “primitive” state of animated nature worship, then to polytheism, and ultimately to monotheism, which, as it turns out, conveniently matched their own cultural biases.    

But Joerstad points out that the worldview of the Bible is far more animistic than we have understood, consisting of a parliament of phyla all flourishing under the providential care of King Alpha.

It was there in front of us all the time, all those references in the Hebrew Scriptures to the agency and personality of natural phenomena:

the heavens declaring the glory of the God …

trees and fields clapping their hands … 

shed blood crying out from the ground …

heaps of stones witnessing to promises that people have made …

the ground swallowing sinners …

mountains writhing …

vines languishing …

the earth mourning …

and to expand our horizon to include the Christian appendix to the Hebrew Bible, 

all creation groaning.

What Joerstad evokes for us is a sense, embedded in scripture, that all life forms, human and non-human, have covenants with the Creator.

The Unpardonable Sin

Walk with me through Genesis 1. God commands the firmament to post up above the earth and act as a dam against the cosmic waters. God commands the earth to grow grass and vegetation to disseminate seeds, and fruit trees to make fruit according to their types. Fish are commanded to swarm, birds to fly, and all of these and other creatures to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.

This understanding of the interdependence of all living communities is in the Prophets. Hosea 2:20 reads:

And I will cut a covenant with them on that day,
with the wildlife of the field 
and with the birds in the sky 
and with the creepers on the ground. 
And the bow and the sword and warfare 
I will shatter from the earth 
and I will allow you to lie down in safety.

Viewing the Bible through the lens of the new animism is not a new hermeneutical trick; rather, it is a recovery of the world view of the Bible’s composers. Such an understanding reframes our relationship with all of life and with our covenant Lord. We are part of a network of covenants. Such an understanding also reframes our conception of sin. It is a sin to interfere with another community’s ability to fulfill its covenant with God. Hills cannot shout for joy if their tops have been sheared off by strip-mining. Fish cannot swarm seas boiled by an ozone-depleted atmosphere. Felled trees cannot clap their hands. Thus, when we damage our elder communities of creation—biological, geologic, and physical—we truly commit the unpardonable sin, the blasphemy against that holy spirit that is within all forms of life. Better a millstone were hung around our necks and we were thrown into the sea than we inhibit other life forms from expressing their God-given responsibilities to rejoice in and contribute to the goodness of creation.

Ten Righteous Persons

So what do we do? It is not enough for virtuous individuals to do a better job of recycling and mulching, and for single institutions such as YDS with its Living Village to embrace smaller carbon footprints. The ecological crisis requires global, non-sectarian action, involving rapid adaptations in energy sources and use, whether in industry or agriculture. Against all odds, against the tide, we must struggle for eco-justice in the political realm.

In the light of this massive challenge, the religious vision remains, in biblical terms, that it only takes ten righteous persons in Sodom to avert catastrophe, that a little yeast can leaven the entire loaf, that a pinch of salt makes the meal palatable. The Hebrew prophets called for a righteous remnant; the Jewish tradition speaks of the Lamed-Vav, the thirty-six virtuous persons required to stay Jehovah’s hand from destroying the world. 

Sabbath Citizens

Another biblical idea providing a vision for living in harmony waits to be rediscovered: the idea and observance of Sabbath. Introduced and based in Torah and adapted and enriched by centuries of Jewish and Christian practice, Sabbath practice entails that we rest, we stop, we incant, “It is enough,” practicing a kind of asceticism that aims not at self-flagellating but at self-stilling so that we gain awareness of creation beyond our needs and summon gratitude for what we already have received. 

Furthermore—and I speak here by faith, not sight—by practicing Sabbath we experience a measure of transcendence, a taste of what it would be to live without anxiety over mortality and to rest in a state of one-ness with all life. Our traditions teach us that this is the ultimate state of the righteous—whether it means an afterlife of walking through pearly gates down golden streets to unite with kinfolk who have gone before, or an afterlife of uniting with some of our other, elemental kinfolk—the topsoil, roots, grubs, and carbonized remains of flora and fauna—that in our misguided dominion we disdain or ignore.

Gregory Mobley is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Congregational Studies at Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School. Mobley’s teaching interests include Judges, prophetic literature, Job, the Bible as story, environmental sustainability, and interfaith learning. An ordained American Baptist minister, he is the author of The Return of the Chaos Monsters—and Other Backstories of the Bible (Eerdmans, 2012) and other books.