The Dominion Story

[This is a storyline for a different way to think about how the biblical revelation on creation and the molecular/fossil data on evolution can be stitched together.  It may not be The Final Truth about things left unsaid by Scripture, but it suggests that, someday, when the full story is told, things will weave together quite well, probably in ways we didn’t anticipate.  In the meantime, the story in Genesis is enough for us to grow straight spiritually, even if things don’t fit together perfectly with scientific discoveries.]

Picture God surrounded by the heavenly host, similar to the first chapter of Job.  God proposes to create Life on Earth that is, of course, dependent on Him to sustain it, but is otherwise autonomous – it lives and evolves freely.  The heavenly host are not sure if this is the best course of action.  But God wants to demonstrate the necessity of His dominion (an essential Old Testament concept) and goes forward with it.  

The first 1.5 billion years of life is unicellular, but already problems arise.  With Life comes Death, and also predation, famine and disease (viruses and intracellular parasites are ancient).  The system is so screwed up that these “unpleasantries” are built into it from the beginning.

What caused these problems to occur from the very beginning?  In Genesis, the Fall of Man is the result of the choice made by Adam (“the man” in English).  So free will granted to humans resulted in death, the realization of nakedness, in Eve having pain in childbirth and in Adam toiling for his food amidst the weeds.  The big message is:  don’t blame anyone else, it’s your own fault.  In the same way, I would propose that when free reign is granted to Life on Earth, so that it can develop by chance, things just went haywire.  In the partial absence of the Dominion of God, terrors developed alongside of beauty.

Progressively, we get nervous systems in the animals and elaborate strategies to kill, parasitize and wreak havoc.  But also brilliant design plans of superior elegance and beauty.  Finally, increasing levels of sentience develop, especially with the arrival of the birds and mammals. 

So far, it seems like the necessity of God’s dominion is well proven.  But there is one more experiment, and this occurs at virtually the last second on the clock of life history.  A creature develops that is intelligent enough to directly interact with God.  This creature can be given a challenge and held responsible for it.  This creature is slow, weak and comically naked.  Other than his intelligence, there is really nothing more to him; he is not the measure of all things.  His intelligence allows him to cover the earth with parking lots, weeds, and organophosphates, but those are small, and mostly stupid, tricks.  The only significance he possesses is his responsibility to God as a reasoning creature. 

At this point, I thought I might take the license to describe God’s interactions with primitive tribes of humans throughout the 100,000 years of our existence.  God makes many entreaties but only a few are willing to follow fully.  Most tribes get part of it right, but most of it wrong and as a result develop odd religious observances.  This is a backwards extrapolation of the covenant pattern seen in the OT and the critique of the prophets on Canaanite religious practices.

Next we move to what we do know, the offer to Israel:  a third-rate nation that is willing to follow God, at least initially/sporadically.  The ultimate failure of Israel to bring light to the nations is picked up by God himself as the Christ takes on Israel’s role to bring all humans into connection with God.  I think this makes the coming of Christ all the more amazing:  God coming as a naked ape, a part of His own creation, to deal with an animal that is only special because it is intelligent enough to be held responsible.  It, of course, coincides with the population explosion of the human species, so that all may hear.

The necessity of Death for evolution has been at the core of Life from the very beginning.  Life is, at its core, a screwed-up enterprise.   We don’t recognize it because we have no external reference point.  We say “It is OK because it is.”  To become a Christian is to reject normality, to recognize the looming absurdity of our own deaths as absurd.  For God to come and take this tragedy on His own Person, this tragedy which developed outside of His Dominion, is to break the curse of Death on the Christian.  In this way, the Cross becomes central and nonreplaceable in any hope of transcendence of Man from his present place in the “natural” world.