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The Terrible Texts: Be Fruitful and Multiply and Subdue the Earth
(Originally posted August 2003)
Christians have never been significantly committed to the preservation of our common environment. Ecological concerns are present in Church life, but they never quite make it to the top tier of the issues that consume ecclesiastical energy. That is usually reserved for theological and sexual concerns. To be fair, each denomination probably includes some environmental enthusiasts, but they tend to be an endangered species when funding is being considered.
There are many reasons for this attitude, but a major one emerges under that rubric that Christians call “The Authority of Scripture.” To put it bluntly, environmental issues are simply not supported in the traditional reading of the Bible. In that sacred text there is no specific command to live in harmony with or even to be dedicated to preserving God’s world. Instead, there is both a latent and an overt anthropocentrism, which suggests that biblical authors believed that the earth exists for the benefit of human beings.
Domination not mutuality is the operative word. This attitude is articulated best in the Creation Story in which God gives human beings directions about how they are to engage this world. These words constitute one of what I call “the Terrible Texts” of the Bible. Out of these texts have flowed great havoc and pain that need to be faced. In this particular verse God is said to have instructed the newly created first family to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every living thing that moves upon the earth (Gen.1: 28).”
To understand what is really being said here, it is necessary to break this destructive text into its constituent parts. I intend to look at these words from several angles until its “terrible” negativity can be fully experienced. Human beings are to “be fruitful and multiply” so that they can “subdue the earth.” Ancient people saw these injunctions as essential to their survival, while modern people see them as negative to theirs. What was thought of as a divine admonition yesterday, has become a prescription for disaster today.
Times have changed! In my mind a text that urges an expanded population produces the very mentality that threatens the future of our world and the longevity of the human race. That assertion drives me to state boldly its inescapable corollary: Any person, organization or institution, no matter how ancient or revered that does not understand the threat of over-population and that does not work for population control and family planning has sacrificed all claims to possessing morality.
To make this case it is first essential to look at our history. The words “be fruitful and multiply” came to be thought of as a divine commandment in a particular time and in a particular context that need to be understood.
When the Bible came into written form, somewhere between 1000 B.C.E. and 135 C.E., there were formidable enemies in several categories that threatened human survival. Among these enemies were first of all rival clans or tribes that sought to secure their future by winning militarily the prizes of war that guaranteed tribal survival: food, wealth and women. Next in that world major animal predators still existed. The desired outcome of the hunt would hopefully be “dinner” for the tribe but it also often resulted in death for one or more of the hunters. Weapons in that early day were primitive – sticks with sharpened or even metal tips, rocks and clubs. They did not always tilt the balance of power in favor of the hunters.
A third natural enemy of human survival was both unseen and undefined and thus was even more deeply feared. Our ancient ancestors did not know anything about germs, viruses, heart attacks, strokes, leukemia or tumors. All they knew was that human life was fragile, mysteriously subject to silent and invisible forces that struck indiscriminately with fevers, pain, paralysis and even death.
With these potent forces threatening human life, the goal of survival was best served by expanding the population and the more children born the better the chances were to keep the tribe at least stable and to replenish those who fell in battle, the hunt or to sickness. So people heard the command to “be fruitful and multiply” as the literal “Word of God.”
Circumstances, however, change and context is altered. The world was vast and tribes moved away from their perceived enemies, into the safety of relative isolation. More efficient ways of hunting were developed and weapons were eventually deployed from a safe distance. These weapons became more and more lethal until no animal remained as an ultimate threat to Homo sapiens. Next the growing human ability to cultivate land, to plant crops and to build surpluses took away the specter of starvation that had once caused our ancestors to pray for “daily bread.” Better diet then combined with access to clean water to contribute to a growing human longevity. As death was postponed, the population grew.
An enormous boost was given to that process when growing knowledge and skill in the healing arts began to identify and defeat the causes of sickness. Counter attacks against germs and viruses were launched with penicillin and antibiotics. Surgical procedures, radiation and chemotherapy were used to fight tumors and cancers. Cardiovascular accidents, now called heart attacks and strokes, were subjected to angioplasty procedures, surgical methods and drugs that opened clogged arteries. The fact that we talk routinely today of double, triple or quadruple by-pass heart procedures only emphasizes the depth of the revolution. With the introduction of pre-natal care for expectant mothers there has been a sharp decline in the deaths of women and a huge increase in the births of healthy babies. All of these forces combined to produce a geometric rise in the human population.
At first these new realities were the source of joy and celebration. But then statistics began to paint another picture. It took the world millions of years before the human population reached one billion people. It took only tens of thousands of years before this population achieved two billion. Then the three billion mark was passed in hundreds of years. Now the six billion mark has been passed, and reliable estimates project a doubling of the human population every forty years.
This population explosion has brought with it tremendous new strains on the earth’s ability to support such numbers. Only dramatic changes in agricultural practices, including the development of genetically modified foods, new chemical fertilizers that doubled and tripled the harvest per acre and breeding programs that exploded the amount of beef, lamb, pork, fish and fowl, have managed to keep up with the food needs of this growing population. Yet the dark side of these advances has begun to make itself apparent.
We noticed first that despite massive efforts human starvation is still present in our world. Then we became aware that the practices used to expand food production were morally suspect. Next we noticed that some of these practices actually carried long-term dangers to health. A new assessment of “fruitful multiplication” had begun.
Next we became aware that the energy needed to support this burgeoning population was threatening to exhaust the finite supply of fossil fuels and simultaneously to contribute to global warming. We now experience clogged highways, smog in our cities, various breathing diseases and enormous pressure on the infrastructures needed to support the human enterprise. One could argue that wars and terrorism both result from an exploding population and its rising pressure on natural resources. No end is visible in these spiraling realities and no one believes that the developing nations of the world will not exhibit the same appetites for automobiles and other energy-using amenities of modern life that mark the developed nations. This will push the common environment over the brink of destruction. In the modern world, the ability to limit human birth has thus emerged as nothing less than a necessity to our continued survival.
If human survival is tied to curtailing population growth, who among us wants to define the biblical injunction calling us to “be fruitful and multiply” as the word of God? It becomes, rather, a ‘terrible’ text in the biblical story that needs to be exposed. It also creates a new demand that a case to be made for the morality of effective family planning and realistic publicly financed programs of sex education for all people that will include instruction on effective and safe methods of birth control. The Christian Church can no longer be either in opposition or quiet and passive on this subject. Some part of the Church must rise to the current challenge and make the case for birth control as a compelling moral imperative. That also means that some part of the Church must carry the debate to the heart of the Vatican and to do so in the name of Christ. I will move to that theme next week in part II of this series.
~ John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Katherine, from Richmond, VA writes:
Question:
What is it about this Jesus that you find so compelling? When I hear the Christmas story from the Bible I believe that I am listening to fairy tales. Stars do not announce the birth of a human being. Angels do not sing to hillside shepherds. Virgins do not conceive and give birth. Is there something behind the old mythology that I am missing? Can you still, with any integrity, refer to Jesus as “the son of God?”
Answer:
Dear Katharine,
Thank you for your questions. Not only are they important ones but they give me the opportunity to articulate my deepest convictions about this Jesus in the column that will go out to my subscribers on Christmas Eve. So I shall frame my answer to you in the form of a Christmas meditation, for this Jesus has always both fascinated and attracted me.
My deepest self-definition is that I am a Christian, by which I mean that in Jesus of Nazareth I believe I see the meaning of God most clearly. This experience of an in-breaking divine presence is what I believe created the Christmas traditions that you refer to in your question. Certainly during this season they are omnipresent.
It was more than two thousand years ago that the historic figure we call Jesus lived. It was a life of relatively short duration, only thirty-three years. At most only three of those years were devoted to a public career. Yet, that life appears to have been a source of wonder and power to those who knew him. Tales of miraculous power surrounded him. Words of insight and wisdom were believed to have flowed from his lips. Love and freedom seemed to be qualities that marked his existence. Men and women found themselves called into being by him. Those laden with guilt discovered, somehow, the joy of forgiveness in him. The alone, the insecure, the warped and twisted found him to be a source of peace. He possessed the courage to be who he was. He is described in terms that portray him as an incredibly free man.
Jesus seems to have had no internal needs that drove him to prove himself – no anxieties that centered his attention on himself. He rather appears to have had an uncanny capacity to give his life away. He gave love, he gave selfhood, he gave freedom, and he gave them abundantly – wastefully, extravagantly.
Lives touched by his life were never the same. Somehow life’s secret, its very purpose, seemed to be revealed in him. When people looked at him they were somehow able to see beyond him, and even through him. They saw in his life the Source of all life that expanded them. They saw in his love the Source of love and the hope of their own fulfillment. This kind of transforming power was something they had not known before.
Freedom is always scary. People seek security in rules that curb freedom. So his enemies conspired to remove him and his threat to them. From one perspective it might be said that they killed him. When one looks more closely at the story, however, it might be more accurate to say that he found in himself the freedom to give his life away and to do so quite deliberately. He died caring for those who took his life from him. In that moment he revealed a love that could embrace all the hostilities of human life without allowing those hostilities to compromise his ability to love. He demonstrated rather dramatically that there is nothing a person can do and nothing a person can be that will finally render any of us either unlovable or unforgivable. Even when a person destroys the giver of life and love, that person does not cease to be loved by the Source of love or called into life by the Source of life. That was his message or at least that is what people believed they had met in this Jesus. Such a life could not help but transcend human limits. For this kind of love can never be overwhelmed by hatred; this life can never finally be destroyed by death.
Is it any wonder that people had to break the barriers of language when they sought to make rational sense out of this Jesus experience? They called him the Son of God. They said that somehow God was in him. So deeply did people believe these things that the way they perceived history was changed by him. To this day we still date the birth of our civilization from the birth of this Jesus.
They believed that he was able to give love and forgiveness, acceptance and courage. They believed that he had the power to fill life full. Since people tended to define God as the Source of life and love, they began to say that in this human Jesus they had engaged the holy God.
When they began to write about this transforming experience they confronted a problem. How could the human mind, which can only think using human vocabulary, stretch far enough to embrace the God presence they had experienced in this life? How could mere words be big enough to capture this divine meaning? Inevitably, as they wrote they lapsed into poetry and imagery. When this life entered human history, they said, even the heavens rejoiced. A star appeared in the sky. A heavenly host of angels sang hosanna. Judean shepherds came to view him. Eastern Magi journeyed from the ends of the earth to worship him. Since they were certain that they had met the presence of God in him, they reasoned that God must have been his father in some unique way. It was certainly a human reference but that is all we human beings have to use.
Life as we know it, they said, could never have produced what we have found in him. That is why they created birth traditions capable of accounting for the adult power that they found in him.
Our modern and much less mysterious world reads these birth narratives and, assuming a literalness of human language that the biblical writers never intended, say “How ridiculous! How unbelievable! Things like that just do not happen. Stars don’t suddenly appear in the night to announce a human birth. Angels do not entertain hillside shepherds with heavenly songs. Virgins do not conceive. These things cannot be true.”
On one level those criticisms are accurate. Things like that do not happen in any literal sense. But does that mean that the experience this ecstatic language was created to communicate was not real. I do not think so.
The time has come for Christians, when we try to talk about God, to face without being defensive, the inadequacy of human language. These stories were never meant to be read literally. They were written by those who had been touched by this Jesus. That is why they challenge our imaginations and sound so fanciful and unreal. Our minds are so earthbound that our imaginations have become impoverished. Literal truth has given way to interpretive images. When life meets God and finds fulfillment one sees sights never before seen, one knows joy never before experienced, and one expects the heavens to sing and dance in celebration.
The story of Christmas, as told by the gospel writers, has a meaning beyond the rational and a truth beyond the scientific. It points to a reality that no life touched by this Jesus could ever deny. The beauty of our Christmas story is bigger than our rational minds can embrace. For when this Jesus is known, when love, acceptance, and forgiveness are experienced, when we become whole, free and affirmed people, the heavens do sing “Glory to God in the Highest,” and on earth there is “Peace and Good Will among Us All.” Hence, we Christians rejoice in the transcendent beauty and wonder of this Christmas story. To those who have never stepped inside this experience we issue an invitation to come stand where we stand and look through our eyes at this babe of Bethlehem. Then perhaps they too will join those of us who read these
Christmas stories year after year for one purpose only: to worship the Lord of life who still sets us free and who calls us to live, to love and to be all that we can be. That is why the Christmas invitation is so simple: Come, come, let us adore him.
How do we adore him? In my mind the answer to that query is clear. I adore him not by becoming religious or by becoming a missionary who seeks to convert the world to my understanding of Jesus. I do it rather by dedicating my energies to the task of building a world where everyone in this world might have an opportunity to live more fully, love more wastefully and have the courage to be all that they were created to be. This is the only way I know how to acknowledge the Source of Life, the Source of Love and the Ground of Being that I believe that I have experienced in this Jesus. How can one adore the Source of Life except by living? How can one adore the Source of Love except by loving? How can one adore the Ground of all Being except by having the courage to be all that one can be. It is not possible to seek these gifts for oneself and then deny them to every other life. So our task as disciples of Jesus is to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that we can be while we seek to enable every other person, in the infinite variety of our humanity, to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that each person can be. That also means that we can brook no prejudice that would hurt or reject another based on any external characteristic, be it race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. It all seems so simple to me. God was in Christ. That is the essence of what I believe about this Jesus.
Have a blessed and holy Christmas.
~ John Shelby Spong
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