Dominion and Stewardship
October 11, 2014
Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley
© 2014 by Paul Britner
`Columbus Day weekend has a special place in the hearts of Italian
Americans. Although Columbus didn’t discover what he later named America—it
was already here and populated—he did discover the route to America from
Europe. Given the sailing and navigation challenges in such a task, it’s fair to say that
took a lot of skill, determination, and courage, all values worthy of emulating.
Native Americans have a different view, one that many of us have come to
appreciate and understand. In this alternate view, Columbus was patient zero for
everything that has gone wrong in the history of the world since 1492: disease,
warfare, exploitation and so on. That’s a little one-sided in my view. It’s not like the
Aztecs were peace-loving people who lived like the Amish until Columbus got there.
I’m not saying that to be defensive but to add perspective. One of my themes is that
our problems are manifestations of the human condition. All humans have the
capacity for love, hate, greed, compassion, envy, fear, and so on. These qualities then
find expression in religion, culture, politics, etc. The good and evil we see in this
world comes from the inherent capacity for goodness and evil in each of us.
That’s another whole sermon or two or ten. I add that today because we
sometimes act like Columbus let out some malevolent genie that we can’t put back
in the bottle. That’s a little too convenient. There are some things we can’t undo.
There are conditions that won’t go away, but we can do better.
So, I’m not going to beat up on Columbus today. Rather, I suggest he was
more effect than cause, and that the cause was the Doctrine of Discovery. It’s not
uniquely Christian or European or Nationalist. Rather, it’s an amalgam of all of those
things.
The phrase refers to a series of proclamations, papal bulls, and royal decrees
that purported to set the rules for the so-called age of discovery in the 15th and 16th
centuries. England, France, Portugal, and Italy among others were becoming modern
nation states, and all of them had allegiance to the Catholic faith. This mostly was
before the Reformation. These countries were laying claim to territories all over the
globe, and as you might guess, they were bumping into each and warring with each
other to lay claim to new lands. The Pope and the respective monarchs were trying
to find a way to have each other’s claims recognized and to set out some rules for
conquest. This all sounds very good if your one of the conquerors. For everyone else,
not so much.
Here’s a pronouncement from Pope Nicholas V in 1452 recognizing the
claims of King Alfonso of Portugal to certain Muslim areas in West Africa. Columbus
was born in 1451, the year before this pronouncement. So, this describes the
worldview in which Columbus was raised from birth. It’s a bit wordy, but please
bear with me.
“We weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and noting
that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free
and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso -- to invade, search out, capture,
vanquish, and subdue all (Muslims) and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of
Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions,
possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed
by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and
appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties,
principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and
their use and profit” http://www.doctrineofdiscovery.org/index.htm
First, for the record, for all of you who think I’m too wordy, Pope Nicholas is
making me look pretty good right now. More importantly, the next time someone
tells you that, unlike Christianity, Islam was spread by the sword, you may want to
recite this quote. This is not just a history lesson. This is the status quo. The
Doctrine of Discovery continues to define the relationships among peoples and
between people and nature.
Before the American Revolution, many individuals negotiated land deals with
native tribes in which the tribes ceded title to the individuals for some negotiated
price. After the Revolution, it wasn’t clear at all whether those titles were valid.
That question made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and resulted in a
decision written by John Marshall that essentially incorporated the Doctrine of
Discovery into U.S. law. In short, it said that Native Americans lost all legal title to
their lands when they were conquered by the various European powers, and
therefore the titles to their lands weren’t theirs to give to other. Here’s one
paragraph from that decision:
“The United States, then, has unequivocally acceded to that great and broad
rule by which its civilized inhabitants now hold this country. They hold and assert in
themselves the title by which it was acquired. They maintain, as all others have
maintained, that discovery gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of
occupancy either by purchase or by conquest, and gave also a right to such a degree
of sovereignty as the circumstances of the people would allow them to exercise.”
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/21/543/case.html
Advocates for indigenous peoples and the environment are working to
educate others about the Doctrine of Discovery and to get them to formally
repudiate that doctrine. At the 2012 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, the
delegates adopted a resolution stating in part, “we, the delegates of the 2012
General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, repudiate the Doctrine
of Discovery as a relic of colonialism, feudalism, and religious, cultural, and racial
biases having no place in the modern day treatment of indigenous peoples.”
No one is saying that we should return to the state of the world in 1491. No
one wants to undo all the property titles on record today. Rather, this conversation
reminds us that we’ve still got a lot of right relations work to do with indigenous
peoples here and around the globe. That’s not how the Columbus Day holiday
started, but that’s what it is becoming, and that’s a good thing.
Let’s enlarge the conversation. Underneath the Doctrine of Discovery is a
theology of creation that separates humankind from nature and humans from one
another. One of the indirect consequences of Doctrine of Discovery and its
antecedents is climate change and the many other environmental challenges we face
today.
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We need a new way of understanding the creation stories that have shaped
our culture and provide some of the theological cover for kinds of papal statements I
read earlier. In our seventh principle, Unitarian Universalists affirm and promote
the interdependent web of existence. So, it makes sense that we are a sympathetic
audience for this task. We didn’t invent the phrase, though, and many faith
traditions have been struggling to redefine our relationship to the earth.
Here is how one Christian, writing last year for the magazine of the
Association for Religious and Intellectual Life put it—he did not further identify to
which faith group he belongs:
“The global environmental urgency we face is indeed a crisis. It also
represents an opportunity for mankind to take the next step in the evolution of
consciousness, our spirituality, our awareness of and appreciation for our
interconnectedness and interdependence with everything else which exists.” Bock,
Nelson. “An eco-theology: toward a spirituality of creation and eco-justice”. Cross
Currents 63 no 4 D 2013, p 433-446.
Most people think the creation stories are located in the first chapter of
Genesis. That answer is incomplete, but it’s a good place to start. We’re told at
chapter 1 verse 28: “God blessed (humankind), 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 air and over every living thing that moves upon the
earth.’"
Of course, advocates of so-called dominion theology have taken that one
word and run with it. They skip over the verses that precede that, in which “God
said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every
kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. The earth brought
forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing
fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good.” (Gen. 1:11,12)
God is saying you have dominion over everything with which I am pleased.
God isn’t saying that humans have been created to take out the trash, to clean up the
place. It’s clearer in chapter 2 when God creates the Garden of Eden first and then
creates Adam and then Eve to care for it. At verse 15, we’re told “The Lord God took
the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” Gen. 2: 15. Here, the
language shifts from dominion to stewardship, from exploitation to conservation. It
doesn’t stop there.
After the great flood, God and Noah make a pact to start over, if you will. God
again repeats that Noah and his family shall have dominion over the earth. In other
verses, though, God qualifies that. Beginning at Genesis 9 verse 8: “Then God said to
Noah and to his sons with him, ‘As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you
and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the
birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as
came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh
be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy
the earth.’"
Note this promise is made to Noah and to every living creature. God is
promising never to destroy the world again, and I ask, “who are we to do what God
has promised never to do?”
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There are other expressions in the Bible that warrant more time. I’m going to
add only one more today, and that comes from Job. When Job complains to God how
unfair he, Job, as been treated, God puts him in his place. This is from chapter 40,
verse 15: "Take a look at the mighty hippopotamus. I made it, just as I made you.”
(Many translations use “behemoth” for hippopotamus.) In context, that almost
seems like a throw-away line. God wasn’t saying hippos are equal to humans.
Rather, he was saying (I believe) “I made everything you see and don’t see, great and
small, and who are you to question me.” There are a lot of ways to go with that, and
one of them is that humans are just one part of an entire creation that God said is
good.
From these brief examples, I hope you can see how issues as seemingly
diverse as the treatment of indigenous peoples and climate change are brought
together by whatever creation story we tell, and that’s it’s time to tell a new story.
We also have to acknowledge that we’re not going to change the world by
converting everyone to Unitarian Universalism and having them embrace our
seventh principle. There is good work being done in other faith traditions, all of
which have some version of our green sanctuary program. These advocates may be
minorities within their own traditions, but they are the only ones who can speak
with credibility to their own members. We may disagree with them on other issues,
but on the issues I’ve discussed today, they are our allies.
I give the last words to Ralph Waldo Emerson from his essay “Nature”:
“Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial
festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand
years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. . . . I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me;
I am part or particle of God. . . . The happiest man is he who learns from nature the
lesson of worship.”
May it always be so. Blessed Be. Amen.
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