Wilderness and Dominion                                       

            Section 3-D

“Wilderness and Dominion:

God’s will in creation and our response”

by Vincent Rossi

To understand the human and, ultimately, religious responsibility to preserve wilderness, we must have an orthodox — that is, a theologically correct and spiritually sound — understanding of the Biblical principle of dominion. More specifically, we need to understand how and why the Bible insists on a close and vital relationship between wilderness and dominion.

      To grasp the vital link between wilderness and dominion requires that we know the Biblical answer to two deceptively simple questions. The first is simply "what is creation?" The second is one that Wendell Berry used as a title for one of his books: "what are people for?"

      The heart of the challenge to understand dominion in its relationship to wilderness lies in the Biblical under-standing of the nature of man in the context of creation. But the Bible insists that we cannot understand human nature, or what people are for, without also under-standing both dominion and wilderness, or what creation is and what it is for.

      So we have four elements in our Biblical ecological equation: the creation, human nature, wilderness, and dominion. The Bible itself gives us both the question and the answer and the principle that links the two. The first chapter of Genesis makes it abundantly clear that God made the world because He willed to do so; He loves His creation, lavishes his providential care upon it each and every moment of its existence, and considers all of it and every part of it very good. He offers it as gift and expects it to be respected and cared for.

      Creation as God's will, gift and good pleasure is the inescapable ecological first principle of Scripture. But note the crucial sequence at the beginning of creation. God creates the heavens and the earth. The earth is without form and void; darkness is on the face of the Deep, upon the face of that upon which the eternal Spirit moves. And God says "let there be light," and there is light. Creation begins with the initial movement of God's will. Following this, the first conceivable manifestation of creation is darkness, formlessness and the infinite potentiality of an incomprehensible creative power. This darkness is not the darkness of evil, because God is not the

author of evil. It is rather the initial manifestation of the Unmanifest in all its infinity and potentiality — in other words, Chaos, properly understood. This is not chaos as evil, but chaos as the unknowable immensity of Divine power and potentiality underlying creation. When God said, “let there be light,” He initiates, not the beginning of creation, but the beginning of Cosmos, the order, beauty, harmony, purpose and perfection of creation. Creation is the manifestation of cosmos out of chaos. Nothing exists in the created order that does not have chaos as its underlying energy and force and cosmos as its form, beauty and purpose.

      In Genesis 1:26, God gives dominion over creation to man whom He created in His image and likeness. Immediately we are led to understand that dominion is a potentiality and an actuality that expresses something of what it means to be in God's image and likeness.

      In the following verses the nature of dominion is spelled out by a number of Divine imperatives given to that creature created especially in His image, after his likeness: to be fruitful, to multiply, to replenish the earth, and to subdue it. As God is the infinite source of abundant life, His image must reflect and continue that fruitfulness in the created order. The sense of creative abundance in "replenish" balances perfectly and precisely the sense of lordship and mastery in "subdue." But it is not always noticed that the word subdue implies something upon which the command to subdue rests, a powerful, creative, vital force that resists the imposition of a will other than its own — in other words, chaos, or in the form in which we experience it today — wilderness. I will return to the question of chaos in wilderness later. Now we must address the question, what are people for?

      Scripture asks the question "what is man?" three different times, the same question in three different contexts, each context providing part of the total answer: Psalm 8:4, Psalm 144:3 and Job 7:17.

      "What is man that thou art mindful of him?" Psalm 8 answers in positive wonderment that God made man a little lower than the angels, gave him dominion over all the works of His hands, and put everything created under his feet.

      Psalm 144 answers in negative wonderment that this human being whom God cares so much about seems to be nothing but a vanity, an evanescent being whose existence is no more than a shadow that passes away, in contrast to the created order of the heavens, the planets and stars, which seemingly go on forever. Job hurls the question toward heaven in anguish, bitterness and anger at the seeming injustices of created life and the inexplicable suffering allowed by an inscrutable Divinity. The last four chapters of Job provide the answer to all three questions. God's answer to Job is shocking and highly instructive. He roars at Job out of the whirlwind, literally flattening the man from Ur with the overwhelming force and power of His Divine Majesty and omnipotence. God rains upon the head of the helpless Job a relentless hailstorm of questions, every one of which is powerful enough to crack the windshield of his arrogance in contending with God.

      The crucial significance of these questions which God demands that Job answer, yet which He knows he cannot, is that every one of them, nearly 90 in all, is a question rooted in the natural world. More precisely, every one of these questions pushes Job to face the immensity, wisdom, astonishing delicacy, overwhelming power, intelligence and sheer wildness of nature as created by God. In short, God humbles Job by forcing him to contemplate the wilderness. God does not tell Job to study the scriptures and the writings of the theologians so that he can get a right idea about Divinity. Instead, he compels him to look at the heavens and the earth, to wonder at the beauty and order of the stars, the wisdom of the clouds, the seasons, the light and dark of day and night, to contemplate the overwhelming complexity and harmony of the biosphere, the mystery of life and death, to taste the fierce freedom of the wild ass, the majesty of the horse, the untamable power of behemoth and leviathan.

      Forcing him to face the wilderness, God asks, do you dare to contend with the Almighty One who has created all this out of nothing but his wisdom and good will? In the last four chapters of the book of Job, in the context of the whole Biblical teaching on creation, we learn the key lessons of creation, what people are for, the meaning of wilderness, and the purpose of dominion. Creation is a wondrous divine gift, beyond all human capacity to fathom, but not at all beyond, indeed, demanding, the exercise of the human capacity to wonder, praise, appreciate, love, protect and use with respect and, above all, humility.

      Creation is a mysterious relationship of chaos and cosmos, of darkness and light, of force and form. Dominion, which is given to human beings as a capacity of human nature created in the image and likeness of God, is the creative power to draw cosmos, ordered beauty, from chaos, formless potentiality and power. Human beings are co-creators with God, and we fulfill our creative potential as images of God most naturally when we bring the "light" of intelligence and wisdom and creativity to bear on the "darkness" of the deep potentialities of the natural order as created by God.

      God so ordered creation that it is in the nature of chaos to be capable of being subdued by cosmos, but the inexhaustible power and potentiality of divinely created chaos can never be totally subdued or consumed. In theological terms, we know that God in his Divine Nature is unknowable and inexpressible, yet He can be known by us through the work of His hands, the creation.            

      Romans 1:19-20 teaches us exactly this when it tells us that the invisible things of God from the creation of the

world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead. Therefore, in creation, every part and facet of which is the work of His hands, there is both that which is knowable and comprehendible and usable, and that which always surpasses and eludes our knowledge and capacity. Just as there is an "apophatic," or hidden impossible-to-express dimension in the Divine nature, so there is an "apophatic" dimension in created nature: and this is most clearly seen in wilderness.

         Equally, just as there is a "cataphatic" or manifestly knowable dimension in God's being, which he reveals to us in creation and revelation, so too in the creation, the forms and behaviors of all beings reveal the cosmos as the "light" of created beings emerging from the "darkness" of the infinite and inexhaustible creative power that is the ground of creation's being. Human beings stand in creation between wilderness and garden. Wilderness is the creation in its "chaotic" state, in which the dimension of chaos (which, it must be repeated, is not disorder, but is an order of incomprehensible depth, complexity and harmony) is clearly revealed in all the relationships of the cosmos. Garden is the creation in its "cosmic" state of ordered harmony, which is most clearly revealed when human beings exercise their power and responsibility of dominion in the manner originally intended by God.

      When the humanly created cosmos subdues the chaos of wilderness, the result is or should be gardens in the midst of wilderness, in other words, a right balance between chaos and cosmos. But when the human power of dominion is used to subdue nature in a tyrannical and destructive manner to serve human needs and greeds in a way contrary to God's purpose, then a demonic form of "cosmos" results, in which an artificial, mechanized and robotized order is forced upon nature. Such a demonic form of cosmos in the very nature of things turns tyrannically upon its creators, human beings in their fallen state, and forces human nature to adapt to its inhuman and demonic patterns. That is our punishment for the misuse of the power of dominion. The balance of nature is destroyed, and a truly demonic chaos ensues, one that is indeed a terrible and punishing form of disorder, to which and by which we humans are compelled to adapt.

      Wilderness is one of God's greatest gifts to humanity. In wilderness is preserved all that God revealed to Job to soften his heart and lead him to a salvific repentance in which Job could once again be in communion with God and with all things.. In wilderness are found all the principles, causes and forces that preserve and sustain life and the world in their pristine forms.

      In wilderness, there is the possibility for each one of us to have a "Job experience" in which we might learn the humility that will allow us to exercise our God-given dominion in the way God intended. In fact, it is in the wilderness that the possibility exists for us to discover that the true purpose of dominion is to preserve wilderness as an act of true religion, in which we learn to practice respect and love for all creatures as gifts of God.