This past growing season reacquainted me with aspects of the world I had long forgotten, As it did, I become increasingly convinced that the theology of the garden, particularly of Genesis and the Garden of Eden, is the taproot by which the theology of the entire Bible is fed and understood.

Near the end of the creation story, Genesis 1:26 tells how 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 creepth upon the earth.” Many people take this verse to mean God has left mankind in full charge of the earth and all its creatures to do with as we want until the second coming of Christ.

The Slavers of the Old South had no trouble embracing this meaning. They justified their dominion over the slave class by casting them as less than human, as part of the animal kingdom over which God had most assuredly given them dominion.  Kings of old and many people today had and have no trouble working at the altar of this particular interpretation.

This narrative remains plausible until a person notices that Genesis, in its entirety, is written as one large morality tale arguing against such arrogance – the tradgedy of Caine whose thoughtless sense of dominion ushered in the murder of Abel; the flood after mankind chose to believe it could do anything it wanted with its dominion; the fall of Babel as its inhabitants sought an unbounded dominion. Yet the book ends on an opposite note, with Joseph’s dreams and the fruition of those dreams in his humble, merciful dominion become the exemplar that God calls all of us to follow.

This closing counterargument is easy to miss. We can be blinded by habits, politics, and ways of seeing the world that warp our biblical interpretations. But come to Genesis after kneeling long hours in a garden, and something in the humble nature of the endeavor begs an alternate reading of God’s word.

From the first chapter of Genesis onward, the Bible is really a study in contrast between these two opposing types of dominion. It is asking us to choose between embracing the arrogant, judgmental, lie-infested, wordly version of that dominion or the humble, merciful, truth-filled, heavenly version.  

To paraphrase four biblical descriptions in tandem (two, found in Philippians 2:6-8 and Matthew 4: 1-11, which describe Jesus; two, found in Ezekiel 28: 12-17 and Isaiah 14:12-15, which describe Satan),  our choice is:

• One: whether to establish our arrogant thrones above the stars or on the high cliffs of temptation, as if forgetting the lessons offered by Babel, the flood, and Satan. Or two: despite being created in the image of God, to humbly foreswear the power of God as a thing to be grasp and used for our own advantage.
  
• One: whether to go to war over apples and the desire to ensure our daily bread? Or two: to remember that man lives ‘neither by apples nor bread alone, but by also tending to God’s every word.  
  
• One: Whether to believe that our violent tendencies and all the earthly kingdoms we have conquered are a mark of our beauty, light, and exceptionalism. Or two, believing we are meant to be peacekeepers and the stewards of all things?

This set of paraphrases is dense with allusions to verses that span the Bible. For now, it is enough to know that you can see the main threads of the contrast between arrogance and humility, between Satan and Christ, by reading the descriptions of them found in the four verses referenced above.

The point here is that there is no place in the Bible where the text seriously implies that God has given us ownership of the earth or of anything on it, not even of our own bodies. The only way to claim such ownership is to usurp it by imagining God has made us the beneficiaries of the same kind of dominion Satan was caste out of heaven for seeking.

Try raising tomatoes, wheat, or corn during a three-year absence of rain, the kind that is given freely by the one who owns it all. Attempt growing potatoes, squash, or beets without the sunshine gifted us every day. Show me how to take waste, death, and decay, and to turn it back into life, beauty, and sustenance. Show me the creator who manages all of these things effortlessly, and I will show you the true owner of the world – the one who by way of some devine oedipal complex we often subconsciously or purposely trying to overthrow.

The dominion offered by God is a choice, a struggle between arrogance and humility, violence and grace, curse and blessing.

• The Two Dominions in a Nutshell
• Joseph’s Dream and Cain’s Nightmare
• Planting a Garden with Your Sunday-Schoolers
• The Opposite of Humility?
• Blessed are the Meek
• The Parable of the Caretakers
• Humility as the Sine Quo Non of Love
• Spirtuality versus Supremacy
• Humilty, Redemption, and Shipwrecks
• Job, Gardening, and Humility

(These and other posts are coming soon.)