2024's Blueprints for the Tower of Babel (Gen 11)
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “The Tower of Babel”
by Lowell Bliss, Director of Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership
This Bible reflection first appeared in the February 2024 newsletter of Climate Intercessors.
It was hard to be in Dubai for COP28 without thinking about the Tower of Babel story (Genesis 11). There was, of course, the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. You could go up to the observation floor, the 124th, and look out over a city that only a fossil fuel civilization could have built. There was also the confusion of the languages evident in the COP28 negotiations. I met a young activist from the Democratic Republic of Congo. English was not his mother tongue and he was lamenting the English language’s hegemony over the Paris Agreement discussions. He has a point: if the document that COP28 produced, the UAE Consensus—which is already a euphemism in itself—was built on parsing out nuances like “transition away,” or “phase out fossil fuels” vs. “phase down,” how is this not an extra burden we have placed on Francophone Africans and other developing nations?
A year ago, renowned Old Testament scholar John Walton published an essay entitled “Beware Our Tower of Babel.” Walton recognizes that the “inevitable lesson” he grew up with from the story “warns against the dangers of overweening pride, the hubris of ambition, and the folly of disobedience.” Yet when he made Genesis 11 the focus of his dissertation, he didn’t automatically find the Old Testament sanctioning a people for wanting to “make a name for themselves” or refusing to scatter. “If wanting a legacy (making a name) and desire for community (reluctance to scatter) are normal and unobjectionable, we are then left to start from scratch to figure out what this passage is all about.”
Where to begin is apparently with a deeper investigation into the architecture of the ancient Near East, where the Tower of Babel certainly did not resemble a brick version of the Burj Khalifa despite what our Sunday School illustrations may have depicted. The Tower of Babel was likely a ziggurat, and “reaching up into heaven” had a spiritual meaning more than a physical one. Additionally—and this is an important point—ziggurats were part of a temple complex and, according to Walton’s research, “were not built for people to ascend to heaven but rather for the god to descend from heaven. The idea was that the tower provided a convenience by which the god could make a grand entrance into the temple where he would be worshiped.”
The trouble with this set-up is that it creates a transactional arrangement with God. The god tucks himself away cozily in the temple while, through the rituals of the temple, the people care and feed their deity. In return, the god blesses the people with prosperity and protection. The surest way for a fledging people to make a great name for themselves is to make sure that they have a god in their back pocket, on call, on retainer. “They would make a god beholden to them,” Walton explains, “they would flourish, and their fame would spread—they would be people favored by a god.”
What’s this got to do with Christians who pray for the climate crisis? When I flew back home after COP28, my first stop was the Newark airport from which one could look across and see the famous skyline of New York City, with its skyscrapers that the Burj Khalifa had long supplanted as the tallest. I was also aware that we were only a few weeks away from the New Year, from 2024, which is an election year not only for the USA but also for over half the population of planet Earth. For all these elections, we could hope that they would be a referendum on the climate crisis, but in my birth country especially, the US election is also about the power and ascendancy of the idolatrous religion known as Christian Nationalism. The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty claims that “white Christian nationalism has worked as a unifying theme for a particular type of narrative about America” including:
America is a divinely appointed nation by God that is Christian.
America’s founders, rather than wanting to disestablish religion as a unifier for the nation, were in fact establishing a nation based on Christian principles, with white men as the leaders.
Others (Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and immigrants) would accept and cede to this narrative of America as a Christian nation, and accept their leadership.
America has a special place not only in world history, but in biblical Scripture, especially concerning the return of Christ.”
Let’s admit that Christian or Religious Nationalism is not strictly an American phenomenon, any more than building ziggurats was a construction practice limited to the ancient Near East. Prime Minister Modi in India just rebuilt the Ram temple in Ayodhya on the rubble of an Islamic mosque and to the glory of Hindu nationalism. In the list above, one could easily substitute in the British Empire or Canadian settler society with little disruption to the nationalist narrative.
“Elections have consequences,” we say, and so, in all of the elections scheduled on planet Earth in 2024, we could contemplate how certain outcomes might prove disastrous for progress on the climate crisis, but let’s think for a moment about the opposite scenario. What if all climate-denialist, climate-obstructionist candidates are defeated? That would not be the same as them being repudiated, and it doesn’t mean that the Church will emerge out from under Christian Nationalism into any new light of gospel love. In the US at least, it is more likely that the vast majority of white evangelicals will double-down on the narrative of Christian nationalism, further reinforced in their delusion that they are the embattled Righteous, that they are the “true” Americans. Make no mistake: I intend to pray fervently in 2024 for certain election outcomes around the world, but I also commit to staying focused on the bigger picture: liberating the world (and those who claim to follow Jesus as Lord) from the idols that helped spawn the climate crisis in the first place and help stymie our best efforts to love our neighbors in it.
And we should also commit to avoiding the same sin of ziggurat-building transactionalism which corrupt Christian nationalists. Every movement—including the creation care one—is tempted to argue “God is on our side!” to the point of enjoining the shouting match, the dueling sermons that cry out, “Nah-ah, God is on OUR side.” John Walton claims that Genesis 11 is a monumental turning point in human history, and not as an explanation of where languages came from. It was God’s final declaration before the Abrahamic Covenant of Genesis 12. It was God saying that he doesn’t need any human-made mechanism for descending to a planet that he himself created and governs. The images of him that might be tended (i.e., fed, bathed, clothed) at the center of a temple miss the whole point of the creation moment, where God created men and women “in his image” and placed them in the center of his garden where he could care for them, and they could care for each other. For however much the Abrahamic Covenant does promise to make Abraham’s name great, and to build up a community around him, it will do so without transaction, but as a function of God’s unconditional love. Walton writes that Genesis 11—and all of Genesis—
also reminds us that God has planned from the beginning to be with us. We need to have an “Immanuel theology”—“God with us” reflects his desire and our privilege. Immanuel is not just a Christmas story. God’s plans and purposes have always been to be in relationship with and to dwell among the people he created. This was initiated in the Garden of Eden and reflected in the purpose of the temple. It exploded into a new reality in the Incarnation and reached unimagined heights at Pentecost, when Babel was reversed and people spread throughout the world, not in the aftermath of a failed project but with the presence of God within them.
For the first time at a COP, COP28 in Dubai featured a “Faith Pavilion” but God was not exclusively there among all the other sites in the Blue Zone. COP29 is scheduled to take place in Baku, but we won’t be bringing God there as if he hasn’t been in Azerbaijan all along. A theology of incarnation will keep us in solidarity with the suffering. And we won’t need to march, or preach, this year that “God is on our side,” as if God’s vision for well-being doesn’t extend to all people that he has created in his image, including those we might rightly label as enemies to shalom. (See below.) Admittedly, 2023 was a rough year: the hottest on record, and beating the second hottest, 2016, by a record margin (an additional 0.15° C). It was also the year where the battle against the fossil fuel industry was fully enjoined so that there is no turning back. Here at the beginning of another year of Climate Intercessors, I confess to feeling a bit burned out. My main strategy to sustain myself is going to be to drop the bricks, and seek to suss out all the ways that I am still trying to “game God” or bind him transactionally. Instead, I intend to try to identify, through faith, those places where I can most feel God’s presence. The climate scene of 2024 is a turbulent and murky river, but there is a current of God’s love that we can float in as it courses its covenantal way through.