Reading the creation story in a dying world

In late summer, as Hurricane Dorian was visiting catastrophe upon the Bahamas, I was reading Genesis 1 and 2 with undergraduates. We noted the usual things that can surprise or unsettle students: that there are two creation accounts from distinct traditions, that these ancient writers were not doing science for us, that they didn’t know they were writing something called the Bible. In wide-ranging conversations, we explored the idea that the two versions together create a social imaginary indicative of the writers’ time and instructive for ours.

But to what end? It’s one thing to examine these texts for their cultural import. It’s good to know, for instance, that the English word dominion (1:26, 28) does not convey the subtleties of the Hebrew, with its connotations of shepherding, kinship, and communal power. That translation and our go-to associations with it—words like domination and subjugation—have underwritten the ruinous relationship with the earth that much of Christianity has permitted of its followers.

It’s common enough and admirable, too, to find in such explorations, especially among the young, a wake-up call to the ecological calamities of the moment. We need to do something, for God’s sake. We need to call out religion’s complicity in the orchestrated undoing of the world. We need to mobilize. It’s another thing, though, and not always an entirely separate thing, to read these texts as companions to grief, as guides of a sort for living in a dying world.