Dominion

“Dominion” has a bad rap these days. The creation mandate to “have dominion, fill, subdue, and rule” the earth is regarded with suspicion: It gives human beings religious justification for environmental rapacity, domination of the other, sexism and racism.

The Bible recognizes this possibility. The first king in Scripture is Lamech, who already carries out all the horrors of tyranny—multiplying wives, multiplying vengeance, multiplying taunts. 

Yet in Lamech’s dominion there is already a clue to another form of dominion. Lamech’s sons invent animal husbandry and music, and the latter points to the deeper significance of our rule over the creation.

To make music, I need to control my body—my intake and outgo of breath, my mouth, lungs, vocal chords. Music-making results from dominion over my own body; dominion over my own body comes to its telos, we might imagine, in my ability to sing, to praise.

Dominion of the creation has the same telos. To make a woodwind, you have to skillfully work with wood; you have to rule metals to make brass; you have to find inventive ways to use the detritus of animals—guts and skin—to make strings and drums. Dominion comes into its own in the making of instruments, and in making music with those instruments once made.

This is one way (not the only one) that human dominion brings creation to its proper end. Everything, everything is destined to praise the Creator. Trees clap their hands at his coming, but trees also praise when they are formed into oboes and bassoons. The metals in the mountains praise God, but their praise becomes audible in flutes and trumpets. 

The point of human dominion is to bring creation to music. We are made kings to make creation sing.

(Much of this is taken from a lecture by James Jordan during the Theopolis course on Revelation.)