Rooted and Grounded

Essays on Land and Christian Discipleship

Harker, Johnson

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498235556
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

For many of us, the connection between the ecological crisis and humanity's detachment from the land is becoming increasingly clear. In biblical terms, adam (humanity) has severed itself from the adamah (soil), and we (creation) are reaping the consequences. This collection of essays, and the conference from which it took shape, calls the church to root itself more deeply in the agrarian biblical text and ecclesial tradition in order to remember and freshly imagine ways of living on and with the land that are restorative, reconciling, and faithful to the triune God's invitation to new life in Christ. When we listen attentively to and patiently learn from the biblical text, church history, and theology, the land itself can become a conversation partner, and we are summoned to recognize that the gospel is reserved not simply for humanity, but for the whole of creation.

part one

Biblical Reflections

1

Land as Kin

Renewing the Imagination

Ellen F. Davis

I remember with gratitude speaking at AMBS in February 2008, when I was writing my book Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture. That evening, people expressed a pained sense of loss, regret, even guilt because, as they said, Mennonites had forsaken their traditional agrarian heritage under the pressure of our urbanized culture and the illusion that staying “relevant” within that culture required leaving the farm behind. If that was true a few years ago, then the situation seems to have changed, and I celebrate with you the reclaiming of agrarianism—that invaluable element of the Mennonite heritage. Let us celebrate together by speaking again of the Bible as agrarian literature, indeed, as the only body of agrarian literature that rivals—in amplitude, scope, and subtlety—the new corpus of agrarian literature that has for fifty years now been emerging in strength largely in North America, largely in the Heartland—in what used to be called in our recent cultural benightedness “the fly-over states.”

Let me be clear: the point I want to make is not that the work of Christian discipleship is to demonstrate the relevance of the Bible. Preachers and others generally cite its relevance when they are cadging a decorative or decorous phrase to ornament an argument that otherwise has nothing essential to do with the Bible—in a word, when “relevance” means Bible as convenient add-on. By contrast, my argument is that the substance of the Bible can help us all, Christians and non-Christians alike, to grasp the full dimensions of both the problem we face and the hope we might have (or build). I hope to show that this ancient corpus may inspire fresh approaches to urgent matters; it might even inspire a renewal of our moral imagination.

I speak of moral imagination because the Bible is imaginative literature in the strongest sense. The imagination is the intellectual faculty whereby we reckon with anything that is not fully known to us, including God and the things of God such as nature—which, interestingly, is not a biblical word. What we call “nature,” the Bible calls “the works of [God’s] hands.”1 When people such as ourselves, who stand in biblically oriented religious traditions, say the Bible is inspired, at least part of what we mean is that it is or should be a primary shaper of our imagination about all manner of things, all dimensions of what it is to be human. But even those who don’t hold to this claim might nonetheless find their thinking powerfully reframed by our witness to biblical representations of reality. Their perspective might be clarified were we to help them look through literary lenses that were carefully ground some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. For as we know, what the Bible brings into sharp focus is what it is to be truly human, a uniquely knowing creature in a world we probe incessantly, manipulate, and alter. What the Bible tells us that our dominant culture does not, is that we do not and can never control the world.

Before continuing, I will make two short prefatory remarks:

1. First, the Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures (the part of the Bible I know best) comes to us from a culture of farmers living in villages and small walled cities, where almost everyone, including in the cities, was directly involved in food production and processing.

2. The Bible mostly comes from a society in economic transition. (Maybe I should say “multiple societies in social and economic transition,” since these texts emerged over a period of some 1,400 years, across the Eastern Mediterranean and east to Mesopotamia.) In many cases, the texts reflect severe economic straits. In an article recently published by the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, economist Richard Levins wrote that in our own society “decision making power has in large part left the farm sector.”2 This is exactly the kind of situation that generated the classical prophetic movement in eighth-century Israel. The earliest prophets whose words are preserved—Amos, Isaiah, Hosea, Micah—all inveigh against what is happening to small farmers as local food production and consumption is yielding to commodity agriculture under crown control. Levins’s concern is to come up with a farm bill that can counter “the shortcomings of unfettered corporate decision making.”3 Similarly, the prophets are pitting themselves against unfettered royal decision-making that is driving farmers off their own land or making them work it as serfs or slaves of a rising aristocracy (large landowners). There is no legal code in the Bible that does not give prominent attention to the problem of farmers falling into debt slavery; evidently it was a problem that Israel never managed to resolve once and for all. So in a very real sense, the biblical writers are giving us a mirror as well as a lens. They confirm our reality about how hard it is going to be, how hard it has always been, to “break the stranglehold,” as Wes Jackson puts it, of “the powers controlling farm policy.”4 The Bible is imaginative literature, not fantasy literature; it is crucial to observe the difference.

In the following, I will hold up five biblical lenses or mirrors that might help us re-envision our humanity in relation to the land.

1. Gen 2:7: And the Lord God formed the human being [adam], dust from the fertile-soil [adamah].

From an agrarian perspective, this verse from the second chapter of the Bible establishes our lineage. We are “descended,” so to speak, as adam from adamah. This is a rare instance where a Hebrew pun works in English: we are human from humus. People and land are kin, and what is more, the fertile land comes first. Although “mother earth” is not a biblical phrase, I think the biblical writers would accept it as a metaphor, and this biblical image is akin to it. Adamah (fertile soil) is a feminine noun; the fertile soil is the original source of nurture from which human life derives and on which it utterly depends. I wonder if there is any connection between that understanding and the fact that the fifth of the Ten Commandments, beginning “Honor your father and mother,” continues thus: “that your days may be long on the fertile soil (adamah) that the Lord your God is giving you” (Exod 20:12, cf. Deut 5:16). Certainly the biblical writers assume that “you” will live on the same fragile land your parents tended and preserved for you and your children.

2. The Bible is relentlessly realistic about the human situation, and it is just one chapter later, in Gen 3, that things begin to fall apart. We should not be surprised that the first sin is an eating violation. At this point in the text, there is only one established limit on human conduct—they cannot eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil—and the humans violate it. This evidently comes as an unhappy surprise to God. To me, one of the most poignant lines in the Bible is this one, from God’s mouth to Adam’s ear: “Who told you that you are naked?” And then in a flash, God knows what must have happened: “From the tree that I commanded you not to eat from it . . . you ate?!” (Gen 3:11).

Of course, everyone wants to know if the biblical God meant humans to be permanently ignorant, since the tree of knowledge was forbidden to them. Philosopher Bill Vitek and biologist ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Series Preface
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One: Biblical Reflections
• Interlude One: Excerpts from Isaiah 34 (NRSV) and a Contemporary Interpretation
• Part Two: Theological Reflections
• Interlude Two: Creation Care Hymns
• Part Three: Historical Reflections
• Interlude Three: Sustainable Agriculture as Conscientious Objection: Perspectives from Japan