This week for our environmental message, I have included an excerpt from a book written by Old Testament scholar Dr. Ellen F. Davis. She discusses how the two different creations accounts of Genesis 1 and 2 can shape and guide how we interact with the environment around us. Enjoy!
“Unquestionably, the editors who fused the two creation accounts intended us to see them as complementary components of a single story. Together, the two images give us a rich understanding of the derivation and the destiny of the human being: we are connected on one side of the family with divinity; on the other with fertile soil.
To use a phrase from the African-American tradition, we might say that the first chapter of Genesis give us a sense of ‘somebodyness.’ We are made in the image of God; we have a definite worth and high destiny. But the second creation account implicitly warns us not to get a distorted opinion of ourselves.”
“The two biblical symbols – humanity made in the image of God and human from humus – belong together, but in practice most contemporary Christians separate them. I think it is fair to say that our self-estimation generally owes more to the first chapter than to the second. We rightly remember that we have something of God in us, but we tend to forget the equal claim that the soil lays upon us.
For us in this generation, the call to discipleship may well be a call to remember our kinship with the fertile earth. If we are listening to the Bible’s prophetic witness to the present rapacious age, then we should be as shocked and radically reorientated as were those (few, perhaps) who hear and heeded Amos or Jeremiah, when we are told that the soil is more like a relative than a resource: it is to be respected, and not just used. For us, heeding the prophetic call means turning away from the rampant materialism that infects our society to the healthy materiality that is the first principle of a biblical ecology.”
(This quote has been taken from “Getting Involved with God – Rediscovering the Old Testament).