Dominion

Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

Definition

Dominion is the rule God gave mankind over the rest of his creation at their making, in virtue of bearing his image (Gen. 1:26, 28).¹ It is delegated, not self-owned: humanity governs the earth as God’s representative and under his law, not as an independent sovereign, and the Fall disordered rather than ended that rule.²

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession, in the same chapter that grounds humanity’s creation in the image of God, states plainly that this dominion was part of the blessedness Adam and Eve forfeited by sin:

Besides the law written in their hearts, they received a command not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which whilst they kept, they were happy in their communion with God, and had dominion over the creatures.²

The confession ties dominion to obedience, not to strength or cleverness: it belonged to Adam and Eve only “whilst they kept” the command, alongside their communion with God, and both were lost together at the Fall. The Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration close the identical paragraph in their own chapters on creation with the same clause, that Adam and Eve “were happy in their communion with God, and had dominion over the creatures.”³ This is the shared confessional witness of the wider Reformed tradition, not a distinctively Baptist formulation.

Biblical Basis

Genesis states the mandate in a single divine speech-act: God makes humanity in his image, “male and female,” and in the same breath commissions them to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28). The commission is total in scope (every kind of living creature named) but bounded in source: it is a delegated grant, spoken by God over a humanity he has just made in his own likeness, not a title mankind holds independently of him.

Genesis 2 narrates the same dominion at ground level rather than by royal decree: “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). Bavinck reads the garden placement itself as part of the pattern:

Bound to the earth, Adam could still exercise dominion over it; dominion is an integral part of the image of God in humans (Gen. 1:26, 28; 2:19-20; 9:2-3; Ps. 8:7-9). As God’s image bearers, humans are elevated above all other creatures and appointed lord and king over them all.¹

Adam’s own naming of the animals (Gen. 2:19-20) belongs to the same dominion: to name a creature, in the Old Testament’s own idiom, is an act of the one who rules over it.

Psalm 8 restates the mandate as praise rather than command, marveling that God has crowned mere humanity “with glory and honor” and “given him dominion over the works of your hands,” putting “all things under his feet” (Ps. 8:5-6). Hebrews 2:8-9 quotes this psalm and immediately qualifies it:

Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus.

Dominion as Genesis and the Psalter describe it and dominion as the world now actually is are not the same thing; Hebrews locates the difference in Christ.

The mandate does not vanish after the Fall. God repeats it to Noah in almost the same words after the flood (“be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”; “the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth,” Gen. 9:1-2), and Genesis 9:6 grounds the prohibition of murder in the same image that grounds dominion: a creature who bears God’s image may not be treated as one more object of another human’s rule.

Doctrinal Significance

Dominion is disordered, not abolished, by the Fall. Bavinck traces the difference directly to Genesis 3’s curse:

These cannot be ascribed as caused by personal sin… but still reflect a world under divine curse and subjected to futility. The forces of nature are no longer under human dominion but hostile and requiring great human effort to counter.⁴

The same curse that made the ground yield “thorns and thistles” against Adam’s labor (Gen. 3:17-18) is what converts dominion from a settled inheritance into contested, effortful work; humanity still rules in some sense, since God never revokes the Genesis 1 commission, but no longer rules a cooperative creation.

Christ recovers what Adam’s dominion lost. Adam’s rule was never a private possession but a headship over “every corner of the earth” exercised on behalf of the race he represented, so its loss at the Fall was likewise never merely personal; McCormick argues that this is exactly why the reader “should not be surprised when the universal import of Adam’s sin is revealed.”⁵ The Second Adam reverses that headship rather than merely repeating it. Bavinck ties dominion directly to Christ’s own threefold office:

To us was given dominion over the earth (Gen. 1:26), an essential part of the image restored by Christ the King who makes us kings as well as prophets and priests. Angels are not kings, only servants.⁶

Hebrews 2 makes the same move from Psalm 8: what is “not yet” true of humanity in general is already true of Jesus, “made lower than the angels for a little while,” now “crowned with glory and honor” (Heb. 2:9) as the one in whom the original mandate is finally being fulfilled on behalf of his people.

The whole creation waits on that fulfillment. Paul describes the present condition of nature in terms that read as the New Testament’s own commentary on Genesis 3’s curse:

[Creation was] subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Rom. 8:20-21)

Dominion’s own future, on this text, is not humanity discovering a better technique for managing the earth but creation being released into a freedom that follows the children of God’s own glorification, in Christ, the one through whom “all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities” (Col. 1:16).

Historical Development

Genesis 1:26-28’s language of image and dominion together has an identifiable background in the ancient Near East, where a king’s statue set up in a conquered province represented his rule over that territory, and the king himself was described as a living image of a god, executing that god’s rule on earth. Duby, surveying this background, notes that reading Genesis 1’s “image” primarily as royal function in this sense “appears to be… the near consensus of opinion in current Old Testament scholarship,” and that “the exercise of power and authority in action is indeed included in the meaning of the image” on any reading of the text.⁷ Genesis grants that royal role to “them” (Gen. 1:26-28), male and female alike, rather than naming it for a single ruler.

The doctrine’s later development mostly tracks the wider history of how the image of God itself was understood; see Image of God for that fuller history.

Opposing Views

Dominion theology is itself a principal cause of the modern ecological crisis. In 1967 the historian Lynn White Jr. argued exactly this, on the ground that Christianity, “especially in its Western form, is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen,” teaching “that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.”⁸ On this reading, the doctrine of dominion sets humanity over creation with no internal check on how that rule is exercised, and the image-of-God teaching in particular authorizes treating every other creature as existing “to serve man.”⁸

Biocentric and ecocentric approaches reject dominion altogether, denying humanity any special standing over the rest of creation. Rather than correcting an overreaching anthropocentrism, these views, in Magnuson’s survey, give human beings no special status among the rest of the created order.⁹ Richard Young describes the same approach as treating all of nature, not humanity in particular, as “the ultimate reference point for all meaning, purpose, values, and ethics,” existing “for the sake of the whole” rather than for human benefit.¹⁰ Magnuson judges this its own kind of overcorrection, one that “places biological life ‘at the center of things,’ in contrast to the biblical perspective that ‘God lies at the center of things, not life.’”¹¹

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t the Genesis mandate license humanity to use creation however it wishes, as White’s thesis claims? The text itself does not read that way. Genesis 2:15 places the man in the garden “to work it and keep it,” a pairing of cultivation and guardianship rather than extraction alone, and Genesis 1’s dominion is granted to a humanity that is itself God’s image, answerable to him for how a delegated rule is exercised, not an independent title. Magnuson answers White directly on this point, arguing that “biblical Christianity is neither the anthropocentric religion that White claims, nor is it the root cause of environmental problems.”¹² Calvin’s more general statement of Christian stewardship names the same principle that applies here, that in regard to everything God has entrusted to us, “we are his stewards, and are bound to give account of our stewardship.”¹³ A steward answerable to an owner is not the same thing as an owner free to use up what belongs to him.

If Christianity isn’t to blame for the ecological crisis, what is? Alister McGrath, answering White directly, locates the real cause elsewhere:

Lynn White is completely right when he argues that human self-centeredness is the root of our ecological crisis, but quite wrong when he asserts that Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever seen. The most self-centered religion in history is the secular creed of twentieth-century Western culture, whose roots lie in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.¹⁴

Douglas and Jonathan Moo make a similar case from the history of ideas rather than from Scripture directly:

The rise of humanism and loss of robust belief in a personal, creating God in the last few centuries have fostered a mechanistic way of thinking about the world that has had dramatically unfortunate consequences for the health of God’s creation.¹⁵

Neither answer denies that Christians have sometimes treated the earth destructively; both locate the cause in a departure from the doctrine of creation, not in the doctrine of dominion itself.

Related Doctrines

• Image of God
• Creation
• The Fall
• Covenant of works
• Jesus as the second Adam
• Environment

References

1. Herman Bavinck, “The Image of God,” chap. 11 in Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011): “Bound to the earth, Adam could still exercise dominion over it; dominion is an integral part of the image of God in humans (Gen. 1:26, 28; 2:19-20; 9:2-3; Ps. 8:7-9). As God’s image bearers, humans are elevated above all other creatures and appointed lord and king over them all.” ↩ ↩²

2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” para. 3. ↩ ↩²

3. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” para. 2; the Savoy Declaration (1658) states the identical clause in its own chap. 4, para. 2. ↩

4. Bavinck, “Sin and Its Consequences,” chap. 13 in Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume: “The forces of nature are no longer under human dominion but hostile and requiring great human effort to counter.” ↩

5. Micah John McCormick, “Adam’s Obedience for Eternal Life before the Fall,” chap. 3 in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 108: “Adam was God’s image-bearer, created to rule the earth as vice-regent for God, to exercise dominion to every corner of the earth.” ↩

6. Bavinck, “Creator of Heaven and Earth,” chap. 10 in Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume: “to us was given dominion over the earth (Gen. 1:26), an essential part of the image restored by Christ the King who makes us kings as well as prophets and priests. Angels are not kings, only servants.” ↩

7. Steven J. Duby, “To Whom Will You Compare Me?,” chap. 5 in God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 234. ↩

8. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” quoted in Ken Magnuson, “17. Creation Care,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩ ↩²

9. Magnuson, “17. Creation Care.” ↩

10. Richard Young, quoted in Magnuson, “17. Creation Care.” ↩

11. Magnuson, “17. Creation Care.” ↩

12. Magnuson, “17. Creation Care.” ↩

13. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), book 3, chap. 7, 5. ↩

14. Alister McGrath, quoted in Magnuson, “17. Creation Care.” ↩

15. Douglas J. Moo and Jonathan A. Moo, Creation Care, quoted in Magnuson, “17. Creation Care.” ↩