In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2).
On Twitter last year during Advent, Wil Gafney (a womanist biblical scholar I hope you’re all following too) called attention to the problematic ways in which “light versus dark” imagery in the Bible gets associated with a “good versus evil” paradigm without proper recognition or critique of the role that such binaries have played in producing and perpetuating racism. [1] It was uncomfortable and personally convicting to realise that the language and metaphors of scriptures that I love (and that pre-date constructions of race) had been so distorted by human, and specifically Christian, sin and oppression that their use (when handled unthoughtfully) could contribute to ongoing harm. [2]
I happened to be reading Jordan Peterson’s ‘Twelve Rules’ at the time (y’know, to get me in the festive mood), as I was upset by his influence among some Christians and wanted a fuller picture of what was going on with that. However unenjoyable, it proved an oddly worthwhile exercise. His celebration and promotion of ‘order’ — via a selective appropriation of myth, literature, philosophy, psychology and evolutionary biology — starkly exposed the violence, exclusion and persecution underpinning that idealised state as humans generally understand it. At least, it exposed it to me; I can only hope his fans read it differently, otherwise their enthusiasm for him becomes even more frightening. (I have since discovered the ideas of René Girard and the theological application of them by writers such as James Alison, and am still marvelling at how much they resonate with the thought trajectory that Peterson helped set me on … But that’s a story for another day.)
And so I spent some time exploring the ways that the Bible defies our categories and disrupts our notions of ‘order’. I read and re-read the creation accounts in Genesis, Job, Proverbs and the Psalms, noticing with fresh eyes that God pre-exists order as we know it; that God is apparently unperturbed by chaos, creating sea monsters to 'play'; that God transcends gender, being imaged in male and female together; that God ‘dwells in deep darkness’ and that ‘darkness is as light’ to God. And it occurred to me that God’s order is for our sake: we are the ones whose conditions for existence and survival are so particular. God’s order looks like the creation of those conditions; it looks like provision, not scarcity; it looks like regulations on our interactions with each other to enable mutual flourishing. [3]
Meanwhile, our own ideas are fuelled by fear and greed. We grasp at, and cling to, 'order' by accumulating, depriving, centralising control and concentrating excess resources and power among a privileged elite. Our ‘order’ transfers chaos and scarcity onto others — and comes back round on all of us eventually, destroying the environment and making the planet increasingly unfit for human life.
Ideologies like Peterson's are alluring to those (I must include myself here) whose interests are most well-served within the current set-up. But our ways are not God’s ways; our thoughts are not God’s thoughts (Isaiah 55:9). And our order is not God’s order. We do not get to arrange things how we want and call them ‘very good’.
[1] For more from the excellent Rev. Dr. Gafney on this topic see her sermon transcript for Embracing the Light and the Darkness in the Age of Black Lives Matter.
[2] In particular, I suddenly felt very self-conscious about one of my favourite of my own poems, which perhaps risks doing just that.
[3] I would struggle to list every source that fed into this process, but three that particularly stick out to me are a Christians in Science talk Is Evolution Compatible with Genesis 1-3?, by Ernest Lucas, 19th March 2010, the article Troubling the Waters: Tehom, Transgender, and Reading Genesis Backwards, by Deryn Guest, 2016, and Lisa Sharon Harper's book The Very Good Gospel.
On Twitter last year during Advent, Wil Gafney (a womanist biblical scholar I hope you’re all following too) called attention to the problematic ways in which “light versus dark” imagery in the Bible gets associated with a “good versus evil” paradigm without proper recognition or critique of the role that such binaries have played in producing and perpetuating racism. [1] It was uncomfortable and personally convicting to realise that the language and metaphors of scriptures that I love (and that pre-date constructions of race) had been so distorted by human, and specifically Christian, sin and oppression that their use (when handled unthoughtfully) could contribute to ongoing harm. [2]
I happened to be reading Jordan Peterson’s ‘Twelve Rules’ at the time (y’know, to get me in the festive mood), as I was upset by his influence among some Christians and wanted a fuller picture of what was going on with that. However unenjoyable, it proved an oddly worthwhile exercise. His celebration and promotion of ‘order’ — via a selective appropriation of myth, literature, philosophy, psychology and evolutionary biology — starkly exposed the violence, exclusion and persecution underpinning that idealised state as humans generally understand it. At least, it exposed it to me; I can only hope his fans read it differently, otherwise their enthusiasm for him becomes even more frightening. (I have since discovered the ideas of René Girard and the theological application of them by writers such as James Alison, and am still marvelling at how much they resonate with the thought trajectory that Peterson helped set me on … But that’s a story for another day.)
And so I spent some time exploring the ways that the Bible defies our categories and disrupts our notions of ‘order’. I read and re-read the creation accounts in Genesis, Job, Proverbs and the Psalms, noticing with fresh eyes that God pre-exists order as we know it; that God is apparently unperturbed by chaos, creating sea monsters to 'play'; that God transcends gender, being imaged in male and female together; that God ‘dwells in deep darkness’ and that ‘darkness is as light’ to God. And it occurred to me that God’s order is for our sake: we are the ones whose conditions for existence and survival are so particular. God’s order looks like the creation of those conditions; it looks like provision, not scarcity; it looks like regulations on our interactions with each other to enable mutual flourishing. [3]
Meanwhile, our own ideas are fuelled by fear and greed. We grasp at, and cling to, 'order' by accumulating, depriving, centralising control and concentrating excess resources and power among a privileged elite. Our ‘order’ transfers chaos and scarcity onto others — and comes back round on all of us eventually, destroying the environment and making the planet increasingly unfit for human life.
Ideologies like Peterson's are alluring to those (I must include myself here) whose interests are most well-served within the current set-up. But our ways are not God’s ways; our thoughts are not God’s thoughts (Isaiah 55:9). And our order is not God’s order. We do not get to arrange things how we want and call them ‘very good’.
[1] For more from the excellent Rev. Dr. Gafney on this topic see her sermon transcript for Embracing the Light and the Darkness in the Age of Black Lives Matter.
[2] In particular, I suddenly felt very self-conscious about one of my favourite of my own poems, which perhaps risks doing just that.
[3] I would struggle to list every source that fed into this process, but three that particularly stick out to me are a Christians in Science talk Is Evolution Compatible with Genesis 1-3?, by Ernest Lucas, 19th March 2010, the article Troubling the Waters: Tehom, Transgender, and Reading Genesis Backwards, by Deryn Guest, 2016, and Lisa Sharon Harper's book The Very Good Gospel.
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