Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics

From Creatio Ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius

Whitney Bauman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415998130
• eBook ISBN: 9781135839871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Winner of the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, 2009

This book argues that the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) sets up a support system for a "logic of domination" toward human and earth others. Conceptually inspired by the work of theologian Catherine Keller and feminist philosopher of the environment Val Plumwood, it follows a genealogical method in examining how the concept of creation out of nothing materializes in the world throughout different periods in the history of the Christian West.

1
A Genealogy of the Christian Colonial Mindset

Ex Nihilo from Disputed Beginnings to Orthodox Origins

Theologians keep declaring that this creation by the word from absolute nothing is the evident meaning of the bible. Yet there is no such biblical teaching.¹

Despite its firm commitments, the political must always pose as a problem, or a question, the priority of the place from which it begins, if its authority is not to become autocratic.²

What is gained by claiming a creatio ex nihilo in Christian theology? How does a myth of creation out of nothing by One, True, Creator God shape epistemology and ontology? What has become the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo was far from created out of nothing. In fact, one could say it was created out of heated debates between groups of humans and their understandings of the “more than human world.” “In the beginning” there was a group of people in the Ancient Near East trying to maintain a cohesive identity and some cohesive understanding about the world in which they lived. This chapter explores those contested and debated beginnings and argues that “ex nihilo” backgrounds these contested beginnings and becomes a foundation for a colonial narrative and mindset toward “others” (both human and non) outside of the Christian, Roman world.³ This chapter is broken into two different parts, each of which deals with a facet of “the logic of domination” that I am arguing ex nihilo supports. The first section examines the context of the Ancient Near East (ANE), out of which Christian understandings of creation emerge. This section pays particular attention to the rise of monotheism among the Ancient Israelites in the ANE as a theoretical and historical-contextual precursor to the understanding of creation as creatio ex nihilo. The development of monotheism encourages the type of center-periphery thinking that becomes “central” to the logic of domination supported by ex nihilo.⁴ The second section gives specific attention to the genealogy of ex nihilo within Christian thought in the 3^rd century of the Common Era.⁵ I argue that the development of ex nihilo, more than anything, was the result of rhetorical battles for orthodoxy against the Gnostics and other heretics. In analyzing this rhetoric, I highlight how “ex nihilic” thinking is an epistemological precursor to what becomes known as “philosophical foundationalism” and essentialist identity formation, both important developments for the logic of domination.⁶

Throughout this chapter I argue that ex nihilo is one originating source in Christian thought for the separation between history and nature, which during the middle ages becomes the “two books” of revelation and nature, in modern theology becomes Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften,⁷ and in post-modern/post-structural/post-colonial thought becomes the problem of the separation of “culture” and “nature.”⁸ It is this separation between culture and nature and the valuing of culture over nature (or in some cases vice versa) that lends support to an “ex nihilic” way of thinking about human and earth others. Said another way, creatio ex nihilo supports a logic of domination in Christian-other, and humanother relations.

THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST AND THE RISE OF MONOTHEISM

[There is a] need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences.⁹

The first section of this chapter takes us beyond the “originary and initial” formation of ex nihilo, to its beginnings in the social, political, and ecological context of the ANE. The emergence of monotheism in the ANE along with its notion of omnipotence is a precursor to an understanding of creation as creatio ex nihilo. Accordingly, it is important to examine the ecological, political, and social contexts in which polytheism became henotheism and eventually monotheism.¹⁰ Contra what a theology of monotheism and ex nihilo creation might suggest, “Christianity has never been pure and has continuously, from its beginning, adopted elements from different cultures.”¹¹ The claim of purity, transcendence, and objectivity is exactly what the logic of domination promises, but to the detriment of the relational, contextual world in and from which all epistemological claims are made. If all theology is both theo-anthropology and theo-politics, then we must ask, what is gained epistemologically and politically from the development of monotheism; and, how does ex nihilo become a foundation for securing the political omnipotence and epistemological transcendence implied by monotheism?

From Polytheism to Monotheism: Transcending Context

Any attempt to discuss the “emergence” of monotheism from polytheism runs the risk of being at best anachronistic and at worst, supercessionist. I do not want to fall into either camp, but will admit a bit of anachronistic terminology in order to communicate the shift from belief in many, ecosocio-contextually based gods to a transcendent single Creator God. Ecological, social, and political factors contributed to these transitions. Though I am claiming that polytheism was bound more to eco-socio-contexts, I do not mean to imply that monotheism was not. On the contrary, its beginnings were as much influenced by location as any other new development in thought. I do want to make the claim that monotheism lost its contextual beginnings and that its claim of transcendence and universality became and continues to be destructive of local contexts.

The context of wandering peoples and later peoples in exile that contributed to the development of monotheism was erased once the notion of monotheism became allied with dominant institutions and empire. One people’s experience of a unifying and liberating vision of the God-humanworld relationship became the justification for later people’s colonizing, universal claims. In describing the genealogy of monotheism, as a precursor to ex nihilo, I challenge the persistent theological assumptions that monotheism and ex nihilo are givens, uncontested truths, and universally acceptable tenants of Christian thought for all times and all places. Rather, they arose out of contexts and for particular, socio-political reasons. I argue that examining the function of the development of monotheism in the ANE,¹² a function that served to liberate and unify oppressed others, challenges its subsequent and contemporary subsumption by a logic of domination.

Part of the reason for eco-socially, contextual gods in the ANE was that for most peoples then, the local was exhaustive of life. Though there was travel between areas and communication between different groups of peoples, the specific geographical region that people lived in—its politics, climate, economic system, and religious life—was the context for viewing the whole world. As Daniel Hillel notes, God was a local-thing to the extent that moving to other geographical areas meant changing gods. “As societies in neighboring domains came into contact with one another through trade or war, they often adopted one another’s gods.”¹³ For peoples in the ANE, gods and their corresponding creation myths were designed to explain the world around them: social and natural. There was no such distinction between the “natural” and “social” worlds that contemporary Western minds assume; rather, the social and the natural reflected one another, both were controlled by the gods, and a change in one had implications for the other. “Natural” events reflected the happiness or unhappiness of gods with the people. The governing bodies of a given society were agents or representatives of the gods and thus represented the “natural” social order in any given region. The success or failure of an individual or of a people in a given region was interpreted as falling into or out of favor with local deities. “Earthly wars therefore had cosmic significance—ultimately each victory by a king was also seen as a victory of his patron-god over another god.”¹⁴ This mode of polytheism made sense in a world where people lived a mostly sedentary life. The regional god ruled over that region, but it was understood that different regions, different societies and environments, had different ruling gods. A shift in this way of thinking about the divineworld-human relationship arose from nomadic peoples such as the Ancient Israelites. For nomadic Israelites, these separate identities no longer made sense and they combined “the separate deified ‘forces of nature’ into an overall ‘Force of Nature.’”¹⁵

A step along the way to this notion of monotheism was henotheism, or the idea for Israelites that Yahweh was their God, though other gods existed. This move to henotheism was the idea that though other gods may exist, “for us” there is only one God. Here I will not discuss the complexity surrounding the move from polytheism to henotheism,¹⁶ but only highlight the general progression from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism. Much of the Torah still reflects this notion of henotheism and this historical transition ought not be glossed over by a supercessionist monotheistic reading of the texts. In fact, it could be argued that the Torah reflects no clear vision of monotheism.¹⁷ However, monotheistic supercessionism in later theological interpretations of the Torah served to background the historical emergence of the biblical notion of God. In doing so, these interpretations deny their own historical context and become imperialistic ways of viewing the God(s) of the Hebrew Bible.

Once nomadic peoples, such as the Israelites, have a “traveling” god, the move to monotheism is not simply inevitable. A move from henotheism toward monotheism makes an even stronger claim about reality, about nature and culture. Henotheism does not necessarily make exclusivist claims about the unity of all nature or the universality of truths. Though it does present a hierarchy of values and truth claims, it is not yet an exclusive claim to the truth. There could still be other gods, in other regions, which dictate the customs, etc. of that area. Through traveling around different regions, nomadic groups, such as the Israelites, however, realized that many different social and geographic regions were, in fact, connected and began shaping a unified vision of the different regions in which they traveled. This realization was key for the development of monotheism. “A necessary condition for the advent of monotheism was a realization that all natural phenomena—hence all the gods presumed to control them—were, in reality, manifestations of the overarching unity of nature and therefore of nature’s creator.”¹⁸ The idea of one world and one nature called for a corresponding understanding of deity. Perhaps henotheism was a step toward this unity, but monotheism makes a much stronger case for one world, created by one god, and therefore of one reality and its corresponding truth. Furthermore, the rhetorical power of monotheism, of one God, helped to hold together a “national” identity through nomadic and exilic periods in the life of Israel. The rhetoric of monotheism made location irrelevant: No matter where you are Yahweh is the one true Lord over existence.¹⁹ Another important component in the development of monotheism according to historians was the urban setting, in this case Jerusalem. “It was in that urban center that the disparate elements were brought together and Judaic monotheism was promulgated and fostered as the official state religion.”²⁰ Monotheism, arising out of the multi-contexts of nomadic peoples and urban dwellers, offered a way to make sense out of the unity of the world in the face of experienced diversity.

Monotheism enabled the unification of disparate groups of people under one God. Likewise, it unified different geographic regions under the power of One God. This move not only provided a foundation for enduring identity, but also for an understanding of a God that ruled over all of the forces of a unified nature. In other words, this God was (ultimately) the single, all-powerful, and transcendent basis for the people’s identity regardless of context (exile, urban, or rural). This type of certainty was an effective way to ensure that order would win over chaos or certainty over uncertainty.

Order Out of Chaos: Monotheistic Power Over Creation

In the ancient near east, as to a certain extent today, the ordered world was constantly threatened by images of chaos.²¹ In ancient times, this chaos was the primordial soup out of which order emerged and to which life was under constant threat of returning.²² The desire to bring order out of the chaotic, no doubt, arose in part due to the harsh climates and environments that peoples lived in, the fact that death and disease still had (for the most part) mysterious causes, and many other hardships for which contemporary technology a...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Religion
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Genealogy of the Christian Colonial Mindset
• 2 Ex Nihilo and the Origin of an Empire
• 3 Ex Nihilo, Erasure, and “Discovery”
• 4 The Cogito, Ex Nihilo, and the Legacy of John Locke
• 5 The Creation Ex Nihilo of Terra Nullius Lands
• 6 From Epistemologies of Domination to Grounded Thinking
• 7 Opening Words about God onto Creatio Continua
• 8 Creatio Continua ‘All the Way Down’
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index