Reimagining The World (Part 2)

Prompt 39: July 1, 2024

The Prompt

To properly re-imagine the world, as the topic suggests, we ought to reconsider what it means to be human as the Bible suggests.  

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over the all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food. And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

Genesis 1:26-31a

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up–for the LORD god had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground–then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

Genesis 2:5-8

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it, and the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Then the LORD God said, “it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.

Genesis 2:15-20

And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the Man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Genesis 2:22-25

There are a few observations in this passage that contend with our modern understanding of people:

1. Man is given dominion over all creatures on earth. There is this anti-human reaction from the climate worshippers that human existence is the core problem of the environment.  
2. Man is consulted to name the animals, which means he is the only creature named by God. The evolutionary view of life places man as the climax of the ever complicating forms of creatures, and that any body is merely a link in that continuous chain. 
3. God plants the garden so that man can keep it. This contradicts the idea that sacredness is a social construct.
4. Woman comes from man and takes him out of his family. This is a pattern of outward movement from a self-centered mode of being to outward responsibility. There is a heavy counterweight to this mode of thinking in the way Americans think of freedom, privileges, rights, and even work.
5. Man and Woman are given work, responsibility, and sustenance. There is no indication that pleasure should be lacking. We live in a contradiction that requires all pleasures should be removed from the workplace and resold to us for the good of the economy.
6. Man is the first created being made in the image of God. The crude description of the story suggests that gender is not essential to God’s likeness.  The gendered introduction of Woman is sort of a concession between the infinite forms of God’s likeness and the earthly forms of creatureliness. There are two fault lines in the modern mind that distort this complex view of the body: one is that gender is fluid and we should make our bodies just as amorphous, the other is that our bodies are the disorder and the mind is the purer form of our existence. Both of these dehumanizing beliefs guise a hatred for our created world.

I point out these few distinctions not to critique our culture or even to show a better way to think, but to initiate a way toward imagining.  This series of prompts to re-imagine the world is not meant to play out fantasies or pontificate on our ideas of reality, but to sharpen our vision for majesty.

Context

In studying C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, there is a sense that humans are a lost form of intelligent life amidst a universe of lively, populated planets.  In the universe presented in the story, humans are not at the center of anything.  They are, as the other intelligent races, shown as one brand of stewardship fitted for planet Earth, made in the image of God (Maleldil) as the other races are.