Perhaps J. R. R. Tolkein's
most salient contribution to theology is the doctrine he called the principle
of "sub-creation." By it, he
meant that we make according to the principle by which we are made. That is, like all things else, we were spoken
into existence by a multi-personal God acting in unity. We are the result of the powerful and
creative words of a plurality-in-unity.
That implies three important things:
(1) language, (2) community, and (3) mutual love are at the core of all
reality. From them, all created things
arise.
In Genesis 1: 1, we read that "in the beginning elohim," a plural word,
"created" (a singular verb) "the heavens and the earth."(KJV). That is, a plurality acting as a unity made
the world, and He made it with words. He
spoke it into existence. The same principle re-emerges later in the
same chapter when God says "Let us" (plural) make (singular) man in our
(plural) image So God created man in
his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he
them" (v. 27).
Note that the image of God is something said about no other
creatures but the human creatures, and that this image is distributed across
both sexes. While each human creature
possesses it, no person has it in its fullness.
Without others, male and female, it is incomplete in us. In order to make it more full, in order to
manifest it more effectively, we are to be communal, to work in concert with
one another, just like our Creator, and we are to work the way he works, by
making things with words, by speaking things into existence, things personal
and impersonal, and things that singular and plural simultaneously. Corporations fit that description quite
fully.
As God made the universe with words, corporations are made
with words, in this case, the precise legal language of incorporation, the
result of which is that many persons become one, that one being both personal
and impersonal, much like the universe in which it exists, a universe filled
with persons and non-persons. A corporation
is, as we all know, a person at law, a personal entity replete with rights and
obligations, composed of multiple persons, acting in concert, a marvelous thing
sprung from words. To revert to Tolkein,
we make according to the principle by which we are made.
When God made us, He placed upon our shoulders what
theologians call the "creation mandate:" We are to have "dominion over the fish
of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the
earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" (v.
26). "Dominion" here does not
mean reckless exploitation. It means the
prudent stewardship by which we are to "be fruitful, and multiply, and
fill the earth and subdue it" (v. 28).
It means transforming the entire earth from an uncultivated jungle into
productive and well-sustained garden.
Corporations can be, and ought to be, part of that mandate, part of that
stewardship of productive sustainability.
Corporations, being in our image, have the same obligations we have,
being in God's image. We are to make the
best of things, to cultivate the world in ever richer and more productive ways,
always with an eye toward our Divinely imposed obligations and our Divinely
bestowed opportunities. We are to
"fill the earth," leaving none of it less habitable or less
productive than is possible, not even the deserts in all their native
hostility, which nations like Israel have turned into a garden, a city, a workplace,
a school, and a resort. Much of that
subduing was the work of corporations, doing what they, and we, were created to
do.
One of the central doctrines of Christianity is the Lordship
of Christ. As Lord, He is not the Lord
of merely some things, but of all. If He
is Lord of all things, then nothing is properly secular. Therefore, anything pursued in a secular
fashion is at least partly, if not wholly, mispursued. Our task, then, is to bring his Lordship
wisely and prudently to bear upon all that we do, including filling the earth,
subduing it, and making it what it was meant to be. It means running a corporation as if Jesus
were its CEO, as if the One who turned water into wine were still at work,
turning deserts into oases.
