Page 3 of 9Original Research
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Furthermore, this ‘grey’ mandate is reinforced later on (Gn 9:2) and celebrated (Ps 8). Not identifying ipso facto with the human characters but having empathy with earth as a character, Habel (ibid) indicates imaginatively what her ‘voice’ might sound like:
Where is the justice in such a mandate? Why should I be subdued as if I were an enemy to be placed under foot? Why should the creatures I brought to life be treated as the slaves of human beings?[1] (p. 68)
Habel then presents an alternative humans-to-serve-text,
Genesis 2:15: ‘Then the Lord God took the man and put him
in the Garden of Eden to serve and preserve it.’ This is an
alternative way of life, even an alternative God speaking
here, not to be ‘harmonised’ with Genesis 1:26–28. Finally,
Habel (2009:74–77) emphasises the way of Jesus, of serving
rather than dominating (Mk 10:42–45). This is choosing the
green rather than the grey way of life.
There are other mighty-acts-of-God texts that Habel
highlights, but the Old Testament equivalent of the saving
act of Jesus in the New Testament, namely the Exodus event,
will suffice as an example. The plagues, the departure from
Egypt and the crossing of the Reed Sea (Ex 13–14) all form
part of this prominent event. Habel (2009:16–22) focuses
especially on the waters of the Nile and that of the Reed Sea
to demonstrate the collateral damage inflicted by God to
nature in saving Israel. The Nile is ‘assaulted’ through the
plagues (e.g. Ex 7:19) and the waters of the Reed Sea forced
to swallow the Egyptians. These saving acts are suspiciously
anthropocentric and ethnocentric and become destructive
for earth’s natural eco-systems. The celebration in Exodus 15
depicts God as a mighty warrior and not as a compassionate
creator (Habel ibid:84). Empathising and retrieving the voices
of these innocent receivers as the stage[2] upon which God’s
wrath is enacted against Israel’s enemy, one can repeatedly
after every plague hear the desperate call of the suffering
waters of the Nile: ‘We are innocent!’ (Habel ibid:84). Or one
can hear the call of the earth (and Reed Sea), voiced by Habel
(ibid:85) as an (ironical) rhetorical question: ‘I am happy that
you employed my winds to disrupt the flow of the waters and
destroy people … opened my deeps so that I could swallow
humans …?’ Bypassing some green texts (e.g. Ps 104; Jr 12:11;
Hs 4:1–3) on the way to Jesus, Habel (2009:90) finds Jesus’
healing acts especially ecologically meaningful (e.g. Lk 5:17–
26)[3] in so far as they demonstrate Jesus’ ‘intimate interaction
with the human body’ with a spiritual dimension obviously
also implied. Added to this is the act of God becoming flesh
through Jesus (Jn 1:14) – ‘God became a piece of Earth –
like Adam’ (Habel 2009:94). God joins the web of creation,
identifies with and permeates creation (Habel ibid:94). By associating God so closely with nature, it begets (ultimate)
intrinsic worth!
The third set of grey texts concerns the promised-land
syndrome, the divine right that allowed ancient Israel to
invade and possess Canaan: ‘The Lord has given us this
land!’ (Jos 2:10). The book of Joshua has become the charter
for the promised-land syndrome (Habel 2009:28), not only
for Israel but for all colonising countries later on, invading
the new world. As with the Exodus event, the collateral
damage destroying nature continues, for example: ‘With
the destruction of Jericho, “oxen, sheep and donkeys” are
all destroyed as an act of devotion to God’ (Jos 6:21; Habel
ibid:32). Ironically at the forefront, even with cosmic support
(Jos 10:11–13), is the warrior God. The rights of the Canaanites
who have been custodians of the land for centuries are totally
ignored (Habel ibid:28). The empathising voice that Habel
(ibid) gives to the land sounds as follows:
Why devote cities and landscapes to destruction rather than preservation? Why, after rescuing his people from Egypt with mighty acts of destruction, does this God feel constrained to do the same to the peoples and the land of Canaan? (p. 98)
A few green moments en route to the New Testament is
the Sabbath text and the depiction of Canaan as Yahweh’s
sanctuary where God resides on earth (Ex 15:17; Lv 25–27).
When Israel lost their land during the exile, a new promised
land is depicted, a return to Eden where miraculously even
the deserts will overflow with water (Is 43:19–21), the wolf
and the lamb will feed together (Is 65:25) and the normal
river ecosystems of earth is turned upside down in their
abundance (Ezk 47). Habel (2009) lets the earth protest to
these unnatural ecosystems:
Why does God suggest a future where the new Promised Land is itself alien to the very creation God has celebrated in the past? These images of a transformed land, or even heaven[4] may be grand and glorious but they are hardly green – at least not as I have known green in the past. (p. 106)
When Habel again offers Jesus as the green answer to the
grey inconvenience of some Bible traditions, he interestingly
opts for a Jesus that is part of the here and now and not
reigning in some distant celestial abode where the earth
has been dissolved (e.g. 2 Pt 3:10; see also Phlp 2:4–11). He
finds Romans 8:18–27 a powerful green text where, whilst
creation continues, it groans together with humanity and
the suffering Spirit, anticipating healing from all the wrongs
done to it (Habel 2009:111).[5] The cosmic Christ’s suffering,
reconciliation and healing effects all of creation (ta panta),
not only humans (Col 2:20), and shows God ‘… at one with
creation’ (ibid:113). Habel (ibid) summarises:
The green texts identified above have tended to locate God in, with and under creation; Creation is God’s sanctuary, world – or even body. The grey texts locate God outside of creation, intervening and interrupting the natural ecosystems of Earth.
http://www.ve.org.zadoi:10.4102/ve.v35i1.1310
- ↑ See also the effort of Viviers (2003) of imaginatively giving earth a ‘voice’ in Psalm 150.
- ↑ In his earlier work, Habel (2000a:38–53) refers to the anthropocentric view of earth as only the ‘stage’, an object on which human deeds are enacted and become the main focus. He instead, pleads for earth as a co-subject in her own right.
- ↑ Jesus’ healing of the demon-possessed man in Luke 8:26–39, sending the demons into a herd of innocent, bystander pigs on a hill that led to their drowning in a lake nearby, is, however, considered by Habel (2009:90) as collateral damage and a ‘grey’ text.
- ↑ This tunnel vision on heaven or ‘heavenism’ is aptly described by Habel (2009:34) as follows: ‘… we believers are going to heaven so to hell with Earth.’
- ↑ Reading between the lines of its religiosity, there is the possibility of also sensing the Earth’s healing itself naturally, of which the ‘groaning’ is the first step on its way to recovery.
