What is the meaning of dominion?

In the first of the two creation stories in Genesis (Genesis 1:1-2:3), God gives man dominion over his creation (Genesis 1:26,28). For many people of faith, these verses have justified a mastery-over-nature orientation: dominion is seen as the right to dominate and to possess absolute control over the entire earth. We get an inkling that this interpretation is problematic when we realize that is it is the basis for the view, particularly prominent among some evangelicals, that, in sinning against God, Adam in turn ceded the dominion God had given him to the evil one, who is now the lord of this world. This, of course, is in stark contrast to the message that runs throughout Sacred Scripture that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 24:1).

How, then, are we to understand the meaning of dominion? We can turn to the second creation story in Genesis (Genesis 2:4-25), which tells us that humankind’s responsibility toward God’s creation is “to till it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Viewed through the lens of the second creation account, dominion is not ownership and control, but rather stewardship and caretaking; God did not give the earth to humankind and then walk away but expects us to be responsible stewards over the glory of his creation, in which He remains present and active. This also is in keeping with the Israelites’ belief in the Old Testament that the land in its entirety belongs to God and not to his people.

But more than this, Pope Emeritus Benedict links the notion of dominion spawned by the misinterpretation of the Genesis creation stories to an excessive focus on the doctrine of Salvation (the individual promise of eternal life) and an abandonment of the doctrine of Creation (that all God created is good, and that at the end of time, God’s creation will be restored in its fullness, as Revelation 21:1-4 tells us.) This anthropocentric, individualistic, and egocentric view tends to deny that each of us is profoundly related to all of humankind, as well as to all of God’s creation. Sacred Scripture tells us that we are our brother’s (and sister’s) keeper (Genesis 1:9). But it also suggests that in the same way, we  are the keeper of all of God’s creation, and that every creature has been created by God with a unique dignity that gives glory to its creator. That is why St. John, in one of his visions in Revelation, “heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea” (Revelation 5:13) join in the doxology of praise to our God.