God's sovereignty and what that means for us
These days I’m going through commentaries on Genesis, specifically looking for hints of the priest, prophet, king paradigm in the creation and fall narratives. Today I was struck by a commentary1 that put the Genesis narrative in the context of other Ancient Near East (ANE) myths; the specific ways in which the Genesis narrative differs seems to highlight certain aspects of the text that are harder to see coming at it from a 21st century Western perspective. So I want to look at those, and then consider what that means for the kingly or royal aspect of Christ’s mission, into which we are baptized.
In our culture, we use the phrase “by fiat” to mean something like “someone in charge made a decision that affects all of us, probably negatively, and we’re all upset about it because that person didn’t consult us or have any regard for how it would affect us or what would actually make sense in the situation.” The word for creation in the Latin translation of Genesis is the same: Fiat lux, let there be light. But in the context of other ANE creation accounts, it seems to affirm the exact opposite.
In the other ANE accounts, there is, to begin with, polythesism, and a great struggle among the gods, and finally one of them wins out and successfully imposes his will on the universe, and that is the origin of the things. In the Genesis narrative, God doesn’t struggle with anyone because there is no one for God to struggle with. God is so absolutely and completely powerful, there is no one who can come close to matching him. He doesn’t struggle to create; he just speaks and it happens. Fiat lux, and there is light. It’s that simple. There is no violence or warfare, just words. In this context, fiat2 does not mean shoving others down through an imposition of power. It means that’s what the other nearby peoples claim about their gods; our God transcends that whole thing. The commentator I’m reading now argues that this is one of the central themes of the Genesis creation narrative: Our God isn’t like your gods. Our God is not even in the same category as your gods. Our God operates on a different plane entirely; sovereign and powerful in a way that your gods never will be.
Here’s a piece that caught my attention:
That God should create disorganized matter, only to reduce it to order, presents no more of a problem than does His taking six days to complete creation instead of instantaneously producing a perfected universe. The quintessential point of the narrative is the idea of ordering that is the result of divine intent. It is a fundamental biblical teaching that the original, divinely ordained order in the physical world has its counterpart in the divinely ordained universal moral order to which the human race is subject. p. 6 (emphasis added)
This connection between God’s original ordering of the physical/biological universe and the moral order is really interesting. Obviously, the physical/biological universe and the moral order are not as they should be: we consider both disease and sin as effects of the Fall. (I think it’s fair to say that disease is something awry with the physical/biological world, and sin is obviously something morally wrong.)
I’m going to dig into the gospel commentaries later, but scanning through my memories of the narratives and teaching of Jesus, I’m not finding a lot of forcing people into submission to impose his order on the world. The closest thing I’m coming up with is the cleansing of the Temple, and that’s not really forcing people into submission. There’s a lot of “turn the other cheek” and “love your enemies” and “quit arguing about who is greatest, because the least is the greatest” and “consider the tiny mustard seed, and the leaven which is basically invisible,” and other things, including dying on the Cross. Still, it is clear that the gospel itself has power.
My understanding3 of our kingly/royal mission (as a participation, by our baptism, in Christ’s mission) is that we first govern ourselves (i.e. get our own interiors in order, have our loves and priorities in the right order; please, let’s not talk about the ordo amoris, I just mean we shouldn’t be self-rightously making vests for orphaned children in distant lands while neglecting our own children into starvation4 and that sort of thing; but also, we shouldn’t be nursing grudges or indulging useless anxieties or other things that are contrary to love; all of this relates to properly ordering our interiors),
and then second, we order the world in the areas that we have influence. Jesus obviously had his interior in order, so that was a thing he didn’t have to deal with. When we consider our influence on the world — whether it’s in our families, in our professional work, among our friends, in our interactions with people at the grocery store, in our gardens, in our participation in politics (whether that is our professional work, or if we’re reading and voting and posting on social media), or whatever — what is our approach to having this influence?
So here is my thought: We are not absolutely sovereign like God is, and we cannot just say “fiat” and have things spring into order. We should start by accepting where we are and what influence we actually have. And then from that place, we don’t vie for top position so that we can impose our wills top-down on everyone else. If the overriding theme of the creation narrative in Genesis is God does not struggle to reach the top and then impose his will on everyone, then we shouldn’t do that, either. A lot of the more public/vocal Christian/pro-life political movements seem to take this approach, and I think it is wrong.
I don’t have a fully articulated answer to how we should approach our work of ordering the world, and I’m running out of time, so I guess I want to pitch this to you. Considering the Genesis creation narrative in this context, what do you think about our work of ordering the world according to the “divinely ordained universal moral order”? How should we approach it? What does that look like in the different contexts in which we exist (family, social, political, professional, etc.)?
Sarna, Nahum M. Genesis. The JPS Torah Commentary. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989.
Obviously, they weren’t speaking Latin in the Ancient Near East, but you know what I mean.
This is mostly coming from Christifideles Laici and Lumen Gentium, I think, but I’m trying to fire this off before my kids realize that I’m using a screen, so I don’t want to walk past them to my bookshelf right now.
This example is taken from Mrs. Jellaby in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, a book I have not read.
The first thing that came to my mind was my experience with motherhood. Pretty much everything we do as mothers in teaching our children is done by fiat or as I used to say, "by royal decree." This means that we, as parents, have experience, knowledge, and wisdom about the things in life our kids don't know yet, and we teach them how the world works and how we're supposed to behave. They do what we say because we're in charge, and they don't question us (at least at first). Even after they discover that they have a will that might differ from ours and begin asking "why?", often what we tell them to do is still by fiat, because we simply know more than they do. We begin to explain our reasoning as is appropriate, but sometimes they still have to do what we say simply because we say so. It may be that the reason is to complex or time-consuming or not yet age-appropriate, and they simply have to trust that we're right. We order their exteriors by our teaching role as parents so that they can learn to order their interiors. This is how obedience to God works, too. Often he explains things, whether in Scripture or in the Church, but sometimes his reasons remain obscure. We still have to trust that he knows best, because he's created it all. Because he's the dad, that's why.
Your older sister is doing some parenting of her teenager "by royal decree" recently. She's setting firm guidelines for behavior and giving him concrete ways to follow them, and it looks like it might be working to change his attitudes and behavior. The goal is a well-ordered interior for her son, and she's using all her life experience and wisdom to get the job done.
Dad says that Pope Benedict's book on the Creation discusses the comparison of the Genesis and the ANE creation accounts. He probably has it if you want to check it out.
I don't know how I SHOULD approach the divinely ordered moral order in the public realm, but I've decided (as of recently) that my best bet is to be holy and live like a Christian rather than duke it out in the public realm. I think that making meals for new moms in the parish and knitting baby blankets for our local pro-life support program is more effective than picketing abortion clinics or arguing with people. I might be wrong, but I'm pretty ineffective at arguing and I can knit and cook.