Farming for God: a religion of the soil?

Christian Century, Dec 27, 2003 by H. Paul Santmire

The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age. By Norman Wirzba. Oxford University Press, 240 pp., $37.50.

The Yahwist's Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel. By Theodore Hiebert. Oxford University Press, 210 pp., $49.95.

The Ethos of the Cosmos: The Genesis of Moral Imagination in the Bible. By William P. Brown. Eerdmans, 458 pp., $45.00 paperback.

THIRTY YEARS AGO "ecological theology" was a new phenomenon. By 1995 it was a major concern for the church and for many theologians. A comprehensive annotated bibliography published in that year (Ecology, Justice, and Christian Faith: A Critical Guide to the Literature, by Peter W. Bakken) had 512 entries. However, only 23 of those entries focused on biblical interpretation. This was striking indeed, since during the preceding decades much, if not all, of ecological theology had been developed in response to the charge, most memorably launched by historian Lynn White Jr., that Christianity is ecologically bankrupt in large measure because of its dependence on the Bible.

With hindsight we can discern some of the reasons for the apparent reluctance, even principled refusal, of many biblical scholars to enter the discussion. From the middle years of the 20th century and for several decades thereafter, both Old and New Testament studies were self-consciously anthropocentric. For example, G. Ernest Wright juxtaposed the essence of Israel's faith--a religion of history, he maintained, born in the Exodus event and honed by Israel's desert wanderings--with the faith of the Canaanites, a religion of nature. Rudolf Bultmann set the historical faith of the early Christian community over against the "objectifying," naturalizing faith of other religions. This kind of "history of salvation" approach dominated biblical studies for many years, both in Europe and North America, and is still presupposed Icy numerous scholars.

That situation has begun to change dramatically, thanks in part to Theodore Hiebert and William Brown. Hiebert shows how the Yahwist, the anonymous narrator of much of the Pentateuch, refers to the agrarian terrain of the biblical hill country. Hiebert maximizes the implications of a literal reading of "earth" in Genesis 2: Adam is made not from "the earth" (eretz), Hiebert stresses, but from the "'arable soil," which is what the word adamah means. The story of Israel is thus a story of farmers. "The claim that Israelite religion valued history while it devalued nature can no longer be derived from a formative desert experience."

Serving and protecting the land is part of Israel's innermost identity. This is reflected in the Yahwist's approach to Israel's rituals: "Made by God from arable soil and commissioned by God to farm it, the worshiper offers the soil's produce as service to God, as an act, one might almost say, of self definition." Moreover, cities appear in the Yahwist's narrative as sites where "the great harvest festivals mandated in the Yahwist's liturgical calendar were celebrated." Hiebert brilliantly sets the dominant hermeneutic of the 20th century on its head. Whatever else it was, the religion of Israel, at least the religion of the Yahwist, was a religion of nature.

Brown adopts and adapts many of Hiebert's findings but broadens the scope of the inquiry. He shows how in the divine drama of the creation, redemption and consummation of the world, nature, or the earth in its fullness, was understood as a player in its own right, with its own moral claims. Brown seeks to "rejoin what has been rent asunder": nature and history. To that end, with thoughtful precision and expository richness, he explores the various and variegated theologies of the Priestly traditions, 2 Isaiah, the wisdom theology of Proverbs, the land-theology of the Yahwist and, perhaps most strikingly, the wilderness ethos of Job. All of these, Brown demonstrates, work "to convey a thoroughly cosmic profile of God's reign of righteousness and peace."

HIEBERT'S AND BROWN'S work set the stage for the arresting theological argument of Norman Wirzba. His felicitously written study is the first major theological monograph in conversation with the findings of Hiebert and Brown and with the work of other biblical scholars who have moved in similar directions. Its dialogical character makes Wirzba's work engaging. His biblically informed theological reflection is self-consciously correlated with the kinds of questions that have long preoccupied ecologists and agrarian thinkers, especially the pioneering American ecologist Aldo Leopold. This accessible, sophisticated essay in quest of theological understanding should command widespread attention.

The Paradise of God is well titled, since the biblical theme of "the garden" shapes the entire discussion. Drawing especially on Hiebert, Wirzba shows that the theme of "the arable soil" (adamah) unifies the Yahwist's theology in Genesis 2 and beyond, and that the teaching about the Sabbath, announced in Genesis 1 by the Priestly source, gives biblical thought about creation a profound and thoroughgoing ecological and indeed eschatological character, as well as a pronounced emphasis on justice. Wirzba explains how human culture, despite its many progressive elements, generally represents the sinful denial of God's good creation, most dramatically in the modern era. The machinations of human aggrandizement now have eclipsed the agrarian life and produced an abstracting, godless world of dominance, exploitation and death.