Rev Dr Norman Habel

Presenter/Workshop Leader

Rev Dr Norman Habel is currently Professorial Fellow at Flinders Universityin Adelaide, and a pastor of The Lutheran Church.

Presentation

AN INCONVENIENT TEXT: IS THERE A 'GREEN GOD' IN THE BIBLE?

Harper-Collins has just published The Green Bible! A big mistake! It underlines in green anything about creation... bloody plagues and all! If we read with empathy for Earth and the Earth community, we discover many texts where God destroys nature. If we are aware, as we read, that we are Earth beings as well as human beings, we often wonder whether God has any real concern for creation. Humans always seem to get top priority... especially their sins! What if we read against the grain and let the voice of Earth be heard? Is there a green God among all the grey texts in the Bible? How do we come to terms with the grey portraits of God?

About Rev Dr Norman Habel

Rev Dr Norman Habel is currently Professorial Fellow at Flinders Universityin Adelaide, and a pastor of The Lutheran Church. He is a recognised Old Testament scholar with major publications in a number of areas, including a commentary on Job in the Old Testament Library series and a volume entitled The Land is Mine: Six Biblical Land Ideologies. He has long been involved in issues of biblical interpretation and social justice.

Between 2000 and 2002 he initiated and edited The Earth Bible, a five volume international project with other scholars reading the Bible from the perspective of justice for Earth. As a result he was invited by the Society of Biblical Literature to lead a new consultation on Ecological Hermeneutics which is now a regular session at SBL meetings. He recently edited a collection of key papers for SBL from these consultations under the title Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics. This volume was launched at the International SBL in Auckland in July 2008. His introduction to this volume spells out the essentials of ecological hermeneutics involving the process of suspicion, identification and retrieval.

In 2009 he published a volume with ATF Press in Australia that introduced this approach at a more popular level. The title is An Inconvenient Text: Is a Green reading of the Bible possible? He is concerned that we, as human beings, re-connect with Earth as a sanctuary and a living planet. As part of this concern he has led the move to include The Season of Creation as part of the church year. See www.seasonofcreation.com Fortress Press will be releasing a volume related to this new season of the church year in 2010.