“… in the biblical description of creation, the vocation of God becomes definitive of the vocation of human life and of that of institutions and nations and other creatures and of all things whatever.” — William Stringfellow, Conscience and Obedience

In asking myself what the first chapters of Genesis suggest about obligation, I have one huge pitfall to avoid. I could easily turn the entire exercise into a recitation of previously encountered ideas. Naturally, the many comments by theologians, commentators, and preachers that I’ve encountered both regarding obligation and related concepts and also regarding Genesis, all conspire to hi-jack my journey into the text as I seek to naively experience its story. For this reason, I am restricting my tendency to relate the text before me to the other texts that are tied to it in particular traditions of theological reflection. Hopeless as the attempt in some ways is, I am seeking to come to the text with new eyes.

Keeping in mind that by obligation I mean to be legally, morally, or socially bound to some course of action, we ask the text of the two creation accounts who/what is bound by who/what and also how.

Immediately, the concept of obligation implodes. Clearly the “obligation” to be, the call to life which was God’s creating, isn’t socially, morally, or legally binding. The transaction that occurs, occurs entirely outside any social, moral, or legal context; indeed, one could argue that all of these contexts are themselves contextualized by Creation.

But at the same time, the Genesis account (especially the first one) represent God’s actions in a legal way. To what does this accommodating figure of speech point? To a relation of power, especially the power of authority. God’s Word goes forth; God’s Word is fulfilled. There is little doubt about the origin of the doctrine of God’s sovereignty when we consider that Genesis represents him as standing in a relation of legal authority to the very existence of things. But how does God come to be invested with this legal authority? In human imagination, in our fantasy books when we speak of a wizard “binding the forces of nature to his will,” we typically at least imply some context for his wielding such authority, whether lineage, study, persuasion, or development of force of will; but we discover that God’s authority is contextualized by nothing but his own being. Consequently, we are given to infer that God, simply by being, possesses the highest possible legal authority and the most perfect execution of his will.

But we find three other bindings in the Creation account. God not only speaks life, he also blesses with imperatives, gives for, and confers dominion.

How do these actions relate to obligation? First, in regard to God’s blessings upon fish and birds and men, that they be fruitful and multiply, we notice that unlike his speaking things to life, this imperative is not followed by the assertion “and it was so.” This difference, in the tradition with which I am most conversant, is typically described as the difference between “laws of nature” and “norms.” While not consenting to the full exposition of that distinction, I appreciate the idea of a norm: that is, the idea of an obligation that does not determine so much what will occur as create the possibility for a kind of occurrence. God’s blessings oblige his creatures to act in one of two ways: to accept or reject his blessings. Similarly, later, we will see that God’s commands oblige his creatures to act in one of two ways: to obey or disobey. It is the possibility of blessing to which fish and birds and men seem to be bound here.

God’s blessings also seem to share something with his promises. Insofar as they are open-ended (by not determining whether the blessing will be accepted) they seem to imply that God is obliging himself by his own legal authority to respond in a certain way to the choices of his creatures. Later on in Scripture, we will come across the thrilling oaths of God, in which he binds himself to a promise by staking his own being upon it—the most solemn oath possible, “by God.”

Finally, I note that God gives for and confers dominion. I fear that many, many Christians have equated the two ideas. God gives men and animals the plants for food; our conception tends to be that he “gives” creation to us for, well, whatever the hell we want—and hell is what we make of it when we take dominion to mean domination in this way. Instead, in view of the example of dominion that God himself has just presented, blessing his creation and obligating himself to it, it would seem more likely that God is giving humans for creation rather than the other way around. In any case, God’s grant of dominion establishes a legal context, a conferred authority, connecting the ultimate legal authority (God’s being) to human governing.

In all of this, to conclude by referring to my opening quotation, we witness God defining the vocation of his creation, a much larger and richer thing than merely obligating it in certain ways. Nonetheless, we understand a part of this vocation as we see God’s legal authority to oblige, his creation of a context for human legality, and his own magnificent obliging of himself to his creation.