Imaging God, Dominion as Stewardship

OK, at the outset of this reflection on Douglas John Hall's book, Imaging God, Dominion as Stewardship, I want to say two things. First, this guy is a "smarty pants". I say that with the utmost respect and in the best possible sense of that label - I mean I am seriously in awe of this guy's brain. It took me about a month to read his 200 pages and I found myself needing to parse each word of many sentences to uncover his intent. Second, once I did uncover it, I think I am now a converted tree hugger. A few years ago, I saw a guy in Tower Grove Park literally hugging a tree that was suffering from some form of disease. At the time I thought - "well...that's...just...whacky!" But now - while I don't anticipate such radical outworking of my new tree hugging sensibilities - I don't think he was all that crazy. Just...well...more responsible to creation than I ever have been and thus a better witness of what it means to be a human bearing the image of God.

Hall begins with a convincing and convicting evaluation of the typical evangelical mindset toward creation - one that I must confess I owned. Namely, that we fundamentally view creation and our relationship to it (as it comes through the narrative and so-called creation mandate in Genesis) as one of king and servant. In other words the creation's purpose was to serve us (and not vice versa). Along with this comes a belief that creation is inherently bad - needing to be subdued - or whipped into shape. And our job is to carry that whip. But Hall redefines this creation mandate as a call to stewardship which thrusts the emphasis decidedly into one of service/care for creation.

This is rooted first in the understanding of God's work in creating creation as well as his ongoing work to repair/renew creation through the work of Jesus. The telos of creation is not to be a sort of roadside stop for we humans on the way to some greater cosmic dimension called heaven, but rather it is the place that God is making new. We then are called into that process (working with God's sovereign hand) as stewards to that telos.

Also we must understand the fundamental relational aspect of our created order. As Hall puts it, we are not just human beings - we are human-being-with's (God, other humans AND nature) and that "does require...that we view all such capacities and endowments according to their function as attributes enabling us to become what we are intended to be: serving and representative creatures, stewards whose complexity of mental, spiritual, and volitional powers makes it possible for us, within the creation, to image the holy and suffering love of the Creator." (p 141)

So, if we are to be true image bearers of God, we must place the care for creation in the same priority as care for our fellow humans. And I don't know about you, but that's pretty convicting to me. Personally, I have lived like a tick on creation, and Hall's work has really helped me to see the vast - and very hypocritical testimony that I have been telling if my identity is that as image-bearer.

Hall sums it up well here: "We mirror the sovereignty of the divine love in our stewardship of earth. This lifts Christian stewardship well beyond the confines of a pragmatic ethic. The motivation for our stewardly acts of preservation, as Christians is not merely utilitarian (as when, for example, it is said that human beings need to preserve forests because we ourselves, or future generations of our kind, are going to need the forests). Rather, as preservers and conservers of all life, we have our commission as a sacred trust that inheres in our new identity - or more accurately, this old identity into which we are newly born through grace and repentance. We are preservers because the creation in intrinsically good, and we are being delivered from the kind of egotism that is able to find goodness only in what is useful to ourselves." (p 200)