KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 19 September
Dust from the ground
The Genesis accounts of creation are the ground for a number of reflections on the nature of reality and our place in it. I am struck with how Genesis 1 and 2 hold together in a creative tension three sets of assumptions that are in opposition to one another in the fragmented character of modern thought. There is the dominant idea of nature as dead stuff there for us to manipulate which assumes our separation from the created order; there is the equally powerful idea that simply collapses our humanity into nature without regard for what makes our humanity distinctive and thus fails to provide any account for human actions – we are just acting naturally. And there is the idea that words are essentially meaningless and have no reference to anything outside of our own minds; paradoxically this leads to the reactionary power games of those who want to control words and assume that their words create reality.
The Genesis accounts argue that our humanity has a special relation to God, on the one hand, and is connected to everything else in the created order, on the other hand. In Genesis 1 God speaks the world as a whole into being. John in the Prologue of his Gospel will argue that God is Word, the Word which is life and light without which nothing exists. This is particularly important with respect to the understanding of our humanity which is said to be made in the image of God. In the Greek text of Genesis 1, the verb for making is poiesis, from which we get the word poetry: God is the poet-maker of all things, and, especially, the one who makes our humanity in his own image, and thus in the image of his speaking all things into being.
Yet human speech is not the same as divine speech. As the scholar and ethicist, Leon Kass notes about the first instance of divine speech in Genesis 1, there is “absolutely no difference between the utterance and the thing called for. In this one perfect case, there is a complete identity of the divine speech and the creation act that went with it: word and thing, word and deed are exactly the same. No human speech is like that” (Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, 2003).
The second chapter of Genesis complements Genesis 1 with a more mythological and anthropomorphic picture of God. Here God is said not to speak our humanity into being but to form our humanity from the dust of the ground. In the Greek, this is about molding, an image of God as being like a potter shaping our humanity as Jeremiah will suggest. This shows our essential connection to all other created beings, from dust to angels, we might say, though emphasising especially our bodily and material being. But it also emphasises that God is the very life of our being. We are the dust into which he breathes his spirit, literally “the breath of life”, and thus ‘Adam “became a living being”. The term ‘man’ is still generic and refers to our humanity in general. Our humanity is ‘adamah, from the ground but as molded or shaped towards God, hence the idea of our being upright and thus able to look up to the source and principle of our being and life.
