Ruminations - Spring Summer - 2021

While I am a city boy at heart, most of my formative years were spent in country Victoria, the Goulburn Valley. We weren’t famers, but often rented houses on farmland. I woke up to the sound of cows pulling at grass, smelled their dung. I swam in irrigation channels and climbed trees. I watched green grass turn into hay. My attempts at hay bailing were mixed. Life on the land gives you a better sense of the cycle of renewal, although urbanites get a taste with the seasonal dive bombings of magpies.

Growing up and moving away to university was the beginning of a long journey to faith – a spiritual Dr Mick Pope renewal – and beyond to integrating aspects of Professor of Environmental Mission my life with that. As someone who had always had an interest with nature – now creation – I have tried to understand how the bible tells us how we are to understand our relationship to the natural world. This includes how we harness it for our food. Having a PhD in meteorology means that must involve understanding climate change through a Christian lens.

This in turn drove me to a Masters degree in theology, reading Genesis 1–3 and its relationship to other parts of the Pentateuch (first five books of the bible).

To get the maximum value out of Genesis 1, we need to leave the origins wars behind, and try and go back to when it was written. It is then we obtain value for an agricultural setting. The first clue is that the earth is described as a “formless void” in verse 2. The two Hebrew words translated here tohu and bohu, are used elsewhere in an agricultural setting. In Isaiah 34, the rulers of Edom are judged for their hostility to Israel and their land is consequently destroyed. We can see how judgment on Edom’s rulers is central, but that the impacts are felt by the land itself, by laying out verses 11–17 as follows:

11a the land of Edom will be occupied by wild animals

11b the land becomes desolate (tohu) and empty (bohu),

unfit for agriculture

12 human rulers will be nothing

13a the land will be full of weeds, signs of agricultural collapse

13b–17 the land will be occupied by wild animals.