with Rachael Kohn
on Sunday 3/02/2002

Earthing the Bible

Summary:

The ecological destruction of the world is often blamed on the Biblical command to have dominion over the earth. But a large number of Biblical scholars have re-read the Bible as an ecological text, and they remind us that “from dust we were made and to dust we return.” Norman Habel, Editor of the remarkable The Earth Bible Project speaks with Rachael Kohn. Anne Gardner, from La Trobe University, has also contributed to this project. And we hear from Satish Kumar, a leading figure in the spiritual and environmental fields in Britain, who advocates a non-dualistic view of life on Earth.

Details or Transcript:

‘Peace on Earth’ is an ideal vision found in the Bible. We think it refers to peace between peoples. But maybe we’ve missed something, and not recognised that the Earth also longs for another kind of peace.

Hello, and welcome to Earthing the Bible on The Spirit of Things, Radio National. I’m Rachael Kohn.

The senseless destruction of human life usually elicits moral outrage. But how often do we extend that moral outrage to the wilful destruction of the rainforests, the ‘lungs of our planet’, the extinction of animal and plant species, or the slow poisoning of our waterways?

The Bible, with its mandate to subdue the earth, has been blamed for this moral blindness. Here is one of the key texts from the Book of Genesis.

And God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, created he him; male and female, created he them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you, it shall be for meat.

Genesis 1: 26-29

Rachael Kohn: Scholars are now fossicking the Biblical texts to discover nuggets if not grand narratives, of ecological justice. Australian Biblical scholar, Norman Habel, has led the way not only here, but far beyond these ancient shores. We’ll speak to him in a moment about his Earth Bible Project.

We also hear from Anne Gardner, a Biblical scholar whose move to the Australian bush not only sharpened her senses, but awakened a whole new interest in discerning the Bible’s ecological messages.

And if your shoes aren’t covered with dust by the end of that, you might find they’re covered with another rather basic substance, as Satish Kumar reflects on how everything has its place on earth, including excrement.

Adelaide-based Professor Norman Habel is one of those unforgettable, sparkling-eyed gentlemen with a long white beard, who always remind me of Rip Van Winkle, with one big difference: this man never sleeps. The Earth Bible, now in its fourth volume, has been a massive undertaking, and it’s making waves around the world. Here is one of the Biblical texts that inspires him, Psalm 65.

Norman Habel:The pastures of the wilderness shout for joy, the hills gird themselves with rejoicing, the pastures are clothed with flocks and the valleys cover themselves with grain. They shout for joy, indeed they sing.

Rachael Kohn: Norman, I would have thought that many people regard the environmental movement as emerging out of an alternative culture, they would never associate it with the Bible. Is that a correct perception?

Norman Habel: Many people would say it’s a kind of New Age movement in many ways, and that Greenies are a little bit loony in many ways. But it’s very clear now that more and more people see the crisis of the earth and the crisis for our planet as being something that we all have to face, it’s not something that we can ignore, and we have to ask where it came from, why are we in this crisis and what connections can we make with our own heritage, in our Christian heritage, in our Jewish heritage and any other religious heritage we might have.

Rachael Kohn: Nonetheless, are there any barriers to earth consciousness that perhaps we’ve inherited from our Biblical tradition?

Norman Habel: Well I think there are many. One of the ones that I use, one of the terms that I use, is ‘heavenism’. Heavenism is for me, a term which refers to the fact that so many of us, certainly in the Christian tradition, have been conditioned to believe that heaven is our home, the place where we’re going eventually, and so we keep our eyes on that goal and it doesn’t really matter too much what happens to earth, because we’re going to leave it, we’re pilgrims here.

We have some rather strange hymns, in fact, you know, ‘Guide me, o thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land’, so we have lots of tendencies to say heaven is the really important thing and earth is secondary, or can be disposed of and so I think there are quite a number of elements from our Christian heritage that are negative towards us, which we have to overcome.

Rachael Kohn: And I suppose the one that’s most often quoted is that we were commanded to have dominion over the earth; does that always have a negative connotation?

Norman Habel: Well that’s a significant text, that one, what’s sometimes called the Mandate to Dominate. And there are kind of three dimensions to the history.

One is what Descartes did, which was to say Look, this really is our right now to – we must control earth, dominate earth and actually exploit earth; that’s our function on earth. There has been a kind of middle road which has said that this refers to ruling, but it ought to be ruling with justice. And then there are those of us who have reflected more closely on the text and have said Look, there are problems with this text. There is a tradition here about subduing earth, and does earth get a voice, is earth being heard? Are there other traditions besides this dominion tradition in the Biblical text which we haven’t heard?

We’ve always focused on that text as if that’s the only text within the Biblical tradition which ought to be considered. And I would believe there are many others which ought to be given just as much weight.

For example, in Genesis 2:15, when the first humans are created, God says to them I want to make you so that you will serve earth, and care for it, or protect it. Now the word for ‘serve’ there is the exact opposite of the word for ‘rule’ in Chapter 1. So we’ve got a completely different picture.

To serve, you can serve as a priest, and honour something. So this refers to serving and honouring and tilling the earth in a particular way, and is an alternative tradition, and needs to be considered over against the Mandate to Dominate, which has been found in Genesis 1 and then built upon by subsequent philosophers and rationalists and the like.

Rachael Kohn: I suppose the person who really focused attention on this anthropocentric view of the Bible was Lyn White. He really laid the responsibility at the feet of the Christian tradition. Why was that?

Norman Habel: Well I think he had some justification in that, in the sense that he saw one of the major strands of our Christian heritage, which was that we should control and dominate earth. It was only one of the traditions, it ignored lots of others like St Francis of Assisi and various other people.

But he did point to a tradition which is there in our Christian heritage and which we have to, I think, be honest with and recognise it is there, and ask the question whether or not the Biblical heritage is consistent with that, or whether there are other traditions which should be put counter to the kind of Christian message that Lyn White saw. And I for one, think Lyn White did us a service in forcing us to face it.

Rachael Kohn: I would have thought that humankind had a very close connection to the earth, since we are seen as having been made from earth, and to earth we return, ‘from dust to dust’. Isn’t that a very strong counterpoint or counter argument to Lyn White’s view?

Norman Habel: Oh certainly there is this very strong Biblical tradition that we are from earth, and we belong to earth, and in fact if you take a text like Psalm 104, ‘The spirit of God continues to renew the face of earth, and the face of God is in the earth’, and this connection between God and us and the earth is very close in some traditions.

A text which is very important to me is Isaiah 6:3, where the Seraphim cry out ‘Holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of God’s glory’. Now the glory of God is the visible presence of God. It fills the earth. So the earth is filled with God’s glory, we are part of that same earth. That’s one very strong tradition which we need to resurrect and reaffirm and reconsider and use in our worship.

There are some texts however, which are problematic, and the thing about the Earth Bible Project which we’ll talk about in a minute, is that we have to be honest with the fact that there are diverse traditions, and not all of them are as earth friendly as we might like. For example, if you read the first 30 chapters of Ezekiel, the rest of earth gets all destroyed, and beaten up, and battered and cursed, not because the earth has done anything wrong, but because human beings have done things wrong, and God wants to prove that God is God.

So you get those texts where the earth in a sense, suffers because of human beings and because of what they’ve done, at the hands of God, and those are somewhat problematic, and also needs to be taken into account when we ask the question Well, if God does that to the earth, should humans also do that? So there are all kinds of discussions that need to go on, not only about the positive texts, but the texts that present real problems for both the Jewish and the Christian heritage.

Rachael Kohn: So it seems that the Bible doesn’t consistently undervalue the earth. There are times in which the earth is very much celebrated, and other times where it suffers, not only of God but of mankind.

Norman Habel: Correct. One of the important things is to recognise that there are texts where the earth is valued in a way that we totally missed in the past. We need to retrieve some of those passages. I’ll give you one example.

In the story about creation in Genesis 1, we usually have this picture: God says Let there be this, Let there be earth, Let there be light, Let there be stars, and it happens, as if it were some kind of series of orders that God gives. But if you look very closely at that story about the origin of earth, as distinct from sun and the like, God speaks to earth and says Let the earth appear. Earth is under all the waters at the beginning. And then it says Let earth appear. Earth emerges and appears and is revealed from the waters.

Now it doesn’t say Let there be light, he said Let it appear. And the word for ‘appear’ is exactly the same word that’s used of a theophany, when God appears. Immediately one senses there’s something valuable about this, and then God talks to the earth and says, Why don’t you bring forth? Bring forth some plants. And a little later, Bring forth animals. So all the animal creatures, everything emerges from earth as something which has latent life within it, and it’s as though earth is a kind of co-creator, the mother with God.

Rachael Kohn: Now that’s what you’ve dubbed a geothany as opposed to a theophany.

Norman Habel: That’s right, a geothany, the idea that this is a revelation of earth, from the very beginning, and therefore something very valuable. The other aspect of that story is that when God actually looks at earth there, God doesn’t simply say Well everything’s good, God looks at things and in the seeing of, in the discovering of what has been made, God declares that it is good. It’s not that he makes it good, he declares that it’s intrinsically good, and sees it, and then celebrates it.

Rachael Kohn: Now is this a subversive reading of the Bible, is it looking for undercurrents in the text, seeing through the text to what might be there, and then bringing it to the foreground?

Norman Habel: You might want to call it subversive, but I think in many ways what it means is that we try to open our eyes and read from another perspective.

We always have questions when we come to any text, whether they’re explicit or not. And the kind of questions that we’re asking here is, If I put myself where the earth is, if I put myself in the position of earth, and read from the perspective of earth, and make earth central to my reading, instead of something else, what happens? What do I see that I would not have seen otherwise? And those new questions reveal all kinds of things.

There are for me, three grand or meta-narratives in the Scriptures. There’s the narrative about God, there’s the narrative about humankind, or people of God, and the narrative about earth and creation. Now we’ve spent a lot of time with those other two narratives, but very little with the third narrative, which is the narrative of earth. And so the task is to in a sense, recover that narrative, which is there and is in many texts and we need to ask How are we going to find that narrative out? And by reading from the perspective of earth, as if earth is in fact the true subject in the text.

Rachael Kohn: So are you contrasting then, this earth narrative to perhaps the narrative of the history of salvation, which seems to be the most central scheme in Christian reading?

Norman Habel: Yes, I believe there’s a second narrative alongside the history of salvation.

The history of salvation focuses almost exclusively on human beings, and where they’re going, and what’s God’s doing with human beings. But if you look more closely, you realise that all over the place, it’s not just a question of helping and rescuing and renewing human beings, the whole of the earth and the whole of creation is involved in this process, and you have the earth groaning in pain in Jeremiah, and you have the earth celebrating in Psalms, you have the earth doing all kinds of things, but somehow or another it’s seen to be secondary to what in fact is about the story of salvation of humans.

The story of the earth as a major component of the universe, and of the Bible, is central, I believe, to our future on this planet.

Rachael Kohn: Now the creation of the earth actually takes priority in the Bible; that is the first thing that is created. Human beings come sometimes Jewish readers have seen it, as an afterthought. Now I think you read it in a different way, that it actually points to a certain hierarchy in which man is at the apex of creation.

Norman Habel: Well I think it depends on which of the two texts, Genesis 1 or Genesis 2, you take. In Genesis 1, I believe there’s a considerable tension between the first part of Genesis 1, where you have earth appearing and you have this geothany, this grand revelation of earth, and then almost as a way of saying Well we’ve got to also bring humans in, we’ve got to give them a status, they are then given the right to dominion.

But in Genesis 2 it’s very clear that the creation of earth and of animals and creatures and garden and life and waters and humans, all belong in the same kind of complex. They’re inter-related, and it’s necessary for all of them to be there in order for a complete creation to be.

Rachael Kohn: You’re listening to Earthing the Bible, on The Spirit of Things, Radio National, with my guest, Professor Norman Habel the Chief Editor of The Earth Bible, Volumes 1-4. And coming up later, an Indian view on our relationship to the environment.

This verse from Proverbs 30, reminds us of the God of small things.

Norman Habel: Four things on earth are small, yet they are exceedingly wise. The ants are a people without strength, yet they provide their food in summer; the badgers are a people without power, yet they make their homes in the rocks; the locusts have no king, yet all of them march in rank; the lizard can be grasped in the hand, yet it is found in kings’ palaces.

MUSIC

Rachael Kohn: Now so far we’ve been talking about reading the Bible, reading the earth consciousness in the Bible, but does the earth every speak to humankind? Do the inhabitants of the earth, the animals, ever teach mankind in the Bible?

Norman Habel: Well I think that’s one of the things that we’ve progressively begun to discover. We have a kind of dualism in the Western world which puts humans over against nature, humans over against animals, humans have got mind, intellect, and a voice, whereas earth is mute and dumb, and so on.

Now when you begin to work with indigenous peoples, African writers and readers, indigenous Australian writers and readers, you begin to realise that from the outset they assume that other dimensions of the creation have a voice. It may not be a human voice, but it’s a voice, and that voice can be heard in various ways, whether you’re in Africa or Australia, whatever.

And so when we begin to read the Biblical text with a consciousness, Is the earth ever speaking, or is the voice of earth to be heard? Is the voice of earth in fact suppressed in this text? Is it implied somewhere? You ask that question, you begin to discover that earth does have a voice in the Scriptures and it’s more than just a metaphor to say earth’s speaking, mountains sing, the psalmist calls upon the earth to rejoice; now is that just a game, is that just a liturgical game? Or in fact does creation celebrate?

Psalm 104 has everything under the sun, the rain and the hail and everything else, and the dragons under the earth, everybody is creating, celebrating, and has a voice. And this awareness of the voice of earth, I think is a major step forward. We have to see earth as a subject with a voice, even if it’s not the same as a human voice. We communicate in many ways, we talk about body language, we need to hear the earth language of the Biblical text and the ways in which it suffers or groans or sings or responds or objects, or even bears the burdens of humans.

Rachael Kohn: I wonder to what extent your being sensitised to how the earth is alive and rejoicing and almost anthropomorphised comes from your association with Aboriginal Australians?

Norman Habel: I think that’s probably true. There are two parts to my heritage: one is that I’m a farm boy and I was brought up amongst the kookaburras laughing and whatever else, and also I’ve had a long association with some powerful and significant Aboriginal mentors. One of those is George Rosendale, who lives up in Hopevale in Queensland, and the stories that he told made me realise that he is able to hear the voice of earth and has connection with the spirit of earth, and he tells a story about when he was born in a place under a tree, which became sacred. But his mother buried the afterbirth in the ground. Why?

Because that means the spirit of that afterbirth would return to the sacred place with which he had kinship and where the animals had kinship, and that then spoke with him and he had that connection. And that voice was always there. So this kind of awareness of how Aboriginal people have a kinship and can hear the voices of earth, is part and parcel of my awareness, but it’s wider than that, and it’s an awareness I believe that we can all have as we read the text.

Rachael Kohn: Did that actually influence the way you read the Book of Job?

Norman Habel: The way I read the Book of Job, well, that’s one of my favourite texts of all time, as you probably know. But the closing part of Job is quite powerful, because the book at the end, in Chapter 39, takes Job completely in the opposite direction of the Genesis one, Mandate to Dominate.

God takes Job into the wild, not into the world of the city or the world of domestic animals, but into the wild and says, If you go into this world, can you hear what the animals are doing, can you see, can you hear the lion crying out to God? There’s all this kind of language, which is the language of the wild, and the song of the wild that’s sung in that last chapter is making Job conscious of the fact that there are voices that are around, that are part of his world that are not just the voices of human beings. That’s just one aspect of that extraordinary final word from the whirlwind.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, and I was thinking of the story you just told, of George Rosendale, when Job refers to coming from the womb and returning back there. And you interpret that as going back to mother earth, coming from mother earth and going back to it; can you recount that?

Norman Habel: Well Job begins, you remember, and he suffers because God takes everything away. And initially he says to God, Look, naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will return there. Now if he’s going to return, where is ‘there’? And if you look closely in this chapter and in the following Chapter 3, it’s very clear that ‘there’ is the land of the dead, is the land of the earth, is the source of my origins. So he clearly talks about origins from the earth.

Psalm 139 does exactly the same thing. God wove you and me in the depths of the earth. So mother and mother earth become, as it were, one voice and one source and one song.

Rachael Kohn: So Norman the mass of effort that’s gone into the four volumes now of the Earth Bible, is not really a rewrite of the Bible, as one might expect, say emerging from the New Age, where there are all kinds of rewrites of things, this is really a new reading, it’s like putting on new lenses.

Norman Habel: It is putting on new lenses. The important thing that we did when we began this process, this was to say If we’re going to be reading this text, with a genuine ecological concern, a concern for eco-justice, we need to know where eco-justice is, what ecology is saying, what the science of ecology is about. And so we developed a set of six eco-justice principles.

These principles are developed in dialogue with ecologists and ecological writers. So that we are asking questions that really are questions that grow out of current scientific thought, as much as it is any kind of spiritual thought. They are general principles, the principle for example of the intrinsic value of earth and of all things on earth.

We ask the question therefore, Does this text value or de-value earth? Is there a sense of intrinsic value or de-valuing of earth in a given text? So we do not start from simply some kind of New Age perspective at all, we are starting from the basis of the fact that our earth is in crisis and we need to know and understand ecology as part and parcel of our academic and our religious work, and how we’re going to look at our heritage in the light of this serious thing called ecology, and a serious thing called the earth crisis.

Rachael Kohn: How would you ideally see the impact of this book? Where will the ripples be seen? Will it be in ministers being trained to be able to comment on the Bible and read it in a new way, to be able to sermonise about it in a new way? How will this Earth Bible get to the people on the ground, as it were?

Norman Habel: Well I hope there are three or four ways. The first one is that this will become a text in lots of places which train, seminaries and rabbis and whatever else, and these training programs will mean that people have a consciousness of an alternative hermeneutics, an alternative way of reading the text, not simply a feminist way, or some other way, but an eco-justice reading. And so key names like Carol Fontaine is a great Biblical scholar in America, uses this as a text, as do quite a number of others now. So it’s becoming a text.

It also is being planned as a text in Korea, so they’re planning to translate it into Korean to make it as a text for the training of clergy there. So that on a training level, this would be the kind of text we would have.

We would hope also that people would begin to think not just in terms of the traditional modes of worship and traditional seasons, I would hope that we would have a season of creation instead of just a season of Lent or a season of whatever it is; a season of creation, in which the kind of awareness of the songs of earth and the songs of the waters, the songs of the wild, the songs of creation that I found throughout the Biblical text would also then become part of our worship awareness and following from that awareness, participation in all those things that are necessary to heal the earth.

Rachael Kohn: Now I think Lloyd Geering referred to the Bible, perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, as the fallen idol that indeed it had become out of favour largely in the West; is this a way of revising it, blowing a new breath of life into the Bible, to make it more relevant?

Norman Habel: Well I would hope we were breathing something out of the Bible, I’m not one to throw something into it, I would hope that in fact the questions we are asking are questions that will in fact evoke from the text some very specific answers about how in fact the heritage has been understood.

One of the problems for example, let me give one example of the problem we face, which is with apocalyptic, and the idea the world is going to come to an end. Therefore in the mind of many popular thinkers and preachers, the earth is disposable, it’s waste, it can be thrown into the waste, bang, it can be eternity.

When in fact that kind of understanding of earth and of creation, is simply not true to the Biblical text when you look at it very closely. If you look at the text at the end of Revelation, this grand and glorious picture of the new world, the new world is not a disposal of this world, it’s a transformation, a renewal of this world.

This world, this earth, is what God has given, it’s a place where God dwells, and it’s a renewal of this earth that’s central, so I think there’s in fact not simply adding something, but a discovery of the fact that some of our theology, some of our thinking has been negative towards the earth in a way that’s not at all justified in the Biblical tradition.

Rachael Kohn: Now you’ve just recently returned from America where Volumes 3 and 4 have just been launched. How have Americans received The Earth Bible?

Norman Habel: Well I think that in general, they’re very well received. There’s a number of American writers, but most of the writers belong around the world, and we quite deliberately have chosen writers from indigenous places, Africa, South America, New Zealand, Australia.

In America they’re beginning to realise that there isn’t only just one major heritage, that in fact they now have to listen to voices from Africa, voices from another country and I think it’s significant that in this particular case it wasn’t just an isolated collection of lectures, or papers, it was in fact a whole new distinctive approach, which was in fact initiated, developed and formulated in dialogue with people around the world, but from within Australia, so in this sense, it’s a major step forward, just like feminism was a major move, this is another move, it’s still embryonic, it’s still the early stages, there’s still a lot of debate going to happen, but in fact it’s significant that I think the Australian academic world in the religious field can hold its head high. These people have done a fine job and the team with which I’ve had to work have been top-flight academic scholars who’ve vetted everything and won’t let me get away with anything.

Rachael Kohn: So how many more are you planning?

Norman Habel: Well there’s one more volume in this set of five, and that will come out next year, and that will focus primarily on the Christian Scriptures, the New Testament, then that set of five will then be the basis upon which a number of other things will develop. But I don’t think I want to reveal too much of that just yet.

Rachael Kohn: Well we await with anticipation. Norman Habel, it’s been great speaking to you, thank you so much for being on The Spirit of Things.

Norman Habel: It’s a pleasure.

Rachael Kohn: Norman Habel is Professorial Fellow at Flinders University of South Australia, and the Adelaide College of Divinity, and is Chief Editor of The Earth Bible, volumes 1-4, soon to be 5. It’s published by Sheffield Academic Press.

More… http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/spirit/stories/s471562.htm