Recognize kinship to the land, Old Testament scholar urges

WACO-The Bible speaks both of the world and of humankind as "the works of God's hands," and they should recognize their kinship to the land, an Old Testament scholar told the Baylor University symposium on stewardship of creation.

"The Bible is the best single resource for reimagining our place in the created order," said Ellen Davis, Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School.

Davis delivered the William Carey Crane Scholars Lecture during the annual Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture.

"There is a direct correlation between the core concerns of Scripture and our most urgent contemporary need; namely, to reckon with the character of the world as it really is-the work of God's hands-and reckon with the degradation of our hands have wrought, "she said.

Appeals to the moral imagination

The Bible appeals to the moral imagination and offers true hope, not a hollow fantasy based on wishful thinking, she insisted.

"Scripture is essential for building a genuine hope," said Davis, "if we just want it badly enough," said Davis. "Politicians may traffic in fantasy, but the biblical writers aim at building substantial hope-a hope grounded in realistic possibilities. And building hope of that is always and everywhere an act of moral imagination. "

Davis, author of the biblical writers had a clearer understanding of the physical world and their place in it Scripture, Culture and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible.

The Bible offers "the world is one of the world's creators of the world."

Read the Bible through agrarian lens

Scripture read through the lens of agrarianism that "human health and wellbeing-shalom-is indivisible from the shalom of the land and its nonhuman creatures," she said.

"Agrarianism is a prospect we are now prepared to recognize once again as being essential for human survival," Davis said.

"We are able to recognize it for the sake of sobriety, which we can not over cultivate without irreversible destruction. … More than 40 percent of the land globally, the land under cultivation, is degraded-much of it seriously degraded. "

The Genesis depiction of God creating the human-Adam-from the fertile reddish-brown soil makes clear the connection between humanity and the land, she said: "We are humans from humus."

According to Genesis, "The fertile land is the ancestor. … The soil comes first, "Davis said.

In Leviticus 26:42, God tells the people of Israel he will remember his covenant to Jacob, Isaac and Abraham and will remember the land, she noted, pointing to the land itself as a "covenantal ancestor."

"The land is the first ancestor from the perspective of Leviticus," she said. "And therefore, the land is worthy of honor, possibly above all other ancestors."

Turning to the Psalms, Davis pointed to metaphors that illustrate God's salvation in terms of preserving and protecting. In Psalm 65, for example, God is compared to an attentive farmer who cares for the soil-a word-picture with deep meaning for farmers seeking growth in the steep, fragile and semi-arid soil of Canaan.

The area could be farmed by the farmers of the United States. Davis contrasted with that of the industrialized world.

'Economy of sufficiency'

Davis noted the Feeding of the 5,000 as the miracle of Jesus recorded in all the furnace Gospels, focusing particularly on the story told in John 6. That accounts for divine generosity in providing all the people needed so nothing went to waste.

"You might say that Jesus is establishing an economy of sufficiency-an economy of enough and not too much," Davis said.

The biblical writers lived in "a hungry world," she observed, and some people played off the fear of food scarcity engenders, just as they do today.

"The vicious combination of greed and fear is inevitably a destructive food system such as our own-a system that plays on the fear of food scarcity and ironically guarantees long-term scarcity by exhausting the land," she said.

"We have a nation and a culture that we have had, we have had enough food, In other words, we have lost the vision that communities can produce food within the limits of nature rather than the world of production by violating those limits.

"This gospel story speaks to our lack of confidence. It speaks of the daily generosity of God working through the created order, as well as human hands and hearts. God's generosity is worthwhile, but not our greed. "