“Subdue the Earth” and “Till It and Keep It”:
Responding to God’s Cultural Commands
In the middle of our cultural crisis, issues such as politics, economics, and education may come immediately to mind. Though these issues are vital to our culture, the crisis stems in part from something even more fundamental. We’ve lost touch with the most basic aspects of culture.
An important answer to our crisis can be found at the beginning of Scripture. The first command addressed to humanity in the entire Bible is to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion” (Gen 1:28). This command is addressed to man and woman in the first creation story and is addressed to all of humanity. In the second story, Adam is said to have been placed in the Garden “to till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). God’s first commands are cultural commands. This reveals his primal will for all human beings: to be fruitful in themselves and to enhance the fruitfulness of the earth by their efforts.
There are many ways to respond to this primal call. I will describe one way it is relevant to me by providing a short theology of gardening. I will then broaden the discussion to show the relevancy of God’s cultural commands more generally.
I bought my first house last year, which contained a large patch of weeds that had served as a dog pen. It looked like a perfect place for a garden, our first, so I rented a tiller and went to work. About half way through I stopped and the primal command I mentioned above just hit me out of nowhere. I realized that I had finally responded to the most basic command that God had given us. It felt good!
As I mentioned, this patch was completely covered by weeds. Grappling with those weeds also took me back to the Garden. They weren’t meant to be part of the plan, but came after Adam had already disrupted his first mission. Tilling the earth would never be the same and now we have to work by the sweat of our brow. The weeds are a reminder of what human work is meant to be after the Fall: not just a work of human culture, but also a work of reparation, or more positively of restoration.
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Cultivating and caring for creation is an instruction of God which he gave not only at the beginning of history, but has also given to each one of us; it is part of his plan; it means making the world increase with responsibility, transforming it so that it may be a garden, an inhabitable place for us all (General Audience, June 5, 2013).
According to Francis, everyone needs to be a gardener! This literally can mean putting one’s hands in the soil or, more generally speaking, cultivating the goods of creation and even our own lives to make them more human and in accord with God’s will. We are all called to be cultural creators and by doing so we explicitly follow the Lord’s commands to “subdue the earth” and to “till it and keep it.”
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