00:00:09.820 - 00:00:25.330

I think I promise you this morning with the conviction of faith, but with not no concrete evidence that you will be inspired by today's lectures. And I am sure you will agree at this time with that

00:00:25.330 - 00:00:42.960

claim. And I know you're eager to hear more from our speakers and to continue this important reflection that we just charted. So I would like to invite again, Dr Timothy Bill to the lectern for the

00:00:42.960 - 00:01:07.330

second Carry lecture and invite you to welcome him again . Thank you. Thanks for being here for a second, a second one with me. I just want to first say thanks to um getting a little

00:01:07.330 - 00:01:25.820

organized here. Thanks to uh Grace and Patrick, I think they're on their way back. But um I've just learned a lot already in, in from them. And um I love uh this idea of

00:01:26.570 - 00:01:46.420

a kind of unstuck in time consciousness. And I love that visual that, that sort of way of thinking about oneself in relation to future selves and past selves. And especially thinking about possibility in relation to

00:01:46.420 - 00:02:04.380

that. That's something that really resonates with me. And I very much appreciated Grace's lecture and what she was saying about lament and the importance of lament and the biblical roots of lament, even complaint against God

00:02:04.380 - 00:02:19.170

, which certainly is, is a strong presence in our scriptures. And as she pointed out, not very present in our worship practices, but something that we can learn from, I think from Jewish tradition

00:02:19.170 - 00:02:31.380

and practices a lot about. So anyway, I feel like I should have waited too, right, this or just talk now and throw away what I wrote last night. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna

00:02:31.380 - 00:02:46.600

proceed. But already my thinking is changing and I love that, I love the interactive kind of synergies and so forth that are, that are happening here . I wanted to say a little more about how

00:02:46.600 - 00:03:02.720

I've come to this conversation from the book that's just out to where I'm wanting to go with you all . And, you know, a lot of it is like the question this morning people reading the book

00:03:02.720 - 00:03:15.930

or hearing about the book and saying, you know , what does this look like on the ground? What does this kind of work together look like on the ground and what might a community context for this

00:03:15.930 - 00:03:30.600

and what our models for engagement around this? Um And at the same time, there is a growing public conversation around these questions of, of really taking seriously, you know, taking seriously the real possibility

00:03:30.600 - 00:03:43.270

of collapse, that we're not going to fix this , that we're not going to stop, maybe not even barely slow what we're looking at on this horizon . There's a, and I just wanted to share

00:03:43.270 - 00:03:58.450

a couple titles in case you're interested. There's a book by Larry Rasmussen. He's a theological religious ethicist who's an emeritus professor at Union Seminary. And the book is called The Planet You Inherit. And it

00:03:58.460 - 00:04:17.080

is a series of letters to his grandchildren. He actually has grandchildren and these are letters to his grandchildren . Another is a book by Carolyn Baker. It's called undaunted Living Fiercely into climate meltdown in an authoritarian

00:04:17.090 - 00:04:33.260

world. It's pretty direct. She is a psychologist and a therapist who works with people struggling with climate grief and climate trauma. So she's one of the leaders in that world of psychology and psychiatry around that

00:04:33.270 - 00:04:48.820

. Another book, Jonathan Lear, who wrote this amazing book called Radical Hope several years ago, but his new book just out is called Imagining The End . He's a psychoanalyst and philosopher and he's thinking about

00:04:48.830 - 00:05:05.620

the work of mourning and what it means to mourn ourselves if there's no one there after us to mourn and what that would look like really profound stuff. Adam Kirsch, who's an editor for Wall Street Journal

00:05:05.630 - 00:05:19.530

, just wrote a piece in the Atlantic Monthly on Trans Humanism. And his new book out is called The Revolt Against Humanity, Imagining a Future without us looking at some of the philosophical responses to this.

00:05:19.540 - 00:05:34.340

And then finally, just an amazing book that's in a second edition, Joanna Macy, a Buddhist scholar of Buddhism and a Buddhist philosopher. Her book Active Hope um is in a second edition. And what's

00:05:34.340 - 00:05:48.510

really interesting about that for me is that the introduction to this second edition, you know, in that book, she talks a lot about what she calls the, the, the, the great turning very

00:05:48.510 - 00:06:01.090

similar to the way Thomas Berry talks about a great turning. But um for her, this sort of moment when humanity is going to come around and she used to say right before it's too late. And

00:06:01.090 - 00:06:16.160

what she's saying now is that maybe the great turning is going to happen alongside the great unraveling and that we are going to see a great turning in the midst of a great unraveling and she's talking about how

00:06:16.160 - 00:06:32.640

to collapse. Well, for example, language like that, so really profound stuff mentioned this morning, some fascinating work among science fiction writers, speculative fiction , afrofuturism through Toe Pia's. Um just some really

00:06:32.640 - 00:06:44.880

fascinating work there too. And I guess my, my feeling is that we the church and churches and other religious communities need to be at the table, need to be part of these conversations. And so

00:06:44.880 - 00:06:56.690

that's really what I'm what I'm wanting us to consider and to reflect on and to think about together. Last time, I kind of still had one ft in, in that book and kind of thinking about

00:06:56.690 - 00:07:08.810

where I want to step next, setting up the sort of bed we've made for ourselves, the reality we may be facing and thinking about that kind of , of a framework of reality, grief and hope

00:07:08.810 - 00:07:21.140

as some of the work that we need to do and very much appreciated grace. What you were talking about with regard to lament makes me kind of want to do something different today in this second lecture.

00:07:21.140 - 00:07:41.410

But I'll try to talk a little bit about lament as well. But cream that's close. Composting, composting Christianity. But my good friend Nadia Bolz Weber says that we really have two choices with regard to

00:07:41.410 - 00:07:51.470

what we're going to do with inherited traditions that we have a problem with that. We aren't just sort of keeping and retaining. We can either cremate or we can compost. You know, we can burn

00:07:51.470 - 00:08:03.750

it, burn it down, get rid of it or we can try to grow something new from it , turn it over, um stir it up and see what new can, can grow from that.

00:08:03.750 - 00:08:18.330

And you know, I'm a compost. Er and I like this idea. I like, I love , I love the the the idea of of some new life coming from death from decomposition. Um And

00:08:18.330 - 00:08:28.450

so that's part of what the, what the, what the work that I would really like to do . Um Today I think this human exceptionalism that I talked about this morning is really to go with that

00:08:28.450 - 00:08:43.640

metaphor of composting is really rooted very deeply in our theology. And I think that we, as I said this morning, we need to think about um um a theology that can conceive of a post human

00:08:43.640 - 00:08:56.070

creation. And, you know, in some other context, I might say world or um planet or something like that. But in a theological context, we can talk about creation and, and we probably

00:08:56.070 - 00:09:13.510

should be and what that might mean to think about theologically about a post human creation. a thriving, inherently good creation without us after us. So that's where I'd like to go today in, in,

00:09:13.520 - 00:09:30.720

in many respects. I think theologically, we are in a kind of moment of theocracy, a kind of theological crisis where we are needing to um uh deal with some, some tensions that are really kind

00:09:30.720 - 00:09:50.080

of irreducible within our theological context in the face of certain realities. I think on the horizon of climate collapse, Christianity faces something of an existential crisis that I believe will require a radical reinvention of itself,

00:09:50.090 - 00:10:09.270

reforming its core theological beliefs, practices and institutions in ways that will push against and perhaps even beyond the broadest limits of orthodoxy. And I'm thinking right now that nobody can guess ST Augustine, nobody guessed that

00:10:09.270 - 00:10:22.100

. What did that? That's what I'm thinking about right now. But I'm thinking about Saint Augustine in 4 10 common era, right? That's when the Visigoths sacked Rome for three days, burned and ransacked

00:10:22.100 - 00:10:35.020

buildings poured the ashes of their emperors out on the ground. Many Romans were tortured, raped, killed , taken for ransom, taken into, into slavery . It was a, it was a trauma that

00:10:35.020 - 00:10:54.970

, that felt like the end of the world for , for many Romans. And it was a trauma that really provoked um Augustine's work on what eventually came out. Um When 2024 26 the city of God

00:10:54.980 - 00:11:13.310

, uh Augustine's great work that really in many ways , um re conceived the history of creation in some respects, but, you know, to, to summarize it in a nutshell. Um And I'll probably

00:11:13.310 - 00:11:28.310

get this wrong. I hope there are no Augustinian scholars in the room. But so the Millenarian, the North African Millenarian is, were the kind of the fundamentalists of the time and they Millenarian is believed

00:11:28.310 - 00:11:41.190

that we were getting close to the end of the sixth millennium, you know, since the beginning of creation and that what was going to happen was the second coming of Christ. And that Christ was gonna

00:11:41.440 - 00:11:54.970

usher in this millennium, long, seventh millennium of the history of creation, millennium, long rule of Christ and the church in the world. And so all of these end times sort of catastrophes, the

00:11:54.970 - 00:12:07.870

sack of Rome and the eventual fall of Rome and other things leading up to that were part of that . And so they were expecting the second coming. And the beginning of Christ's reign, Augustine came along

00:12:07.870 - 00:12:26.250

with a different interpretation. And what he argued was that um the second coming had happened with the resurrection . And that already the city of God that is the church with Christ as its head was already in

00:12:26.260 - 00:12:39.460

that millennium long rule, but that the city of God was going to coexist with the city of the world throughout that time. And it wasn't going to be until the end of that millennium, that we

00:12:39.460 - 00:12:50.710

would have the final judgment and the resurrection and the renewal of heaven and earth with Jerusalem as the capital . Um And all of that, that, that was gonna happen at the end of the millennium,

00:12:50.710 - 00:13:03.760

but that we were already in that millennium. And so if you think about it, what Augustine accomplished was a kind of new lease on the future, it wasn't ending soon, it was going to go

00:13:03.760 - 00:13:16.910

on like this, you know, for whether it's a literal 1000 years or a figurative 1000 years, right? So Augustine sort of looking at what felt like the end of the world really, in many

00:13:16.910 - 00:13:28.860

ways, came up with a different theological framework that was able to sort of imagine a future in a different way. And I think, um you know , in some ways, maybe that's the kind of

00:13:28.870 - 00:13:48.240

context that we are in. And I start with that story of Augustine because in part, I think to remind us that um theological inter reinterpretation, theological reinvention, theological composting, um it's always happening.

00:13:48.250 - 00:13:58.770

Um Religion is I tell my students, you know , we think about the Latin root of that word religion. And a lot of, you know, many say it goes back to the word, the

00:13:58.780 - 00:14:16.310

Latin word Religare to bind again to re lig ligament to bind again. But cicero or kick a row um said that it went back to relegate, which is a related word and release the leg means to

00:14:16.310 - 00:14:31.470

read. Um That's where we get our word lecture , for example. So really means to read again to reread. And so the idea of religion as always rereading inherited tradition, always making new meaning from

00:14:31.470 - 00:14:46.780

inherited tradition on new horizons that call for new interpretations . So religion is always, is always about process is always about an ongoing process of meaning making and rereading. And that's the work we do. If

00:14:46.780 - 00:15:05.340

we put relig array together with relig array, we could even say that we are bound together as a community, um connected together as a community and bound to reread and reinterpret the traditions that we inherit together

00:15:05.350 - 00:15:13.280

. Um So I like thinking about religion in that way. And, and so that's the work that I think we're doing that we're always doing. But I think it's a really a crisis moment for us

00:15:13.290 - 00:15:33.780

in many ways to be thinking about that. My modest contribution to that conversation of composting here um is going to draw mostly from my background, which is Hebrew Bible, Hebrew scriptures and biblical theology. To

00:15:33.780 - 00:15:50.440

some extent, there are lots of really interesting theologians out there who are doing really amazing work around this . I would want to mention Larry Rasmussen again, also Catherine Keller at Drew University Divinity School and Dorothy

00:15:50.440 - 00:16:03.650

Dean, who is I believe she is a student of Sally MCF AIG, one of the later students of Sally mcfayden, but amazing work. And I don't dare try to go too far into these worlds

00:16:03.650 - 00:16:17.370

of constructive theology. But I do dare to do a little work around biblical theology with you today. And honestly, I think it's not a bad place to start because if I were to ask you,

00:16:17.460 - 00:16:37.310

where in Christian tradition, would you say human exceptionalism is rooted um this sort of theology that, that humans are exceptional to the rest of the rest of creation, let's say, um and accepted from the

00:16:37.310 - 00:16:53.740

rules that govern it, where would you probably point to, I'm gonna guess that most people are going to point to the beginning of Genesis and to the moment in the first creation story where God blesses the

00:16:53.740 - 00:17:11.170

humans and tells them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and have Dominion over all the other creatures. So I think that's where we're going to start. I think we need to read ourselves out

00:17:11.170 - 00:17:26.390

from under some of those interpretive traditions. And for me, and by the way is something I read about in the book Francis Bacon, who in many ways is kind of one of the fathers of,

00:17:26.410 - 00:17:44.890

of, of western early modernity called that, that text in Genesis. One, our charter of found , he believed that it was the call that we had to sort of re realize our godlike Dominion over

00:17:44.900 - 00:18:03.100

nature and other people's non Western peoples as well. Um at any rate. So I think part of the work of reading ourselves out from under a story like this, a text like this is to um

00:18:03.110 - 00:18:19.280

estrange ourselves from what we think we know about it . Um to realize that it's not as, as familiar as, as maybe we have made it, I think in some ways, the study of religion

00:18:19.290 - 00:18:33.200

, something else. I tell my students, it's about making the strange, familiar and making the familiar strange. It's about encountering religious ideas and practices and institutions that initially strike as, as, as strange

00:18:33.200 - 00:18:45.880

, as unfamiliar as foreign as other and, and coming to see how they can make sense, they can be true according to a certain story within a certain context. But at the same time, it's

00:18:45.880 - 00:19:00.020

about making the familiar strange. It's about looking at our own traditions, our own practices and institutions and beliefs and coming to realize how very odd and strange and unfamiliar they are. And so that's part of

00:19:00.020 - 00:19:18.090

the work here. And what I would like to do is offer a kind of what I will call a biblical theology of earth creature, holiness, earth creature leanness, which I consider a kind of antidote

00:19:18.100 - 00:19:33.940

to human exceptionalism. A biblical antidote to human exceptionalism . And I'm some of you, especially those of you with the biblical studies background will quickly recognize that I'm very strongly influenced in this way of thinking by

00:19:33.950 - 00:19:49.230

Phyllis Tribble, especially her book God and The Rhetoric of Sexuality, which really sort of cracked open these early creation stories in Genesis in some very profound ways . Um And so I'm just gonna dive in,

00:19:49.230 - 00:20:00.790

I could have maybe put something on the screen, but I'm going to talk with you through these first stories and we'll see how that goes. So as probably most of, you know, from Intro to

00:20:00.790 - 00:20:17.180

Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures or something like that, whenever you took that or maybe you're still teaching it . There are two very different creation stories at the beginning of Genesis. There is one that's starts in

00:20:17.180 - 00:20:32.090

the first verse of the first chapter and goes halfway through chapter four, verse, chapter two, verse four, the first creation story. And then the second one starts there and goes through to the exile

00:20:32.090 - 00:20:45.550

from the Garden of Eden before it moves into the Cain and Abel story and genealogies and so forth like that. So two very different creation stories, we know that they're different and not even trying to be

00:20:45.550 - 00:21:00.730

the same creation stories for a number of reasons. For one, the, the style, especially when you're reading them in Hebrew very, very different style . Um The language in the two texts is very

00:21:00.730 - 00:21:15.490

different the names for the creator God are different. In the first one, it is consistently Elohim, which you know, we most of us probably know is grammatically plural. It can mean gods, but

00:21:15.490 - 00:21:30.450

it's often used with singular verbs for the proper name God. Whereas in the second creation story that starts toward the beginning of chapter two, it's always the tetra Graham Aton, um which most say would be

00:21:30.450 - 00:21:45.230

, would have been pronounced. Yeah, way. Um But we out of respect for those who prohibit the saying of that name, we'll call it hashem or, or in our our English translations will use

00:21:45.230 - 00:22:00.850

Lord in capitals to indicate that it's that uh Yo Haven of hey Tetra Graviton, but it's Yahoo Elohim is the way God is named in the second story . Most importantly, the content in the order of

00:22:00.850 - 00:22:11.180

these two creation stories is wildly different, right? In the first one, you've got six days of creation and it starts with light and dark and goes from there. And on the sixth day as the

00:22:11.180 - 00:22:23.380

kind of culmination of the story, you have God creating all of humankind in mass um all at once in the image of God. But most importantly, on the sixth day after the animals, after the

00:22:23.380 - 00:22:37.740

plants, after the fish is after the birds as this kind of culminating create active creation, right? And then on the seventh day, God rest takes the first Shabbat. In the second creation story,

00:22:37.750 - 00:22:52.170

the human is singular is created singular, not in mass, not male and female, but a singular earth creature, let's say um and is created before the plants before the, before the animals. In

00:22:52.170 - 00:23:03.180

fact, the animals are created as potential partners for this human. So obviously, very different order of creation. These two stories are not trying to tell the same story and we all understand that I don't

00:23:03.180 - 00:23:18.810

need to preach to you about that. Um In fact, the second story most argue is probably older . You maybe recall that many would identify that with the J text with the yeah was text. Whereas

00:23:18.810 - 00:23:33.760

the first story is most commonly identified with the priestly tradition, which dates quite a bit later than the Yeah West tradition. So different stories just going to talk a little bit about this first story that we

00:23:33.760 - 00:23:45.440

need to read ourselves out from under a little bit . And then I want to focus on that second story to just to kind of give us some imaginative resources for beginning to think about a different kind of

00:23:45.440 - 00:24:00.670

theology of earth creature leanness if, if you will . Um So this first one is the one that's most leveraged toward a kind of human exceptionalism. Dominion is um Dominion theology and so forth just to summarize

00:24:00.670 - 00:24:15.910

it very quickly. Um Six days of creation on the seventh day, God rested, took the first Shabbat. And um you know, as we know , this story is very symmetrical, is very repetitive

00:24:15.910 - 00:24:30.020

it's very poetic. I mean, it makes sense to translate it with line breaks as a kind of , of a poem. Um You have this wonderful ambiguity and pol evoke al itty in this story in

00:24:30.020 - 00:24:42.810

the very beginning with that very first word. In fact, with the very first letter of the very first word of the very first verse of the very first chapter um Beret sheet that, that first Hebrew

00:24:42.810 - 00:25:00.880

word there um which you can translate to very different ways depending on how you read that bait that book at the beginning, if, if you translate that as a preposition in or with, then you read

00:25:00.880 - 00:25:11.750

Ratite as a noun, the beginning. And so you get in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and the heavens and the earth that God, the earth that God just created was to

00:25:11.750 - 00:25:25.990

who've about who this kind of primordial chaos of some kind, right? So if you read it as a preposition with rashid as a meaning beginning, then you've got creation ex ni Hilo, which is actually

00:25:25.990 - 00:25:37.210

how Augustine read it. So you get God first creating heavens in the earth and that earth that God just first created out of nothing. Um is this kind of chaotic blob and then it gets kind of

00:25:37.220 - 00:25:56.130

structured and ordered into, into, you know, this ordered ecology. Um But if you read it as read that bait as going with a verb begin , began, then you get you read the bait

00:25:56.140 - 00:26:11.320

as something more like when and you get something like , and this is what most of Jewish tradition reads it as. It's probably the right way. Um You get something like when God began to create the

00:26:11.320 - 00:26:22.840

heavens and the earth, the earth was to have a baby who was formless void or however you want helter skelter. What, however you want to translate that? Um So in that story were beginning in

00:26:22.840 - 00:26:41.690

the midst of things. It's not creation from nothing , it's creation from a chaotic earth that's already there . It's creation ex to home from the deep from chaos. I love that because that gives us an

00:26:41.690 - 00:27:00.380

image of chaos and the deep as a kind of generative second source of new complex systems and orders. And I borrow that from Katherine Keller's amazing book, Face of The Deep As well. So lots of

00:27:00.390 - 00:27:11.600

pollen locality and ambiguity right there, even in the very first world, in the very first word of this text, you have a kind of cosmic unfolding , right? Starting with light and dark and land

00:27:11.600 - 00:27:25.880

and sea. And all of that, it culminates on the sixth day with the human, with the creation of humankind in mass male and female who are blessed and commanded to fill the earth to be fruitful

00:27:25.880 - 00:27:45.370

, multiply, fill have Dominion and rule over the other, the rest of creation. So that's the summary of that story. I'd like to share with you my translation of that text where I try to

00:27:45.380 - 00:28:03.220

, I guess you could say estrange myself and ourselves from what has become such a familiar story in order to maybe see it differently and hear it differently and populate our imaginations differently with this text. I'm,

00:28:03.230 - 00:28:15.970

I'm pleased to tell you that, that this translation actually got published in a poetry journal. That's kind of cool. It's my only published poem. Um but just a few things, a few things that

00:28:15.980 - 00:28:36.520

, that I was playing with um to kind of estrange ourselves. There's a term that translation theorist Lawrence Venuti uses called foreign Izing effects that we need to practice foreign izing effects that will kind of distance us

00:28:36.530 - 00:28:47.800

so that we are aware that something is being translated so that we don't just assume it's already in our language and already hours and already that there's an otherness to it that needs to be respected. And so

00:28:47.810 - 00:28:59.650

that's part of the work here. And so a few things that, that I, I try to do in this, I try to keep the Hebrew the English very sparse like it is in Hebrew,

00:28:59.660 - 00:29:15.200

most English translations, the King James version, for example, is about twice as long as the Hebrew , almost all throughout the Hebrew Bible. But certainly in this text, the Hebrew is very repetitive.

00:29:15.210 - 00:29:30.820

And so a lot of English translations will try to make it better English by getting rid of that repetition . And I feel like it's fine to have that repetition. And that kind of sparseness in this translation

00:29:30.830 - 00:29:45.570

instead of translating vase, you know, which normally get translated as a conjunction as an and or a , but I use them as line breaks or as pauses. What else? Construct forums where we have

00:29:45.580 - 00:30:02.410

something of the something they're often translated in that face of the deep, for example, is a construct vault of the skies would be another one. I instead make those neologisms. I come up with a

00:30:02.420 - 00:30:21.050

word that puts the two words together. I try to use, I try to avoid figure the kind of more figurative language and stick with language that's more close to the body. So for example, in

00:30:21.050 - 00:30:33.680

Hebrew, we have this phrase lift, which means , you know, literally means to the face of or on the face of. And in this text , we have alpine upon the face of, but

00:30:33.680 - 00:30:48.120

it's often translated upon the surface of or in the presence of I think translating in the face of is a very powerful way to think about in the presence of right. But things like that, that,

00:30:48.120 - 00:31:07.930

that, that, that highlight the ways in which these different elements in this story are embodied, are are personified. And you know, so much of our translation history has tried to um tried to distance

00:31:07.940 - 00:31:22.580

our scriptures from what were perceived as more kinds of primitive religious perspectives of what we sometimes call animism. Um One term for this, but this notion that everything is sort of alive and animated by spirit in

00:31:22.580 - 00:31:37.980

some way, I think animism is in these, in these texts. And I want to read it in a way that kind of recuperate that finally, I translate Elohim, uh not as singular God and

00:31:37.980 - 00:31:53.850

not as lowercase G gods, but as capital G gods to sort of try to capture the, the plural plurality that's in this word. And yet it's being used as a proper name with singular verbs.

00:31:53.850 - 00:32:09.790

So that's a little bit of my principles. And I'm just gonna go ahead and read it. Listen for the word of the Lord. I'm kidding. But anyway, you can. Um Alright, here

00:32:09.790 - 00:32:30.850

we go. The T B V when Gods began shaping skies, earth, earth was bottomless, brine , dark on Dep's face. God's breath brooding on waters face. God said is light was light.

00:32:31.240 - 00:32:54.360

Gods saw that light was pleasing. God's divided between light between dark gods called the light day, too dark, called night Was evening was morning day one . God said vault amid waters dividing between waters,

00:32:54.360 - 00:33:15.470

two waters. Gods made vault divided between waters under vault between waters over vault. So it was God's called to vault skies Was evening was morning day two . God's said waters under skies, gathering to one

00:33:15.470 - 00:33:37.120

place, dry ground showing. So it was God's called to dry ground, earth to gathering waters called seas. God saw that it was pleasing. God said earth, greening, green grass seeding seed,

00:33:37.400 - 00:33:54.490

fruiting tree making fruit of its kind with its seed in it on earth. So it was Earth bore green grass, seeding seed of its kind tree making fruit with its seed of its kind in it.

00:33:54.500 - 00:34:14.850

God saw that it was pleasing was evening was morning , day three. God said lights in sky vault dividing between day, between night. They are for signs for times, for days, for years,

00:34:14.870 - 00:34:31.770

lights in sky vault for light on earth. So it was God's made two great lights, great light ruling over day, little light ruling overnight stars too . God's put them in the sky vault for light

00:34:31.770 - 00:34:52.650

on earth for ruling over day overnight. Dividing between light between dark. God saw that it was pleasing was evening was morning day four. God said waters swarming, swarm life, birds birding on earth in

00:34:52.650 - 00:35:13.170

sky vaults face Gods shaped great sea monsters. Every creeping life, water is swarming with their kind, every bird wing of its kind. And God saw that it was pleasing. God blessed them saying burst

00:35:13.170 - 00:35:34.440

forth breed fil waters in seas. Birds breed on earth was evening was morning day five. God said earth bearing life of its kind beast creeper earth life of its kind. So it was God's made earth

00:35:34.440 - 00:35:51.830

life of its kind beast of its kind, every ground creeper of its kind. God saw that it was pleasing. God said we make human in our form as our image they rule over sea fish over

00:35:51.830 - 00:36:08.840

sky, bird over beast, overall earth, over every creeper creeping on earth. Gods shaped human in his form, in God's form, shaped him. Male female shape them. God has blessed them.

00:36:08.900 - 00:36:27.460

God said to them, burst forth, breed fill earth, tread it. Rule over sea fish over sky, bird over every life creeping on earth. God said behold, I gave you all grass seeding

00:36:27.460 - 00:36:40.880

seed on all earth's face. Every tree with tree fruit in it, seeding seed for you as food to every earth life, to every sky, bird , to every creeper on earth with life being in

00:36:40.880 - 00:37:00.080

it. All green grass for food. So it was God saw everything made, behold, it was very pleasing was evening was morning, day six skies , earth, all their array were finished. God's

00:37:00.080 - 00:37:15.710

finished doing work in day seven, rested in day seven from doing all work. God's blessed day seven , hallowed it for in it. He rested from working, shaping, doing so that's my translation.

00:37:16.590 - 00:37:27.860

Thanks. Appreciate it. I'd be happy. By the way, I have a, I had a handout. I thought about copying it out, but I thought let's just see how it sounds. Um

00:37:27.870 - 00:37:37.210

But I can, I can certainly get, get you anybody who would like a copy of that. I'm happy to share that with you, but just a few things to kind of note and hopefully even

00:37:37.210 - 00:37:51.700

just the experience of hearing that and I can, I will, I would argue that it's good Hebrew translation. I did a lot of work on that , but just hopefully it starts to kind of shift

00:37:51.700 - 00:38:02.000

things a little even just hearing that and reflecting on it in that way. But a few things to kind of keep in mind here and then we'll talk a little bit about the second story. First,

00:38:02.010 - 00:38:15.480

I would argue that this is not creation. Ex ni Hello, this is not creation from nothing. This is there is like other ancient near eastern stories of creation. This is creation from chaos. There's

00:38:15.480 - 00:38:35.260

something primordial pre ordeal that is there to start with . And it is this kind of second depth of chaos and new life and new organization is emerging on the surface of the deep in that way. And

00:38:35.270 - 00:38:52.490

it's interesting, Catherine Keller talks about to homophobia to home is the, is the Hebrew word for the deep on the face of the deep and, and she ties to homophobia with uh masculine uh and white

00:38:52.490 - 00:39:06.640

European supremacy and some of some of these other things this this fear of, of this kind of chaos that's identified in other mythologies with the feminine. Um And you know, this kind of desire for more

00:39:06.640 - 00:39:20.210

of a top down sort of ordering of things that we see in the other creation story. So it's not creation from nothing. It's creation from chaos, interacting with chaos. I love that God. In

00:39:20.210 - 00:39:31.200

this story, the divine and the story is in relationship with these different elements of creation as they emerge . Um You know, every time whenever it says in your King James or whatever God called them,

00:39:31.200 - 00:39:45.750

blah, blah, blah, as an intransitive, it's not God calls to whatever it is every time and, and then you've got whatever God says, which I guess becomes the name. But it is

00:39:45.750 - 00:40:01.510

the divine addressing light addressing dark, addressing each of these elements in a kind of relational way, which I think is quite fascinating. Just to note the obvious things are good before any humans are around,

00:40:01.520 - 00:40:15.380

keep declaring these things pleasing and good before humans. Um Also that the animals are blessed with much of the same language as the humans are about, about filling and, and, and, and, and

00:40:15.380 - 00:40:27.880

being fruitful and so forth and, and they're told to eat the same thing um the Dominion and I hate to say it, but I think those words are hard to translate differently. Rule over, you

00:40:27.880 - 00:40:40.260

know, Kobayashi is one of the words, put the Kibosh on it, step on it, you know, that's there. It's only toward animals. It's not about natural resources or something like that.

00:40:40.270 - 00:40:53.190

But I think it's worth keeping in mind the ancient near eastern context for this story, which is, you know, a context in which infant mortality was incredibly high where, you know, just the exigencies

00:40:53.190 - 00:41:07.870

of, of life, of subsistence, life were incredibly difficult. So the notion of having rule over everything is, is maybe a little bit more of a fantasy than a reality. So, moving on

00:41:07.870 - 00:41:17.830

to the second story and I'll just move fairly quickly through this and we can talk a lot more about it, but I'm going to read the King James version and then I'm going to say a little bit

00:41:17.830 - 00:41:30.650

about a couple of Hebrew words and then I'm going to read my version. So this is the King James version. Every plant of the field and every plant of the field before it was in the earth

00:41:30.650 - 00:41:42.080

and every herb of the field before it grew for the Lord, this is no plants yet for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth and there was not a man to till the

00:41:42.080 - 00:41:53.450

ground, but there went up from there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his

00:41:53.450 - 00:42:06.340

nostrils, the breath of life and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden and there he put the man whom he had formed. So that's the one that we're

00:42:06.340 - 00:42:21.240

sort of familiar with a few Hebrew words that could be re translated there briefly first is Ha Adam, which is the generic word for the human. It has hot in front of it, the definite article

00:42:21.240 - 00:42:32.280

ha It's got Adam, but it's not a proper name here. This is the word that is used in Hebrew when we want to refer to generic humans . We have ish and Isha for male, human

00:42:32.290 - 00:42:46.750

and female human. Adam is a generic term for human. In this case, it's related to another word in the text Ha Adama mama, which sounds very much the same because it's just got that,

00:42:46.750 - 00:43:00.080

that ending, the grammatically feminine ending on it is the earth or the land or the humus if you will. And so in Hebrew, we have had um being formed from the, from Ha Adama,

00:43:00.090 - 00:43:17.670

the let's say earth creature being formed from the earth from the kind of top soil there, right? Um And uh this earth creature is not necessarily, I would argue shouldn't be understood as male yet because

00:43:17.670 - 00:43:35.410

what happens later is after the animals don't work out as partners. God puts this Adam to sleep and takes part of it takes aside from it and forms it into woman and therefore the leftovers are the male

00:43:35.420 - 00:43:49.720

if you read it that way, right? Um But yes, so and so, and we have this in other languages to write. Even our word human is related to humus. And I play with

00:43:49.720 - 00:44:02.070

that a little bit around like human being and that sort of thing. But in a lot of languages , the term for human is connected to language for ground and earth, which I think is just really

00:44:02.070 - 00:44:20.230

fascinating and something worth thinking more about the other Hebrew word is never fish translated in the King James as a living soul. Never fish is I think a good translation would be life breath or something like that

00:44:20.240 - 00:44:35.510

in the kind of anthropology of Hebrew scriptures. Life begins with that breath and it is animism. It's this notion that, that, that life is that , that, that something is animated into life by

00:44:35.510 - 00:44:45.000

breath. And so, you know, we might think about how to translate that differently. There are some other words that I'd love to talk with you about, but I, I know that we are

00:44:45.010 - 00:45:00.110

running out of time. So I'm just going to read my translation of this using some of those different principles. Every field sprout was still in the earth and every field grass was yet to spring up for

00:45:00.110 - 00:45:15.230

Lord God did not make rain on the earth. And there was no humus being to serve the humus , the ground and ground water rose from the earth making the face of the humus drink. Lord God

00:45:15.230 - 00:45:31.580

formed the humus being soil from the humus and breathed into its nostrils, life, breath and the human being was breathing life. And Lord God planted a garden in East Eden and put the humans being whom

00:45:31.580 - 00:45:44.840

he formed there. Another word that's important to remember is of odd, which is often translated as till or work the soil, but it's translated almost everywhere else as serve. So again, we have a

00:45:44.840 - 00:45:55.710

notion of relation al itty between the human being and the humans and the earth. And I like this sort of, I think for me, this is a kind of, I wish I had more time

00:45:55.710 - 00:46:09.760

to talk about it. But I kind of core text for this anthropology of earth creature leanness, this this understanding of what it means to be human as being intimately connected to the ground coming from the ground

00:46:09.760 - 00:46:22.330

. And as we know from Ash Wednesday, from our liturgies on Ash Wednesday, returning to the ground when that left, when that breath leaves us intimately connected with the ground, intimately connected with the divine

00:46:22.330 - 00:46:35.430

at the same time, which is wind, breath , anima, and intimately connected as well with the other living creatures who God creates the same way um forming them from the earth. So I think that's

00:46:35.430 - 00:46:49.020

a start, I just want to summarize where I go from this because um it's not just this text , I think we need to be looking at a lot of other biblical texts as well, but you

00:46:49.020 - 00:47:00.140

get this, this, this biblical theology of earth preacher holiness that takes very seriously by the way, grace. This is importance of lament and grief. And I think in the profits, the ways in

00:47:00.140 - 00:47:16.380

which the land mourns, human injustice suggests an inextricable connection between environmental justice and social justice, which is something that, that seem to just be kind of intuitively understood. I think in these poems, in

00:47:16.380 - 00:47:34.390

the profits So this earth creature loneliness, affirms the inseparable itty of human and non human beings, animate and inanimate. It understands the interconnectedness and intertwining of life and death that life comes from death and returns

00:47:34.390 - 00:47:52.540

to, to that, that they're interconnected and intertwined . It recognizes the inseparable itty of environmental justice and social justice. It embraces the deep relationship between spirituality and impermanence between divinity and earthiness. And not only

00:47:52.540 - 00:48:08.890

is this religious eco theology of earth creature leanness more faithful, I think to Jewish and Christian scriptures, it also resonates with other indigenous religious ecologies, opening new possibilities for inter religious dialogue with adherents of diverse

00:48:08.890 - 00:48:23.560

religious traditions and views in modern history. Christianity has taken pains to distance itself from other so called primitive religions. And I think it's time that we read ourselves out from under that interpretive history in order to

00:48:23.570 - 00:48:37.540

rediscover deep affinities between the religious ecologies found in biblical tradition or at least traces there are traces there. It's not all that way, it's not that way . And Nehemiah, for example, um and those

00:48:37.540 - 00:48:50.790

of other, of other indigenous religious traditions, so I will stop there. But this was just a stab a plunge into the, into the soil and a turning and uh seeing what, you know,

00:48:50.800 - 00:48:59.780

what else might grow. I think that's the work that we're all about and the work that we all need to be doing. And I'm sorry, I went a little bit long, but thank you very