Creation, Order, and Freedom

How Genesis and Anarchism Intertwine Order and Freedom; Also: Fandoms, Maximilian Kolbe

Do you ever watch nature documentaries in wonder at the environments brimming with seemingly chaotic life yet fitting together in a harmonious self-sustaining system? I know I have. The natural world is full of such places.

from Shaun Low on Unsplash

One of the most controversial texts in the past century has been the creation story in the Book of Genesis where the world begins to brim with wild yet harmonious life. While many debates have discussed its ability to align with modern science regarding material origins of the universe and humanity, I don’t think it’s that type of text at all. This story, read in context literature of its time, is a text meant to tell us about the character and purposes of God, humans, and world, and I think its perspective on God, humanity, order, and freedom, rightly understood, bears interesting parallels to anarchism, which is also a frequently misunderstood site of controversy.

So let us turn to the beginning.

The Text

As you read, notice, what is the situation of the earth before God begins to work? In what ways does God’s work shift this initial situation? If humans are made “in God's image” what does this passage tell us about the God in whose image they are made? How do order and freedom relate within this story?

When God began to create the heavens and the earth— the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters— God said, “Let there be light.” And so light appeared. God saw how good the light was. God separated the light from the darkness. God named the light Day and the darkness Night. (Genesis 1:1-2 CEB)

From Chaos to Order

One of the most helpful resources I’ve found on this story is the work of John Walton in The Lost World of Genesis One and New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis. His work lays out an argument for Genesis telling the story of God giving order, function, and purpose to the universe, a literary text in conversation with other Ancient Near Eastern origin stories, with significant differences that give insight into ancient Hebrew perspective on God and the world. Many other parallel stories of the time period from other cultures imagine humanity as the chaotic result of the violence and coercion of vengeful gods in conflict, but Genesis tells a different story.

Walton highlights that the beginning state, which is presented as the opposite of the goodness at the end of the story, is not one of non-existence, but of formlessness and chaos. This fits the argument that the story is not about the material creation of the universe but about giving the world form, purpose, and order. Verse 2 describes the world as “without shape or form” and tells of “the deep sea”. The sea held associations with chaos and disorder in that cultural context, and the picture at the beginning of the story is a chaotic, formless sea.

Over the course of the story, God takes creative actions that move the world from formlessness and disorder to increasing form, function, and order. The first three days tell of this ordering work, poetically describing the ordering of light and darkness, sea, sky, and land. Walton highlights how the whole story parallels the creation of an ancient temple, a place of order and purpose.

But those three days are not the end of the story.

Form and order are not themselves the purpose of God’s action. They make space for the flourishing, free, and fruitful growth of life. Plants and animals fill the space made for them, culminating in humanity’s entry into the story. The language used in these days pictures a world full of energy, as the waters swarm with living things (repeated a second time for emphasis) which are fertile, multiplying, and filling the seas. The birds fill the skies in parallel, and the land produces wildlife, every kind of it (repeated multiple times for emphasis), crawling their way through the world made for them. This wildlife is pictured as wild and vibrant, freely expanding in the world. Humanity follows the same pattern, made for fruitful multiplication and spread throughout the world to care for it.

A Path to Freedom

The meaning of Genesis 1 includes that part of what God does (and continues to do) is to give order to the world, making space for flourishing and freedom. Genesis 1 depicts a work of creativity, freedom, and fruitfulness that gives more space for creativity and freedom for a vast and wild multitude of beings, allowing them to reflect God’s own character.

Like a gardener, God creates the space and conditions for flourishing, but does not directly manipulate and coerce the growth of each plant. Each has the freedom to take it’s own path toward growth and life, given by the reality of an ordered environment.

Humans are presented as the pinnacle of that work, made in God’s own image. From the text, it seems that being “in God's image” means humans are made with freedom that allows for creativity, cultivating order that facilitates goodness, freedom, and thriving for other beings, gardeners placed into the Garden of Eden.

That image-reflecting human freedom shows up in the text as freedom to name, to create, and to steward, but as it reaches chapter 3, it is intertwined with freedom to do evil, twisting and distorting order, purpose, and flourishing, bringing formlessness and chaos back into the world. However, God is so committed to the goodness of human freedom from divine coercion that God chooses this path, even with its risk of evil.

Order is often opposed to freedom, and freedom associated with chaos, but the vision of Genesis is that order makes the space which freedom needs and chaos both brings the death of freedom and is the result of freedom misused.

Anarchism Doesn’t Mean “Anarchy”

When you hear the word anarchism, what comes to mind? For many it is chaos, violence, and destruction, and anarchy is often imagined a synonym for chaos.

However, like in Genesis, anarchism understands that order, freedom, and flourishing are intertwined.

One of anarchism’s primary symbols, the A in a circle, is understood by some to refer to this dynamic, with some anarchists interpreting it as an intertwined A for Anarchism and O for Order, referring back to key thinkers such as Proudhon, who said “As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy”, describing order as an end goal of anarchy.

Anarchism seeks to remove state-based coercion in favor of freedom, but its imagined world is not one of unfettered chaotic individualism. Instead, it is one of cooperative communities bringing order. Like God in the Genesis story, cooperative human community in the anarchist vision cultivates spaces for creativity and thriving, with true freedom. Anarchism’s vision is the pursuit of life in the image of God as we see God here. Through free association and cooperation, an orderly world is pursued, one in which freedom can thrive and all beings can flourish. Freedom and order are envisioned as intertwined and mutually nourishing to one another, while coercion and chaos are the enemies surrounding and pressing against order and freedom.

For both anarchism and Genesis, the usual assumed pairings of order-coercion and chaos-freedom are challenged and remixed, undermining the narratives of authoritarianism and complementary visions of a coercive and domineering God.

Everyday Anarchism: Fandoms

I recently was talking to some friends and hearing about their participation in fandom culture where fans create supplementary content and engage in discussion and gatherings around their enjoyment of a certain show, movie, story, band, game, etc. The conversation also went into the world of fan fiction where people write additional stories based on characters in existing published stories and post them online for others to read.

I find these areas beautiful depictions of creativity and freedom at work. Though they have their dramas and issues at times, these communities self-organize, generally without profit motive or coercive force, and create infrastructure for ordered spaces where creative work and social connection can flourish. That is a picture of anarchism, in my opinion. They function through free exchange and free association and facilitate creativity, storytelling, and relationship that reflect the image of God.

Historical Heroes

I'll regularly highlight historical heroes, often in the week of their birth or death. Thursday marked the anniversary of the death of Maximilian Kolbe.

Maximilian Kolbe of Poland (8 January 1894-14 August 1941) was a priest, friar, and martyr. At age 12, he had a vision of the Virgin Mary that impacted his faith and called him to martyrdom. He joined the Franciscans and entered seminary. His father was hanged by Russia in the fight for an independent Poland. He taught in seminary, published devotions, and did some missionary travel in China and Japan. On returning to Poland, he published a newspaper and ran a radio station. When World War II started, he helped run a temporary hospital and sheltered Jews from the Nazis, refusing to claim the rights of a German citizen (his father was of German descent). The Gestapo shut down his monastery, arrested him, and sent him to Auschwitz, where he was executed after volunteering to take the place of another man about to be executed who was worried for his wife and children.

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