Christ and the Created Order: Perspectives from Theology, Philosophy, and Science 0310536081

Table of contents :
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction: Christ and the Created Order
I. Theological Perspectives
1. Jesus Christ, the Order of Creation
2. Creation Through Christ
3. Jesus Christ the Divine Animal?: The Human Distinctive Reconsidered
4. Christ, Creation, and the Powers: Elements In a Christian Doctrine of Creation
II. Biblical and Historical Perspectives
5. Christ and the Cosmos: Kingdom and Creation In Gospel Perspective
6. Gospel Narratives and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory
7. In Him and Through Him from the Foundation of the World: Adoption and Christocentric Anthropology
8. Paul, Christ, and Narrative Time
III. Philosophical Perspectives
9. For Better for Worse Solidarity
10. Our Chalcedonian Moment: Christological Imagination for Scientific Challenges
11. Convictional Knowledge, Science, and the Spirit of Christ
12. Explaining the Created Order: Scientific and Personal Images
IV. Scientific Perspectives
13. Christ and the Cosmos: Christian Perspectives On Astronomical Discoveries
14. Cognitive Science, Sensus Divinitatis, and Christ
15. Science As the Foolishness of God: Twenty-Eight Theses and Scholia On “Science and Religion”
16. The Scientist-Believer: Following Christ As We Uncover the Wonders of the Living World
Subject Index
Scripture Index
Author Index

Citation preview

In the large and fascinating global conversation between sciences and religions, the cutting edge is often about specific doctrines or particular sciences. This outstanding anthology of experts in philosophy, theology, and the sciences turns their minds and faith to Jesus and the doctrine of Christ. The result is an outstanding collection that anyone interested in either Christology or religion-­and-­science will learn from and enjoy. I found the book engrossing. ALAN G. PADGETT,

professor of systematic theology, Luther Seminary

This ground-­breaking collection of essays by eminent scholars from theology, philosophy, and science will transform discussions of science and faith by recognizing the central role of the person of Jesus Christ, since it is he who creates a union between the Creator and creation. ERIC PRIEST, FRS,

emeritus professor of mathematics, University of St. Andrews

The delicate, sometimes tense conversations that go on between science and Christianity can be fascinating and creative, and sometimes dangerous and destructive. By bringing Christ to the centre of the conversations around creation, this book opens up fresh, challenging, and profound new perspectives. Focusing on Jesus creates vital theological space for reimagining creation and our place within it. This volume has transformative value for those who take the time to dwell within its message. JOHN SWINTON,

chair in divinity and religious studies, University of Aberdeen

For a long time, theology, philosophy, and science searched for different truths, as if there were not one truth, a single harmony, a cosmic liturgy in the universe. This book eloquently demonstrates that Christ may be discerned and deciphered in many variations of intonation, articulation, and exploration of the created order. theological advisor to the Ecumenical Patriarch

JOHN CHRYSSAVGIS,

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 1

3/13/18 1:14 PM

If colliding hydrogen atoms produce rock-­liquefying energy, what happens when creator fuses with creature? “The Word became flesh and dwelt in our midst.” God says yes to creation and its restoration. This dazzling collection is light and heat. Discover why the Christ matters not just for religion or theology but for all things. associate professor of theology, Quincy University, and author of The Birth of the Trinity MATTHEW W. BATES,

The person of Jesus Christ is patently of first importance for Christian faith yet hardly features in much of the current science-­religion dialogue. This admirable and wide-­ranging collection of essays reverses that neglect by bringing Christology to the heart of the discussion. emeritus course director, Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, and fellow commoner, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge RODNEY HOLDER,

This volume is a welcome addition to the conversation on the Christian doctrine of creation. It presents a variety of perspectives that offer fresh insights, challenging ideas, and new terrain to explore. The book’s mutually enriching interdisciplinary character makes it all the more robust and enlivening. Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics, Palm Beach Atlantic University, and coauthor of Creation Out of Nothing

PAUL COPAN,

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 2

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ and the Created Order P E R S P E C T I V E S f r o m T H E O L O G Y, P H I L O S O P H Y, a n d S C I E N C E

A N DR E W B . TOR R A NC E a nd T HOM A S H . M C C A L L , E D I T O R S VOLUME

2

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 3

3/13/18 1:14 PM

ZONDERVAN Christ and the Created Order Copyright © 2018 by Andrew B. Torrance and Thomas H. McCall This title is also available as a Zondervan ebook. Requests for information should be addressed to: Zondervan, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Torrance, Andrew B., editor. | McCall, Thomas H., editor. Title: Christ and the created order : perspectives from theology, philosophy, and science / Andrew B. Torrance and Thomas H. McCall, editors. Description: Grand Rapids, MI : Zondervan, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2017050345 | ISBN 9780310536086 (softcover) Subjects: LCSH: Jesus Christ-­-­Primacy. | Jesus Christ-­-­Person and offices. | Bible and science. Classification: LCC BT590.S4 C47 2018 | DDC 232--­dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​ 2017050345 Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from New Revised Standard Version Bible. Copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked CEB are from the Common English Bible. Copyright © 2011 Common English Bible.

®

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version ). Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

®

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version. Public domain.

®

Scripture quotations marked NASB are from New American Standard Bible . Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)

®

®

Scripture quotations marked NIV are from The Holy Bible, New International Version , NIV . Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.Zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.

®

®

Scripture quotations marked RSV are from Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Copyright 1946, 1952, and 1971 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Any Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers in this book are offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by Zondervan, nor does Zondervan vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—­electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—­except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Cover design: David Carlson / Studio Gearbox Cover photo: By © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro /, CC BY-SA 4.0 Interior design: Kait Lamphere

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 /DHV/ 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 4

3/13/18 1:14 PM

To Marilyn McCord Adams, Pax et bonum

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 5

3/13/18 1:14 PM

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 6

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Contents Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Introduction—­Andrew B. Torrance and Thomas H. McCall. . . . . . . . . 15

I. Theological Perspectives 1. Jesus Christ, the Order of Creation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Murray Rae 2. Creation through Christ. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Norman Wirzba 3. Jesus Christ the Divine Animal? The Human Distinctive Reconsidered. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Brian Brock 4. Christ, Creation, and the Powers: Elements in a Christian Doctrine of Creation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Brian Curry

II. Biblical and Historical Perspectives 5. Christ and the Cosmos: Kingdom and Creation in Gospel Perspective. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 N. T. Wright

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 7

3/13/18 1:14 PM

6. Gospel Narratives and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory. . . . . . 111 Richard Bauckham 7. In Him and through Him from the Foundation of the World: Adoption and Christocentric Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Erin M. Heim 8. Paul, Christ, and Narrative Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Chris Tilling

III. Philosophical Perspectives 9. For Better for Worse Solidarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Marilyn McCord Adams† 10. Our Chalcedonian Moment: Christological Imagination for Scientific Challenges. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 James K. A. Smith 11. Convictional Knowledge, Science, and the Spirit of Christ. . . . . . . . 195 Paul K. Moser 12. Explaining the Created Order: Scientific and Personal Images . . . . . 211 J. B. Stump

IV. Scientific Perspectives 13. Christ and the Cosmos: Christian Perspectives on Astronomical Discoveries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Deborah Haarsma and Loren Haarsma 14. Cognitive Science, Sensus Divinitatis, and Christ. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 Tyler S. Greenway and Justin L. Barrett

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 8

3/13/18 1:14 PM

15. Science as the Foolishness of God: Twenty-­Eight Theses and Scholia on “Science and Religion”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Wilson C. K. Poon 16. The Scientist-­Believer: Following Christ as We Uncover the Wonders of the Living World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Ruth M. Bancewicz

Subject Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 Scripture Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 9

3/13/18 1:14 PM

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 10

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Acknowledgments

T

he editors would like to thank the John Templeton Foundation for its generous support of the Scientists in Congregations Scotland program, and the Templeton Religion Trust for its generous support of The Creation Project. It is out of these two programs that this volume has been developed. Also, we are indebted to the helpful feedback and encouragement from our editors at Zondervan Academic, Katya Covrett and Matthew Estel, which proved to be invaluable. Lastly, we are enormously grateful to Bethany Rutledge for the hard work she did on the indexing for this volume.

11

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 11

3/13/18 1:14 PM

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 12

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Contributors

MARILYN MCCORD ADAMS†—­was distinguished research professor of philosophy

at Rutgers University. RUTH M. BANCEWICZ—­is senior research associate at the Faraday Institute for

Science and Religion, Cambridge. JUSTIN L. BARRETT—­is professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary. RICHARD BAUCKHAM—­is professor emeritus of New Testament at the University of St. Andrews, and senior scholar at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. BRIAN BROCK— ­is reader in moral and practical theology at the University of Aberdeen BRIAN CURRY— ­is a ThD student in theology at Duke Divinity School. TYLER GREENWAY— ­is an assistant research professor at Fuller Theological Seminary and the research director at the Fuller Youth Institute. DEBOR AH HA ARSMA— ­is president of BioLogos. LOREN HA ARSMA— ­is associate professor of physics at Calvin College. ERIN M. HEIM—­is assistant professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary. THOMAS H. MCCALL—­is professor of biblical and systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and director of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding. PAUL K. MOSER—­is professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. WILSON C. K. POON— ­is professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. MURR AY R AE— ­is professor of theology at the University of Otago. JAMES K. A. SMITH— ­is professor of philosophy and Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview at Calvin College. J. B. STUMP— ­is senior editor at BioLogos. CHRIS TILLING— ­is graduate tutor and senior lecturer in New Testament studies at St. Mellitus. 13

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 13

3/13/18 1:14 PM

14  Christ and the Created Order ANDREW B. TORR ANCE—­is lecturer in theology at the University of St. Andrews. NORMAN WIRZBA—­is

professor of theology, ecology, and agrarian studies at Duke Divinity School and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. N. T. WRIGHT— ­is professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 14

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Introduction Christ and the Created Order A N DR E W B . T OR R A NC E A N D T HOM A S H . M C C A L L

I

n conversations about science and faith, Jesus Christ rarely comes up. In many respects, this is understandable. It is not immediately obvious how Jesus could be relevant to the scientific study of the natural order—­even for Christians. While it is widely assumed that the historical Jesus really existed, the natural order does not generally reveal him. And it is difficult to know how a historical figure, especially one who lived on Earth 2,000 years ago and did not concern himself with scientific discovery, could make a decisive difference to our scientific understanding of the natural world. It is understandable, then, that some scholars are tempted to conclude that Christology simply does not—­or perhaps even should not or cannot—­make a decisive difference to Christian thinking about the natural order. On the other hand, however, it could be argued that such an achristological approach would be deeply mistaken. If the Christian wants to recognise the natural order for what it actually is, a created order, then Christ has everything to do with the object of her study. For according to the most orthodox claims of the one ecumenical church, the person of Jesus Christ creates a union between the Creator and creation. In the words of Chalcedon, Jesus Christ is “of one substance (homousios) with the Father according to the Godhead, and of one substance (homousios) with us according to his humanity.” In the unity of Christ’s person, he is fully human and fully divine, fully creator and fully creation. This means not that the divine and the created are confused within the person of Christ, but that they are inseparable. Surely it is worth 15

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 15

3/13/18 1:14 PM

16  Andrew B. Torrance and Thomas H. McCall

exploring how this claim, as astounding as it is, might be relevant for our understanding of creation. But how is Christ important for a properly Christian understanding of the created natural order? Several options present themselves. For instance, one could argue that a recognition of Jesus’s miracles could make a scientist more open to the possibility that irregular and unpredictable occurrences sometimes take place within the natural order. However, were such openness to make an actual difference to the practice of natural science, this could become more of a problem than a benefit. A recognition that miracles sometimes occur could encourage a scientist to refer to the miraculous when trying to explain the emergence of certain complex phenomena in the natural world. For example, when faced with the challenge of understanding the complexity of the eye, a scientist could jump to the conclusion that its emergence is the consequence of a miraculous act of divine intervention rather than a part of the natural regularity of things. Were this to happen, such a move could function as a “science stopper”: that is, it could stop science from advancing by looking deeper and deeper into the possibility of natural explanations. This kind of perseverance, in the face of uncertainty, is fundamental to progress in the natural sciences. If the main way that Christology might make a practical difference to the sciences has the potential to be more problematic than beneficial, why bring Jesus into the conversation about science and faith? It is our view that this conversation should not just be about how theology can make a concrete difference to scientific practice. Additionally, it should not simply involve inventing a generic natural theology that can coexist comfortably alongside the natural sciences without getting in the way. When this happens, we often end up with a fairly deistic theology in which God creates the world and then largely leaves it to itself. Under these circumstances, the object of faith ends up being nothing more than a mystical “God of wonder.” Such a God is far removed from classical Christian renderings of the triune God, who is actively involved in and with creation—­creating, sustaining, teaching, and redeeming. For the conversation about science and faith to be Christian, reflection on creation cannot just be about remote beginnings or the distant acts of a divine originator. Rather, it needs to be attentive to the ways that the triune God actively relates to and involves himself in and with creation. In particular, it needs to pay attention to who God reveals himself to be in the person of Immanuel—­God with creation—­Jesus Christ. In Christ, we see the creator

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 16

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Introduction 17

most fully revealed in creation. But not only that. We are also given to know how God relates to the created order and what that order is created to be for creatures. The New Testament explicitly relates the act of creation to the person of Christ, who is also a participant within creation, and who is said, by his participation, to have secured creation’s ultimate redemption from the problems that presently afflict it. Christian theology proposes that Christ, the incarnate Word, the agent in whom the Spirit of God is supremely present among us, is the rationale and the telos of all things—­space-­time as we experience and explore it, nature and all its enigmas, and matter itself. Christology is thus utterly fundamental to a theology of creation, as it is unfolded in Scripture and the ecumenical councils of the church. For the apostle Paul, Jesus Christ is the one in, through, and for whom “all things [ta panta] in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers. . . . He himself is before all things [ta panta], and in him all things [ta panta] hold together” (Col 1:16–17). In Christ, God has not simply left the natural order to its own devices—­ those regular and well-­ordered devices that the natural scientist takes such care to study. And so the Christian scientist is called to recognise that any apparently self-­regulatory activity of the natural order is not as independent as some natural scientists might be inclined to presume when they blur the boundaries between physics and metaphysics. While knowing Christ may not make any practical difference to the natural scientist, it makes all the difference to her perception of the cosmic field in which she operates. As such, it is not difficult to see why Christology would not only be relevant but also central to her understanding of the natural order.

The Aim of This Volume As with the first volume, Knowing Creation, this volume brings together a wide range of theological, biblical, philosophical, and scientific perspectives on the Christian doctrine of creation. However, it advances the conversation by focusing on the specific relationship between creation and the person of Christ—­considering the ways the doctrine of the incarnation can shape our understanding of the natural order so as to invite a decisively Christian conversation between theology and other sciences. The chapters deliberately concern themselves, from their various perspectives,

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 17

3/13/18 1:14 PM

18  Andrew B. Torrance and Thomas H. McCall

with the significance of Christ for creation’s ends as well as its beginnings; the materiality of the incarnation and human embodiment; the relationship between Jesus Christ and matter in general; redemption in Christ and the transience and suffering of the natural world; and the natural order of scientific enquiry as “known” in and through Jesus Christ and the implications of this for scientific investigation. A pervasive concern is to trace what it might mean to know the world in the light of the confession of Jesus Christ as God incarnate and to probe the relationship of faith knowledge, scientific knowledge, and the construal of practical and philosophical questions concerning time, space, and matter. By so doing, it is our hope that readers become more cognizant of Christology when they consider the created order and the natural scientific study of it. Furthermore, we hope that Christian scientists who read this volume might find ways to keep Jesus Christ in mind when working in the laboratory or in the field more broadly. By so doing, it will help them see science not simply as a vocation that can be held alongside their Christian beliefs, but one that can be conceived as a Christian vocation. To be clear, as with the last volume, this does not mean that we are seeking to encourage Christian scientists to start referring to Jesus Christ in scientific journals. We are not expecting Christian scientists qua scientists to become more vocal witnesses to the gospel by trying to introduce Christology into science textbooks. Nor do we expect Christian science teachers (qua science teachers) to start confessing Christ in the classroom. Nonetheless, we do want to make it clear that the person of Jesus Christ is inextricably bound up with the created order scientists study. And not only that, but we also want to make it clear that the created order itself is bound up with Christ. Therefore, to bracket out Christ from considerations of the created order is to put on blinders. It is deliberately choosing to obscure our vision of what this universe is created to be. Accordingly, to think aright about the created order, study it, and live within it wisely, we must reckon with the fact that Jesus Christ is himself—­ remarkably—­the means and the end of creation. So long as Christian reflection on science and faith leaves Christ out of the conversation, it gives hostages to fortune; it invites a tendency towards a natural theology that, without recourse to special revelation, imagines a very different god from the triune God who is worshipped in the life of the church—­the “one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist” who discloses himself in the “one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist”

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 18

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Introduction 19

(1 Cor 8:6). This volume, however, is not an exposé of the shortcomings of natural theology. Rather, it aims to be positive. It seeks to understand more fully what it means to recognise the created order as the work of the Son who becomes incarnate within creation.

The Chapters This volume starts out with theology. Without God, there is neither a createdness to the natural order nor is there any Christology through which to think about the created order. It is in this way, therefore, that we must begin—­albeit in a way that is tied to Scripture and is quick to turn to biblical scholarship to ensure that it stays on track and does not become too speculative. In the first chapter, Murray Rae looks at what it means to view Jesus Christ as the order of creation. Going beyond discussions that merely focus on what Jesus achieves for us following his virgin birth, Rae reflects on the significance of Paul’s claim that Christ is the one in and through whom the universe was created. Such reflection, Rae argues, is critical for knowing the essential nature of creation—­an order that is held together and given purpose by the one to whom it belongs. In chapter two, Norman Wirzba focuses specifically on what it means to understand the material created order as existing through Christ. To do so, he explores what is distinctive about a christological doctrine of creation and providence. As well as exploring the theological implications of this unique view of creation, he also considers the practical and moral significance of knowing creation as an order that has its existence through Christ. To develop the issue, he draws on Tim Ingold’s understanding of the natural order as a meshwork of dynamic life. In the third chapter, Brian Brock argues that Christians ought to do more to recognise the distinctiveness of humanity when compared to the nonhuman creatures that inhabit this world. That is, he thinks there should be a hesitancy to dismiss human distinctiveness in reaction to a Darwinian account of the natural order. He argues that today, as much as ever, human beings are called to recognise the unique lives for which they were created—­lives defined by the distinctive relationship with God that finds its fulfilment in the God-­human person of Jesus Christ. In chapter four, Brian Curry examines the place of the biblical notion of the “powers” in a Christian view of creation. In conversation with John

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 19

3/13/18 1:14 PM

20  Andrew B. Torrance and Thomas H. McCall

Howard Yoder, Curry shows that the New Testament presents the powers as having a much more prominent place in creation than is typically recognised, at least in modern Western Christianity. He then considers how this theme can help us come to terms with the presence of evil in the world and reflects on a connection he sees between modern science and the powers. While it may be the case that there is no Christology without theology, it is also the case that there would be no knowledge of Christology, and its close connection with creation, were it not for the biblical witness. As such, the first section of this volume is entirely dependent upon the reception of Scripture. So, it is important to turn straightaway to hear from biblical scholars. In the opening chapter of the second section, N. T. Wright shows how closely together the New Testament holds the themes of Christ and creation. Taking this point seriously, he argues, is critical for challenging some of the deistic tendencies that have emerged in reaction to the modern scientific understanding of evolution. For Wright, Christians must continue to turn to the revelation of Jesus Christ to understand creation, rather than resorting to natural theologies to make sense of the world and its relationship to God. In chapter six, Richard Bauckham updates some of the arguments he made in his renowned book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses—­where he argues that the Gospel narratives were much more closely informed by the testimony of eyewitnesses than biblical scholars tend to recognize. What makes this chapter a particularly relevant contribution to this volume is that he develops his argument by engaging with more recent advances in cognitive psychology, thereby providing a concrete example of a way in which attentiveness to contemporary science can serve biblical scholarship. In chapter seven, Erin Heim investigates what the Pauline adoption metaphors contribute to christological anthropology. As she demonstrates through a close reading of the texts, the adoption metaphors help us recognise (1) that human beings are adopted in Christ, and (2) it is this adoption for which human beings have been created. By attending to Paul’s theology of adoption, she also concludes that we are better able to appreciate the ways in which God upholds and secures the individual particularity as we are given to conform to the image of the Son. In chapter eight, Chris Tilling explores the unusual understanding of time that we find in the theology of the apostle Paul. By engaging closely with Pauline texts, Tilling shows that Paul’s Christology doesn’t fit neatly

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 20

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Introduction 21

within a narrative account of creation. Instead, Jesus Christ has an utterly unique relationship to time that should challenge us to rethink the nature and significance of his temporal locatedness within the history of creation. In the third section, we turn to the world of philosophy, to sharpen our understanding of the relationship between Christ and the created order. Opening this section is a chapter from Marilyn McCord Adams, who committed herself to finishing this piece in the early days of her terminal illness—­such was her commitment to a task that she described as “preaching the gospel.” In this chapter, Adams addresses how the doctrine of the incarnation should make a difference to our understanding of creation. For her, all creation is made for the sake of Christ. Reflecting on this point further, she considers the importance of this point for understanding the materiality of creation. That God assumes a material human nature in Christ is a critical part of the specific relationship of love for which God creates the world. In chapter ten, James K. A. Smith makes the perhaps surprising claim that one of the reasons that tensions arise between a Christian doctrine of creation and a contemporary (so-­called) “scientific” worldview is precisely because it is in Christ that “all things hold together” (Col 1:17). According to a Chalcedonian Christology, the person of Jesus Christ is paradoxical: he is one person with two wholly different natures—­he is fully human/created and fully divine/uncreated. As Smith argues, this paradox is reflected in the struggle to bring together a theological imagination (that prioritises God) with a scientific imagination (that prioritises the natural or created order). Chapter eleven sees Paul Moser explore some characteristics of our creaturely knowledge of a morally perfect God. In particular, he looks at some of the ways that particular theological convictions of Christian knowledge make our knowledge of God very different from the natural scientific knowledge we have of the created order. In chapter twelve, J. B. Stump argues that a Christocentric understanding of creation mandates us to bring together theological explanations (that can be attentive to Christ’s divine nature) with scientific explanations (which could be attentive to his created human nature). By so doing, he argues that each perspective can nuance our understanding of the created order, helping us develop a more accurate picture of the way things are. Taking such an approach, he proposes a way to hold to the theory of evolution with a continuing attentiveness to the God who purposefully seeks to create personal beings.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 21

3/13/18 1:14 PM

22  Andrew B. Torrance and Thomas H. McCall

In the fourth section, we hear from six scientists about how they understand the relationship between Christ and the created order. In the first chapter of this section, Deborah and Loren Haarsma raise the point that an astronomical understanding of the universe can risk intimidating persons into feeling a deep sense of insignificance. However, as they seek to show, recognising Christ as creator can help give us a very different perspective on the universe. For them, the magnificence of the universe can be seen very differently when we are alert to the one who creates and upholds it. And as they also consider, Christ’s relationship to creation is not only one of transcendence but also one of nearness as he becomes incarnate to live alongside creatures within the universe. In chapter fourteen, Justin Barrett and Tyler Greenway reflect on some of the ways that contemporary research in the field of cognitive science can give support to Calvin’s view that God creates humans with a sensus divinitatis—­a sense of the divine. At the same time, they consider how this sense is both limited and corrupted by sin. For them, not only is special revelation required to guide this sense towards its proper object—­the God revealed in Jesus Christ—­but it also needs to be restored by the redemptive activity of Christ. Drawing on this discussion, they conclude by considering constructive ways forward for the conversation between theology and cognitive science. In chapter fifteen, Wilson C. K. Poon advances twenty-­eight theses for the church’s conversation about science and religion—­reminiscent of Martin Luther’s twenty-­eight theses in the Heidelberg disputation of 1518. Although the theses are broad in scope, they are particularly attentive to the need for this conversation to be grounded in an awareness of the distinctive way in which God relates to creation in and through the person of Christ, who was crucified on the cross. This leads Poon to advocate a “cruciform theology of science,” according to which a person can be continually faithful in the scientific task while being attentive to the self-­limiting ways in which God involves himself in the created order. In chapter sixteen, Ruth Bancewicz considers what it might mean for scientists, as scientists, to go about their task as followers of Christ. For her, the scientific study of the created order can serve to inspire a sense of wonder and worship. And for the Christian, these things should be understood christologically. Accordingly, Bancewicz explores some of the concrete ways Christian scientists can connect their faith in Christ to the scientific task.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 22

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter ONE

Jesus Christ, the Order of Creation M U R R AY R A E

T

he Christian faith is not a set of personal values or spiritual preferences; it is a claim about the way reality is constituted, about all things having been created by God and ordered to God’s good purposes. It is a claim, furthermore, that God’s purposes for the world are established and revealed in Jesus Christ. In what follows, I explore the content and implications of that claim. In a letter to the fledgling church in Colossae, the apostle Paul makes an astonishing claim. Jesus Christ, Paul says, “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—­a ll things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:15–17).1 We are accustomed to Paul speaking of Christ as the one who died for us, who reconciles us to God, who calls us forth to a new form of life, and who gives the Spirit in order to enable our full participation in that life. Taken by themselves, however, and ignoring much else that Paul has to say, these claims could be and often are pieced together to produce a picture of Christ as some kind of spiritual guru, a life coach, one to whom we may turn for counsel and solace. Paul will have none of that. In Christ, we have to do with the one in and through whom the entire universe came to be. We are encountered by the one who is in person the very logic of creation, the one who reveals the end and purpose to which all things are directed. The Christian gospel does 1. At this point, it is immaterial whether these words are Paul’s own or whether, as is commonly assumed, he is citing part of an ancient hymn.

23

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 23

3/13/18 1:14 PM

24  Murray Rae

make claims that are deeply personal and that call each of us to participate through the Spirit in the new life established and brought to fulfilment in Christ, but the gospel has its basis in the claim we see here in Colossians that Christ is the one in, and through, and for whom all things were created. The Christian gospel is cosmic in scope; it testifies, above all, to the essential nature of everything that exists. Fundamental to the story variously told throughout Scripture is the claim that all things together are a cosmos rather than a chaos (e.g., Isa 45:18). They are the fruit of their Creator’s intention, they hold together, and they are directed towards some goal. Further claims follow upon this basic confession of faith. The world is not self-­sufficient. It does not sustain itself. Nor is it self-­generating. It has not caused itself to be, and it does not determine its own end. The world is a creation. It is the creation, moreover, of one who has made himself known. That is the reality to which Paul testifies in Colossians 1:15–17. He repeats that testimony in 1 Corinthians 8:6, and we hear it echoed in the gospel of John 1:1–5, and again in Hebrews 1:2–3 and 10–12. Beyond these explicit affirmations, however, the claim that all things owe their existence to God and are ordered to his good purpose undergirds the whole of Scripture, even and perhaps especially in those texts that lament the evil, disorder, and suffering that challenge belief in the goodness of creation. The desperate cry to God, often heard through the course of Israel’s history and preserved for us in Scripture, is an expression of the faith that despite all appearances, despite the suffering and the disruptions that often afflict us, we live in a creation ordered and sustained by God and destined to be perfected according to God’s good purpose. The cry of desperation, then, is a cry that God will restore order and make haste in bringing creation to its promised goal. The most well-­k nown affirmation that the world is a creation ordered to God’s good purposes, in Genesis 1:1–2:4, is commonly thought to have emerged from the midst of intense suffering and the severe disruption of Israel’s existence. Walter Brueggemann explains that the account of the world’s creation in Genesis is usually “assigned to the Priestly tradition which means that it is addressed to a community of exiles.”2 The scattered people looked back in anguish to a homeland laid waste by marauding armies and to a temple 2. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation Commentary (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982), 22.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 24

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ, the Order of Creation   25

left in ruins. The political and humanitarian crisis prompted a crisis of faith as well. Where now is the God who was supposed to have ordered all things for good? The story of creation with which the Bible begins emerged in the midst of this crisis. It affirms again, contrary evidence notwithstanding, that the world is ordered by God and remains a place suitable for the outworking of his purpose. Night follows day even in times of hardship; the dry land remains separated from the waters and is hospitable still to human life; the sun still shines and the rain falls to nourish the earth, while the earth in turn continues to bring forth plants for food. Genesis 1:1–2:4 declares that God establishes and upholds the order of the universe; he keeps it in being. He declares the goodness of all that he has made, and that declaration is the basis upon which, even in hardship, Israel may trust and hope.

Discerning the Order of Creation Although the confession that Christ is the one through whom all things came to be and in whom all things are ordered to God’s good purposes is a matter of faith, the ordered structure of reality is accessible to human enquiry, at least in part. Scientific enquiry is one, though not the only, human endeavour to discern the way things are ordered. The natural sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology, investigate the ways in which matter is ordered, while the human sciences, such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology, are concerned with the ordering of human behaviour and experience, including that of individual human beings but extending especially to their social, political, and cultural interactions with one another and with the world at large. Science is concerned with regularities that render the world intelligible, enable prediction and planning, and constitute the conditions under which human projects may be undertaken with a reasonable hope of success. That night follows day, that the sun gives light and heat, that there are habitats hospitable to a vast range of living things, that the earth produces all manner of vegetation including fruits suitable for the sustenance of life, that there are galaxies of planets and stars arranged in ways that ensure a relatively stable environment for earth’s living things, that human life is essentially (and not volitionally) a communal venture are all features of the cosmic order that can be relied upon and that are observed in common by ancient biblical authors and by modern science. So it is not true to say that

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 25

3/13/18 1:14 PM

26  Murray Rae

Genesis 1, for instance,3 has nothing much in common with modern science. Both are captivated by the order of things, and both venture an explanation. Genesis offers assurance that because God is the author and sustainer of the world’s order, that order can be relied upon. Science, for its part, investigates the material means by which that order has developed and through which it is sustained, and so offers, through observation of the natural world, its own complementary assurance that the order of things can be relied upon. Discernment of the way things are ordered necessarily takes place at multiple levels. No single mode of enquiry and explanation can produce a comprehensive account even of the simplest phenomena, much less of complex entities like human beings and their social arrangements. The point is easily demonstrated.4 Consider, for example, Friedrich Chopin’s “Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Opus 23.” It would be possible, no doubt, to produce a complete account of the succession of sounds and their associated frequencies that together constitute Chopin’s ballade. Within the same mode of enquiry, namely the science of acoustics, an explanation could be offered of the way harmonies are produced through the simultaneous sounding of different frequencies. Within its own level of explanation, the science of acoustics could in theory deliver an exhaustive account of the sounds that combine to produce Chopin’s ballade, of the way those sounds are produced through the vibration of strings on a piano, and even of the unique reverberant environment produced when the ballade is played on a particular piano in a particular venue under particular ambient conditions. Yet no one with even a modicum of musical sensitivity is likely to be convinced that this scientific description of the material alterations involved in producing a performance of Chopin’s ballade constitutes an exhaustive description of the reality in question. No explanation has yet been given as to why Chopin ordered the sounds as he did. Nothing has been said so far to distinguish the succession of sounds as a piece of music having structure and coherence and an intelligible progression through its various 3. Genesis 1 is but one instance of the recurring biblical fascination with the order and intelligibility of things. Although the deep structures of the material world often eluded their grasp (and continue to elude ours), that there is an order deeply embedded in the nature of things was repeatedly apparent to the biblical authors and repeatedly gave rise to wonder. The book of Job is a masterfully crafted case in point, confessing through the saga of Job’s suffering that profound disruptions to human life need not undermine the confession that the world is well-ordered by God. For a fascinating study of the scientific sensibilities evident throughout the book of Job, see Tom McLeish, Faith and Wisdom in Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 4. I concede, however, that the demonstration does not constitute a proof. The determined reductionist will continue to seek a material explanation for the realities which I am about to describe.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 26

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ, the Order of Creation   27

themes and tonal modulations. Nothing has been said of the ballade’s power to give voice to our sorrows and yet inspire hope. Nothing has been said of the distress or of the beauty expressed through the music, nothing of Chopin’s exile first in Vienna and then in Paris, or of his anguished reflection upon the insurrection in Poland that had failed to free his beloved homeland from oppressive Russian rule. Nothing has been said of his desperate prayer, “Oh God, do you exist? You do, and yet You do not take vengeance. Have you not had enough of these Muscovite crimes . . . !”5 Yet all these things and more, traversing multiple levels of explanation, help us to understand the reality of the ballade and to appreciate its exquisite beauty and order. The claims briefly made here about the reality of Chopin’s music presume that the particular arrangement of sounds is intended. The way the sounds are ordered coheres in some fashion with the intentions of the composer. Those intentions are expressed through particular arrangements of matter, musical notes written on a page, and keys pressed on a keyboard producing vibrations in wires of varying length and thickness stretched taut over a piano’s frame and giving rise in turn to pulses of air that strike our ears and are interpreted by our brains as sound. All these alterations in the physical environment are products of Chopin’s intention, but no amount of study of these material realities alone will sufficiently reveal what that intention was. An order may be discerned, harmonies may be recognised, and a satisfying coherence may emerge, but if they are divorced from the life of the composer himself, the order, the harmonies, and the melodic coherence of sounds will not reveal the full scope of Chopin’s intent, marvel at them though we may. Indeed, we may marvel. There is no reason to doubt, and experience may easily confirm, that a person who listens to the ballade without knowing who composed it can be profoundly moved. To the degree that they understand the workings of music and appreciate the technical prowess required of the performer, such a listener’s understanding of the ballade is likely to be enhanced, but there are aspects of the reality yet to be discovered by learning about the composer and the circumstances under which the ballade was composed. Precisely because the discovery of the composer’s identity and intention promises further insight into the reality at hand, the identity of the composer will likely be an urgent question for anyone who discerns how wonderful the music is. 5. The prayer appears in Chopin’s Journal, §2, para. 3, now held in the National Library of Poland. This translation is cited by A. Hedley, Chopin (London: Dent, 1974), 42.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 27

3/13/18 1:14 PM

28  Murray Rae

Without knowledge of the one in and through whom the music came to be, an important level of explanation remains inaccessible. We readily recognise of course that many true things can be said about Chopin’s ballade at the levels of explanation appropriate to the natural sciences. The expert in acoustics offers genuine insight into what is going on when the ballade is performed in a concert hall. The physiologist could no doubt tell us many marvellous things about the complex operations of the pianist’s hands as they produce the sounds requested by Chopin’s score. The musicologist could explain the ways the several melodic themes are woven together. And so on. Truth is communicated by these means, but none of them sufficiently captures the reality before us. Those tempted in this instance to wield Occam’s razor will leave us bereft. They will leave us knowing less than there is to be known. My contention that Chopin’s love of his homeland, his anguish at its subjection to foreign powers, and his desperate enquiry about God’s apparent absence in the face of political oppression are all assumptions that fail Occam’s test. Their utility cannot be proven. One can only invite people to listen anew to the ballade with Chopin’s personal, political, and theological concerns in mind, point out to them the urgent appeal for attention in the opening bars, the sorrowful lament of the first narrative subject in D minor introduced at bar eight, and the heartbeat sounded in the bass register that underscores the lament and testifies to the determined endurance of life even in the midst of oppression. One can point out the agitation that emerges at bar thirty-­seven following the lament—­expressive, perhaps, of Chopin’s desperate prayer—­and then the torrents of anguish unleashed through the arpeggios at bar forty-­ nine. The frenzy subsides through bars sixty-­seven to sixty-­nine before a new lyrical theme in E flat major introduced at bar seventy gives voice once more to Chopin’s longing and his love for his homeland. Ultimately, however, this level of explanation into a piece of music once described as “the odyssey of Chopin’s soul”6 requires an emotional and indeed a theological attentiveness.7 6. Chopin’s “Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Opus 23” was described thus by James Huneker in his book, Chopin (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 200. 7. I appreciate of course that other interpretations of Chopin’s ballade are possible. I concur, furthermore, with Samson’s observation that “the music survives because it is larger than all its possible interpretations.” See J. Sampson, Chopin: The Four Ballades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 44. Cited in John Rink, “Chopin’s Ballades and the Dialectic: Analysis in Historical Perspective,” Music Analysis 13, no. 1 (March 1994): 99–115, reference on 112. The point remains, however, that whatever we find so deeply moving in the music requires explanation at a level other than that adopted by the natural sciences, for example.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 28

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ, the Order of Creation   29

Such insight cannot be delivered through rational enquiry alone nor be reduced to a scientific equation. We return now to the text with which we began. “[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created . . . and in him all things hold together.” The text, in conformity with much else that is said in Scripture, explains creation at an explicitly theological level. If it is true, it is a claim of momentous importance, for it declares Christ to be the one in whom all things originate, through whom all things hold together, and for whom all things are created. Put otherwise, we might say that Christ is the inner logic of creation, the one in whom its origin, its order, and its telos are revealed. This is not the only level that explanations of the created order may be given. Creation is established in and through Christ and ordered according to God’s purposes for it, and this is the fundamental reason for there being anything at all to explain. It is the reason why there is something rather than nothing. All other levels of explanation, all other forms of witness to what has been, what is, and what may yet be, have something to speak of only because God in Christ, through the power of his Spirit, has established and given life to a reality other than himself. This divinely ordered reality encompassing all that is, we variously call the creation, the cosmos, the universe. It is the totality of all things in heaven and on earth called into being and held together by God. We have acknowledged that multiple levels of explanation are required to account for any given reality. The Chopin ballade served as an example. So too with the created order in all its aspects. The sciences contribute their expertise to examine and explain how the world is ordered; poets and visual artists and musicians help us see in a different light the complex interdependence of things; economists, political theorists, and social scientists give insight into the workings of human culture and society, while historians provide a further means of contemplating the realms of human action and discerning the consequences of what we do. All these disciplines and more contribute to our understanding of the world. They go about their business under the assumption, repeatedly confirmed by experience, that the world does have an order and a coherence that is intelligible at least in part, even if its ultimate basis in Christ is not seen or acknowledged by all enquirers.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 29

3/13/18 1:14 PM

30  Murray Rae

Theological Explanation The theological claim that Christ is the one in and through whom all things came to be and in whom all things hold together entails that nothing can be understood in its entirety until we consider its role in the working out of God’s purpose. Ian Payne has put the matter well: Because of its relation to Christ, the created world has limited but genuine intelligibility, coherence, and meaning. True knowledge of any thing, whether quasar or quark, person or particle, requires a theological orientation—­a provisional grasp of its relationship to God in Christ and the history of his revealing and reconciling work. Without a grasp of this relation, many true things can be said of it, but they will inevitably be to some extent peripheral and ultimately misleading. The ultimate meaning of the creaturely lights is the service of God.8

Drawing upon Karl Barth, Payne explains further that “seeing all things relative to the Word of God means seeing them in the light of the fulfillment [of] their created purpose. In the service of and in correspondence to the Word of God, they are given their fullest possible significance and freedom.”9 The theological endeavour to see all things in the light of their created purpose enables fruitful interaction between all fields of human enquiry and confirms the legitimacy of the multiple levels of explanation to which we have referred. The theological question cannot but be informed and enriched by all efforts, scientific and otherwise, to discern the nature of things and their relationships with one another. The only and necessary qualification of that claim is that all human enquiry, including theological enquiry, is compromised by human finitude and sin. All of our knowing is partial and provisional. It is constrained by the fact that, as finite human beings, we do not view the world sub specie aeternitatis. We see with limited competence—­no one possesses the expertise necessary for an exhaustive understanding of anything—­and we see from viewpoints that leave much lying beyond our field of vision. 8. Ian W. Payne, Wouldn’t You Love to Know: Trinitarian Epistemology and Pedagogy (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014), 153. 9. Payne, Wouldn’t You Love to Know, 153. Payne develops these insights through reflection upon Barth’s exposition of Christ as “the light of life” in §69.2 of Church Dogmatics, IV/3.1, ed. T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 30

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ, the Order of Creation   31

Our knowing is constrained as well by the sinful propensities of prejudice, self-­interest, impatience with contrary opinions, and so on. Our shared quest to understand the nature of things is always compromised by such factors; confession, humility, and critical awareness are therefore essential at whatever level of explanation we are working. These factors acknowledged, however, let us return to consider what is involved for our understanding of the created order in the Christian confession that Christ is the one in and through whom all things came to be and in whom all things hold together. What does it mean to say that Christ is the one in whom the true nature of things is revealed? To begin with, it means that all created things in heaven and on earth are the outcome of God’s love. Their reason for being is revealed in the sending of the Son to gather them into reconciled relationship with the Father and to fill them with his Spirit. This is an act of love, as is straight-­forwardly affirmed in the Johannine declaration: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). Elsewhere we learn that not only human beings but the whole creation is gathered up in this act of reconciliation and renewal (see, e.g., Isa 11:6, 65:25; Ezek 36:8–12; Joel 2:21–29; Rom 8:21; Col 1:20). The end or telos of all things is to take their place in the working out of God’s purpose and, precisely thereby, to realize their true identity and freedom as creatures of God.10 If, as we have affirmed here, the order and intelligibility of things is a product of God’s creative intent, then discernment of the full extent of that order requires some understanding of God’s purpose. Intimations of that purpose are given already in the Old Testament: “Be fruitful and multiply” was a command issued not just to human beings (Gen 1:28) but also to others of God’s creatures (Gen 1:22). Likewise, the blessing of God is not reserved for human beings alone (Gen 1:22). Nor is it reserved for God’s chosen people, Israel. The promise given to Abram and Sara is that “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:3). The blessing of God’s creatures therefore appears to be a central part of God’s purpose in creation. We may trace the unfolding of that promise through many strands of Old Testament witness, but, according to the witness of the New Testament, that promise of God 10. I am employing a particular definition of freedom, namely, the capacity to be truly oneself. The birds of the air and the lilies of the field are offered by Jesus as archetypes of such freedom. See Matt 6:25–39.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 31

3/13/18 1:14 PM

32  Murray Rae

receives its most definitive expression in Jesus Christ. In and through Christ, the promise of divine blessing takes shape in the forgiveness of sins, in the healing of the sick, in the good news preached to the poor, in the comforting of those who mourn, in the restoration of sight to the blind. It takes shape too in the sharing of earth’s resources so that all have bread to eat and are satisfied (Matt 14:20; Mark 6:42; Luke 9:17; John 6:11–12). It takes shape in the abundance of wine given by Jesus at a wedding feast in Cana, thus reversing the devastation brought upon creation as it is subjected to drought and disease, so causing the vines to wither and the wine to dry up (Isa 24:7). In and around Jesus, God’s good ordering of things begins to be restored. The signs of the kingdom, as they are called, begin to appear, and the true telos of creation is revealed. It is revealed, that is, to those who have eyes to see. The claim that Christ is the one through whom all things came to be and in whom the true nature and telos of creation are revealed is rejected by many. It is rejected by some who, for reasons of their own, simply refuse to entertain the possibility that theological explanation might have something to contribute to our understanding of reality. It is rejected by others whose conception of the end to which human life is directed does not align with Christ’s work of forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation. Some do not see in Christ’s healing of the sick, in his compassion for the despised, in the forgiveness he extends to sinners, or in his feeding of the hungry, any hint of the way creation itself is ordered. Seeing in these things the signs of God’s kingdom, the signs of God’s intended order, belongs to what Søren Kierkegaard called the autopsy of faith.11 Just as scientists are sometimes persuaded of the truth of a theory, not on account of some mathematical proof having been provided, but rather on account of its beauty,12 so the confession that in Christ all things are ordered to God’s good purpose cannot be proven through the kinds of calculation appropriate at other levels of explanation. That God is responsible for the ordering of creation is instead revealed to us. It impresses itself upon us under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Beauty may well play a role here too, but even more so, the impression made upon those who recognise God at work in 11. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 70, 102. 12. Steven Weinberg, for instance, remarks on the intrinsic beauty “that we are finding in the rules that govern matter that mirrors something that is built into the logical structure of the universe at a very deep level.” Cited in Andrew N. Hunt, “Ciphers of Transcendence: Cognitive Aesthetics in Science,” The Heythrop Journal 49 (2008): 603–19, 612–13.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 32

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ, the Order of Creation   33

Christ reconciling all things to himself (2 Cor 5:19) is the impression of divine love. Above all, Christ reveals that all things in heaven and earth are created and sustained, redeemed and perfected through the workings of divine love. That they are to be redeemed and perfected is an important feature of the Christian confession, necessary because the world as we now know it has been subjected to disorder. Its beauty has been tarnished; its ample provision for the well-­being of God’s creatures is being squandered; the call to participate in God’s ordering of all things by love is spurned. Paul, in Romans 8:22, makes clear that the whole creation is disrupted and longs still for the promised redemption through which all things are ordered toward their true end in reconciled relation with God and with one another. Here we come upon a tension between what has already been accomplished once and for all in Christ and what is yet to come. In Romans, Paul speaks of our waiting still for the redemption of our bodies, while in Colossians he declares that through Christ “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Col 1:20). Here, it seems, the decisive event of reconciliation has already taken place. With respect to the Christian understanding of all things being ordered to their true end in Christ, it is necessary to say that this reality is both “already” and “not yet.” What does this mean? It means that the disruption of creation, evident most especially in creaturely suffering, some of which can be attributed to human sin, has been addressed and dealt with once and for all through the death and resurrection of Christ. All that contends against God’s good ordering and all that is oriented toward death rather than toward God’s promise of abundant life has been deprived, through resurrection, of its power to determine the outcome of God’s project. That work of reconciliation is complete. Yet God still gives time and space for his creatures to be gathered into that reality. Tragically, we resist. We struggle to impose an order of our own making upon the world, and we resist the workings of the Spirit through whom alone we may enter fully into the life of Christ. But the myriad ways we defy God’s good ordering have no future. They have been defeated and will not endure. That is the saving work of Christ, and that is the Christian hope. In the meantime, therefore, the confession that Christ is the one through whom all things came to be and in whom all things hold together has very clear ethical implications. If our lives ought to be aligned with the true order of things as revealed in Christ, then in the light of Christ we are bound to

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 33

3/13/18 1:14 PM

34  Murray Rae

consider the ends to which all human endeavours are directed. Are they directed toward the participation of all people and all things in the abundance of life that we see in Christ? Are they characterised by compassion for the poor and the outcast and the stranger? Is our industry used for healing? Is our science directed toward the flourishing of creation, and our economics toward the feeding of those who hunger and thirst? Does our art, music, and literature express the way things really are in our world, helping us to see clearly the world’s disfigurement but also its beauty and its hope? The confession of Christ as the very logic of creation is not a private affirmation about what particular individuals hold to be of value. It is a claim, cosmic in scope, about the way reality itself is constituted. The one who so orders all things for our good commands, as love alone can command, the joyful response of faithfulness and love. I have sought in this chapter to speak of the complex interrelation of all created things and of all things being ordered to God’s good purposes. I have spoken also of the claim that the divine ordering of the universe is revealed most especially in Jesus Christ. This claim affords an account of the mutually enriching and complementary service that all forms of human enquiry into the nature of things, undertaken with appropriate humility and at various levels of explanation, may offer to our understanding of reality itself.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 34

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter T WO

Creation through Christ NOR M A N W I R Z BA

V

ery little in my theological training prepared me to think that Jesus Christ is decisive for understanding the meaning or structure of the material world. To be sure, I occasionally encountered theologians (especially those influenced by patristic sources) who affirmed that the One who redeems is also the One who creates. But the implications of such a statement were not sufficiently or rigorously developed. Whether owing to the well-­established dualisms between history and cosmos, culture and nature, and spirit and matter, or to the desire to affirm God’s sovereign transcendence over the material world, theologians have tended to restrict Christ’s significance to the work of human flourishing. As Karl Rahner succinctly put it, the incarnation of God in Christ is “the unique, supreme, case of the total actualization of human reality.”1 What “human reality” means and includes may have differed among various theological schools, with some emphasizing personal/existentialist and others social/political/liberationist dimensions of human life. Nonetheless, it was clear to me that the work of Jesus belonged primarily to the domains of history, culture, and spirit.2 Similarly, as I began to read widely among natural scientists, the name of Jesus Christ almost never appeared. Perhaps reflecting the long shadow of a deist position, or more likely a commitment to methodological atheism—­God, in whatever form, has no place in rigorous scientific pursuit—­the description and explanation of the material world has no need of Christ. As the highly 1. Karl Rahner, “On the Theology of the Incarnation,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 4, More Recent Writings (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), 110, emphasis original. 2. The perception of many environmentalists, it should also be noted, is that Christianity is the most anthropocentric of the world’s religions.

35

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 35

3/13/18 1:14 PM

36  Norman Wirzba

regarded nineteenth-­century scientist Pierre-­Simon Laplace is famously reported to have said, when asked by Napoleon why God (not to mention Jesus!) does not appear anywhere in his comprehensive scientific account of the world, “I had no need of that hypothesis.” Nature has laws and processes that can be understood on their own. If God or Jesus appears at all, it is in some other (perhaps spiritual, perhaps personal) realm. These two ways of thinking, the one theological and the other scientific, are inadequate if not deeply distorting because Scripture proclaims that in Jesus “all things in heaven and on earth were created” and that “all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:16–17). This early Christian hymn, understood by some biblical scholars to be a summary statement by the early church of Christ’s cosmic meaning and significance, hardly stands alone. John’s Gospel begins with the declaration that without Jesus as the eternal Logos made incarnate “not one thing came into being” because all things “came into being through him” (John 1:3). And in the letter to the Hebrews, we are told that God appointed Jesus as the heir of all things and the one “through whom he [God] also created the worlds” (Heb 1:2). Being the “exact imprint” of God, Jesus is also claimed to “sustain all things by his powerful word” (Heb 1:3).3 Passages like these make it clear that Christ’s significance and work cannot be confined to the human realm, however broadly it is conceived. Nor can Christians claim that the meaning and purpose of the material world are adequately presented if Christ is not a vital part of the presentation. If Christ is the One through whom all things come to be, then Christ touches and is somehow at work in everyone and everything. Besides being a central feature of Scripture, the cosmic scope of Christ’s work was also a core teaching of the church’s earliest and most foundational theologians. As Paul Blowers has reminded us in his magisterial study Drama of the Divine Economy, 3. Sean McDonough argues that although references in the New Testament to creation through Christ are infrequent: “The doctrine had an importance that far outweighs its relatively scant appearances. . . . The very fact that it emerges without explanation indicates that it was almost taken for granted as an integral part of the gospel proclamation. . . . Placing Christ in the role of creator was one of the most dramatic ways early Christians could include Jesus within the divine identity and distinguish him from created beings” (Christ as Creator: Origins of a New Testament Teaching [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 1). For further exegetical treatment on the identity of Christ as creator, see Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 36

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Creation through Christ  37

Well beyond the apostolic era, patristic exegetes continued to expound on the New Testament’s witness to the “cosmic Christ,” and, especially from Irenaeus of Lyons onward, to accentuate the role of Jesus Christ—­ pre-­incarnate, incarnate, post-­incarnate—­as himself Creator and not simply the mediating agent of the Father in his creative work. The Son’s hominization as the Second Adam in Jesus of Nazareth, a particular human being in history, was conceived as the ultimate ratification of God’s commitment to the material creation and as the definitive outworking of God’s original plan for the world. . . . The advent of Christ inaugurates the new, eschatological creation where the gracious, intimate presence of the Creator in and with creation will finally be manifested as “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).4

From a biblical and a theological point of view, to perceive the world is necessarily also to perceive Christ at work within it. Similarly, to sense the meaning of Christ is also to sense the meaning of the material universe. Creation through Christ challenges theological and scientific forms of reductionism that limit salvation to the human and that confine the material world to what can be empirically measured and quantified. In this essay, I will develop one vantage point that helps us see why and how Christ matters for our understanding of creation. In particular, I will attempt to explain what it might mean theologically and practically to say that Christ is the One through whom creation comes and continues. To achieve this aim, I will address what the doctrine of creation is fundamentally about, and what this teaching says about the meaning of the world. I will conclude with some practical/moral implications for humanity (and the church) that follow from a world christologically understood.

What Is Creation About? For a great number of Christians, the teaching of creation is primarily a teaching about origins. The Bible begins famously with the words “In the beginning” (Gen 1:1), thereby suggesting that God finished most of his creative work a long time ago. Though God may be believed to be the One who daily 4. Paul M. Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 37

3/13/18 1:14 PM

38  Norman Wirzba

sustains the world, it is difficult to construe that presence in ways that are not “supernatural” occurrences or the “interruptions” of the normal, law-­bound workings of the natural world. Creation is made complete from the start. It is basically closed and contained, so there is little creative work for God left to do. Saying that creatures have their origin in God is clearly important because it communicates that life’s goodness and beauty are the expressions of God rather than the random effect of accidental processes. When it is developed later as the teaching creatio ex nihilo, or the idea that God creates from nothing, God’s goodness and love are highlighted because then all compulsion and competition are removed from the divine creative act. God did not have to create, nor did God create within a context of constraining conditions. That God creates at all is, therefore, a sign of a divine, hospitable intention for others to be. God creates ex amore, from love, because love is the only “reason” at work in God’s creating action. And what love desires above all else is for creatures to thrive and flourish. This is why the first creation account in Genesis ends on the seventh day with God’s Sabbath rest: God blesses the Sabbath and hallows it so that we can come to rest with God and delight in appreciation of the divine love that has been made materially visible, tactile, fragrant, audible, and nutritious in creatures. The trouble with a narrow focus on temporal origins, however, is that it becomes rather difficult to figure out how Jesus of Nazareth, a specific human being living in media res and in a particular time and place, could also be present at the origin of all time and every place. Moreover, if creation is finished and complete at the beginning, what does Jesus have to add? Is Jesus reduced to saving and fixing a creation that has gone off the rails? For good reason, patristic authors ranging from Theophilus of Antioch to Origen of Alexandria maintained that the “beginning” referenced in Genesis (and in Prov 8:22; John 1:1; and Rev 22:13) did not refer to a temporal beginning, but rather to the ontological principle that founds and governs the being of created things.5 What things are, what they mean and signify, and what their value and purpose are—­these ought to be understood in terms of the archē that Jesus Christ is. To say that Jesus is the ontological principle governing all of creation is to say that his way of being, helpfully and succinctly described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer as his “being there for others,” is determinative for 5. See Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 140–45.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 38

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Creation through Christ  39

the being of everything.6 To say that creatures come to be through Christ is to say that the existence and movement of each thing originates in and passes through the way of being-­for-­others that is embodied in Jesus’s life. To know a creature is not, therefore, to encounter a subject or object complete in itself. It is, instead, to meet a being that is always dependent on, open to, nurtured by, and building upon the self-­offering love of God made manifest in the practical ministries of Jesus’s work. In other words, the loving power that Jesus models in his feeding the hungry, healing the sick, exorcising the demon-­possessed, and befriending the stranger and outcast is the same divine power that brings all creatures into being and that daily sustains and nurtures them. Divine power does not coerce or eliminate the agency of creatures. Being a loving power, it frees and funds whatever agency creatures are able to express. It is important to underscore that God and creatures do not exist in competitive relationship with each other, as when we might mistakenly believe that for God to be great, creatures must be made small. God’s creating reality is not on a continuum with creaturely reality because the former is the enabling condition of the latter. If it is true that God is “the fecund provider of all that the creature is in itself,” then it makes sense to say that God is glorified more fully in each creature’s grateful reception and extension of the gifts that God provides.7 This way of speaking about creation enables us to appreciate better Christ’s central place in the divine work of creation. It communicates that God’s creating work is not solely completed at the beginning but is ongoing and revealed in fresh ways in the ministries of Jesus.8 And it helps us reframe the work of creation as the establishment of a spiritual and material topography that alerts us to what the right ordering and empowerment of creatures looks like in the 6. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 8, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John W. DeGruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010). Bonhoeffer argued that the experience of transcendence is one’s being-for-others. “Our relationship to God is no ‘religious’ relationship to some highest, most powerful, and best being imaginable—that is no genuine transcendence. Instead, our relationship to God is a new life in ‘being there for others,’ through participation in the being of Christ” (501). 7. Kathryn Tanner has written clearly about this matter in Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 2–4, quote from 3. 8. When they are described this way, the miracles of Jesus appear less as interruptions of the lawlike movement of natural processes and more as liberating acts that release creatures from their bondage to sickness, hunger, derangement, and alienation, and that then nurture and empower them into the fullness of their lives. This way of describing Jesus’s work, I would argue, opens many more interpretive possibilities for a text like Romans 8:18–25, where the apostle Paul speaks of creatures being “subject to futility” and awaiting to be “set free” from their bondage to decay.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 39

3/13/18 1:14 PM

40  Norman Wirzba

flesh. Creation isn’t simply a teaching about the beginning of things. More importantly, it is about the character of the world and its proper orientation, alerting us to the meaning, value, and purpose of everything that is.9 We might say that Jesus expresses in his daily, practical mode of life how life should be for all creation because his embodied life is the exact, material imprint of the divine power that daily creates the world. Jesus is the archē through whom creation comes to be because his embodied life is the decisive reference point by which all life is measured as being diminished or full, deficient or abundant. A complete, creaturely life is not something given and finished at the beginning of time. It is, rather, something that can only be perceived with the lens of love, something that is only fully achieved when love is the sole power at work within it. In other words, creation is as much about eschatology and salvation as it is about protology. It is a teaching that is inseparable from Christ’s redemptive work: we do not know what things are or how we should engage them apart from Christ’s work to love and heal everything. Creation’s full realization and significance awaits its consummation in the (Spirit-­empowered) life of God’s love. Few theologians have understood as well as Maximus the Confessor that creation through Christ compels us to think about the world’s current meaning and structure in new ways. In his writings, Maximus developed the idea that each creature has a logos, or what we might also term its coherent structure or principle of order that enables it to be a unique thing. Each creature manifests in its development a logos that defines its specific possibilities and limits, as when the logos of an oak tree enables the full range of growth, shape, color, smell, and texture unique to oak trees. According to Maximus, no creaturely logos exists in isolation. Besides being related to other creaturely logoi (as reflected in fellow plants, soil, insects, animals, sunlight, and weather), each creature is also related to Christ the eternal Logos. Because creatures come to be and become through Christ the Creator, he is also always personally present to each creature as its life-­giving power.10 By being present to each creature 9. When creation is understood as a teaching about the character of the world, then it becomes apparent that Scripture has several creation stories beyond the two in Genesis that normally make the list. I develop some of these in The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). For further development, see also William P. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 10. It is important to stress the personal nature of Christ as the eternal Logos because unlike a platonic form, which acts as an abstract, unchanging, regulative ideal that measures and judges temporal

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 40

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Creation through Christ  41

individually and to all creatures as a whole, Christ can be the harmonizing, unifying presence that empowers the whole of creation into its fullest life. To quote Maximus at length, God, as he alone knew how, completed the primary principles [logoi] of creatures and the universal essences of beings once for all. Yet he is still at work, not only preserving these creatures in their very existence [to einai] but effecting the formation, progress, and sustenance of the individual parts that are potential within them. Even now in his providence he is bringing about the assimilation of particulars to universals until he might unite creatures’ own voluntary inclination to the more universal natural principle of rational being through the movement of these particular creatures toward well-­being [to eu einai], and make them harmonious and uniformly moving in relation to one another and to the whole universe. In this way there shall be no intentional divergence between universals and particulars. Rather, one and the same principle shall be observable throughout the universe, admitting of no differentiation by the individual modes according to which created beings are predicated, and displaying the grace of God effective to deify the universe. . . . The Father approves this work, the Son properly carries out, and the Holy Spirit essentially completes both the Father’s approval of it and the Son’s execution of it, in order that the God in Trinity might be through all and in all things (Eph 4:6), contemplated as the whole reality proportionately in each individual creature as it is deemed worthy by grace, and in the universe altogether, just as the soul naturally indwells both the whole of the body and each individual part without diminishing itself.11

Though creatures possess their own unique integrity, the purpose of creaturely life is being-­with-­others—­in modes of touching, reproduction, growth, eating, play, and so on—­so that something like symphonic flourishing can occur. What creatures are and can become needs to be understood in terms of Jesus Christ because his loving, liberating, and harmonizing power helps us know imperfection, Christ is present to creatures as a loving presence that inspires and empowers them to move freely into the full realization of whatever possibility is uniquely theirs to achieve. 11. Maximus the Confessor, “Ad Thalassium 2,” in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 99–101.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 41

3/13/18 1:14 PM

42  Norman Wirzba

when creatures are moving closer to or farther away from the potential that is theirs to achieve. Having seen Christ’s love at work in his various ministries, we can know that insofar as creatures are caught up within relationships that are violent or that diminish, degrade, and alienate, they are not living into the fullness of their lives. Jesus reveals that God’s creative work always seeks the good and abundant life (to eu einai) that is unique to each creature. The way of being that Jesus embodies is the way of being that has been at work from the beginning. It is daily at work leading creatures to their fulfillment in God. This is why Maximus said, “For the Word of God and God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment.”12 In his recent Hulsean Lectures, “Christ and the Logic of Creation,” Rowan Williams shows how Maximus’s distinction between the logos and tropos of a creature is crucial to understanding Christ’s current and practical significance for creation. If a creature’s logos refers to the internal order that enables a creature to be the thing that it is, a creature’s tropos refers to the particular and practical ways that a creature’s possibilities may be actualized. This distinction allows Maximus to note that any number of factors can come into the life of a creature that disorder relationships or thwart their creaturely potential. When that happens, the logos of a creature is not altered, even as its tropos is clearly impaired. What a creature needs and awaits, therefore, is for its context to change so that its tropos or practical mode of being can freely and fully realize what God has made possible within it. And what is the tropos that defines the modes of being that lead creatures into the fullness of life? It is the tropos revealed in the ministries of Jesus. Jesus reveals through his bodily movement the divine movement that set the whole of creation moving in the first place, and that daily nurtures and leads it to its fullness in God. To share in the lifeway of Jesus is to share in the lifeway of God, for in Jesus “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9). However, the decisive key is to find Jesus and enter his tropos because creatures actually (and paradoxically) more fully realize themselves insofar as they participate in Christ’s way of being.13 Christ’s way of love, his being for others, is “the way” (John 14:6) that leads to creaturely integrity and the fulfillment of life. 12. Maximus, “Ambiguum 7,” in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, 60. 13. An audio recording of lecture 4, “Logos and Logoi: A Byzantine Breakthrough,” of the sixpart series “Christ and the Logic of Creation,” can be found at http://www.divinity.cam.ac.uk/events/ the-hulsean-lectures-2016-christ-and-the-logic-of-creation.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 42

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Creation through Christ  43

The implication of this way of speaking is striking because, as Williams notes, “The more a creature becomes itself, the closer it is to God.” But for a creature to more fully become itself and actualize its life, the conditions need to be right. Jesus reveals in his ministries what those practical conditions are. When the eternal, filial, self-­giving love of God became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, the whole of creation was introduced to and invited to participate in the hospitable ways of love that are the life of God and have been all along. God’s love becoming “all in all” (Eph 4:6) does not amount to a diminution of creaturely identity. Instead, fully participating in the love of God (in ways that respect distinct creaturely capacities) enables creatures to be themselves maximally. Jesus enables us to discern that the world, as it currently is and moves, is not how it is supposed to be. The tropos of creatures is not right because it is determined by and formed in ways of being that isolate, violate, or diminish the ability of creatures to be. It is thus out of alignment with Jesus’s tropos. Scripture acknowledges this when, in speaking of creation through Christ, it emphasizes Christ’s victory over the principalities and powers of this world, his overcoming the darkness of this age.14 Scripture presupposes that the powers currently distorting the world have their origin in God’s good creation. They play an important role in bringing order and coherence to creation. However, these powers have become twisted and now seek to separate creatures from the love of God. Rather than furthering life, they now degrade and destroy it. Brian Curry has noted that people living in this twisted world find themselves in the difficult position of being unable to live without the powers (because they give structure to life) but also being unable to live with them (because the structure they now provide harms life). The world is a good but also an embattled place. The language of powers and principalities is important to recover because it enables us to describe how both the contexts for human and creaturely life and the modalities of those lives operate on the level of systems. Fallenness is not simply the effect of individual choices made. Built environments, a culture’s icons and ideals, entertainment and fashion industries, social and economic 14. In ch. 4 of this volume, “Christ, Creation, and the Powers: Elements in a Christian Doctrine of Creation,” Brian Curry makes this point clearly and convincingly when he writes, “Christ’s triumph over the powers is one of the main ways his primacy over his creation is realized” (78). I am much indebted to his insightful work in the section that follows.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 43

3/13/18 1:14 PM

44  Norman Wirzba

frameworks, racist and sexist systems of oppression—­each of these can act as a power that inspires and forms people so that they cannot live the life God desires. Similarly, the sin at work in a fallen human world is not confined to the human realm. Industrial agricultural practices degrade land, water, and animal. Military operations destroy habitats. The language of powers enables us to speak of disordered patterns of relationship that now adversely affect the whole structure of creation, patterns that clearly have a human face and origin, but are not confined to the human. Jesus is crucial in this regard because he exercises and models the patterns of relationship that enable us to judge the powers and principalities of this age as evil and as needing to be overcome. And in his cross, he shows us how the self-­serving, self-­glorifying ways of the powers are overcome in the self-­offering love that knows no limits. The love of Jesus, in other words, establishes patterns and modalities of relationship that lead creatures into life’s fullness. The cross is the action and the place where the powers that hold creatures in bondage and decay are finally overcome, not by violent might but by the power of nonviolent love. The cross, as Curry suggests, “is God’s response to humanity’s enslavement to the powers more directly than it is God’s response to human sin” (88). Looking to the cross, we see revealed the self-­offering pattern of relationships that heals humanity and the whole of creation together. Looking to the resurrection, we witness the nonviolent defeat of the patterns of relationship that violate and destroy all life, and the birth of new life founded solely upon the love of God.15 This brief account of creation through Christ helps us see that the teaching of creation is not primarily about how the world began and was (more or less) made complete a long time ago. Instead, it points us to a field of dynamic relations, a spiritual and material topography, in which creatures are on their way to fulfillment, or not. Creation is said to be through Christ because it is in his embodied life and practical ministries that we are enabled to perceive the right ordering of relationships. The way of love that Jesus realizes leads particular creatures and the whole of creation into the fullness of life. 15. It is significant that Maximus also stresses that a Christian understanding of creation must pass through Christ’s cross and resurrection when he writes (in Chapters on Theologia and Oikonomia 1.66), “Whoever knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb knows the logoi of these creatures. And whoever has been initiated in the ineffable power of the resurrection knows the purpose (logos) for which God originally made all things” (quoted in Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 245).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 44

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Creation through Christ  45

What Sort of Place Is Creation? Our thinking about creation in christological ways has been made more difficult by a long-­standing tendency to characterize the world as a container of objects. Stated very briefly, the world is the sort of place that contains the creatures that make up our world like a massive jar or vessel. Imagining the world as a container enables some problematic assumptions, including that the container antedates its contents and was basically finished before its contents arrived. It also communicates that the identity of things does not depend essentially on the container. In other words, a pebble in one container is still the same pebble when located in a different container. Both notions presuppose that containers and the things contained bear an extrinsic relation to each other. Similarly, the things contained—­even though they reside together in the container—­do not find being together essential to who they are. The container and the things contained could stand alone. Though people may have rejected container imagery as antiquated or inadequate for an infinite universe, its presuppositions are still at work. Think of how people have subsequently adopted images of the world as a stage, production platform, or warehouse. Each metaphor communicates the extrinsic character of the relationships that join people to this material world and to each other. As a stage, the world matters primarily as a setting or backdrop upon which the more important human dramas are worked out. The stage exists to facilitate human endeavor, which is why it can be rearranged to better suit our dramatic pursuits. With a production platform or warehouse, the material world exists primarily to fund whatever ambitions serve decidedly human-­centered objectives. The instrumental reasoning operative in a world so conceived, and the economic policies that follow in its wake, install human beings as the unencumbered, sovereign miners, engineers, and purchasers of a world with no purpose other than the purpose we assign to it.16 A great deal more needs to be said about the details of this history.17 It is a history that theologians need to understand because they have consented to theological positions that are highly problematic by adopting this 16. I describe this as modernity’s idolatrous appropriation of the material world in From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015). 17. Edward S. Casey gives an excellent overview of the changing conceptions of place operative in Western thought in The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 45

3/13/18 1:14 PM

46  Norman Wirzba

Greek philosophical legacy.18 For instance, thinking of the material world as a container, stage, production platform, or storehouse encourages the theological idea that this material world is but a temporary holding place that can (and perhaps even should) be left behind as Christians make their way to a better place. Heaven thus becomes the ideal stage that fully optimizes human striving, or it is the ideal store where everything people could want is provided. This is a caricature of course, but what it expresses is a deep longing to characterize human flourishing independently of the material places they currently live. The relationships between people and this world are presumed to be nonessential, which makes escaping earth a prerequisite to entering heaven. Given this assumption, we should not be surprised that many Christians are shocked, sometimes even dismayed, to learn that God, rather than destroying creation or leaving it behind, desires to renew it and then dwell forever within it (Rev 21). A dualist anthropology is clearly at work in this characterization. But the separation is not simply between body and soul. It extends to a separation between nature and culture, which in turn underwrites a separation between creatures and their places. At issue is the question of the nature of the relationships that make life possible. The dominant metaphors used to describe the world suggest that our relationships to a place are extrinsic because both the place and those residing within it are essentially preformed. The world exists ready-­made, and people find their sources of identity internal to themselves and to the cultures in which they reside.19 To be sure, people exist in relationship to places and to each other, but the crucial thing to note is that these relationships are understood to be contingent and, in some respect, optional: I can choose to be in another place just as I can choose to be with somebody else. 18. Thomas F. Torrance is among the few theologians to have recognized this. In Space, Time and Incarnation (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), he shows how Nicene thought had to resist a static, container notion of space and replace it with a dynamic, relational one. “Patristic theology rejected a notion of space as that which receives and contains material bodies, and developed instead a notion of space as the seat of relations or the place of meeting and activity in the interaction between God and the world. It was brought to its sharpest focus in Jesus Christ” (24). 19. Think, here, of the influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who described humanity as “an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” and the work of culture as consisting in “the imposition of an arbitrary framework of symbolic meaning upon reality.” This way of describing humanity and culture presupposes a divide between people and the material world, a divide that then underwrites human manipulation of it. For an illuminating discussion of Geertz’s position and its anthropological and cosmological assumptions, see Tim Ingold, “Building, Dwelling, Living: How Animals and People Make Themselves at Home in the World,” in The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 172–88.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 46

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Creation through Christ  47

Philosophical and theological characterizations of the world as the preformed backdrop arena for self-­development are fundamentally flawed. Why? If the world is like a container, stage, production platform, or store, then a major concern will be how the world came to be and whether it is a suitable place for maximum self-­realization. And if people, whether individually or collectively, are more or less self-­contained, self-­making realities, then the focus of faith will center squarely on self or communal development. Both assumptions have the effect of locating and confining Christ’s work in the human realm, and thus both deny his role as creator. Moreover, thinking of creation and creatures as (more or less) preformed does not give adequate attention to scriptural accounts that presuppose creation as a dynamic, relational reality in which God enlists the work of creatures in a creative process that is open, ongoing, and yet to be finished.20 It is one thing to assert a theological, relational account of the character of the world and the nature of creaturely life. It is quite another to demonstrate that such an account does a better job describing and explaining how we live and experience our being in the world. Does a relational view, for instance, give a more honest rendering of the nature of places and the development of creaturely life? Does it yield a better anthropology, one that overcomes the dualisms between nature and culture, cosmos and history, body and soul? To answer these questions, I propose that we consider the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s description of the world and its life as a meshwork. As we will see, such a characterization, besides revealing the inadequacy of container thinking, opens up fresh ways for us to think of the world and our place within it, ways that may resonate more deeply with the christological points already made. To think of the world as a meshwork, it is not enough to think in terms of relations. The relations need to be understood in a specific way. This is why Ingold distinguishes his account from “network” thinking that emphasizes the connections between things. In a network, relations with others influence what things are. Nonetheless, what things essentially are is a feature of characteristics that are inside them. The problem with this characterization is that it is held captive by what Ingold calls a “logic of inversion.” According to this logic, the life of things is internal to them. Others may influence from outside how a body moves—­thus giving a nod to the importance of relationality—­but the 20. Terence E. Fretheim has made this point convincingly in God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 47

3/13/18 1:14 PM

48  Norman Wirzba

core identity of the body is first established internally and is recognized by the boundary that is its skin.21 Meshwork thinking undoes the inversion by saying that things are their relations. What was thought to be outside is also inside. Bodies have no existence, no life, and no meaning apart from the relations that entangle them in a bewildering array of lines of development. Rather than being self-­ contained like a circle or blob, trapped within their skins, and then forming relationships, things are more like open-­ended lines that continually make contact with and cling to other things similarly undergoing development. “Organisms and persons, then, are not so much nodes in a network as knots in a tissue of knots, whose constituent strands, as they become tied up with other strands, in other knots, comprise the meshwork” (BA, 70). Without this interlacing and knotting—­made especially visceral every time we eat, breathe, and drink—­it would be impossible for anything to live. Life is not a property or power internal to a body. Instead, it is constantly being worked out in a field of relations. In other words, there is no being that is not also a becoming-­with-­others. Ingold argues that this meshwork conception of life is the one that has been assumed by most traditional and indigenous peoples of the world. Often going under the name of animism, it is a conception of the world that is now readily dismissed. The dismissal, Ingold thinks, has been too hasty. Animism is usually characterized as the attribution of life, spirit, soul, or agency to objects that are otherwise believed to be inert. Ingold argues otherwise, maintaining that animism is not about adding to things “a sprinkling of agency but of restoring them to the generative fluxes of the world of materials in which they come into being and continue to subsist” (BA, 29). In other words, Things are alive and active not because they are possessed of spirit—­ whether in or of matter—­but because the substances of which they are 21. “Through this logic, the field of involvement in the world, of a thing or person, is converted into an interior schema of which its manifest appearance and behavior are but outward expressions. Thus the organism, moving and growing along lines that bind it into a web of life, is reconfigured as the outward expression of an inner design. . . . By way of inversion, beings originally open to the world are closed in upon themselves, sealed by an outer boundary or shell that protects their inner constitution from the traffic of interaction with their surroundings” (Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description [London: Routledge, 2011], 68). Subsequent references to this book will be included directly in the text following the abbreviation BA.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 48

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Creation through Christ  49

comprised continue to be swept up in circulations of the surrounding media that alternately portend their dissolution or—­characteristically with animate beings—­ensure their regeneration. Spirit is the regenerative power of these circulatory flows which, in living organisms, are bound into tightly woven bundles or tissues of extraordinary complexity. (BA, 29)22

This way of speaking is puzzling to people who adopt an observational modality that stresses attention to discrete objects in space. Such a modality is mostly oblivious to the field of relations in which things in their action and development are constantly bringing each other into varying stages of existence.23 But if we appreciate that things—­whether visibly animate or not—­come to be as the things they are because of a history of entanglements with others and within developmental processes, then it becomes evident that animacy is prior to a differentiation into things that follows from such entanglement: “Life in the animic ontology is not an emanation but a generation of being, in a world that is not preordained but incipient, forever on the verge of the actual” (BA, 69). This means that, to understand life, one must pay attention to the movement of interlacing. Interlacing is not the same thing as interlocking. The joining together that makes a knot is not simply a mechanical act. It cannot be reduced to something coming alongside something else because then only surface exteriorities touch. The coming together of lines or strands that make a knot is much more intimate than that. To convey this intimacy, it is necessary to adopt the language of sympathy. “Like lines of polyphonic music, whose harmony lies in their alternating tension and resolution, the parts possess an inner feel for one another and are not simply linked by connections of exteriority.”24 22. It is instructive here to recall the Christian teaching that the Holy Spirit is God’s continuing, daily presence among us as the power that perfects and beautifies the created world, leading it to its fulfillment in God. Though creation is said to be through Christ, God’s creativity is a triune act that finds its completion in the Holy Spirit. This is why theologians sometimes say that creation is from the Father, through the Son, and by the Holy Spirit. 23. Think here of the first creation account where God enlists the waters and the earth to “bring forth” creatures (Gen 1:20–25). God does not make each creature once and for all. Instead, God sets forth and is at work within processes of development that enable various creatures to emerge as the effect of such processes. Describing creation this way allows us to affirm that the identity of creatures is not self-contained but is a feature of their movement within fields of development that are fluid and ongoing. Emphasizing the importance of fields of development is also important from a christological point of view because Jesus establishes the lines of development, what we described earlier as a christological tropos, that are most conducive to the flourishing of creatures and creation. 24. Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines (London: Routledge, 2015), 23.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 49

3/13/18 1:14 PM

50  Norman Wirzba

In a sympathetic relationship, the members cannot be what they are apart from each other because who they are is a feature of their togetherness coming to be. In their being they carry the memory of all those others that have intersected with and contributed to their own development. If this way of speaking is correct, then life is not lived inside bodies placed in containers. Life happens as a wayfaring movement along paths as creatures interweave the histories and patterns of their lives with the histories and patterns of others. The wayfarer does not simply move between locations or among other beings, as if to transport himself or herself to selected locations. Rather, the wayfarer is his or her movements within entanglements that are themselves constantly on the move. The wayfarer does not float above the world in disinterested fashion but is, instead, the faithful one committed to a life of attention, attunement, responsibility, and gratitude toward others among which it moves. The mistake of network thinking is supposing that beings can live apart from participation in the currents of movement that continually interweave members with one another. Network thinking, because it is committed to the fallacy that life is a property or power internal to things, leaves us with a world of dead, though externally related, objects because it has cut the lines of entwinement within force fields that are the precondition of life. “It is because organisms are immersed in such force fields that they are alive. To cut the spider from its web would be like cutting the bird from the air or the fish from water: removed from these currents they would be dead” (BA, 64–65). Ingold’s description of the world and life as a meshwork compels us to think of creatures as verbs much more than as nouns. This is difficult to do, especially given the long influence of Aristotelian ways of defining things. According to his substance ontology, a thing is what it is because it is not something else. To know something we thus have to establish the boundaries that differentiate it from others. The genius of Aristotle’s thought is that it makes possible the classificatory schemes that allow us to categorize a world of great diversity. Classification matters because our knowing what to do with things is, in large part, a feature of the kind of thing we take it to be (i.e., we treat flowers differently than we treat weeds). The problem, if one can so grossly oversimplify it, is that a substance ontology positions us to see the world as a collection of nouns rather than a field of verbs. A collection of nouns, much like a container of objects, stresses distinctions between things. A field of verbs

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 50

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Creation through Christ  51

stresses the entanglements of lifeways that in their development continually challenge, shift, and penetrate the “borders” that keep things apart. Meshwork does not require us to give up on nouns altogether, but it does problematize how we think about them, rendering every noun fundamentally destabilized and vulnerable. Meshwork thinking also shifts the way we think about knowledge. Rather than being about the accumulation and categorization of facts or data, knowledge must be about directing our attention to things in terms of their developmental complexity because their being is a feature of their coming to be. Therefore, those who desire to know others must attempt to follow their paths of development and enter their folds of entanglement. This means that a narrative and historical dimension is crucial to the production of knowledge because it is the narrative that best communicates the processual, intertwined nature of life. In such a view, a knowledgeable person will have the appropriate sympathies that enable him or her to sense the contingencies and vulnerabilities of things coming to be, so he or she will be better positioned to make their lives a harmonious interweaving with the lives of others.

Some Conclusions How does an account of the world and its life as a meshwork enrich our thinking of creation through Christ? First, a meshwork account refocuses our attention away from discrete beginnings and self-­contained things, and toward the vast field of processes and relationships that enable creaturely coming-­to-­be. This is important because it enables us to investigate more deeply the tropos of creatures, the practical and lived contexts that either impede or enhance creaturely flourishing. Rather than fixing on creaturely identity in terms of internal properties or powers, meshwork thinking reveals the many diverse factors—­geophysical processes, ecosystem health, communal support, legal and political institutions, social and economic policies, hereditary traits, disease/pathogen vectors, a culture’s ethos, and so on—­that inspire, feed into, and grow out of the entanglements that constitute living things. As these factors emerge, we can consider how Christ’s manner of being, his tropos or modality of life, challenges, corrects, or enhances the lifeways creatures currently find themselves in. Second, a meshwork account enables us to think better about the dynamic

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 51

3/13/18 1:14 PM

52  Norman Wirzba

character of the logoi that govern the ordering and coherence of creatures. A creature’s logos, rather than being a static and finished blueprint that determines from the inside what a creature can be, is instead a field of possibilities that is itself susceptible to and dependent upon possibilities that are being realized by those with which it is entangled. This is a picture of creatures as living in and constituted by their sympathetic attunement to others. Clearly, this way of speaking runs contrary to notions of creatures as self-­standing entities and persons as self-­made, autonomous individuals. But Christians should welcome this, particularly if they take seriously Scripture’s depiction of life as abiding in Christ and persons as ecclesial beings. Consider two passages. In John 15, Jesus says he is the vine and we are the branches. Apart from the vine, the branch can do nothing. That is why it is so important that we abide in him and he in us. It is tempting to dismiss this horticultural imagery as being of little anthropological or cosmological significance. That would be a mistake, particularly if we acknowledge the dominance of horticultural language throughout the gospels. The organic picture being drawn rests upon a traditional, agrarian understanding of life that appreciates human life to be always life with others.25 Moreover, it is important to stress that Scripture includes soil, plants, and animals in the list of others that are always already entangled with us. From a Johannine point of view, the question is not if we will be with others but how. The question is whether we will be for others, because to be against others or even apart from them is to experience the diminution of life. Jesus’s organic language of coabiding communicates the closeness and intimacy, even the interpenetration, of life. In Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, the entanglement of life is further communicated using the organic metaphor of a living body with many members. Within a body, no individual member can live apart from its sympathetic attunement to all the other members. It is not enough that they be alongside each other spatially (perhaps one pebble among many others gathered in a single container, or merely one congregant seated alongside another in a 25. Numerous scriptural accounts could be given to elaborate on this point. One of the clearest and most foundational is the second creation story in Gen 2. Here the intimacy of creaturely life between soil, plants, animals, and human beings is powerfully drawn, an intimacy that is altogether animated by the creative breathing of God. For more on the kinship of creaturely life in Scripture, see Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Richard Bauckham, Living with Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 52

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Creation through Christ  53

pew). They must be so intimate with each other, so responsive to each other, and so economically dependent on each other that if one member suffers, “all suffer together” (1 Cor 12:26). This ecclesial account makes it difficult to conceive of a person’s logos as fixed and internal. Instead, we should think of a person’s logos more dynamically, as open and potentially attuned to others and the love of Christ. Being “in Christ,” being informed and inspired by his logos, we now share in his communion-­building tropos. And third, meshwork thinking puts an end to the dualisms that separate souls from bodies, culture from nature, and people from their material places. There simply is no human life apart from or beyond a material world. The work of Christ does not extricate the saved from a doomed or damned world. It repairs the world and reconciles all relationships so that together all creatures can experience the ways of life that lead to mutual flourishing. The work of the church, meanwhile, is to graft the whole material world within itself, not to control or exploit it but, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to be the hospitable presence that heals, nurtures, liberates, and celebrates all creatures into the life that God desires for them.26

26. For a discussion of what “churching the world” presupposes and entails, see Anestis G. Keselopoulos, Man and the Environment: A Study of St. Symeon the New Theologian (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), esp. ch. 5. Too often the ministries of churches are restricted to social and personal worlds. Meshwork thinking and Scripture’s insistence on Christ’s role in creation compel the broadening of the scope of the church’s work to include everyone and everything.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 53

3/13/18 1:14 PM

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 54

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter THREE

Jesus Christ the Divine Animal? The Human Distinctive Reconsidered BR I A N BRO C K

W

e moderns are used to thinking of ourselves not as parts of the earth, carbon-­based entities, or even “things that move,” but as animals. Yet the more we learn about the intricate mechanics of the creaturely world, the more arbitrary this way of cutting the cake appears—­there are innumerable flows, linkages, shared structures that unite our bodily lives with the web of life of all living things. And all living things are, in turn, intertwined from the molecular level up with the unique contingent form of our unique planet, as the breathless and so far futile search for life on other planets keeps reminding us. But there is one way that humans can be levered out of this web of relations: by referring to ourselves as part of the class of creatures called animals. From the early modern economists’ tendency to think in terms of the “economic animal” to more contemporary discussion of the “religious animal” (Mircea Eliade), “dependent rational animal” (Alasdair MacIntyre), or the “legal animal” (Alain Supiot), it is not difficult to discern a modern intellectual habit of thinking of humans as distinctive types of animal, but indisputably animals nonetheless.1 1. William Dixon and David Wilson, A History of Homo Economicus: The Nature of the Moral in Economic Theory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); Aaron Gross, The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999); Alain Supiot, Homo Juridicus: On the Anthropological Function of the Law, trans. Saskia Brown (London: Verso, 2007).

55

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 55

3/13/18 1:14 PM

56  Brian Brock

In this chapter, I will defend the contentious claim that Christians have let the term “animal” do too much work in their definition of the human. Substantiating this claim will take me into the stories we tell about how humans came to have the form they do. These identity-­shaping stories have profound implications for how we think about what it means to be human, and our depictions of ourselves as moral beings. My title may be misleading here, as I will not engage the question of how we might relate the eternal Logos to observable and universal natural laws. I will be focusing more narrowly on the stories we tell about how the creature we call “human” has become distinguishable from other creatures. Following a few lines set out in the biblical primeval history, I will suggest that to be human is ultimately not a biological but a vocational designation. The real history of humanity is the story of God’s attempts to open and reopen communicative relations with human creatures, first in Eden, then in the temple, and supremely in Jesus’s invitation into the kingdom of God. The modern habit of assuming us to be animals is an inflection of much older attempts to define what is distinctive about humans. Aristotle, for instance, believed that humans were the animals with a sense for justice,2 but this politically attuned account was first submerged by and later merged with a more Platonic set of problematics by Christian theologians concerned to protect hard distinctions between temporality and eternity. The displacement of a politically attuned account of the human distinctive was opened by patristic thinkers like Lactantius, who baptized the ancient Greek claim that the upright form of the human body distinguished humans as beings whose faces are turned toward the heavens—­taken to be evidence of an eternal soul in the human alone.3 Augustine most influentially elaborated and disseminated this account of the human distinctive,4 but a partial recovery of the more political and interpersonal account of the human distinctive has been attributed to Boethius.5 The main impulses of both approaches were synthesized in the formulation of Aquinas, which dominated later Western considerations of the human-­animal distinction. In Aquinas, the term “animal” corresponds to the accidental and mutable aspect of all creatures, and “rational” to the eternal 2. Aristotle, Politics, 1253a. 3. Lactantius, Institutes, 3.10, 7.5. 4. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, bk. 10. 5. Boethius, On the Two Natures of Christ.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 56

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ the Divine Animal?  57

and enduring aspect of God, angels, and humans.6 To call a human a rational animal was thus annexed to the problem of explicating the two natures of Christ, conceived as primarily a problem of defining how the created and changeable can be joined with the unchanging eternal. Thus it is fair to say that in the high-­medieval Thomistic synthesis the denomination “rational animal” was primarily oriented toward solving problematic tensions in the metaphysics of being. All this is quite different in Darwin, who is determined to examine the human being as a biological entity. Where Aquinas needed an explanation for the paradoxical union of the eternal and perishable in the nature of the human being, Darwin excludes any consideration of the eternal or immaterial aspects of the human from the outset. The highest mammals, he admitted, have evolved an impressive rational capacity that allows them to “think around” their own lower drives, but this capacity is itself a remarkable instance of a lower, “mutable” drive. Our comprehension of the natural world will deepen if we give up the quest for the “human distinctive,” Darwin insisted in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. No doubt as long as man and all other animals are viewed as independent creations, an effectual stop is put to our natural desire to investigate as far as possible the cause of expression. By this doctrine, anything and everything can be equally well explained; and it has proved as pernicious with respect to expression, as to every other branch of natural history . . . the community of certain expressions in distinct though allied species, as in the movements of the same facial muscles during laughter by a man and by various monkeys, is rendered somewhat more intelligible if we believe in their descent from a common progenitor.7

Darwin’s first criticism of the search for any human distinctive is thus implicit and is made by drawing attention to the ways humans, like many other creatures, live and feed and breed, growing and aging and dying. To live is to be in this kind of motion, and to die is to cease this kind of bodily movement, which is ultimately a cyclic sifting of chemicals through fantastically complex 6. Aquinas, Summa Theologia, 1.29.1. 7. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd ed., commentary by Paul Ekman (London: HarperCollins, 1998), “Introduction to the First Edition,” 19.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 57

3/13/18 1:14 PM

58  Brian Brock

enfoldments of tissues and membranes that eventually become inert, break down into constituent molecules, and are dissipated. Animal and vegetable living is thus equated to bodily motion and action. Put differently, for Darwin and his successors, mortality is materially and definitionally constitutive of all terrestrial life that we know or can imagine. Ecological systems evolve and become more complex because “older” versions die and are taken up in “newer” versions. What is good for the whole is only good for any one organism for a short time: the living of all living things thus depends on death. The traditional Christian problem of human endurance after death, once solved by the positing of an “eternal soul,” has been discarded. Humans are animals, essentially indistinguishable from other living organisms. A second critique of “the human distinctive” has become prominent in post-­Christian moral philosophy and is only dimly glimpsed by Darwin. Darwin seems to agree with Aristotle that the moral sense constitutes the “human distinctive,” but he is quick to stress that he thinks this too is just an especially interesting projection of the animal nature that unites living things. Some apes [might admit that they had aesthetic and communicative and intellective powers]; but they would be forced to acknowledge that disinterested love for all living creatures, the most noble attribute of man, was quite beyond their comprehension. . . . The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals; but I need say nothing on this head, as I have so lately endeavoured to shew that the social instincts,—­the prime principle of man’s constitution—­with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule, “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise;” and this lies at the foundation of morality.8

Wait a second, protests Mark Rowlands, isn’t this setting the bar a little high? Must we begin our definition of morality from the ability to comprehend the universal claim of justice? “The question is not whether animals are moral agents in the same way as humans—­normal, adult humans—­but, rather, whether animals are, or can be moral agents.”9 To this less ambitious question, 8. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1906), 193–94. 9. Mark Rowlands, Can Animals Be Moral? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 21.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 58

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ the Divine Animal?  59

Rowlands offers a qualified affirmation. Since their actions clearly spring from emotional engagements that we know are morally laden for humans, even though we cannot necessarily ascribe rational deliberation to them, we should at least understand many animals as moral subjects, whether or not they are assumed to reach levels of moral responsibility that would render them morally praise or blameworthy.10 Rowlands advances our discussion by explicitly stating what is tacitly presumed in evolutionary accounts of the origin of human emotions: humans can reason about what we feel, but because what we consider moral acts spring from moral feelings and attachments, we have no reason to deny morality to the many animals who so clearly exhibit behaviors that spring from emotions that we appropriately describe as morally laden.11 If we affirm this account of morality as grounded in emotion, Dale Peterson points out, we have committed ourselves to a more substantive (and widely held) account of human morality than is typically acknowledged. It also suggests that we should be more intensively studying other animals’ affective behaviors in order better to understand what is distinctive about human morality, which can be described by close study of the unique palette of moral emotions which has emerged over the lifespan of our species—­and which is analogous but not identical to the moralities we ought to ascribe to other species. Peterson further suggests that human moral arguments are the forum in which we socialize our basic emotional attachments, and our moral codes are the developed routines we use to extend and shape our basic emotional attachments. We should thus understand every human moral not as a “truth” but as an event in the continual work of grooming the supple palette of emotive drives that is our uniquely human evolutionary inheritance.12 The most prominent late modern thinkers who have rejected this collapse of morality into biology have done so for two reasons. Drawing on a long theological tradition, Albert Schweitzer insisted that folding morality into instinct evacuates human moral reflection of any content—­it becomes only a projection of the good of the herd.13 How, in short, is the morally normative 10. Rowlands, Can Animals Be Moral?, 36. 11. Rowlands, Can Animals Be Moral?, 12. 12. “Our moral appeals, our magnificent keyboard of words and sentences and languages, reaches down into the mammalian parts of our brains and enables us to play an elaborate chorus of moral rules and moral attachments, and the various emotional voices and tones and chords they’re associated with.” Dale Peterson, The Moral Lives of Animals (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 82. 13. “If nature wishes to have a perfect herd, she does not appeal to ethics, but gives the individuals, as in the ant-or bee-kingdom, instincts by the force of which they are wholly merged in the society.”

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 59

3/13/18 1:14 PM

60  Brian Brock

to be defined if instinct is the norm of human and nonhuman behavior? Much animal research now proceeds by noting the “moral” sensibilities of various animals, but Hannah Arendt sharply summarizes the obvious question this approach systematically avoids: “If we define man as belonging to the animal kingdom, why should we ask him to take his standards of behavior from another animal species?”14 Colin Gunton notes a second criticism, that such treatments, on one hand, present everything in human life as reducible to the operations of brute matter, while at the same time a godlike mind is presumed to be capable of standing over and judging these processes.15 The root conceptual problem of the relation of instinct to morality has been regularly revisited by anthropologists and biologists who rightly deny that any immanent (biological or social) feature of humans categorically distinguishes them from animals.16 But on theological grounds that Schweitzer did not develop, I will suggest that this distinction should nevertheless not be discarded in theological anthropology. On biblical grounds, we can at least agree with Rowlands’s insistence on a distinction between the animalian powers of empathy and reason and the ascription of moral agency and so moral blameworthiness. In order to do so, however, we will need to become clearer about why only humans, as the creatures explicitly addressed by the divine word, can sin and why creation as a whole is cursed on account of human sin (Gen 3:16–18). A second reason for rejecting the equation of instinct and morality lies in the post-­Christian sensitivity that the very concept of morality in the West Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics (London: Unwin, 1969), 153. See discussion in Neil Messer, Selfish Genes and Christian Ethics (London: SCM, 2007), ch. 5. 14. Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1970), 60. Darwin was unsure how to explain the rise of morality (Descent of Man, 68), while Richard Dawkins, recognizing the problem, simply asserts that the power to overcome instinct is itself the human distinctive, while not going so far as to call this rebellion “morality”: “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 201, cf. 331–32. The philosophical problems that attend evolutionary theories of morality are aptly surveyed in Michael Ruse, The Philosophy of Human Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 6. 15. “The contradiction . . . is an ethical one: of, on the one hand, treating the person in a reductionist way as merely the organization of brute matter—merely instrumentally, as something to be manipulated—and at the same time positing a godlike mind, apparently of a different order of being, which has dominion over what shall be done with the merely material body.” Colin Gunton, “Flesh and Spirit after Darwin,” in Beyond Determinism and Reductionism: Genetic Science and the Person, ed. Mark L. Y. Chan and Roland Chia (Adelaide: ATF, 2003), 44. 16. Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 60

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ the Divine Animal?  61

rests on some conception of a supreme being who is its guarantor and arbiter. As a more thoroughgoing rejection of the divine sovereign over the cosmos has solidified in Western thought, more attention has been given to the way that “the human” is a cultural construction, a leftover from that world that believed in God. This line of thought was most influentially developed in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, which showed a secular age how psychology, morality, and law intertwine to frame our contemporary sensibilities about what constitutes “human” or “humane” action. Other contemporary thinkers have also pointed out the ways in which this boundary-­maintenance activity has also relied in indefensible ways on the “animal” as a contrast case.17 However, all such accounts remain threatened by the oscillation between the assumption that the human being is ultimately a node in the play of larger environmental forces, or is rising above those entanglements in a grand project of self-­formation.

The Human Distinctive Reconsidered It will be theologically fruitful to dwell on Darwin’s attack on hard distinctions between humans and other living things, as well as the destabilization of the traditional body-­soul distinction that it effects—­a destabilization that remains important for Christians to engage today. Such engagement is critical to the mission of the church, I presume, even though it is rarely undertaken. It is also decisive for Christians as they try to understand the nature of human life in light of what they have learned about the fullness of human life revealed in Jesus Christ. My suggestion, then, is that, if we take seriously the Christian confession of Jesus Christ and his great commission, we are committed to ongoing engagement with whatever philosophies and beliefs about the natural world shape the imaginations, hopes, and fears of the world in which Christians live.18 The authors of Genesis display a cognate stance toward the myths of the peoples of their day. They quite apparently assume that to love God’s people 17. Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 18. Barth nicely encapsulates the central point: “That God is his Creator and [the human] a creature is something which we cannot forget for a single moment when we think of real [humanity], but must always interweave into the very texture of our thoughts. If it is forgotten, if we think of [the human] in isolation from and independence of God, we are no longer thinking about real [humanity].” Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, ed. T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 121, 123.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 61

3/13/18 1:14 PM

62  Brian Brock

and, with them, the whole world is to engage in polemical warfare with the myths of the age that obscure the works of the living, covenanting God.19 What I draw from their example is this analogy: as the gods of Canaan, Babylon, and Egypt competed for the affections of the ancient Israelites, so too do the myths of the modern age shape the perceptions of modern Christians. It is on these grounds that I want to follow the lead of the authors of the biblical primeval history who told the story of creation in a manner that resisted the myths of the age that they understood to direct attention away from the works of the God who had rescued them from slavery. As a fully signed on member of the early Enlightenment intellectual project, Darwin committed himself to thinking his way out of the Christian story of the origin of life on Earth. He intensively engaged the Christian protological narrative because he understood it had implications far beyond his study of cetaceans, birds, and geology. As Mary Midgley observes, When the young Darwin immersed himself in the arguments about cosmic purpose in Paley’s theological textbook The Evidences of Christianity, and repeatedly read Paradise Lost on exploring trips from the Beagle, he was neither wasting his time nor distorting his scientific project. He was seriously working his way through a range of life-­positions which lay on the route to the one he could finally use.20

Midgley insists that we see the moral seriousness of this pursuit in that it represents a work of existential orientation that every self-­realizing human being must undertake, since every human life must be lived out through enacted judgments and commitments, energized by some faith, and ventured by people with some sense of their place within a whole that is greater than themselves. Though the theory of evolution is indeed a theoretical hypothesis within the practice of day-­to-­day scientific experimentation, it is also rife with metaphors and images which have powerful, if increasingly internally conflictual, symbolic force. While scientists may often decry the blending of science and religion in popular discourse, Midgley insists that it was 19. John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009). 20. Mary Midgley, Evolution as Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 5.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 62

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ the Divine Animal?  63

psychologically and logically inevitable that evolution began to play the role of a powerful folktale about human origins. Nor should this overreaching of a scientific theory into the domain of faith be summarily dismissed as a conceptual confusion, since the symbolic power of evolutionary theory now does such broad-­based load-­bearing work sustaining the intellectual fabric of the secular world. This symbolic work greatly overshadows its utility as an investigative heuristic for the material world used by a relatively tiny cadre of research scientists. Evolution, then, is the creation myth of our age. By telling us our origins it shapes our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological theory. To call it a myth does not of course mean that it is a false story. It means that it has great symbolic power, which is independent of its truth.21

Its most dangerous power, Midgley suggests, is its power to become a quasi-­ religious talisman offering emotional consolation in the face of the assumption that grounds modern science: that the universe is ordered by natural laws that are indifferent to human wishes and well-­being.22 My purpose in this chapter is to foster the liberation of ourselves and our neighbors that comes from grasping the specifically mythic qualities of this contemporary story of origin. I do so by returning to Genesis yet again. As I do so, it is important to state explicitly that my premise is that the theologian and the scientist can discuss the phenomena of the natural world only if both interlocutors can affirm that a discussion is being had of the “stuff” of the cosmos to which each discussant is already in a practical relation. This thesis presumes that a genuinely theological engagement with the material creation is, for Christians, grounded in a theological claim about creation: that it is possible to agree with those of other faiths and none that we are all talking about a material world in which we all already exist. On the basis of this bald and practical point of agreement, we then 21. Midgley, Evolution as Religion, 33. This critique has been elaborated in a slightly different way, and with more success, by Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), ch. 2. 22. Midgley, Evolution as Religion, 43.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 63

3/13/18 1:14 PM

64  Brian Brock

have reason to be hopeful that cross-­disciplinary discussion can proceed by sharpening our terminology and conceptual descriptions in order to convey to others outside of our own discourse what each of us perceives to be going on in this world we share.23 Here, much modern theology often stumbles in having given up some traditional hermeneutic assumptions about how such empirical investigation does not travel parallel to but actively demands the careful reading of Scripture. In such a view, empirical study and exegesis are inextricably related.24 The essence of that view is drawn from the view of the biblical authors, who apparently assume that close engagement with the many aspects of the creaturely world is a way of becoming more attentive to God’s ways of acting. A properly Christian account of this activity needs to be theologically robust enough to integrate the whole range of knowledge of the creaturely world to which the most acute students of creaturely occurrence can articulate from their own investigative traditions (such as evolutionary biology, among others). Does this mean that the biblical creation account is to be taken as a historical account, or is it rather a story that powerfully orients our lives in 23. Martin Luther provides a clear example of classical theologians being aware of this distinction. “The experts themselves state: ‘We give examples, not because they are actually true, but because these matters cannot be taught by any other method.’ It would, therefore, be the height of stupidity to sneer at the ideas, as some do, because they are not so definite that they could not be otherwise. They contribute to teaching in the arts and this is sufficient. . . . Therefore, this division of the spheres is not the teaching of Moses or of Holy Scripture; but it was thought out by learned men for the purpose of teaching, something which we ought to recognize as being of great benefit.” Luther, Luther’s works, vol. 1, Lectures on Genesis Chapters 1–5, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia, 1958), 27–29. 24. This approach is present in the Christian tradition from at least Augustine onward: “There is knowledge to be had, after all, about the earth, about the sky, about the other elements of this world. . . . And it frequently happens that even non-Christians will have knowledge of this sort in a way that they can substantiate with scientific arguments and experiments. Now it is quite disgraceful and disastrous, something to be on one’s guard against at all costs, that they should ever hear Christians spouting what they claim our Christian literature has to say on these topics . . . to the great detriment of those about whose salvation we are so concerned, should be written off and consigned to the waste paper basket as so many ignoramuses.” Augustine, Literal Meaning of Genesis, in On Genesis, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City, 2002), 1.39, pp. 186–87. Therefore, “We . . . whose steps are being directed through holy scripture . . . must now make every effort to track down with God’s help, from the clues also supplied by his very works, where and how he created simultaneously, when he rested from his completed works, these things we see around us, on whose forms and appearance he is still working right up till now through the succession of times and seasons.” Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, 5.42–44. What this approach seeks to avoid is on one side what we might call a fideist resistance to bringing the truths of faith into conversation with the truths of the natural sciences, and on the other side, a concordist presumption that the writers of Scripture, through inspiration or otherwise, somehow already grasped the truths which science is only now discovering. Cf. Henri Blocher, “The Theology of the Fall and the Origins of Evil,” in Darwin, Creation and the Fall: Theological Challenges, ed. R. J. Berry and T. A. Noble (Nottingham: Apollos, 2009), 150–51.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 64

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ the Divine Animal?  65

the present and so is better called a myth? Must we read Genesis as either an imagination shaping fairy tale or a newspaper account? Much ink has been spilled trying to explain why reading Genesis commits us to choose one side or the other of this false polarity. My anchoring assumption is that the biblical primeval history narrates a real beginning of the material world by the work of God, a real engagement of the human being by God’s direct speech, and a real disengagement of the human with that divine Word. It is, therefore, no myth or fairy tale. We have a record in Genesis of events that actually happened, but of a very peculiar and unrepeated variety: the speaking into existence of the material world by the God of Scripture, the establishment by this same God of a direct communicative relation of this same God with humanity, and the entry of a rebellious character into that relationship. Given the peculiarity of the real events being named, it is clear that Genesis should not be understood to offer a newspaper account of the first days of creation, since the conventions of modern positivist historiography assume the stability of the universal causal laws of our contemporary experience as the framing condition of what could conceivably be counted as a true story about the past. Genesis is a story about something which happened before we existed that radically departs from Darwin’s positivist account of history. This departure from the epistemological assumptions of modern understandings of history is itself drawn from a theological reading of the creation account. Christian theologians have long agreed that the account sets out three conceptually fundamental assumptions that remain in effect for as long as this creaturely realm exists. First, God created the world when there was nothing, no other power or existing thing. Second, this confession of creation ex nihilo has soteriological implications, as highlighted in the Reformation: just as God made creation without a contribution from any other being, so God justifies (elects) God’s people in Jesus Christ, and therefore they have no claim to have contributed anything substantial to their deliverance into human fullness. This twofold creation of something from nothing is also, third, a witness to the end of some creatures in the resurrection of the dead. In all three moments, something wholly new is brought into existence that did not exist before, and solely by the act of God—­f irst creation as a whole, then redeemed human beings, and one day persons who have been raised from the dead. The grammatical unity of the three assertions is thus identical. As God created the whole world without the contributions of any other being,

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 65

3/13/18 1:14 PM

66  Brian Brock

so too must we not presume that the “formlessness and void” of creation before God’s ordering work on days two through six of the first creation week was somehow a cocreator of the ordered world that arose during that week. God created the formless and God gives it form. In no sense is the preceding formlessness a cause or limiting factor of God’s work, any more than a sinner can manufacture their own redemption or a dead body can be understood to condition God’s resurrecting activity. The issue at stake is the irruptive and de novo character of God’s redemptive working and its inner connection with God’s creative working.25 It is the irruptive nature of divine action that interrupts the positivist assumption that we can talk about the past because the causal laws we observe in the natural world inform us of what can and cannot have happened in the past. From the viewpoint of the theological position I have just outlined, Christian theology already cautions us not to think of the movements of formless or even formed nature as history, in the sense assumed by language like “natural history” or “prehistory.” In the biblical view the nexus of events, which characterize the narrative of this world, find their continuity not in the stability of natural laws but in the stability of the faithfulness of the Creator. The events that give creation its narrative, and so its history, are fundamentally those discreet divine engagements by which God opens communion with creatures. On the basis of this line of reasoning, we might speculatively extend what we know of the dynamics of salvation history to think of this divine opening of communion with creatures as perhaps having happened in events like lightning strikes on the primeval soup. Such interventions, in bringing a Creator-­creature relationship into being that did not exist before, are an opening of communion with an unresponsive creature that is not different in kind from what happens when God graciously confronts sinners today.26 The core point to keep in mind is that the cause and motor of this history is the divine impingement on creatures; it is not the capacity of these creatures to have this relationship that is the motive force of this history.27 At each level of creaturely existence and living, the “ex nihilo” character of the creaturely contribution to their own flourishing reappears in the lives of creatures, who are by definition entities who cannot self-­create. 25. Barth, CD III/2, 156. 26. Barth, CD III/2, 158–59. 27. Barth, CD III/2, 161.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 66

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ the Divine Animal?  67

What is rejected by this argument is any suggestion that calling a creature “human” primarily indicates a biological entity with certain characteristics. To be human is to be awakened to life with this Creator. The crucial question is therefore not “What is a human?” but more basically “How does a human subject arise?” This subject can only be properly sought and described if we do not imagine them torn from their relation to the image of God, as creatures somehow describable without reference to God’s redemptive and eschatological working.28 The essential environment of the human subject is the economy of God’s salvation and deliverance, not the universal laws of natural causality. Thus, the human being is not defined by looking at one aspect of this creature in abstraction (its genetic sequence, for instance) but in the determination of this being for living in an ever-­changing relation with the Creator—­what the primeval history calls “walking with God.” The one who is truly human is one who emerges in recognition of and response to this environment.29 Such a theological account presumes that an overly reductive account of the human being, commonly advanced in the name of science, is a product of our fallen thinking. A properly theological account does not attempt to explain nor insist on pinpointing human origins beyond what we are offered in the scriptural narrative. The text simply asserts that evil too has a real beginning in human history, even if the causes for its entry into creation cannot be exhaustively surveyed. The issue here “is not whether we have a historical account of the Fall, but whether we have the account of a historical Fall.”30 If the core purpose of Scripture is to open a communicative relationship with a God whom we experience as distant, then we must agree with 28. Barth insists, “It is in the closed circle of the relationship between divine grace and human gratitude that we have to seek the being of man.” Barth, CD III/2, 169. 29. Barth, CD III/2, 168. 30. Blocher, “The Theology of the Fall and the Origins of Evil,” 159. On these grounds, Blocher is right to think that it makes sense for theologians to engage with the work of paleoarcheologists in order to think further about when the historical human-divine event might have occurred in prehistory. What we will find, however, raises a set of questions similar to those raised by Old Testament studies. In the latter discipline, the constant question is “How did Israel’s distinctive view of God arise out of an ancient world in which many other religions were dominant?,” a question which is pushed back by paleoarcheology to the question of “How did the God of the Israelites make Godself known to the prehistorical humans who drew pictures of suprasensory realities in caves?” The rise to clarity of Israel’s sages was certainly a complex story of observation, revision, and correction (not unlike what we see in scientific inquiry), but it does yield a clear and stable picture of the covenant God Yahweh. On the basis of this clarity and its crystallization, in a long tradition captured in the biblical canon, it becomes possible to investigate processes as processes: events which have reached a terminus in a people who can understand themselves and the whole world as created, claimed, and recreated by the divine Word.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 67

3/13/18 1:14 PM

68  Brian Brock

this assessment by Henri Blocher that, because the fall’s present reality is so evident, it must have had a beginning, and that the place of this real beginning is a divine-­human interaction. This interaction is described in the primeval history, even if it is couched in the pictorial-­symbolic language of the ancient world, in which serpents speak and rivers run from a single point to the four corners of the world. What matters is the constant energy the text directs toward revealing certain events as pivotal at the beginning of the divine-­human relationship. Within the parameters of this definition of history, I have affirmed both the biblical text as historically accurate alongside the project of scientific observation as a meaningful human activity. I have also noted how deeply the theory of evolution shapes the contemporary self-­understanding of our contemporaries. If we are to image the loving Creator in our time, we have still to respond to Darwin’s challenge to the longstanding habit of theologians to look for the “human distinctive.” We must allow ourselves to be challenged to think afresh about the primeval history in response to Darwin’s insistence that we stop looking for a function of a biological organism that exceeds that of the “other” animals—­something that theologians have tended to ascribe to the human organism and its possession of a unique soul or capacities.31 My suggestion is that natural science has here reminded theology of what it should have known long ago: humans stand apart from animals only because God related Godself to them in a special way, both in their initial creation by forming and animating them personally and in speaking to them to articulate their relation to creation and himself. All other creatures have been put lovingly into places made for them, the fish in their sea, the birds in the air, and the rest on the specifically created dry land. The “human distinctive,” Scripture tells us, has nothing to do with biological function or the metaphysics of being. What matters is the divine emplacement and tasking of these specific creatures. 31. “Humans are obviously different to the apes in many ways—but are the differences merely ones of degree or is there a real qualitative difference? This is probably unanswerable from the scientific point of view, but theologically there is a simple solution: to regard the biological species Homo sapiens, descended from a primitive simian stock and related to living apes, as having been transformed by God at some time in history into Homo divinus, biologically unchanged but spiritually distinct. There is no reason to insist that this event took place at the same time as the emergence of the biological form we call H. sapiens; it was not a genetic change.” R. J. Berry, “Did Darwin Dethrone Humankind?” in Darwin, Creation and the Fall: Theological Challenges, ed. R. J. Berry and T. A. Noble (Nottingham: Apollos, 2009), 61.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 68

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ the Divine Animal?  69

Darwinism and the Divine Word How then does the story of Eden relate to our present? I want to suggest that all the stories of God’s salvific works recounted in Scripture be understood as works aiming to open spaces in the processes and cultural patterns in creation that are configured by depredation and conflict. This observation about God’s salvific work has bearing on the doctrine of creation because the theory of evolution assumes that specific facets of this conflict must exist behind any account of the Eden and the fall. It is important to make this point more precise: for Darwinism biological complexity arises through more complex life-­forms learning to eat what others have not, thereby flourishing and reproducing. When all basic consumable classes of organic substance are being exploited, some so-­called “better adapted”32 groups push out old groups whose acquisition or utilization of the old foods was in some way less efficient. Some groups learn to eat other animals and become predators. Darwin did not describe natural selection only in terms of conflict, but his scientific contribution was making competitive relations the basic mechanism for producing biological complexity. Some groups of organisms may also discover the utility of social structures that allow them to sustain their young more effectively. Evolutionary theorists have titillated ethicists by again rejecting the distinction between instinct and morality by pointing out that something like faithful marriage, different types of family structures, and even acts that look like altruism often arise amongst the animals. I say “look like” because to equate animal and human moral behavior, as Schweitzer, Arendt, and Gunton noted, begs the very questions we are attempting to answer.33 32. The scare quotes here flag up the fact that adaptation is a highly contested term in the philosophy of biology, evolutionary biology, and genetics. “Better” is an evaluative term which carries with it the clue that Darwinist theory still carries within it a vestige of a “mind” directing its processes of development (Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong [London: Profile, 2010]). We do not have the “God’s eye view” from which to speak of “mutations” in more than a very low-level (and counterintuitive) fashion. See Brian Brock, Walter Doerfler, and Hans Ulrich, “Genetics, Conversation and Conversion: A Discourse at the Interface of Molecular Biology and Christian Ethics,” in Theology, Disability and the New Genetics: Why Science Needs the Church, ed. John Swinton and Brian Brock (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 146–60. 33. Peter Singer has made the most visible use of this supposed scientific fact but is by no means alone within secular and theological ethics. Notice the widespread purchase of the idea that evolution yields something like a Judeo-Christian morality (Stephen G. Post et al., eds., Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Dialogue [New York: Oxford University Press, 2002]) or even a symmetry between evolutionary behaviour and the agape of the New Testament (Philip Clayton and

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 69

3/13/18 1:14 PM

70  Brian Brock

My proposal is that we imagine Eden as the first of many spaces that God has been faithful to open in a creation groaning under conditions of predation, and more important, waiting to be delivered from the wages of human sin.34 Because primeval history does not present animals as subject to the divine command given to humans, Christians may affirm that the struggle for life between organisms can be understood as nonmoral and religiously innocent. It can only be called conflictual if we evacuate that term of its many moral connotations. The atmosphere has not sinned by not raining and so eventuating a drought, any more than a monkey commits murder by killing another monkey.35 Eden, like the new creation and the kingdom of God, ought to be understood as a realm of divine rule in which the taken-­for-­granted material and social order generated by “selfish genes”36 are displaced by an alternative grammar. To say this allows us to imagine that no matter what preceded the story of Eden as recounted in Scripture (including uncounted ages of animal predation), Eden was the first theologically significant “event” recorded for the creaturely covenant partners, the earliest named temporal and spatial region in which the eternal “peaceable kingdom” was established. It was the first place where God spoke this second explicit Word that he did not speak to the other living things. This divine address elevated these creatures beyond instinct and for the first time into moral and religious innocence. The Genesis account of the giving of the command and the defection from it called the fall is thus to be understood as a stylized account of a real historical event, the real beginning of the history of humanity. Before the law, there could be no sin (Rom 4:15), and Jeffrey Schloss, eds., Evolution and Ethics: Human Morality in Biological and Religious Perspective [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004]). I am resisting here the approach that has become popular recently among theologians to emphasize not the competitive side of Darwinian theory but the altruism now being emphasized by some evolutionary biologists. See Sarah Coakley’s Sacrifice Regained: Reconsidering the Rationality of Religious Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), which were expanded in her yet to be published Gifford Lectures. The reasons for my dissatisfaction are articulately surveyed in Neil Messer, Selfish Genes and Christian Ethics: Theological and Ethical Reflections on Evolutionary Biology (London: SCM, 2009), 109–29. 34. I am using “space” here in a primarily social sense, as a domain of elaborated communicative relation, that I take to be further developing the sort of analysis developed by Stephen H. Webb, The Dome of Eden: A New Solution to the Problem of Creation and Evolution (Eugene: Cascade, 2010). 35. I am disputing a crucial assumption in the emerging theology of animals movement. For a theological account sympathetic to the claim that animals can be described as having morality, see David Clough, “The Problem with Human Equality: Towards a Non-Exclusive Account of the Moral Value of Creatures in the Company of Martha Nussbaum,” in Transforming Exclusion: Engaging Faith Perspectives, ed. Hannah Bacon, Wayne Morris, and Steve Knowles (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 83–94. 36. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins popularized this term in his refutation of the claim that altruism is a natural human trait.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 70

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ the Divine Animal?  71

following Luther’s reading of Genesis, I am reading the first command as a first iteration of the Torah.37 It is unnecessarily speculative to examine the question of whether God approached other hominid apes with such a command for the reasons theologians like Luther have resisted constructing detailed accounts of the fall of the angels which also preceded the fall of Adam and Eve.38 The real history of humanity begins in this way, with an actual and not just a figurative interaction between God and humans. The second creation account only gives us a slightly longer glimpse of Adam and Eve newly born as flesh and by the life-­giving Word and Spirit. These are creatures liberated from the will to compete that marks the feeding habits of other creatures, not least by being “put” (Gen 2:8) in a garden where food (fruit) was abundant. Whether from birth or as a function of an inbreaking divine address, and combined with emplacement in a sphere of plentiful sustenance, being created free from this impulse to self-­preservation at all costs is an act of grace, coterminous with their being approached and directly spoken to at the high point of the scriptural narrative. What if we agree that the equation of instinct and morality is conceptually untenable and yet remain open to the idea that something broadly like what biological evolutionary theories imagine did in fact occur in the production of life on Earth? If we pursue this line of thinking as part of an attempt to develop a fully theological account of God’s creative working, the first thing that we will notice is that we must learn to appreciate the phenomena in question as previously unappreciated facets of God’s grace. The Creator’s interventions in creation have yielded the healthy and helpful encoding of instincts in the formation of biological life to bring into being creatures with the capacity to understand themselves as something more than the sum of their urges. Humans can know themselves as human not by looking to themselves and reaching toward base or altruistic things but because, as a creature with urges like all other living things, this creature has been claimed from outside itself and flourishes in the active embrace of the divine word. Humanity is therefore extrinsically defined: distinctive not because it has the capacity to respond to God (which some individual Homo sapiens may possess in only a very attenuated form and some cetaceans may possess in abundance) but because God has set them apart by speaking to them and awaiting their response. 37. Here following Luther, Lectures on Genesis, on 2:9 and 2:16–17. 38. Luther, Lectures on Genesis, on 1:6.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 71

3/13/18 1:14 PM

72  Brian Brock

To so humanize Homo sapiens intrinsically recreated them as self-­conscious beings. Only now for the first time are they capable of that willed rebellion we call sin. “Innocence” names this state, however long its duration and whenever it arose in chronological time. Put negatively, the new freedom granted to these creatures through the special divine address was only the freedom to reintroduce the nonmoral reign of depredation, competition, and selfishness back into the sphere of peace opened by God’s own active working as a moral and religious choice. Human sin is thus to be defined as moving back into a state of competitive self-­promotion that was once nonmoral but now in the postlapsarian state constitutes a self-­induced moral and religious deafness. Repudiating God’s enlivening word cannot return Adam and Eve to their former nonmoral existence and condemns them to be cut off from the word that has created them as human, rendering Eden a zone of deadening moral and religious silence.39 In this idolatrous and eerily silent relation to creation instead of the Creator, fallen humans only exist as those creatures in need of being passively moved by God into a place where they can once again hear the divine claim on them. God’s will is always to open that space, maneuvering the deaf back into those divinely given pockets of peace where they can actively hear and respond again.40 The construction of Israel’s temple is best understood as Israel’s attempt by cultic activity to recognize that this explicit Word must again be heard so that the thanksgiving of individuals can be reincorporated into the full chorus of praise of all creation. I am rejecting here a strong polarization of language and ritual on the basis that the command, as offered in the garden, assumed that an embodied response was necessary—­starting with an eating and a noneating. Thus, like ours, the obedience requested of the first couple could only be liturgically and ritualistically obeyed or disobeyed—­they could live either as creatures designated to be representative priests in and to creation or as priests of a cult devoted to self-­assertion. The first command offered to Adam and Eve was their law, the Christ they could “taste and see,” that anchored their lives in the economy of God’s works. In it, they were offered a life congruent with their Creator. Contemporary 39. Cf. 1 Cor 12:2; Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), ch. 1. 40. This is an eschatological affirmation. See John D. Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, ed. Douglas H, Knight (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 135–39.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 72

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ the Divine Animal?  73

scholarship has outlined how Israel understood its priests as enacting the role of Adam in coming again before God’s command, but unlike Adam they must be purified to return to the garden to stand before the ark where God’s presence and word reside. Israel’s priests represent the whole people, as Adam stood for all his descendants. But the difference between Aaron and Adam was that while Adam was expelled, Aaron is invited and initiated in order to pass beyond the guarding angels into the holy of holies. The church took this complex of theological ideas up and interpreted it in the fullest christological terms.41 We cannot understand Israel’s protology without understanding that the tabernacle was conceived as a mobile garden that found its way to the center of the earth, Jerusalem. The first garden is unique and unrepeatable because beginnings are always unique (paralleling the Christian doctrine of ex nihilo). But the notion of the kingdom of God, in both Israel and the church, as the place where “the lion will lay down with the lamb” makes it clear that Christ’s kingdom of peace is defined in strongly Edenic conceptual overtones. Eden is the first of God’s many, persistent, and effective efforts to fan into life and consolidate genuine inner-­worldly realizations of the eschaton. We can thus say that the church is the servant of the word that makes explicit that original divine invitation that made and still makes sinning possible. But the kingdom does not only serve this condemnatory role. It exists because the Trinitarian God is faithful to ever again establish a reign of peace. The kingdom is that invitation to become responsible again—­responsive to God’s articulate presence to and for us. God is gracious to open up those spaces for humanity, as he did for Adam and Eve. But unlike them, we enter those spaces from East of Eden, as children of those who have been irresponsible, who have turned away and endured in their turning. Adam and Eve were the first to be made responsible by the divine address, but we, like them, are drawn into clearings where we may again hear, and like them receive and respond, but only as those born and habituated into religious and moral irresponsibility and self-­centeredness. When we are led into such clearings, it is the continuing grip of original sin that goads us to close them down, to repudiate them by reintroducing our old patterns into them, to grasp them by the mechanisms of 41. Crispin Fletcher-Louis, “God’s Image, His Cosmic Temple and the High Priest: Towards an Historical and Theological Account of the Incarnation,” in Heaven on Earth: The Temple in Biblical Theology, ed. T. D. Alexander and S. Gathercole (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2004), and G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 73

3/13/18 1:14 PM

74  Brian Brock

religion as a private possession. Christ alone has displayed the perfect obedience that receives this divine address in a manner that preserves and extends the realm of peace that characterizes God’s rule. Put more succinctly, as Eden was an incursion of a fertile womb of peace into the dynamic enfleshed solidarity of the pre-­Edenic world, a space opened in which the laws of this fabric were set right, so too was the womb of Mary the site of the ultimate physical and bodily negation of the sinful fabric of human relations. The body of Jesus Christ was thus utterly of the body of this created world without being ensnared in its sinful fabric. The Gospel of Matthew’s explication of the virginal conception of Jesus alerts us to the mode of God’s working also on display in the promising and fertile womb called Eden at the center of the earth. Jesus Christ was of the social and embedded fabric of this world but not possessed by it and so displayed God’s power over it. The same is true of Eden with the divine command at its heart. What is original about original sin is that Adam and Eve are woken up—­declared innocent—­in the sphere of eschatological peace by the divine word. They alone could experience the terrible shock of falling from this state because before them nobody was in it. After them, every human can only be drawn back into this eschatological space (as the Orthodox liturgy nicely preserves), crossing a threshold from the now common-­sense universe of selfish desires for self-­actualization. We have now to be taught that hearing and receiving God is peace for us (grace), not a declaration of war (law). The difference between us and the first couple is that they are the start of a new bifurcated history. Any change in their physical nature due to the fall was not the cause but the effect of their becoming beings who, coming from having no history to having one history with God, fall into a divided history, a new social world characterized by inner division between “God’s view” and “the human view.”42 Does my account give too much theological weight to a theory from the physical sciences? It may be, but it does so as part of a missionary interest in engaging the lords of this age and in hopes of breaking their hold on ourselves and our neighbors. In this engagement, we have discovered that Darwinism gives Christian theology the ability to free itself from its tendency to look for the human distinctive in some aspect or feature of the human physiognomy.43 42. Bonhoeffer, “The Fall,” Creation and Fall (New York: Touchstone, 1997). 43. Here Christian theology draws alongside the conversation sparked by Jacques Derrida (The Animal that Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills [New York: Fordham University

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 74

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Jesus Christ the Divine Animal?  75

Darwin releases Christian theology to develop a fully theological account of the human distinctive, an account which recovers the biblical insistence that the human role and vocation amongst creatures and before God has been distinctly given. It therefore stands with the long tradition of theological thought that circumscribes but does not reject out of hand the dangerous theological questions such as how the serpent came to be present in the garden of Eden.44 Whereas thinkers like Augustine felt that we needed an explanation of the serpent’s historical origin in order to understand Scripture, I have emphasized the conceptual problem of locating what the serpent introduces into Eden, namely, a moral and religious impulse broken free from the intimate relation to its Creator that is its origin and fulfillment, which today, as in every age, must be expressed again in light of our contemporary beliefs about the natural world of which we are a part.

Press, 2008]) and Emmanuel Levinas (see David L. Clark, “On Being ‘The last Kantian in Nazi Germany’: Dwelling with Animals after Levinas,” in Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, ed. Jennifer Ham and Senior Matthew [New York: Routledge, 1997], 165–98). 44. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, 11.21–37.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 75

3/13/18 1:14 PM

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 76

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter FOUR

Christ, Creation, and the Powers Elements in a Christian Doctrine of Creation BR I A N C U R RY

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—­all things were created through him and for him. COLOSSIANS 1:16 ESV

And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. COLOSSIANS 2:15 NIV

M

ost writing on the Christian doctrine of creation tends to work with two main categories: God and the world. The present book is part of an encouraging development that stresses the importance of thinking about ontology christologically.1 This turn to a distinctively Christocentric and Christotelic account of creation brings with it renewed attention to the distinctiveness of the New Testament message itself in all its strangeness. This chapter argues that the New Testament material pushes us to account for not just two realities—­God and the world—­but three: the God who reveals 1. For a synthesis of New Testament material, see especially Sean McDonough, Christ as Creator: Origins of a New Testament Doctrine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

77

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 77

3/13/18 1:14 PM

78  Brian Curry

himself in Christ, the created world, and the powers. Virtually every passage that discusses Christ’s mediation of creation has in view his supremacy to the “thrones and dominions, the principalities and powers” that are said to dominate the world at present. In 1 Corinthians 8:6, Christ’s role in mediating creation shows his supremacy over demonic forms of mediation. Colossians 1 has the powers as a central theme, teaching not only that Christ created them but that he triumphed over them in the cross and that in Christ’s body, the church, believers share in Christ’s victory over them. Hebrews 1 examines Christ’s supremacy over all other authorities, be they angels, mediators, or traditional figures of the Jewish tradition. In Romans 8, Paul argues that no powers can separate us from the love of God. In 1 Corinthians 15, death is personified as the preeminent power defeated in Christ’s resurrection. If you read through the New Testament with an eye on such concerns, you will find the powers all over the place. The theme appears so frequently in Scripture that we might even say that Christ’s triumph over the powers is one of the main ways his primacy over his creation is realized. Christ, the creator-­Messiah, in his cross and resurrection, pacifies the rebellious powers that he made in the beginning. This notion of rebellious powers can make some Christians feel un­ comfortable. After all, the New Testament’s demonology, or perhaps we should say “exousiology,”2 is at best perplexing, and at worst an embarrassment for modern Western Christians. When we read this sort of language in the New Testament, it is very difficult to know what exactly is being said. And a book engaging with natural science is perhaps the last place you might expect to find such a discussion. For many of us, cosmology may be as simple as imagining the world presented to us by modern science but with God added on top—­the creator God who sets in motion and (usually) providentially guides a fundamentally disenchanted world of material. The assertion of a third term in the discussion—­a sort of mediating realm of agencies or powers, which is neither reducible to mere matter nor to aggregate human agency—­simply does not make sense to many of us anymore. And yet it is central to the New Testament’s Christocentric doctrine of creation that we think is valuable to recover. What are the powers, and what is their place within a doctrine of creation? This chapter will make some first steps towards answering this question. 2. This is from the Greek exousia, a common New Testament word for a “power” or “authority.”

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 78

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ, Creation, and the Powers  79

First, leaning on John Howard Yoder’s synthetic work,3 as well as some more recent studies of the powers,4 we will start by examining what they are in the New Testament. Then, we will argue that it is not only possible but highly necessary to recover a sense of the powers today, as this is still a crucial part of any full-­orbed christological doctrine of creation. In order to get a proper feel for the sort of world this actually is, we need some account of the powers. Finally, we will explore the relevance of the preceding argument for a couple of topics: the consequences of how we think about evil’s presence in the world over against typical theodicy arguments, and whether the institution of modern science itself might betray some uncanny similarities to the New Testament’s principalities and powers.5

The Powers in the New Testament So, first of all, what are the powers in the New Testament? In opening his essay, “Christ and Power,” Yoder first wants to oppose any view of Jesus that asserts his irrelevance to “problems of power and structure,” due to Jesus’s supposed “radical personalism.”6 Thinking of the powers requires us to think corporately and structurally. He writes, In line with the personal appeal which has been so central in Protestant faith since Luther, even more since Pietism, and especially since the merging of Protestant existentialism with modern secular personalism . . . it has seemed quite evident that the primary message of Jesus was a call most properly perceived by an individual, asking the hearer for something that can be done most genuinely by an individual standing 3. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 134–61. Yoder’s chapter titled “Christ and Power” is a lucid, synthetic account of the place of the powers in a doctrine of creation. In this chapter Yoder is able to “surf ” the trajectory of leading New Testament scholarship of his day in making his case for the importance of the powers. As such, it models doctrinal theology’s integration with New Testament theology and is therefore broadly useful and thought-provoking regardless of whether one agrees with Yoder on wider questions of systematic theology. 4. I use “powers” as a preliminary shorthand for “whatever it is that the New Testament texts may variously be talking about in such passages” with the intention that we will specify the various content of such uses more fully later. Nevertheless, translating such powers language-in-use remains elusive within a modern imaginary. 5. Saying this is not meant to “demonize” the sciences, but it is meant to show the relevance of Christ’s triumph over the powers for how we think of the institution of modern science with its attendant clusters of formative practices. 6. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 134.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 79

3/13/18 1:14 PM

80  Brian Curry

alone. Whether this “something that one can do standing alone” be a rare heroic performance like loving one’s enemies, or a response more accessible to the ordinary person, like sorrow for his or her sins, it is a response each individual can make only for himself. It has nothing to do with the structures of society.7

Yoder points out this individualist emphasis because it has been the typical way of marginalizing Jesus’s relevance to the construction of a social ethic during the whole era of Christendom. Jesus matters to individuals, not to power structures. The first issue in the literature that Yoder addresses is the nature and identity of the powers. In making his argument, Yoder draws on a whole wave of biblical scholarship on the Pauline doctrine of the powers, in the work of Hendrikus Berkhof, G. B. Caird, G. H. C. MacGregor, and Markus Barth.8 There is by no means agreement both in the literature of the 1970s and today. Yet such disagreement, says Yoder, can actually be seen as productive: scholarly diversity of opinion reflects and elucidates the diversity of discourse found in the New Testament material itself! In contemporary use, Sometimes the term “power” is clearly distinguished from “authority,” including in the latter term a special reference to some kind of legitimacy or validation of the exercise of power; other times the two are merged. Sometimes “power” is distinguished from “force” as being somehow more general or more justified or less overt; again they are sometimes identified. The concern for precision and the concern to observe generalities and commonalities constantly cross over and overlap, with the linkages being different within every school of thought and every language.9

While the precise sense of a term denoting a power is often hard to identify, this unclarity can also have its use. Something of the same stimulating confusion is present in the thought of the apostle Paul as he applies some of the same thought patterns to 7. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 134. 8. A wave of scholarship which has continued in the more recent work of Walter Wink’s trilogy on the powers, as well as the work of Jacques Ellul and Marva Dawn, Robert Moses, and many others. 9. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 137.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 80

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ, Creation, and the Powers  81

different challenges in different contexts. He speaks of “principalities and powers,” and of “thrones and dominions,” thus using language of political color. But he can also use cosmological language like “angels and archangels,” “elements,” “heights and depths.” Or the language can be religious: “law,” “knowledge.” Sometimes the reader perceives a parallelism in all these concepts, sometimes not.10

Yoder’s larger point, which he makes later, is that when we bring our modern questions to the powers too soon, asking in what sense they are “real” or “personal” on our terms, we are in danger of missing the point. The point is not how they can be translated into our terms but how Paul uses them. For part of what they do is call an outlook like ours into question, by showing us an alternative cosmology than we are used to imagining. The New Testament’s language of the powers conveys a general sense of the cosmos as embattled. Yoder says, “The challenge to which the proclamation of Christ’s rule over the rebellious world speaks a word of grace is not a problem with the self but a split within the cosmos.”11 This split within the cosmos is fundamental to understanding the New Testament vision of the doctrine of creation properly because Christ can rightly pacify and reassert primacy over the powers on the basis of his having created them.12 Yoder’s description of the powers leans heavily on Hendrikus Berkhof’s Christ and the Powers, which remains a major source in discussions of the powers.13 Yoder’s first point is that the powers have their origin in God’s good creation. According to Colossians 1:16, the “all things” created in Christ are the powers, and they are held together “in him” in the beginning. “It is the reign of order among creatures, order which in its original intention is divine 10. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 137. Yoder goes on to note that even if Paul had very precise and technical meanings in his use of these various terms, it would “hardly matter if he had not. . . . To use several terms with roughly synonymous meaning or to use one term with different meanings and different contexts is not necessarily a sign of unclear thinking” (137). 11. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 161. 12. See specifically Col 1:16 in light of the “all things” of v. 20. 13. As Robert Moses has recently observed, Berkhof ’s presentation emphasizes the powers as structural in a way that can both flatten some of the diversity of New Testament usage and that can obscure the close connection between the influence of the powers upon us through our participating in certain practices. But most writers maintain a close link between powers language and something like creational structures. One major exception is Bultmann, who unambiguously says we have to discard (demythologize) language of the powers as simply antiquated cosmology. This paper is in part an attempt to point out what might be lost by simply demythologizing the powers. Robert Moses, “Powerful Practices: Paul’s Principalities and Powers Revisited,” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2012).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 81

3/13/18 1:14 PM

82  Brian Curry

gift.”14 Yoder goes on to argue, following Berkhof, that the powers are a part of what makes the world have its own integrity as a created order. “Society and history, even nature, would be impossible without regularity, system, order—­and God has provided for this need. . . . It was made in an ordered form and ‘it was good.’ The creative power worked in a mediated form, by means of the Powers that regularized all visible reality.”15 At the same time, this idyllic picture seems alien to our experience of the world. The powers are twisted structures of a fallen world. We might even say that their rebellion is what we mean when we say that the world (as opposed to humanity) is “fallen.” Yoder writes, “No longer active only as mediators of the saving creative purpose of God; now we find them seeking to separate us from the love of God (Rom 8:38); we find them ruling over the lives of those who live far from the love of God (Eph 2:2); we find them holding us in servitude to their rules (Col 2:20); we find them holding us under their tutelage (Gal 4:3).” Yet they are not limitlessly rebellious, but “continue to exercise an ordering function.”16 Tyranny (Rom 13:1), for example, “is still better than chaos, and we should be subject to it.”17 Similarly the law, according to Galatians, while holding us back from maturity in Christ, served a good function for a time, and even “pagan and primitive forms of social and religious expression . . . remain a sign of the preserving patience of God . . . (Acts 17:22–28).”18 So these powers, though created good, have rebelled and are fallen. “They did not accept the modesty that would have permitted them to remain conformed to the creative purpose, but rather they have claimed for themselves an absolute value. They thereby enslaved humanity and our history.”19 These structures, which should have been life-­giving, have become instruments of bondage in a world in cosmic rebellion against Christ. Yoder continues, “ ‘Slavery’ is in fact one of the fundamental terms used in the New Testament to describe the lost condition of men and women outside of Christ. To what are we subject? Precisely to those values and structures which are necessary to life and society, but which have claimed the status of idols and have succeeded 14. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 141. 15. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 141. 16. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 141. 17. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 141. 18. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 142. Peter Leithart has recently argued that the powers are the fundamental socioreligious building blocks of the Old Creation. See Leithart, Delivered from the Elements of the World: Atonement, Justification, Mission (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016) 23. 19. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 142.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 82

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ, Creation, and the Powers  83

in making us serve them as if they were of absolute value.”20 Yet, since these are good things that have become idols, “The Powers cannot fully escape the providential sovereignty of God, who is still able to use them for good.”21 Robert Moses, in his recent dissertation “Powerful Practices,” corrects and expands this line of argument. According to Moses, in order to understand this New Testament language, we must pay attention also to the kinds of practices that either protect us from the powers, or turn us over to their influence. He asks us to imagine a time in the far future when we have somehow eradicated all forms of germs from the earth, and we no longer possess a concept of harmful germs or their attendant infections.22 In order to understand what “germs” meant to twenty-­f irst-­century people, future historians might have to look not only to what we said about them but especially to how we acted in light of them: performing certain rituals of purification or purgation to rid ourselves of them, making pilgrimages to visit those authorized to ward them off, and so on. Moses shows how closely powers language in the New Testament is likewise tied to one’s participation in certain practices, rituals, or liturgies that are said either to give one over to the powers or to protect one from them. For example, for Paul, eating food sacrificed to idols involves exposing oneself to possible demonic influence.23 And this is true not just of food; there was a whole way of life that lived in bondage to the powers (Eph 2:1–3). On the other hand, participation in baptism and the Eucharist secure the believer under the protection of Christ’s kingdom (Col 1:10; 2:12; Rom 6:4). Another way to get at the nature of the powers is to look at God’s response to them. For if humanity’s enslavement to the powers is one of the primary ways of putting the “problem” addressed in redemption, then the work of redemption involves freeing humanity from their enslavement. Colossians 1–2 depicts Christ as the anointed king, the creator-­Messiah, who was always the head of creation and always meant to exercise primacy over the powers as the sole mediator between God and the creation.24 The cross and resurrection are God’s way of subduing the powers and reinstating Christ as the head over

20. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 142. 21. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 142. 22. Moses, “Powerful Practices,” 302–5. 23. Moses, “Powerful Practices,” 126. 24. This is the import of language of “firstborn,” “primacy,” and “headship” in Colossians 1–2. For a wonderful treatment of these themes, see Sean McDonough, Christ as Creator, 172–91.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 83

3/13/18 1:14 PM

84  Brian Curry

all creation.25 Yoder describes Christ’s victory over the powers in three ways. The first is Christ’s “living a genuinely free and human existence.”26 Christ refused to play by the rules of the cosmic order, shunning violent revolt against Rome and refusing to court either the religious power of the Sadducees or moral power in the Pharisees. For these and related reasons, Christ died by the hands of the powers (1 Cor 2:8), but his death was also the end of their rule. By the cross (which must always be seen as a unit with the resurrection) Christ abolished the slavery that, because of sin, permeates our existence as a menace and an accusation. On the cross, he “disarmed” the powers, “made a public example of them and thereby triumphed over them.”27 Berkhof’s exposition of Colossians 2:13–1528 is worth quoting at length on Christ’s response to the powers:29 He “made a public example of them.” It is precisely in the crucifixion that the true nature of the Powers has come to light. Previously they were accepted as the most basic and ultimate realities, as the gods of this world. Never had it been perceived, nor could it have been perceived, that this belief was founded on deception. Now that the true God appears on earth in Christ, it becomes apparent that the Powers are inimical to Him, acting not as His instruments but as His adversaries. The scribes, representatives of the Jewish law, far from receiving gratefully Him who came in the name of the God of the law, crucified Him in the name of the temple. The Pharisees, personifying piety, crucified him in the name of piety. Pilate, representing Roman justice and law, shows what these are worth when called upon to do justice to the Truth Himself. Obviously, “none of the rulers of this age,” who let themselves be worshipped as divinities, understood God’s wisdom, “for had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:8). Now they 25. Note, again, that the “all creation” and “all things” of Col 1:15–20 is explicated in the passage as being the powers. 26. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 144–45. 27. Hendrikus Berkhof, Christ and the Powers (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1962, 1977), 30. All rights reserved. Used by permission. 28. “And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him” (Col 2:13–15 RSV). 29. Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, 30–31.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 84

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ, Creation, and the Powers  85

are unmasked as false gods by their encounter with Very God; they are made a public spectacle. Thus Christ has “triumphed over them.” The unmasking is actually already their defeat. Yet this is only humanly visible when they know that God Himself has appeared on earth in Christ. Therefore we must think of the resurrection as well as of the cross. The resurrection manifests what was already accomplished at the cross: that in Christ God has challenged the Powers, has penetrated into their territory, and has displayed that He is stronger than they. The concrete evidence of this triumph is that at the cross Christ has “disarmed” the Powers. The weapon from which they heretofore derived their strength is struck out of their hands. This weapon was the power of illusion, their ability to convince us that they were the divine regents of the world, ultimate certainty and ultimate direction, ultimate happiness and the ultimate duty for small, dependent humanity. Since Christ we know that this is illusion. We are called to a higher destiny: we have higher orders to follow and we stand under a greater protector. No powers can separate us from God’s love in Christ. Unmasked, revealed in their true nature, they have lost their mighty grip on us. The cross has disarmed them: wherever it is preached, the unmasking of the Powers takes place.30

The church becomes the diachronic sign of the defeat of the powers because it is the community in which creation is once again ordered under its archetypal head and creator. It participates in Christ’s triumph over the powers simply by being itself, the community of the new creation. Its distinctive way of life is to live out Christ-­like freedom from the oppression of the powers, especially with counterintuitive willingness to accept worldly “failure” in the name of not “playing their games.” By simply being the community in which, to name one important example, death has lost its power as a final enemy, the church is free to live in ways that make no sense within a worldly economy of limited time. As Christians, we are a people with all the time in the world. As Yoder says, the church is in itself “a proclamation of the lordship of Christ to the powers from whose dominion the church has begun to be 30. Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, 30–31. Used by permission.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 85

3/13/18 1:14 PM

86  Brian Curry

liberated. The church does not attack the powers. This Christ has done. The church concentrates upon not being seduced by them. By existing, the church demonstrates that their rebellion has been vanquished.”31 So, if the above is true of the New Testament, then what sense can we make of the powers today? The answer to this question is difficult, since our thinking and perception of the world is so decisively shaped by a materialist outlook, at least in the West.32 Living amidst “a secular age,” to quote Charles Taylor, it is hard enough to believe in God, let alone to consider the existence of various superhuman forces or structures not readily open to scientific investigation.33 In order to get at this question, we will follow Yoder’s exposition and see where it leads. The powers, for Yoder and others, are parts of the good creation and necessary for society to function: “We cannot live without them. These structures are not and never have been a mere sum total of the individuals composing them. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. And this ‘more’ is an invisible Power, even though we may not be used to speaking of it in personal or angelic terms.”34 The powers are more than the aggregation of human agency, good or bad. They have or take on a life of their own. Yet these structures turn against us and demand of us “unconditional loyalty. They harm and enslave us. We cannot live with them. Looking at the human situation from within, it is not possible to conceive how, once unconditionally subjected to these Powers, humankind can ever again become free.”35 Under the powers, says Paul, we were separated from Christ, “without hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12 NIV). So by “powers” Paul means to name structures of the world that were at least to some extent part of a good creation but threaten to ruin our lives and life of the world more generally. Paul’s description of creation as consisting of fallen humanity in bondage to the powers clearly widens what we might otherwise think of as the scope of a doctrine of creation. It means that we must treat social and institutional aspects of the world, organized as they are under created powers, as just as important 31. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 150. 32. Moses shows how this is not true of an African context in Moses, “Powerful Practices,” 301–26. 33. Taylor means “secular” not necessarily in the sense of an increasing absence of belief, but in the sense that we can no longer take for granted a belief in God. Whatever we may choose to believe, all particular beliefs are fragilized by the knowledge that others choose to believe differently or not at all. Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007). 34. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 143, emphasis original. 35. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 143.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 86

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ, Creation, and the Powers  87

to a creational theology as the “natural” world is. There is no “natural” world for us comprehensible apart from the powers, and our doctrine of creation must reflect this. Yoder writes, Our lostness and our survival are inseparable, both dependent upon the Powers. Thus, far from being archaic or meaningless, the “exousiology” of the apostle . . . reveals itself to be a very refined analysis of the problems of society and history, far more refined than the other ways in which theologians have sought to describe the same realities in terms only of “creation” or “personality.”36

Here, in addition to widening the scope of the doctrine of creation, Yoder makes a key point. By framing the doctrine of creation in terms of Christ, the creation, and the powers, Paul can simultaneously portray both fallen humanity in bondage to sin and God’s continuing providential control of the world in a way that casts the powers as the enemies of God to be pacified in redemption. This way of arranging the terms is more inclusive and fine-­grained than traditional approaches that focus on the “orders of creation” as the main structuring principle. For an orders-­of-­creation approach typically excludes key elements of the human sphere, such as religion or ideology, from consideration since they are not parts of creation but of culture on this view. An approach that includes the powers in its analysis will not exclude any area of human activity from the scope of its consideration as part of a creational ethic, since these structuring powers are central to how we conceive of creation at all. Orders-­of-­creation approaches also tend to leave out Christ, notes Yoder. They look instead for creational norms to regulate their creational ethic, with creational meaning to ground ethics not in Christ but in supposedly independently discoverable principles embedded in creation’s various spheres of activity.37 In such a scheme, because the doctrine of creation is conceived as prior to Christ, redemption, and the church (more on this later), Christ is not considered to be the one in whom all these realms find their meaning and coherence. Yoder continues, 36. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 144. 37. Here Yoder mentions H. Richard Niebuhr’s claim that an ethics based on orders of creation counteracts what Niebuhr calls a “unitarianism of the second person,” by which he means to avoid the problem of “an ethic too directly oriented around Christ.” Yoder also mentions Dooyeweerd’s philosophical theology, with its sphere of sovereignty, as falling into this category. See Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 144n7.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 87

3/13/18 1:14 PM

88  Brian Curry

As a matter of fact, the theology of the orders of creation has generally affirmed that Jesus Christ has little directly to do with them, but that rather these several orders (the state, family, economy, etc.) have an autonomous value unrelated to redemption and the church, by virtue of their being the product of a divine act of creation.38

So we begin to see how important it is to hold both a christologically oriented doctrine of creation and a place for the quasi-­mediatorial function of the powers so that our sense of what creation is actually reflects the full New Testament picture.

Theodicy and God’s Victory Over the Powers We now turn to examine a few consequences of such an emphasis on the powers for science and faith dialogues. We will look at consequences for theodicy first before we look at the status of natural science relative to the powers. Recognizing the New Testament’s relation between Christ, powers, and creation as basic to a properly oriented doctrine of creation, we find ourselves pressed towards a more acute recognition of the embattled nature of the world as it is today—­the eschatological conflict between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of evil, which is one of the major themes in the New Testament. In the New Testament, these powers are portrayed as very real enemies of God to be conquered and pacified. We might even say that the cross is God’s response to humanity’s enslavement to the powers more directly than it is God’s response to human sin. This is not a consideration that makes its way into theodicy very often. In most defenses of God’s goodness and sovereignty in light of the existence of the evil and suffering in the world, the terms are set up so as to assume a God whose power simply means an all-­determining will or design. Much of the intractability of the problem has to do with assuming a cosmology in which the powers play no role and in which we let our conception of power be defined by them and not by God’s power as revealed in the cross and resurrection of Christ. To get at the problem, we can, for a moment, look at it the other way. If we were to take the common Protestant position and think only in terms of God 38. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 144.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 88

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ, Creation, and the Powers  89

(or even Christ) and creation, then several structural problems in the doctrine of creation are aggravated. The first problem is accounting for evil and for the New Testament’s description of its power. The Christian tradition has often stressed that God’s sovereign will providentially directs whatsoever comes to pass. Nothing happens apart from God’s holding all things in being. The relevant categories in such a vision of creation are simply God (conceived of through the category of will) and the world (which is passive relative to God’s all-­encompassing sovereign will, even while the freedom of its secondary causes is enabled by God). In this binary scheme, in order to account for the evil and fallenness we see everywhere in the world, we have to attribute evil either to the effects of individual human sins or to God. Part of the trouble with the first option is that the world is so full of evil that seems not to be of human origin: disease, earthquakes, tsunamis, drought, famine, and death. It is prima facie hard to believe that individual human sins could transform the world in such a dramatic way. In order to envision anything like a cosmic fall, we need a notion of powers that is more all-­encompassing than individual sin.39 Without a robust doctrine of the powers, Christians can all too easily think that it is their responsibility to put forward a flat-­footed theodicy, defending the status of the present world as really good even though the New Testament does no such thing. If human sin is the only real problem, then we are pressed to say that the structures of the present world are actually good. If only we could see the bigger picture, we would recognize that all the disasters and violence in the world are not truly evil but necessary for God’s “big plan.” But a God whose plan requires a world with such oppressive structures would seem to be beyond goodness, or good only equivocally, so far as our creaturely concept of goodness is concerned. If we are driven to suspect that we live in an economy of violence by necessity and by God’s design, then it can be hard to worship such a God with our whole hearts. The powers, strange as they are, are just the sort of superhuman intermediary forces that we need to make sense of structural evils. The New Testament exousiology we have been examining helps us avoid such rigid dualisms and enables wholehearted worship at the same time by presenting a creational vision that is at once both stranger and more satisfying. From a New Testament 39. Some account for a fallen world by speaking of God’s curse on the ground (Gen 3:17). But even within Genesis this curse lasts only until the end of the flood and is later canceled by God (Gen 8:21). Further, it exercises no systematic relevance within the rest of Scripture.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 89

3/13/18 1:14 PM

90  Brian Curry

perspective, foreign though it is from our contemporary sensibilities, we can recognize the powers as structural forces that have become evil and are arrayed in rebellion against God, to the ruination of God’s good creation. They are more than the summary effects of human sin. Their depredations are not willed by God. God’s relationship to them is not one of causation but of opposition: of victory over, pacification of, and freedom from. Their rebellion is not part of the plan but rather wholly unnecessary, indeed absurd. To describe this perspective, we turn to David Bentley Hart’s remarkable book on the 2004 tsunami, The Doors of the Sea. Hart’s position is that Christianity demands the believer to perceive that the work of a faith rules out either of the options described above. Hart writes, Christians sometimes find it exceedingly difficult to adopt the cosmological idiom of the New Testament. . . . For the scriptural understanding of evil has always been more radical and “fantastic” than anything that can be fitted either within a deistic theodicy or, for that matter, within any philosophical indictment of such a theodicy. Christian thought, from the outset, denies that (in themselves) suffering, death, and evil have any ultimate value or spiritual meaning at all. It claims that they are cosmic contingencies, ontological shadows, intrinsically devoid of substance or purpose, however much God may—­under the conditions of a fallen order—­make them occasions for accomplishing his good ends.40

Evil is not part of “God’s good plan” and exercises no necessity upon the divine purposes in creation. It is wholly parasitic, wholly unnecessary to the flourishing of all things in fellowship with God. Yet its influence upon the structures that make our lives possible is more radical than we may be used to thinking, and taking it seriously in the form of the powers is centrally pressed upon us by Scripture. Hart continues, Perhaps no doctrine strikes non-­Christians as more insufferably fabulous than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe: that this is a broken and wounded world, that 40. David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 61–62.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 90

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ, Creation, and the Powers  91

cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, that the universe languishes in bondage to the “powers” and “principalities” of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the Kingdom of God.41

Such a perspective is difficult, both in its dissonance from scientific materialism and in its dissonance from models of meticulous providence that see history as the unfolding of the divine big plan, to the exclusion of a real cosmic battle. But when the drama of redemption becomes no more than the playing out of a story that was written by the divine Author, it becomes difficult to take seriously that Christ’s triumph over the powers is any more than playacting. What needs to be defended is a version of divine willing and providence that takes as its subject matter the actual drama of redemption described in Scripture and not simply a set of logical deductions from what we assume it means for God to exercise power. As Hart puts it, Nevertheless, and disturbing as it may be, it is clearly the case that there is a kind of “provisional” cosmic dualism within the New Testament: not an ultimate dualism, of course, between two equal principles; but certainly a conflict between a sphere of created autonomy that strives against God on the one hand and the saving love of God in time on the other. . . . It is to acknowledge, however, that his will can be resisted by a real and (by his grace) autonomous force of defiance, or can be hidden from us by the history of cosmic corruption, and that the final realization of the good he intends in all things has the form (not simply as a dramatic fiction, for our edification or his glory, nor simply as a paedagogical device on his part, but in truth) of a divine victory.42

The “provisional cosmic dualism” that Hart finds in the New Testament, and that we have seen in Yoder’s description as well, is a description of a cosmos riven by the powers, and of the human situation as being in bondage to them.43 41. Hart, Doors of the Sea, 62. 42. Hart, Doors of the Sea, 63. 43. As Paul says, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph 6:12 KJV). Satan is called “the prince of this world” in the John’s Gospel (12:31, 14:30, 16:11), or even “the

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 91

3/13/18 1:14 PM

92  Brian Curry

Hart concludes, “The cosmos, then is divided between two kingdoms, that of God and that of death. And while God must triumph, death remains mighty and terrible until the end—­it remains, in fact, the ‘last enemy that shall be destroyed’ (1 Cor 15:26).”44 So rather than putting forward a theodicy explaining why this world is what a powerful and loving God intends, we must instead claim with the New Testament that God’s response to a world whose structures are in rebellion against God takes the form of victorious pacification in the cross and resurrection of Christ. Defending this present evil age as good is a category mistake excluded by a doctrine of creation that is grounded in the vision of the New Testament.

Science and the Powers Turning now to science, we will think through the possibility of its status as a “power.” As we said above, when Paul uses “powers,” he means to name the structures of the world which were part of a good creation, at least to some extent, but which can also threaten to ruin our lives and the life of the world more generally. But we did not provide an actual list of what might count as a power today. Berkhof lists several modern phenomena that he considers contemporary analogues: Human traditions, the course of earthly life conditioned by the heavenly bodies, morality, fixed religious and ethical rules, the administration of justice and the ordering of the state . . . politics, class, social struggle, national interest, public opinion . . . the ideas of decency, of democracy . . . the powers of race, class, state and Volk.45

In Reclaiming the Body, Shuman and Volck argue that the institution of modern medicine should be included in such a list of powers today.46 They show how we put ourselves at the mercy of a whole set of forces in the medical sphere—­we god of this world” in 2 Cor 4:4, and 1 John 5:19 says that “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” The dualism is provisional, however, because God remains the soul source and sustainer of all being, so that it is impossible for evil either to have truly independent existence, or for it to triumph in the end, however powerful it may be at present. 44. Hart, Doors of the Sea, 66. 45. Quoted in Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 142. 46. Joel Shuman and Brian Volck, Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 92

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ, Creation, and the Powers  93

turn ourselves over to the power and practices of medicine which we hope will save us. But Christians ought to view medicine-­as-­power with a sort of caution—­we cannot live without it, but in a very real sense, Shuman and Volck show how it can also put us into bondage if we have not been shaped by the protective Christian practices of patience, long-­suffering, and community, which can provide a hard-­won perspective on living and dying independent of the world of medicine.47 Based on the above, it is quite easy to see how we might consider the institution of modern scientific research as a sort of power. On the one hand, it is one of the greatest of collaborative human achievements. We depend upon scientific research to help us know the world and to be able to flourish in it. We cannot imagine life without its benefits.48 When we talk about science as a power, this is not first of all a criticism; recall that the powers are created by and for Christ. They are basically and originally good, and we need them in order to live.49 However, as Hart has argued, the glory of scientific practice is in its humility.50 In its essence, the scientific method narrows its focus to that which can be investigated without reference to teleological explanation. It seeks answers that do not involve explanations regarding purposes—­the reasons for things being the way they are in an ultimate sense. But we sense the rebellious power of modern science, to give just one example,51 in the ease with which this self-­limitation becomes itself a cosmology and metaphysics. Not only does a particular investigation of a problem look for explanation on the level of material cause, but, in a totalizing move, the material cause 47. See also Stanley Hauerwas, “Practicing Patience: How Christians Should Be Sick,” in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Beckman and Michael Cartwright (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 348–66. 48. As Peter Harrison has shown, the scientific method has its origin in a Christian theological anthropology, in which our fallen ways of knowing must be rigorously tested. Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 49. By “science” I mean to name not only the people, institutions, and repeated practices of natural scientific research, but also a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts, including our beliefs about and faith in science to give reliable knowledge of the world and thereby to bring it increasingly under our control. 50. See David Bentley Hart, Provocations and Laments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 198. 51. Other ways of getting at science-as-power in the threatening sense might include noting the widespread sense that a technology-induced apocalyptic disaster is somehow inevitable. Why should this seem inevitable if we are the ones in control of scientific and technological research? That sense that we are not in control, that strong artificial intelligence or replicative nanotechnology will be created and may annihilate all life—is an almost perfect exegesis of the New Testament concept of a power in contemporary terms. Christ’s pacification of the powers, in this perspective, becomes (for us) once again literally lifesaving.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 93

3/13/18 1:14 PM

94  Brian Curry

becomes the only valid explanation for anything whatsoever. This sort of reductionism would shock us, were we not so used to cowering before its supposed explanatory power. Within its imaginary, God is an unnecessary hypothesis. But such perspectives only betray their captivity to science-­as-­ power, not any real knowledge about the origin or purpose of the world. We sense a similar power at work whenever we are told that science functions as an ideologically neutral basis for decision making in the public sphere, as if it were possible to denote proper ends based upon facts alone and not upon a conception of the good.52 It is easy for those whose daily life is a participation in the practices of modern scientific research to come to see the world in this way. I can say from personal experience doing scientific research that turning oneself over to such practices means being formed by a power structure in which God, Christ, and any larger purpose of the world whatever is deemed irrelevant, not just methodologically but often metaphysically.53 In order for one’s faith to survive within the apparently monolithic secularism that can so easily characterize natural-­science-­as-­power, one must participate in the protective practices of the church, or risk succumbing to a creeping materialism. In a recent article in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik writes, apparently under the power of science and without recognizing the absurdity of such a claim, that science gives nonbelievers a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about the natural world. They have this monopoly for the same reason that computer manufacturers have an edge over crystal-­ball makers: the advantages of having an actual explanation of things and processes are self-­evident. What works wins. We know that men were not invented but slowly evolved from smaller animals; that the earth is not the center of the universe but one among a billion planets in a distant corner; and that, in the billions of years of the universe’s existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession with the laws of nature. We need not imagine 52. And as for facts, MacIntyre wryly notes that “facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention.” Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 357. 53. My personal experience was in clinical pharmacology research at Vanderbilt University, where my main task was to develop an assay for detecting and classifying a new class of lipid mediators and their oxidative byproducts in vitro and in vivo.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 94

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ, Creation, and the Powers  95

that there’s no Heaven; we know that there is none, and we will search for angels forever in vain.54

This is science usurping its proper role as a power in the world and becoming a potentially enslaving reductionism.55 But to those under the power of such claims, these sorts arguments sound plausible.56 Charles Taylor refers to such forces in modernity as “closed world structures” because they help reinforce a structural construal of the world in which there is only immanence and no possibility of transcendent openness to God.57 What Christ triumphs over in the cross and resurrection is precisely these sorts of totalizing claims by the powers. He reveals their vaunted totalizing claims to be shams, and he is exalted in the resurrection to the right hand of God, above all earthly powers. When we really perceive this and embody it in our Christian practice, then we are free to immerse ourselves in the practices of science—­perhaps free to do better science, with our minds free to perceive the world nonreductively with its relation to God.58 In triumphing over a power, even over natural science, Christ returns it to its proper humility and hence to its own particular glory. For science, like the rest of creation, is a good gift of God. When it is freed from the burden of either providing us with a metaphysics or of saving us—­these Christ has done—­and offered back to God in thanksgiving and praise, then science can shine as one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

54. Adam Gopnik. “Bigger than Phil,” New Yorker, 17 and 24 February 2014, http://www.newyorker​ .com/magazine/2014/02/17/bigger-phil. 55. For more on this, see Hart’s “Of Gods and Gopniks” in which he says, “What I find so dismal about Gopnik’s article is the thought that it represents not the worst of popular secularist thinking, but the best.” David Bentley Hart, “Of Gods and Gopniks,” in A Splended Wickedness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 269. 56. Cf. Col 2:1–4. 57. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 556–90. It would be interesting to bring Taylor’s account of closed world structures into a more extended conversation with a New Testament theology of the powers. 58. So much of the work of science involves developing just the right sorts of habits of perception. And such perception is inescapably dependent upon metaphysical and, yes, theological commitments. T. F. Torrance persuasively made the argument that Einstein, to take one example, could intuit a fundamentally relational view of space and time because such a view had already been part of the Western theological tradition. Thomas F. Torrance, “Einstein and Scientific Theology,” Religious Studies 8, no. 3 (1972): 233.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 95

3/13/18 1:14 PM

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 96

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter FIVE

Christ and the Cosmos Kingdom and Creation in Gospel Perspective N. T. W R IGH T

A

biblical scholar reflecting on the questions that animate many of the contemporary debates on science and religion (debates that originated in the early modern period) will often be struck by the sense in which, despite sometimes vociferous disagreements, the many sides of a pluriform discussion often share a set of basic assumptions. These assumptions, though quite foreign to the world of the biblical texts, strongly influence many scholars’ approach to these same texts. The creation of the cosmos, celebrated in the vivid imagery and multilayered stories of the biblical texts and especially the New Testament’s vision of Christ as an agent of that creation, seem a far cry from the picture of “nature” against “supernature” over which cultural wars are still waged. The public mood on both sides of the Atlantic may be shifting on many of these issues, as on much else. Such shifts often go hand in hand with social, cultural, and political turbulence. This is the complex context within which I offer the following reflections on the New Testament vision of Christ and the Cosmos. This has the nature of a preliminary exploration; I hope to develop this line of thought elsewhere in due course. The problem I shall address here comes in three stages. First, the New Testament affirms that the whole creation was made in, through, and for the Messiah, the Christ, Jesus. In saying this, the writers seem to be echoing the ancient Jewish belief that the one God made the world through his “wisdom” or his “word”; but this “wisdom” or “word” has now become human, and we see and know who he is. But what exactly does this mean? Second, many orthodox theologians have been happy to embrace the main 97

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 97

3/13/18 1:14 PM

98  N. T. Wright

findings of modern science, not least a belief that the world we live in has evolved in significant ways over fourteen billion years or so. But some have questioned whether a consistent belief in evolution might actually undermine orthodoxy, leading to the loss of Trinitarian theology and a collapse back into the deism of earlier centuries. I can see why some might think that, but I want to suggest that this would be wrong. Third, the question of science and religion has long been associated with the question of natural theology: Can we start with observation of the world and argue up to Christian truth without an appeal to some kind of revelation? Again, I want to suggest that putting “Christ and the Cosmos” at the centre of the argument shifts and clarifies this important but complex discussion. Here again the present study is a preliminary reflection in advance of fuller study elsewhere.

All Things Were Made through Him First, then, to the New Testament. The prologue to John’s Gospel takes us back to “the beginning,” but “the beginning” is now explicitly about the “Word,” the Logos, the one through whom all things were made. John is echoing the Psalms: by the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth (Ps 33:6). He is also echoing Proverbs 8 (which itself echoes Genesis), and its retrieval in later Jewish writings: “Lady Wisdom” was God’s handmaid in planning and making the world. The question of whether Sophia in this passage was simply one metaphor among other possible ones, and to what extent pre-­Christian Jews saw “wisdom” as a second quasi-­divine figure, is important, but not within my present argument.1 What matters for the moment is that the New Testament retrieves this tradition, not least in John 1, and declares that any such ideas are in fact to be predicated of Jesus himself, the Messiah. The climax of John’s prologue is of course the moment when “the Word became flesh and dwelt in our midst,” with the word “dwelt” evoking, in the Greek, the notion of the temple or tabernacle: the Word “pitched his tent” or “tabernacled” among us. As many studies have insisted, Genesis 1 1. Cf. my discussion in Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Augusburg Fortress, 2013), 670–77 (hereafter “PFG”). For a discussion of Second Temple ways of speaking about God acting through his wisdom and how this relates to Jewish monotheism, cf. the work of Richard Bauckham, for instance in Jesus and the God of Israel: “God Crucified” and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 217.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 98

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ and the Cosmos  99

describes the creation of the world in terms of a temple, a heaven-­and-­earth reality, with humans as the image within the temple. John is working with that theme: the divine Word through whom the creation-­temple itself was made himself became the image within the temple, the personal presence of the Creator. In the Second Temple period many saw the temple, and its ancestor the tabernacle, as a microcosmos, a “little world,” a small working model of the new creation that was yet to be, with kings and priests at its heart. In the New Testament, Jesus is the royal priest, the truly human one, who is both the true image-­bearer—­the genuine human—­and the temple in person. So what might it mean to say that all things were made through him? Two Pauline passages echo the same theme. In what looks like a formulaic development of the Jewish “Shema” prayer, 1 Corinthians 8:6 declares that there is one God, the Father from whom all things come, and one Lord, Jesus the Messiah, through whom all things come. The Father is the origin; the Son is the agent. This develops into the extraordinary poem of Colossians 1:15–20, which echoes Genesis 1:1 and Proverbs 8:22.2 The Messiah is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created . . . through him and for him,” and then, in the second half of the poem, all things are reconciled in and through and for him. Hebrews 1 likewise echoes the Psalms and the wisdom tradition, stressing up front that in the last days God has spoken through a son, whom he made the heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds (1:2). All this is well known though its interpretation is inevitably contested. What are we to make of all this? Here is my proposal. Most theologians and exegetes, reading passages like this, have assumed that what is going on is (1) an affirmation of the one God as the creator of all and then (2) a kind of honorific exaltation of Jesus, so that somehow we should now associate Jesus with this initial act of creation. We first get a picture of creation and of God the creator; then we fit Jesus, or at least the preincarnate Word, into that picture. But that’s not actually how these passages work. The New Testament insists that the epistemological track runs in the opposite direction. It isn’t that we know who God is—­in this case, the Creator—­and somehow fit Jesus, or the preincarnate Word, into that. These passages stress that we don’t actually know much about who or what God is, but that Jesus reveals him. Nobody 2. On some of these echoes, see PFG, 673, esp. n172.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 99

3/13/18 1:14 PM

100  N. T. Wright

has ever seen God, insists John; the only begotten God, the one close to the Father’s heart, has made him known, has (in the Greek) exegeted him. In Colossians 1:15, God himself is invisible, but Jesus is the visible “image,” where “image” of course insists on the humanity of Jesus. It is by looking at the humanity of Jesus that we discover who the invisible God really is. That is how the “image” works. This means, I suggest, that the more we discover about Jesus himself the more we find out, not simply about God in the abstract but about the means of creation itself, and that when we explore this line of thought, all sorts of things look differently to how they look when we come at things the other way around. The four gospels tell us, after all, what Jesus did and how he did it.3 Jesus of Nazareth went about announcing that this was the time for God to become king and that this was what it looked like when he did. His whole project was about the rescue of creation and the launching, from within that creation, of “new creation.” The gospel writers, just like Paul and the author of Hebrews, make it clear that “new creation” is the renewal of creation itself. In other words, it is not a matter of scrapping the original creation and replacing it with something else. (The assumption that the kingdom of God would involve the latter kind of move is at the heart of the century-­old idea that Jesus and his first followers expected the literal end of the world.)4 But if this is so, we know how new creation happens—­because Jesus makes it abundantly clear. This is what several of the parables are about, and it’s no accident that Jesus takes imagery from the first creation to make the point. His fellow Jews were thinking of the kingdom of God as a new social and political state of affairs that would come in with a bang, with a sudden revolution, quite possibly with a Messiah driving out the Romans and establishing a new, free 3. Part of the trouble here is that we read the evidence wrong because of various pressures to make Jesus conform to different expectations arising from within our modern framework. Conservative Western Christianity has often tended to be docetic (emphasising the divinity of a “Jesus” figure who performs “supernatural” miracles over against his humanity, which receives a more perfunctory acknowledgment), and Platonic, in carving up creation into an earthly, sensible sphere and a spiritual, heavenly sphere, where the whole point of Jesus’s ministry seems to provide a means of escape from the former to the latter. Liberal Western Christianity has often tended to be sceptical and to deny that we can know that much about what Jesus did in the first place, let alone what he meant by it. This is where history really matters. For methodological reflections on history and the first century, in particular with reference to pressures arising from within a late modern horizon, see my The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992), 81–120 (hereafter NTPG). 4. See my forthcoming article “Hope Deferred? Against the Dogma of Delay,” in Early Christianity (2018).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 100

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ and the Cosmos  101

Jewish state that would last forever. A similar revolution had taken place two hundred years earlier against the Syrians, and it partially succeeded but then went bad. They tried it again a hundred years after Jesus in the famous Bar-­ Kochba rebellion; it worked for three dangerous years and was then crushed for good.5 Jesus stands between these two; he is saying yes to the kingdom but no to the way his contemporaries were imagining its arrival. It will be, he said, like a seed growing secretly, like a small mustard seed that grows into a great plant, like someone sowing seed all over the place so that some goes to waste but some bears a crop out of proportion to what was sown, thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold. The new creation comes through a strange and slow process of sowing, with an eventual harvest in mind but not by the means Jesus’s contemporaries suppose. But that’s not all. Some of Jesus’s kingdom-­stories are about remarkable acts of rescue despite the odds. The Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan are obvious examples. Here it isn’t just a strange and slow process; it’s a work against all probabilities, in the first case of the father welcoming back the prodigal, in the second case of an outsider turning out to be the true neighbour. There are paradoxical twists and turns; unexpected outcomes. This is how the kingdom comes. When we reflect on all this, and put it together into a historical narrative, we realise that all the kingdom-­stories in the gospels are designed to lead the eye up to the moment when Jesus is actually enthroned—­on the cross. It was not, after all, such a silly idea to think that there might be a single moment which would change the world forever.6 To summarize a long, complex story, 5. For an overview of the historical background, see NTPG, 157–66. For a summary of the present point, see Wright, Simply Jesus: Who He Was, What He Did, Why It Matters (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011), esp. ch. 9. 6. See Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’ Crucifixion (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2016). This is the idea behind the word “apocalyptic”—a sudden revelatory moment when God reveals himself in decisive action. God reveals himself to Moses in Exod 3:14, and this initiates the saving action of God, liberating his people from the oppression of their slavery in Egypt. The dramatic event of the crossing of the Red Sea becomes, in the tradition and memory of Israel, a moment of the self-disclosure of Israel’s God in his decisive rescue (see Exod 15:1–21). The visions in Dan 7 are at the same time disclosures of the God of Israel in his confrontation of the empires as they focus on the critical moment of the vindication of those who belong to him. That the gospel writers, in different ways, retrieve both the exodus narratives and Dan 7 should come as no surprise. For a discussion of some of the complexities involved in the use of the term “apocalyptic,” especially in Pauline scholarship, see my Paul and His Recent Interpreters (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2015), 135–44 (hereafter PRI ). An earlier discussion of “apocalyptic,” including a discussion of Dan 7, can be found in NTPG, 280–99. See now the collection of essays in B. E. Reynolds and L. T. Stuckenbruck, eds., The Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition and the Shaping of New Testament Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 101

3/13/18 1:14 PM

102  N. T. Wright

the Gospels present Jesus’s death in converging ways, and through them all we find the imagery of creation and new creation. Jesus goes to the heart of the darkness in order to take the full weight of that darkness on to himself and so to exhaust it. He submits to the forces of chaos so that there may be new order. He tastes death itself in order to bring new life. And the Gospels, as well as Paul of course, insist that this was an act of utter self-­giving love. In and through it all, the Gospels make it clear—­we should say, the Jesus of the Gospels makes it clear—­that his kingdom-­project constituted a radical redefinition of what the world means by power. In Mark 10:35–45, Jesus is faced with James and John wanting the best seats in the kingdom. He tells them sternly that while the high-­and-­mighty power-­brokers in the pagan world get their way by bossing and bullying, “we’re going to do it the other way.” The one who wants to be great must be the servant, the slave of all. Ultimately, Jesus himself expresses this in matchless acted symbolism by washing the feet of the disciples at the supper (John 13:1–20). This is the New Testament’s picture of how the kingdom comes. The same point is picked up in Acts, particularly in Paul’s discussions of “power.” We might mention 2 Corinthians 12:9, where Paul insists that God’s power is made perfect in weakness. We could develop this theme much further, but we must hurry on to the point, which should be obvious but is not usually made. When we say that “all things were made in and through and for Jesus the Messiah,” this is the Jesus we must be talking about. There is no other. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And this means that we should at least try to think what it might mean to say that this Jesus, and this vision of the kingdom, is the lens through which we might understand creation. Instead of starting with a great act of creation and then fitting Jesus into it, simply declaring in general terms that somehow he was involved in it all, we ought to start with what we know of Jesus’s own vision of kingdom, truth, and power (think of Jesus’s conversation on these topics with Pontius Pilate in John 18 and 19!) and ask what that might mean about creation itself. The results are striking. To begin with, if creation comes through the kingdom-­bringing Jesus, we ought to expect that it would often be like a seed growing secretly; that it would involve seed being sown which went to waste and other seed being sown which produced a great crop. We ought to expect that it would be a strange, slow process which might suddenly reach some kind of a harvest. And we ought to expect that it would involve some kind of

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 102

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ and the Cosmos  103

overcoming of chaos. Above all, we ought to expect that it would be a work of utter self-­giving love; that the power which made the world, like the power which ultimately rescued the world, would be the power, not of brute force, or of some vast robotic machinery controlled by a distant bureaucrat, but of radical outpoured generosity. We ought to expect, in other words, that creation would not look like a despot deciding to build a palace and throwing it up at speed with his architects and builders cowering before him. We ought to have anticipated that the deist models of creation, conceived I think on the analogy of the early industrial successes, might in fact be misleading and that they would need correcting in the light either of a better picture of the one through whom creation was accomplished or in the light of fresh scientific research.7 And what do we find? Very few people in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century were doing the kind of fresh work on Jesus and the gospels that would lead us to this picture. But various scientists, not least the Darwin family, motivated by a quite different worldview, namely that of a developmental Epicureanism, none the less came up with a picture of “origins” that looks remarkably like Jesus’s parables of the kingdom. Some seeds go to waste; others bear remarkable fruit. Some projects start tiny and take forever but suddenly produce a great crop. Some false starts are wonderfully rescued; others are forgotten. Chaos is astonishingly overcome. This says nothing about generosity since that word only makes sense in terms of a personal creator, which the Epicureans like Erasmus Darwin had ruled out. But the evolutionists have been driven again and again to speak of the prodigality of the natural world. And the theologians can pick that up and say, “Yes, this is precisely what you might expect if there is a God of boundless, generous love behind it all. The prodigal father. The God we know in and as Jesus the Messiah.” This proposal could be developed in all sorts of directions, for which there is unfortunately no space here. I will restrict myself to two points that follow from an attempt to look at creation through the lens of the kingdom of God as portrayed in Jesus’s parables. 7. We recall that the deists were keen to get Jesus out of the picture or at least relegated to the margins of the merely exemplary. If creation appears to an age fond of mechanics as a clockwork machine, which God winds up at the beginning and which is then supposed to run on its own, then Jesus must seem at best an interruption of the established order. Jesus might be allowed to exemplify the virtue of punctuality, but he should really not interfere with the productive schedule of bourgeois society. For the influence of deism on Reimarus, for example, see Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 16–18.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 103

3/13/18 1:14 PM

104  N. T. Wright

Evolution and Orthodox Theology A good deal of our trouble to this day stems, I think, from the way in which the controversies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were set up. These controversies took place in a wide cultural and political context, not always taken fully into account in the well-­publicised debates over science and religion. There are several interesting parallels between nineteenth-­century attempts to get rid of a creator in what was then claimed to be the domain for the various independent actors and forces of nature, on the one hand, and the revolutions of the late eighteenth century getting rid of monarchy and of the very idea of the divine right of kings, on the other. Epicurean science, in other words, was making essentially the same move as the French and American revolutionaries; in other spheres, similar things were happening with economics (as in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations) and of course with studies of Jesus, as in the work of Reimarus and its propagation by Lessing. In the political sphere, the replacement of divine right with an evolving society of democratic elections resulted in what some have called “the biopolitical.”8 Elections function as evolutionary triggers of natural selection within a political system which is self-­created by voluntary agreement, owing nothing to a higher purpose beyond the self-­serving preservation of power. The operative assumption is that the natural world and the political sphere work in the same way: only the fittest survive. The best physical specimens and the best political proposals will win out in the long run. Looking at the last two centuries in the Western world, it would be difficult to maintain that this biopolitical process has done what it said on the tin. But, as with evolution, the theorists might reply that these things take time—­that, indeed, lots of seed will be wasted before one will produce good fruit. To change the metaphor, you may have to break a lot of eggs before you create an omelette. And the problem is that breaking eggs by itself gets you nowhere. You have to turn the stove on, for a start. To be sure, these things may only pan out in the long run. But from the position of biblical theology it is precisely at this point that the analogy between politics and the natural world breaks down. The political process involves humans, and (according to Scripture) humans have a God-­given responsibility 8. On John Milbank’s stimulating essay “Paul against Biopolitics” (in Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology, ed. J. Milbank, S. Žižek, and C. Davis [Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010], 21–73), see PRI, 323–28.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 104

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ and the Cosmos  105

and vocation to rule wisely. A blind evolutionary process—­which is indeed how democracy does sometimes seem to work, rejecting the paths of wisdom and embracing the wrong sorts of power—­may never of itself “evolve” into wise and peaceful governance. But that is for another time.9 My point at the moment is that the development not just of “evolution” (a hypothesis about biology and then the wider world, with data to match) but of evolutionism (the necessary correlate of an Epicurean worldview, which is a very different thing) came not least as a response to an older would-­be Christian but in fact semideist position.10 In this framework, “creation” was not about seeds being sown slowly and secretly, not about a creation that was the work of a generous self-­giving love. It was about raw, hands-­on power. As we saw a moment ago, the would-­be orthodox Christianity of the day tended towards a docetic view of a divine Jesus whose humanity was necessary for what had to be done but otherwise largely irrelevant. A false stand-­off was thus generated between the kind of would-­be Christian view that went with the divine right of kings, a quasi-­docetic Jesus, and a “creation” accomplished by naked divine power, and the kind of reaction that was agitating for popular rule, for evolutionary biology, and for a “quest for the historical Jesus,” which would find out that he was just a deluded religious or political teacher. The Bible itself speaks against this entire construct. Interestingly, so does evolution itself, once we eliminate the Epicureanism at the heart of it. The charge of implicit deism (“go with ‘evolution’ and you’ll end up with deism”) rebounds on the accusers. A fully Trinitarian vision of God, Jesus, and the Spirit goes with the vision of a theistic, that is, a non-­Epicurean, evolution.11 And this leads to my final point.

Science, Jesus, and Natural Theology The project of natural theology, as conceived in the early eighteenth century, belongs with this older model. Few today would argue that we can straightforwardly begin with the natural world and argue our way up to a view of God that corresponds more or less to the Christian one. But if I’m right in what I’ve said above, then a more interesting and complex possibility opens out before 9. For some initial reflections, see my God in Public (London: SPCK, 2016). 10. I have developed related ideas further in the first two essays in Surprised by Scripture (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014). 11. I have not been able here to comment on the role of the Spirit in creation and new creation, but passages like Rom 8 offer a powerful starting point for such reflections.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 105

3/13/18 1:14 PM

106  N. T. Wright

us. Natural theology as popularly conceived, that is, the attempt to reason up to God without the use of revelation, was always a strange and culturally conditioned thought experiment. Most humans do not work like that most of the time. I think—­a lthough a forceful presentation of this argument would take many more words than I have space for here—­that this contrast of two types of knowledge, that which we have by revelation and that which we have by unaided observation and reason, makes two mistakes.12 First, it flattens out what actually happens in revelation, and for that matter what actually happens in observation and the use of reason. For a start, the Bible is not, as it were, naked revelation. Precisely because of the sort of book it is, it invites and indeed demands reflective reading. It means what it means because it is the book a community reads to give direction and order to its common life, hope to its common sorrow. The Bible demands that people live within its teasing and troubling narrative and try to make sense of it, or perhaps to let it make sense of them. The Bible should not be treated as, so to speak, a list of naked truths given on a take-­it-­or-­leave-­it basis. That is a rationalist parody—­a trap into which many would-­be orthodox Christians have fallen. In the same way, observation and reasoning never take place in a vacuum (unless you artificially create such an epistemological vacuum and demand that everyone live inside it).13 When we observe the natural world, we are involved observers, trying to make sense at the same time of what that involvement might mean, including the question of what “observation” consists in and how it affects the observers, in this case ourselves. This will then naturally involve a critical awareness of our own context, cultural encyclopedia, and so forth. So the idea of natural theology, as often imagined, creates an artificial disjunction. It colludes with the trivial idea that scientific knowledge is somehow objective and faith-­k nowledge is somehow subjective. Things are more complex, and interesting, than that. This is where the theme of an epistemology of love would help, though there is no space here to develop that important notion.14 12. For a preliminary statement on types of epistemology, see NTPG, 31–46. I hope to expand considerably on this in the Gifford Lectures for 2018. 13. For a dense and multifaceted description of the cultural, historical, experiential, and epistemical factors involved in the shift of the default approach to the world for many people in the West, from an always already meaning-endowed cosmos to a physical world devoid of moral meanings, which requires our constructive efforts, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), especially 25–35. 14. For a short preliminary statement, see Wright, The Challenge of Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1999), ch. 8.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 106

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ and the Cosmos  107

Second, this false antithesis then gets bundled up with the regular antithesis between induction and deduction. Scientific knowledge is thought to be inductive, starting with raw data and working up without a big overarching narrative, whereas theological knowledge is supposed to be deductive, starting with divine revelation and working downwards. The Western world has privileged the former since Descartes. Many theologians are currently hurrying back to the latter, looking for a “perfect” vision of God from which everything else might be deduced. Both models are oversimplifications.15 They have bedevilled the debate between exegesis and theology as well as between science and faith. It’s time to think more clearly about how all knowledge actually happens and to see the larger integration, held as I believe it must be within a Trinitarian (that is, Jesus-­shaped and Spirit-­animated) ontology and expressed in an epistemology of love.16 At the heart of all this stands the story of Jesus. That has been the problem as well as the promise. How “scientific” is history, not least the history of Jesus? But without knowing for sure about Jesus, how can any of this be anchored? What use might it be to say that looking at Jesus will give us the clue as to how creation, as well as new creation, came about or comes about, if “looking at Jesus” turns out to be a complex series of “ifs” and “buts” in which all chance of historical knowledge seems to recede like a rainbow’s end? There are many problems, of course, about making any claim about past events. The practice of history is not like the practice of the so-­called hard sciences; the experiment cannot be repeated. But there are nevertheless rules of procedure which correspond to scientific enquiry, namely the method of hypothesis and verification with the aim of getting in the data (in the historian’s case the source material of whatever kind), doing so with appropriate simplicity or elegance, and shedding light on other areas.17 History is, in other words, a form of knowledge, not merely of opinion.18 Disputes continue both at the level of method and at the level of specific application to Jesus, as they would to the detailed interpretation of any figure of the past; some theologians may well worry about whether this leaves their Christology, and with it their whole 15. Cf. the discussion in Wright, The Paul Debate (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015), 100–7. 16. For further reflections on an epistemology of love, see Wright, The Challenge of Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1999), 194–96. 17. See NTPG, 81–120. 18. Still helpful on this is Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM, 1979), 87–92 (see my remarks in the introduction to the second edition [San Jose: Pickwick, 2002]).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 107

3/13/18 1:14 PM

108  N. T. Wright

construction of the faith, and in our present case their whole view of creation and new creation, without proper anchorage. It is incumbent on those who study Jesus as Christian historians both to present the history as what it is, a publicly available argument and narrative, and to insist that, despite the questions which attend all historical accounts, this is more than sufficient for Christian faith.19 One could say much more here, but that is for another occasion. I conclude with the following reflection. Both Jesus and the first Christians used Psalm 8 as one of their key texts. The psalmist praises God for his wonderful name in all the world; then, looking at the moon and the stars, doesn’t ask “so who is God?” but instead “so what is a ‘human being,’ what is ‘man,’ or the ‘son of man’?” That is the challenge and the clue. The answer, reflecting Genesis, is that God has made humans in his image, a little lower than the angels, and has crowned them with glory and honour, putting all things under their feet. The gospels and Paul link this with Psalms 2 and 110, and particularly with Daniel 7, and insist that this has come true in a new way in Jesus, in his humiliation and exaltation. In other words, if you want to know the meaning of creation, look at humans, but if you want to know the meaning of being human, look at Jesus. From Genesis 1 onwards, the story of humans is told as the focal point of the story of creation, just as from Genesis 12 onwards the story of Israel is told as the focal point of the story of humans; then, in the Gospels, the story of Jesus is told as the focal point of the story of Israel, and then also of humanity and therefore also of creation. In other words, we learn about creation by reflecting on the claim that God made humans to stand at the metaphysical bridge, the dangerous interface between heaven and earth, and we learn what that human role itself meant when we reflect on Jesus himself, what he was, what he did, and what he accomplished. When we look at new creation, we look back and reflect on the meaning of creation itself. When the New Testament says that “all things were made through him,” we don’t start with a view of “how God made the world” and insert Jesus into that. We start with Jesus himself, as I have tried to do in this essay, and we therefore reflect on creation itself not as a mechanistic or rationalistic event, process, or “fact,” and not as the blind operation of impersonal forces, but as the wise, generous outpouring of the 19. My own major attempt in this direction is Jesus and the Victory of God (see n7 above).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 108

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ and the Cosmos  109

same creative love that we see throughout Jesus’s kingdom-­work, and supremely on the cross. This, I think, is part of what Paul meant when he wrote, “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-­born of all creation.” This is why historical-­Jesus work is so difficult but also so necessary. It is necessary for understanding Christian origins, of course, but necessary too if we are to understand creation and new creation and indeed our own place and vocation within that narrative. There is more to the theme of “Christ and the Cosmos” than normally meets the eye.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 109

3/13/18 1:14 PM

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 110

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter SIX

Gospel Narratives and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory R IC H A R D BAUC K H A M

I

n Jesus and the Eyewitnesses,1 I argued, controversially, that the Gospel narratives are based quite closely on the testimony of eyewitnesses of the events. Since this naturally raises the question of the reliability of eyewitness testimony, I devoted a chapter to the psychology of eyewitness testimony, based on the findings of research in cognitive psychology.2 It was the first published study of this field of research in relation to the Gospels. I have subsequently updated my reading in the field, and the present essay aims to present what we know from cognitive psychology about eyewitness testimony, with special reference to the Gospels. The relevance of this field of scientific research to the Gospels does not depend on my own view of the Gospels. If the Gospels contain any material of historical value, the value depends ultimately on the accounts of eyewitnesses, even if the traditions subsequently passed through many ears and mouths before they reached the writers of the Gospels.

An Early Memory Let me introduce you to thinking about memory by sharing my own memory of an event that occurred more than sixty-­f ive years ago, when I was three or 1. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1st ed. 2006; 2nd ed. 2017). 2. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, ch. 13. See also Bauckham, “The General and the Particular in Memory: A Critique of Dale Allison’s Approach to the Historical Jesus,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 14 (2016): 28–51.

111

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 111

3/13/18 1:14 PM

112  Richard Bauckham

four (I cannot be sure which).3 Some background information may be necessary. In those days people celebrated Guy Fawkes Night on the 5th of November by making their own effigy of Guy Fawkes, known as a “Guy,” and burning it on a bonfire. In the days preceding that night, children would often take their Guy, a roughly life-­size figure made of old clothes, around the streets, sometimes wheeling it on a small cart or pushchair. They would ask passersby for “a penny for the Guy.” In the year in question, I think that probably I had become aware of this practice for the first time. This is what I remember. I was walking through the park with my mother. We came to a point where the path divided, forming two semi-­circles around a circular flowerbed and reconnecting on the other side. The flowerbed blocked my view of anything beyond it. I was running ahead of my mother and, turning the bend, saw ahead of me someone coming towards me wheeling a Guy. I ran back to my mother, shouting, “Mummy, I’ve seen another Guy!” It turned out the “Guy” was actually an elderly man in a wheelchair. I remember my mother had to apologise for my mistake. That account contains everything I remember about the event. I guess that soon after the event I could remember other details, but I am sure I forgot such details long ago. Quite possibly the account I have just given is all that was lodged in my long-­term memory not long after the event. What is significant is that the details I remember are the essential details that make up a coherent little story. They comprise the “gist” or basic outline of what happened. If any of these details were omitted, there would not be much of a story left and little reason for me to remember it. Like this example, a great many of our memories are stories. We have already given them a narrative form when they are encoded in our memories. We may or may not have vivid memories of details that are not essential to the story. If we tell the story to others, we may include more or less unessential details, and such details may vary. But generally the “gist” remains the stable core of the memory because it is why we remember the story at all. I recall the event clearly. In my memory it has a quite precise outline. But the memory is not vivid, doubtless because of the passage of time. Research shows that the vividness of autobiographical memories declines over time.4 But I think it important to distinguish vividness from clarity. What I actually 3. Researchers say that earliest memories generally date from between the ages of two and five. 4. Gillian Cohen, Memory in the Real World, 2nd ed. (Hove, UK: Psychology, 1996), 159.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 112

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Gospel Narratives and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory  113

remember, the “gist,” is not vague in my mind. Moreover, I remember it from a participatory perspective. In my memory I am running, seeing, shouting. I can also switch to an observer’s perspective, but I am conscious of this as a secondary adaptation of the memory. It is apparently common to be able to shift perspective in that way. Why can I remember this event and few others from that period of my life? I cannot remember my first day at nursery school, which surely must have been important to me at the time. The memory carries no particular emotion with it, but I strongly suspect that at the time I felt embarrassment (even then I must have realised that mistaking an elderly man for a “Guy” was insulting) and turned it over in my mind for that reason. Eventually, I came to recall this event with some amusement, but I doubt that was the case for quite a long time. I have hardly ever recounted the story to anyone else but have recalled it to myself sometimes over the course of my life, evidently often enough to retain it. An aspect of the event that probably accounts for my retention of the memory over so long a period is its distinctiveness. As I recall it now, it may seem trivial but it is utterly unique. I suppose I must have walked through the park with my mother on many occasions, but I have no memory of that. I don’t even recall it as something we used to do, and I have no memory of any other specific occasion. This event was memorable because of its exceptionality. It is theoretically possible that the event never happened and that my memory of it is a “false memory.” It seems extremely unlikely that I invented the story. It is of the “you couldn’t make it up” kind. Possibly I heard it as a story about someone else and appropriated it as though it were my own experience. This can happen. Such false memories can “feel” like personally experienced events. But is that likely in this case? Even after reading about how false memories can arise,5 I confidently judge there is a very high probability that this is a veridical memory. The burden of proof would lie with anyone who wished to doubt it.

Types of Memory I have discussed that example in order to introduce us to thinking about memory and the kinds of questions we can ask about the reliability of memories. It is an example of what I shall call “personal event memories.” 5. On false memories of early childhood, see Julia Shaw, The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory (London: Random House, 2016), ch. 1.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 113

3/13/18 1:14 PM

114  Richard Bauckham

Cognitive psychology generally accepts three distinct types of memory. Procedural memory refers to learned skills and habits. We use procedural memory if we ride a bike or use a computer. This type of memory need not concern us in this essay. Semantic memory is memory for concepts and information. Episodic memory is memory for experienced events. If I read or hear about an event and then remember the account of it, that is semantic memory. But if I witness something happening and then recall it, that is episodic memory. There may be other kinds of episodic memory, but the kind that concerns us here—­and the kind of episodic memory people usually think of—­is called a variety of names, including “autobiographical memory” or “recollective memory” or “personal event memory.” The term “autobiographical memory” can have additional connotations that are not essential to this type of memory (such as contributing to the rememberer’s construction of their life history). So, although it is common, I shall not use it. The term “personal event memory” seems the best for conveying the specific character of this kind of memory. Personal event memories are what the rest of this essay will be about. Though I did not use this term when I wrote the chapter on the psychology of memory in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, they are the sort of memories I discussed there. A personal event memory is a memory of a specific event in a person’s past understood to have happened at a specific time and place (even if the memory is vague about these) that was personally experienced and is remembered as personally experienced. In other words, it embodies a subjective perspective on the past. One remembers being there, participating or observing, seeing and hearing, thinking and feeling. There may be a vivid sense of reliving the experience, though this need not be the case and probably diminishes over time. But always the memory is of something experienced by me. It is possible for such memories to be inaccurate or even completely false (in the sense that I did not actually experience the event at all), but false memories of this type embody a subjective perspective on the past just as genuine memories of this type do. A personal event memory is memory of a specific event in a person’s past. I should add that we also have generic event memories. For a particular event to stick in the memory as a memory of that unique event, it needs to have remembered features that are distinctive enough to distinguish it from similar events (if there are such). From time to time I travel by train from Cambridge to London. As I write this I can remember, as a specific event, the journey I made

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 114

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Gospel Narratives and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory  115

from Cambridge to London last week. But I can also recognize that there was little about it that I am likely to remember as distinctive. My memory of it will merge with memories of other such journeys. As a series, these experiences have enough to distinguish them from, say, journeys from Cambridge to Scotland, which I also make from time to time, and so they form a generic memory of something I have done repeatedly over a certain period of my life. As a category of episodic memory, these generic memories have been appropriately called repisodic memories.6 If we are interested in traditions about Jesus in the Gospels as remembered initially by eyewitnesses, then both semantic and episodic memory are relevant. Most sayings of Jesus must have been remembered as semantic memories. Exceptions will be those that belong intrinsically to a specific narrative, as in so-­called “pronouncement stories,” unless the story has been created artificially as a setting for the saying. But mostly those who first passed on the sayings of Jesus did not recall a specific occasion when Jesus said them. (In fact, it is likely that the carefully crafted sayings of Jesus that we have in the Gospels were not improvised on one occasion but used frequently in Jesus’s teaching ministry.) So the study of semantic memory is relevant to the tradition of the sayings of Jesus. The study of the sayings of Jesus from this point of view would also need to pay attention to mnemonics and memorization practices. In this essay I shall focus on Gospel narratives rather than sayings of Jesus. On the face of it, most of these were originally personal event memories of specific events at which the eyewitnesses were present, though there are also some generic event memories in the Gospels (often referred to in the scholarship as summaries).

Personal Event Memories as Reconstructions A personal event memory is nothing like a videotape of the event. Even the process of encoding the memory as the event is experienced is selective and interpretative. Much of what we perceive is remembered only very briefly. The brain stores long-­term what we experience as memorable. (It has been said that forgetting is at least as important as remembering. If we remembered everything, we would be overwhelmed with data we could never do anything 6. Ulric Neisser, “John Dean’s Memory: A Case Study,” Cognition 9 (1981): 1–22, quote from 19–20.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 115

3/13/18 1:14 PM

116  Richard Bauckham

with.) The brain apparently stores the various aspects of a memory in different memory systems, and these must be brought together again in retrieval. Retrieval also draws on schemas (patterns of what usually happens in such cases, and narrative patterns we use to structure such memories). Presumably there must be some kind of event model in the brain that enables it to retrieve the required elements of that specific memory. So memories are not copies of what we perceived at the time; they are reconstructions. It must be stressed that this does not make memory generally unreliable. Reconstruction is emphatically not the same thing as invention. The brain performs the task of reconstruction astonishingly well.7 After all, memory evolved to serve purposes in human life for which it needs to be generally accurate. It is a functional system that we would not have if it did not work for most purposes. But it does allow the possibility for mistakes of the kind we know we sometimes make. An event can be placed in the wrong time and place. Bits of one memory can get confused with another. Information from semantic memory can be misapplied to a specific event. Moreover, the brain tends to fill in gaps, often intelligently but not always accurately. Reconstruction accounts for the errors that can occur. But it also ensures that most of time memory is sufficiently accurate for most of the purposes of ordinary life. The phenomenal experience of personal event memories (that it feels like being there) is not infallible. We may come to think we were present at an event we only heard about. We may acquire completely false memories. But these are relatively rare aberrations (to which I shall return). David Pillemer says: [It] is safe to say that memory researchers do approach a consensus on some issues. There is widespread agreement that memory is an active, reconstructive process rather than a passive, reproductive process. In the process of constructing a memory narrative, errors can occur. At the same time, memory, for the most part, does its job; that is, memory descriptions usually are consistent with the general form and content of past experiences, even if particular details are lost, added, or distorted in the act of remembering. 7. For a very impressive example, see Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 321–23. There I did not make it sufficiently clear that the man who reported the event seventy-three years later had moved away from the area shortly after it and never saw the newspaper reports.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 116

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Gospel Narratives and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory  117

He then quotes a research paper from 1995 as providing an apt summary: Most memory research . . . is really about the distortion of details, not central events. A person hit by a car may misremember its color, or the day of the week, but will rarely confuse being hit by a car with, say, falling down a mountain.8

The Reliability of Personal Event Memories Too often in popular literature we find general discussions of whether memory is reliable or not. If we are to get beyond such facile observations as “memory often leads us astray,”9 we need to distinguish between types of memory as I have been doing. We also need to discriminate about what kinds of things we remember well or badly and under what conditions we remember them so. There is plenty of discussion of these matters in the psychological literature. One of the sources of a widespread impression that memory is pervasively unreliable is Daniel Schacter’s engaging book How the Mind Forgets and Remembers: The Seven Sins of Memory.10 But Schacter himself identified a critical question for the psychological study of memory: Under what conditions is memory largely accurate and under what conditions is distortion most likely to occur? . . . It is unlikely that a memory system that consistently produced seriously distorted outputs would possess the adaptive characteristics necessary to be preserved by natural selection. Therefore, the key issue is not whether memory is “mostly accurate” or “mostly distorted”; rather, the challenge is to specify the conditions under which accuracy and distortion are most likely to be observed.11 8. David B. Pillemer, Momentous Events, Vivid Memories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 55. 9. Dale C. Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (London: SPCK, 2010), 2. 10. Schacter, How the Mind Forgets and Remembers: The Seven Sins of Memory (London: Souvenir, 2001). The US edition has the title The Seven Sins of Memory. 11. Daniel L. Schacter, “Memory Distortion: History and Current Status,” in Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel L. Schacter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1–43, here 25. Cf. also Eugene Winograd, “The Authenticity and Utility of Memories,” in The Remembering Self, ed. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush, Emory Symposia in Cognition 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 243–51, quote from 250.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 117

3/13/18 1:14 PM

118  Richard Bauckham

In my study of the psychology of memory in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, I illustrate both the strengths and the failings of memory and attempt a way forward beyond one-­sided generalizations. I certainly do not argue for the reliability of all eyewitness memory, as some people (but not attentive readers of the book) seem to think I do. Rather, from the literature on personal event memories, I distill an account of what sort of events are remembered well, what aspects of those events are likely to be remembered, and what conditions help to ensure accurate and stable preservation of memories.12 Here is a very brief summary of the conclusions I reached. First, what would events have to be like to be remembered well? Unique and unusual events are remembered better than others; consequential or salient events are remembered better than less significant ones; events in which the eyewitness is emotionally involved are remembered better than others.13 These criteria indicate some of the reasons why eyewitness testimony in court can be seriously unreliable, because witnesses are asked to remember things that did not concern them at the time. But, conversely, by these same criteria the events of the story of Jesus score well as events their participant eyewitnesses would likely remember well. Second, what aspects of events are remembered well? Recollected events seldom include dates. The gist is often accurately recalled while unessential details are not and may well vary when the memory is rehearsed on different occasions.14 Again these criteria throw some doubt on testimony in court, where it is often peripheral details of an event that witnesses must recall. But in the Gospels, where variation in details can easily be observed, it is the generally stable core narrative that counts, and the variations of detail need not discredit it. That the gist of an event, as opposed to unessential details, is remembered does not mean that generalities are remembered better than particulars. The gist usually consists of certain details that comprise the essential outline, giving the story its point. Peripheral details vary; core details compose the gist. Third, the preservation of memories is assisted greatly by frequent rehearsal, 12. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 330–35. 13. These characteristics of the kind of events that are well recalled are widely evidenced: see, e.g., the studies cited in William F. Brewer, “What is Autobiographical Memory?,” in Autobiographical Memory, ed. David C. Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 25–47, quote from 44; Gillian Cohen, Memory in the Real World, 2nd ed. (Hove: Psychology, 1996), 159–60. The effect of emotion on memory has been extensively debated. 14. For references to the literature, see Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 333–34.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 118

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Gospel Narratives and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory  119

which provides stability. When memories are told, they often quickly acquire a standard narrative form, which they then retain. Memories can, of course, fade over time. But frequent rehearsal of memories (to oneself or to others) is a very strong counterweight to transience. This is one of the most assured results of psychological research on memory,15 and it has obvious relevance to Gospel traditions. Though I formulated my account of these criteria in 2005, updating my knowledge of the relevant literature in cognitive psychology has given me no reason to revise them. It is worth noticing that these criteria for good remembering, the results of research, correlate well with what is generally considered “memorable.” David Pillemer comments that “research supports a conclusion that fits nicely with commonly held conceptions of human memory: memories of personal life episodes are generally true to the original experience, although specific details may be omitted or misremembered and substantial distortions do occasionally occur.”16 At one point, however, the results of the research may seem counterintuitive: the vividness of memories is a poor indicator of reliability.17

Memories of Exceptional or Momentous Events The kinds of memories that score very well according to my criteria well-­ remembering personally experienced events have actually come to the fore in some recent psychological studies, notably in very different books by David Pillemer18 and Stephen Schmidt,19 who respectively call them momentous or exceptional events. These memories are of events that (from the point of view of the person remembering) were unique or especially distinctive, particularly significant for that person, and experienced as deeply affecting emotionally. All three characteristics need not be present, but a fourth element, frequent rehearsal of the memory, is probably essential. These factors are relative, of course, and so this category of memory does not have hard 15. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 334. 16. Pillemer, Momentous Events, 59. 17. A special kind of vivid memories are so-called “flashbulb memories,” in which people remember their circumstances when they first learned of an important public event (such as 9/11). It has been shown that such memories can be false. But this category of memory is a specifically modern phenomenon, dependent on the operation of modern media such as radio and television. 18. Pillemer, Momentous Events. 19. Stephen R. Schmidt, Extraordinary Memories for Exceptional Events (New York: Psychology, 2012).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 119

3/13/18 1:14 PM

120  Richard Bauckham

boundaries. Remembered events may be more or less exceptional or more or less momentous. But as roughly defined categories, they are especially useful in thinking about Gospel narratives. Many of these have strongly distinctive profiles, highlighting not generalities about Jesus but the kind of unusual features that distinguish specific events. Together with their obvious significance for people who witnessed them, these events are actually of a kind that is now recognized in cognitive psychology as producing strong and influential memories.

Why Do Other New Testament Scholars Conclude That Eyewitness Memory Is Highly Unreliable? Few New Testament scholars have yet taken serious account of research on memory in cognitive psychology. But among those who have, Dale Allison begins his discussion of memories of Jesus in the Gospels thus: “The frailty of human memory should distress all who quest for the so-­called historical Jesus.” Even if we had dependable access to eyewitness testimony, which he does not believe we do, we still ought to be distressed, for observers “habitually misperceive, and they unavoidably misremember.”20 This is a hugely exaggerated claim, as well as unhelpfully undiscriminating. Why have Allison and others reached such a judgment?21 The idea that research in cognitive psychology has shown “personal event memories” to be comprehensively unreliable may stem from the following factors: First, there is a failure to distinguish between types of memory. Unfortunately, Daniel Schacter’s popular discussion of the failings of memory—­what he calls the seven sins of memory—­omits to distinguish types of memory, and one could gain the impression that the seven sins all infect all kinds of memories. This gives a cumulative impression that is very misleading. I guess that for many readers who already knew little of the subject, learning that there are so many ways that memory can fail has created a general impression of frequent and pervasive failure. (Of Schacter’s seven, only two—­suggestibility and bias—­have much relevance to eyewitness 20. Allison, Constructing Jesus, 1. 21. See also Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (New York: HarperCollins, 2016) chs. 4 and 5. Ehrman is more careful than Allison to discriminate between types of memory, though he dwells on “flashbulb” memories (140–42), which are in fact of no relevance to the kinds of memories that lie behind the Gospels.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 120

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Gospel Narratives and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory  121

memories of Jesus.) Dale Allison, who from his wider reading in the literature formulated his own list of nine sins of memory, similarly fails to distinguish types of memory. A more recent popular account by a cognitive psychologist, Julia Shaw’s The Memory Illusion, also takes its readers through a series of examples of the way different kinds of memory can go seriously wrong, leaving a misleading cumulative impression.22 In dealing with eyewitness testimony, there is a particular problem in the failure to recognize that eyewitness testimony in police investigations and in courts of law constitutes a very special category. The serious failings of memory in this kind of context have featured prominently in the psychological literature. For obvious reasons, this sort of eyewitness testimony has attracted a lot of attention and study, and many of the conclusions are genuinely disturbing regarding the safety of verdicts heavily based on such evidence. But there are very good reasons why we should not generalize from the unreliability of memory in this sort of context to judgments about the reliability of the sort of personal event memories I have discussed and which are the sort of memories we must postulate for Gospel narratives if they have historical bases. Unfortunately, writers like Judith Redman,23 Dale Allison, and even Robert McIver24 have done precisely that, despite the fact that in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses I carefully pointed out the special problems that attend eyewitness testimony in legal contexts. I will explain these problems more fully in the next section. Second, the scientific literature focuses on the failures and distortions of memory rather than its strengths and accuracy. The research is interested in why memory goes wrong when it does go wrong. This is because failures of memory are particularly revealing with regard to questions about how memory works, which are the main interest of most of the researchers. Most of the research, we should realise, consists of experiments in laboratory conditions (typically involving lists of words, nonsense syllables, pictures, and videos), which are set up to illustrate both successes and failures of memory and to discover how precisely memory fails when it does. If there are too few failures to provide the data required, the difficulty of the memory tests is increased. 22. Shaw, The Memory Illusion, ch. 1. 23. Judith C. S. Redman, “How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research,” Journal of Biblical Literature 129 (2010): 177–97. 24. Robert K. McIver, Memory, Jesus and the Synoptic Gospels, SBL Resources for Biblical Studies 59 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), ch. 1.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 121

3/13/18 1:14 PM

122  Richard Bauckham

Such experiments bear no statistical relationship to the frequency of memory errors in real life situations. It is also worth noting that most experimentation of this kind studies retention of memories only over very short periods. A month is a long time in cognitive psychology. But most of what we initially encode from events we forget very quickly. What survives into long-­term memory has a much better chance of survival over many years, but this is largely beyond the reach of experimental psychology. In fact, many of the psychologists who write about this subject for a general audience are at pains to counteract the possible impression that memory is generally unreliable and to point out that most of the time memory is reliable, even remarkably accurate. For example, Gillian Cohen says, “In daily life, memory successes are the norm and memory failures are the exception. . . . Considering how grossly it is overloaded, memory in the real world proves remarkably efficient and resilient.”25 Daniel Schacter himself, one of the experts on memory distortion, says that “memory operates with a high degree of accuracy across many conditions and circumstances,”26 and “it is important not to lose sight of the fact that memory is often accurate.”27 Hoffmann and Hoffmann state, “Under the vast majority of circumstances, the probability exists that the information provided by memory, like that provided by most perceptions, is trustworthy.”28 David Pillemer, I have already quoted to the same effect. Third, the sin of memory that Schacter calls suggestibility provides an example of the way the importance of attested memory distortions can be exaggerated. Our memories can incorporate, without our realising it, information provided by others. “Suggested memories can seem as real as genuine ones.”29 There are well-­known cases of psychological experiments in which completely false memories of childhood incidents are planted in people’s memories so that they recollect them just like other childhood memories. It is striking that such examples seem all to be cases of adult memories of childhood.30 Then there are so-­called recovered memories, usually recovered during psychotherapy, in 25. Cohen, Memory, 222. 26. Schacter, How the Mind Forgets, 6. 27. Schacter, How the Mind Forgets, 4. 28. Alice M. Hoffman and Howard S. Hoffman, “Memory Theory: Personal and Social,” in Handbook of Oral History, ed. Thomas L. Charlton, Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless (Lanham: AltaMira, 2006), 275–96, quote from 282. 29. Schacter, How the Mind Forgets, 114. 30. E.g., Shaw, The Memory Illusion, 18–22; Brewer, “What is Autobiographical Memory?,” 43–44.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 122

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Gospel Narratives and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory  123

which people remember events, most often sexual abuse during childhood, of which previously they had had no conscious knowledge. The topic is highly controversial. It looks as though many of these are false memories, but the whole phenomenon seems to depend on the specifically twentieth-­century notion of “repressed” memories that can be recovered through psychotherapy or hypnosis and thus belongs to a peculiarly modern Western cultural context. It is curious that, like the implanting of false memories in psychological experiments, they also concern childhood. Cases of false memories of adult experiences are reported in cases of mental disorder such as schizophrenia. People do have recollections of events they never experienced that are indistinguishable from genuine recollections, but, as far as my limited reading suggests, this seems to be an exceptional phenomenon.

Eyewitness Memory in Legal Contexts I have suggested that a general impression of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony has resulted from failure to recognize that special factors are involved in legal contexts. Since so much research has focused on this particular category of eyewitness testimony, it will be useful to discuss this further. Are eyewitnesses reliable when they are interviewed by police officers, when they are asked to identify persons in identification parades or photos, and when they give evidence in court? I think it is fair to say that most psychologists who have conducted research intended to answer these questions have concluded that these methods of eliciting evidence from eyewitnesses of crimes are not very reliable. Some of the research relates to the way in which eyewitnesses are questioned and the way in which, for example, lineups including the suspect are managed. As a result, psychologists have offered valuable advice for improving procedures. But others suggest that, even with the most careful procedures, eyewitness testimony remains disturbingly untrustworthy. Why is this? First, there are problems about what the witness is likely to have observed. In many cases, what the eyewitness is asked to remember are aspects of the event that were insignificant at the time and insignificant to the observer. Their interest lay elsewhere. Sometimes the nature of the event may inhibit eyewitness perception. The situation may be very fast-­moving, and the eyewitness might only catch passing glimpses of those involved. The eyewitness

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 123

3/13/18 1:14 PM

124  Richard Bauckham

may be observing from a distance and in bad light. There is a frequently noticed phenomenon that the eyewitness to a crime fixates on the weapon. In a situation of danger and stress, attention naturally focuses on the source of danger so that details get little attention. All this means that many details the police and the court may wish to know were never encoded in the eyewitness’s memory and therefore cannot be dredged up by any effort of questioning and memory. Secondly, in the process of retrieving memories there is often a tendency for witnesses unconsciously to fill in gaps in their memories, but this tendency is likely to be much greater in the legal context than in many others. In interviews and in court, witnesses are less likely than in many other situations to say simply, “I don’t know,” or “I didn’t notice.” They guess, they infer, they elaborate, they are influenced by the testimony of other witnesses, and they feel the pressure of questioning. In the situation of an identification parade, where they know that one of the people shown to them is someone the police have good reason to suspect, an eyewitness may be inclined to pick out someone who looks somewhat familiar. They adjust their memory to fit the available suspects. They may even pick someone else they saw at the scene, someone who was not the criminal. It follows that processes of interview or identification can easily distort the eyewitness’s memory. Questions may convey misleading information that the eyewitness, in a susceptible condition, incorporates into their memory. When others seem constantly to doubt something the eyewitness remembers, they may lose confidence in it themselves. The contexts include police officers determined to get a result. It would be difficult to deny that these factors making for untrustworthy testimony in legal contexts are real and have an effect. They lie behind some notorious cases of mistaken verdicts. But when psychologists judge the rate of significant errors in eyewitness testimony to be very high, they are largely dependent on experiments in a laboratory context. Critics suggest that the real-­life experience of witnessing a crime cannot be convincingly paralleled by the sort of experiments psychologists devise for testing subjects in controlled conditions. On the other hand, it is difficult to apply independent tests in the case of real crimes. Psychologists cannot intervene in an ongoing legal process. But one case study of a real crime and its witnesses concluded that the accuracy of the eyewitnesses was much greater in this case than the laboratory

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 124

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Gospel Narratives and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory  125

studies would lead one to expect.31 At this event on a busy main road that involved a gun fight, there were many witnesses with a good view and a great deal of forensic evidence, leaving no doubt as to what actually happened. Since the criminal died at the scene, there was no need for identification by the witnesses. Thirteen of the witnesses, among those who had been interviewed by the police, were interviewed again by the researchers four to five months later. The event was particularly striking and dramatic, and it gripped the attention of the witnesses. Some of them also got involved in dealing with the situation after the shootings. These factors may have contributed to the accuracy of their testimony. In any case, the testimonies were very accurate. Moreover, there was little change in the amount or the accuracy of recall over five months. The researchers made deliberate attempts to mislead the witnesses with biased questions but were unsuccessful. Finally, regarding the inaccuracies that were present in the witnesses’ accounts, the researchers observed that “the incorrect recall of a detail such as the date of the event or the colour of clothing is unrelated to the accuracy of the rest of the witness’s account.”32 A witness should not be judged generally unreliable on account of some inaccuracies of detail. It should be stressed, however, that there was a generally accurate recall of many of the incidental details. Among the features that distinguish this study from the laboratory experiments relating to eyewitness testimony are the fact that the event was an obviously life-­and-­death matter, occurring close to the witnesses, and that some of the witnesses participated, actively as well as emotionally, in the event. They were interested and involved. These features distinguish this case from many court cases and bring it closer to those “personal event memories” where significance and emotional affect are key factors contributing to good remembering (as I have observed above). There is no need here to reach a general conclusion about the reliability of eyewitness testimony in legal contexts. For our purposes, the important conclusion is that for many reasons this category of eyewitness testimony does not provide useful analogies for the kind of testimony on which the Gospel narratives presumably depend. 31. John C. Yuille and Judith L. Cutshall, “A Case Study of Eyewitness Memory of a Crime,” Journal of Applied Psychology 71 (1986): 291–301. 32. Yuille and Cutshall, “A Case Study,” 300.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 125

3/13/18 1:14 PM

126  Richard Bauckham

Conclusion Contemporary Western culture is an unstable mixture of modern and postmodern currents. With regard to history and memory, there is, on the one hand, a naively positivistic attitude to truth in history. Many popular books and television programmes claim to uncover the “real facts” behind accepted accounts of Christian origins or other well-­k nown events of the past. On the other hand, there is a postmodern distrust of memory’s ability to recall what really happened, which chimes with the postmodern emphasis on the pervasive malleability of “truth.” Julia Shaw ends her recent book—­a popular account of research in the psychology of memory—­by explaining why we should be pleased to know that our memories are “highly questionable.” For a start, It is distressing to think that all our memories are tainted in minor or even major ways. But this introduces a flexible creativity into reality. Memory is personal and subjective anyway, so when we are in the surprisingly common situation of being faced with multiple interpretations or versions of what happened and have no independent evidence to help us to know what actually happened, we can pick the one we like best. We all prefer our versions of the truth, but when we understand memory processes we can actively weave the life we want in ways that maximise our happiness and the happiness of those around us.33

She goes on to make some more responsible remarks about the value of understanding how memory can fail but ends in this way: Finally, understanding all the shortcomings that our memory system presents allows us to adhere to a whole new ethos. Our past is a fictional representation, and the only thing we can be even somewhat sure of is what is happening now. It encourages us to live in the moment and not to place too much importance on our past. It forces us to accept that the best time of our lives, and our memory, is right now.34 33. Shaw, The Memory Illusion, 253. 34. Shaw, The Memory Illusion, 255.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 126

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Gospel Narratives and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory  127

One wonders how this advice would go down with survivors of the Holocaust or survivors of sexual abuse. Shaw evinces an understandable tendency to exaggerate the significance of her own research, a tendency that is especially understandable in a work written not for her scientific peers but to appeal to a wide readership. We can find more sober conclusions about the general reliability of memory in other psychologists, such as I have quoted above. What they and she have shown is that memory is not infallible (did anyone ever think it was?) and, more important, the sorts of distortions that can happen to different types of memory in various circumstances. The conclusions about how memory goes wrong when it does can actually assure us that most of the time it does a good job. Both the practice of everyday life and the practice of history depend upon the general reliability of memory. In neither case do intelligent people trust memory uncritically, and the findings of the cognitive psychology of memory can improve our alertness to possible failings of memory in both cases. For example, realising that the unessential details of a narrative tend to be remembered less accurately than the basic outline can prevent us from putting too much reliance on the former, while also realising that the general reliability of a memory should not be impugned simply because unessential details turn out to be wrong. It is also important to realise that personal event memories are always interpretative to some degree. They embody the subjective perspective from which all of us necessarily view the world. One response to realising this could be, as Julia Shaw suggests, to take it as a licence to weave whatever fictional version of the past suits us. But it is odd to find such a conclusion drawn from experimental research that was designed to establish some kind of “truth” about how well we remember. (So could it be the case that Shaw’s book attempts no more than a fictional version of her research, the version she prefers for the postmodern reasons she explains at the end?) A different way of responding to the necessarily interpretative character of personal event memories would be to recognize that in good remembering we grasp and retain the truth of what happened to us through interpretation. We can never know the truth of everything that happened in the event (which would require the perspective of God), but we can have reliable memories of what happened to us.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 127

3/13/18 1:14 PM

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 128

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter SEVEN

In Him and Through Him from the Foundation of the World Adoption and Christocentric Anthropology ERIN M. HEIM

T

. F. Torrance argued that the starting point for Christology is “the mysterious duality in unity of Jesus Christ, God without reserve, man without reserve, the eternal truth in time, the word of God made flesh.”1 Correlated with this, it is impossible to arrive at a proper understanding of humanity without a proper grounding in Christology. Yet discussions of adoption rarely venture outside of soteriology. “Adoption” is not often paired with “Christology,” let alone “Christocentric anthropology.” I believe this is shortsighted and unnecessarily limits the implications of the adoption metaphors for other areas of theology. Indeed, it is difficult to give a soteriological account of adoption without first grounding that account in the christological and anthropological implications of the adoption metaphors. In this short essay, my aim is to show what the Pauline adoption metaphors contribute to Christology, and in turn what they contribute to a Christocentric anthropology. When considered together, the adoption metaphors in the New Testament point to Christ as the locus of adoption, and present adoption as the telos of human existence. The locus of adoption, which is most clearly seen in Ephesians 1:5, draws into view the immanent relations of grace between the Father, Son, and Spirit, 1. T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 1.

129

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 129

3/13/18 1:14 PM

130  Erin M. Heim

the radical distinction between the divine persons and our personhood, and the freedom of God in Christ, who moves toward humanity in divine love and generosity. Adoption as the telos of human existence, seen most clearly in Romans 8:23, grounds the significance of humanity in the God who acted for us in creation and carries us toward fullness and restoration in adoption. Moreover, as I will show below, these adoption metaphors communicate that the embodied particularity of persons (e.g., gender, race, class, historical location) are not incidental to the telos of humanity, since “adoption” implies a continuity of personal identity and yet a change in familial relation and status. Thus, these particularities are carried through to the final restoration where they are dignified and sanctified. I also must acknowledge at the outset that I write this essay as a biblical scholar who is attempting to cross over Lessing’s ditch, which is to say that I am putting forth an account of adoption and Christocentric anthropology that is attempting to hold the historical particularities of the metaphors in the biblical texts together with the affirmation that these historical particularities reveal who God is eternally in himself.2 This is a humbling task for which I am ill-­equipped, but perhaps the questions I raise here will prompt others to pursue these matters further. The aims of this short essay are threefold: first, to argue that an account of adoption and Christocentric anthropology must be generated from a close reading of these metaphors as they stand in the biblical texts and as they would have been understood in their historical contexts; second, to argue that the adoption metaphors communicate that in the act of adoption God reveals who he is in himself (locus); and third, to demonstrate that the adoption metaphors entail an affirmation of the ongoing particularity of individuals in the redemption of their bodies and their conformation to the imago Christi (telos).

The Pauline Adoption Metaphors Only a handful of passages in the New Testament use the language of adoption (Rom 8:15–23, 9:4; Gal 4:5; Eph 1:5),3 but within these few passages there is a 2. See also Murray Rae, “Theological Interpretation and Historical Criticism,” in A Manifesto for Theological Interpretation, ed. Craig Bartholomew and Heath Thomas (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 94–109. 3. Though some would argue that the “concept” of adoption is present even where the vocabulary of adoption is absent, I will restrict my discussion to those passages where the specific vocabulary of adoption is used.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 130

3/13/18 1:14 PM

In Him and Through Him from the Foundation of the World  131

rather remarkable diversity of referents. In Romans 8:15, adoption (huiothesia) describes the activity of the Spirit who enables those who live by the Spirit to cry out, “Abba, Father.” A few verses later, adoption is the long-­anticipated culmination of the chorus of groaning from all of creation that longs to see the children of God revealed, joined together with groans from the children themselves, who long for the final redemption of their physical bodies. In Romans 9:4, adoption is listed as one of the historic privileges of ethnic Israel, highlighting both the sovereignty of God, who calls Israel into being,4 and the particularity of God’s action in and through a designated ethnic group. In Galatians, adoption is spoken about as a completed act that occurs simultaneously with the receiving of the Spirit (Gal 4:5). Finally, in Ephesians 1:4–5, adoption is the telos of predestination in Christ; election, which was before the foundation of the world, moves in grace toward “adoption.”5 The adoption metaphors in the New Testament rely on Jewish and Greco-­ Roman cultural understandings of sonship and adoption that would have undoubtedly been familiar to the original audiences of these letters.6 However, some of the most important theological content in these passages is found not in the cultural background of the metaphors but in the incongruities between the customs and practices of adoption and the textual metaphors and cultural assumptions surrounding sonship. In order to see these incongruities clearly, we must briefly examine adoption and sonship in their first-­century Jewish and Roman contexts, which will be the first point of discussion below. After laying the groundwork for understanding the congruous and incongruous elements in these metaphors, we can then examine what these metaphors contribute to our understanding about Christ and his relationship to created human beings. 4. See Beverly Gaventa, “On the Calling into Being of Israel: Romans 9:6–29,” in Between Gospel and Election, ed. Sigurd Grindheim (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 255–69. 5. I acknowledge here that I will freely discuss the adoption metaphor in Ephesians alongside the metaphors in the uncontested Pauline epistles. Because this essay is slightly more geared toward the theological implications of these metaphors, I have adopted a canonical approach. However, I also believe that there is a strong case for Ephesians being an authentic Pauline letter, and there are many similarities between the adoption metaphor in Ephesians and those in the uncontested letters. 6. It must be recognized that huiothesia is a gender-specific term that refers unambiguously to the adoption of a son and that most of the time these passages use the vocabulary of “sonship” rather than “children.” This need not trouble us as long as we recognize that the metaphors are not intending to exclude women from receiving the blessing of adoption. Just as Paul can refer to himself as a woman in labor (Gal 4:19), Paul can use a gendered metaphor to communicate the nature of their status and inheritance to his male and female audience members.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 131

3/13/18 1:14 PM

132  Erin M. Heim

Metaphor and Model: Jewish Sonship and Roman Adoption I have used the term “metaphor” several times in the preceding paragraphs, and it is necessary to clarify and define what I mean by this term before proceeding further. By “metaphor” I mean thinking of one thing (tenor) in terms suggestive of another thing (vehicle), and each adoption metaphor is comprised of both a tenor and a vehicle.7 The adoption metaphors are linked by the common vehicle “adoption” (huiothesia), but the tenor changes in each instance of an adoption metaphor. Thus, metaphorical meaning cannot be transferred between contexts, and a theological synthesis of these metaphors must first take each metaphor on its own terms in each of its occurrences, which is why they will be considered separately throughout the essay.8 It is also necessary to briefly comment on the relationship between a metaphor and the background, or underlying model, of the metaphor. The underlying model of a metaphor is the real-­world object or state of affairs that a metaphor draws upon to frame one thing in terms of another.9 In the case of the adoption metaphors, there are two underlying models that must be considered: the Jewish notion of sonship and the Greco-­Roman practice of adoption. In the Old Testament, sonship is a model most often employed to express Israel’s particular relationship to YHWH (e.g., Exod 4:22; 2 Sam 7:14; Psalm 2:7; Deut 8:5, 14:1; Prov 3:11–12; Isa 43:6–7; Jer 31:9; Hos 2:1 [MT]; Mal 3:17). In most of its occurrences, sonship communicates God’s election of Israel, God’s ongoing care of Israel, and God’s discipline of Israel. Perhaps 7. The discussion that follows in this section is a condensed version of the detailed treatment in Erin Heim, Adoption in Galatians and Romans: Contemporary Metaphor Theories and the Pauline Huiothesia Metaphors (Leiden: Brill, 2017). See also Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985) for a thorough defense of this definition; and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 8. Furthermore, it must be emphatically stated at the outset that metaphors are by no means “ornamental” heuristic devices. Instead, metaphors are powerful tools of communication, capable of conveying information that is not accessible by any other means. Moreover, metaphors do not communicate truth of a lesser order than so-called “literal” statements, and speakers/authors who use metaphors aim at truth. For example, when Jesus utters, “I am the Good Shepherd,” he is speaking truthfully, and he is speaking metaphorically. These two features of a metaphorical utterance are not in competition with one another. Thus the adoption metaphors in the New Testament must be taken as metaphors and also as truly referring to their specific referents. 9. See Heim, Adoption in Galatians and Romans, 40–55; see also Gregory Dawes, The Body in Question: Metaphor and Meaning in the Interpretation of Ephesians 5:21–33, Biblical Interpretation 30 (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 132

3/13/18 1:14 PM

In Him and Through Him from the Foundation of the World  133

most important, sonship frames God’s covenant relationship with Israel in terms of a familial bond to which YHWH is loyal.10 However, the specific vocabulary of “adoption” does not appear in any text in the LXX, nor, as I have argued elsewhere,11 is there any cultural convention within Judaism that parallels the Greco-­Roman practice of adoption. Therefore, what we have in the New Testament adoption metaphors is a recasting of the Jewish sonship tradition that primarily functions to highlight its elective quality. The New Testament uses of huiothesia must also be considered in the context of Greco-­Roman adoption, since these practices form the most immediate parallel for the metaphors in the Pauline texts. In Greek and Roman practices of adoption, the primary motivation for adoption was not the security of a child but the legacy of a father.12 Greek and Roman fathers adopted adult males in order to pass along the family estate and the family cult.13 Ideally, the adopting father chose a son carefully, and likewise the son examined the father to determine whether the offer of adoption was beneficial for him.14 Children were not adopted; their life expectancy was too uncertain to assume such an important role in the familia.15 Moreover, most fathers only adopted a son if they had no biological heir. Conversely, when sons were adopted, they maintained both their biological and adoptive lineage. Adopted sons were considered products of both their biological and adoptive families, though their allegiance was to their adoptive family.16 Thus, adoption was not an erasure of previous identity, but rather it was additive. For example, an inscription from Rhodes (3rd century BCE) reads “Apollodotos, son of Polycrates, son of Sosistratos according to adoption,”17 attesting to both the biological and adoptive families of Apollodotos. 10. See Brendan Byrne, “Sons of God”—“Seed of Abraham”: A Study of the Idea of the Sonship of God of All Christians in Paul against the Jewish Background, Analecta Biblica 83 (Rome: Pontificio Instituto Biblico, 1979); See also Heim, Adoption in Galatians and Romans, 112–47; 251–321. 11. Heim, Adoption in Galatians and Romans, 112–47; 251–321. 12. Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World: Divine Sonship in Its Social and Political Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 13. Robert Brian Lewis, Paul’s “Spirit of Adoption” in Its Roman Imperial Context, Library of New Testament Studies 545 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 75. 14. Seneca advises, “If he wants to go, [the young man] should inquire how many ancestors the old man who seeks him has, what rank they are, what the old man’s wealth is” (Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 1.6.6). 15. Peppard, The Son of God, 60. 16. Gaius records, “Adoptive sons, as long as they remain in adoption, are in the same legal position as natural sons” (Inst. 2.136), and conversely, “so long as they remain in the adoptive familia, they are considered strangers as far as their natural father is concerned” (Inst. 2.137, trans. mine). 17. Erhard Grzybek, “Rhodische Inschriften,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 165 (2008): 68–69.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 133

3/13/18 1:14 PM

134  Erin M. Heim

It is also worth noting that the most prominent adoptions in the first century were those of Roman emperors, whose adoptions were broadcast on imperial coins and through various inscriptions throughout the empire.18 In this way, adoption took on royal overtones. In most imperial successions in the first century, the deceased emperor’s adopted son took over the rule and reign of the empire. Augustus even assumed the title “Divi Filius” to make it perfectly clear that he was the adopted son and heir of Divus Iulius. Although this historical overview might seem rather far afield from a discussion of Christocentric anthropology, it is vital for discerning the elements of congruity and incongruity in the Pauline adoption metaphors, to which we now turn.

Congruity and Incongruity in the Pauline Adoption Metaphors In each instance of an adoption metaphor in the New Testament, there are interesting elements of congruity and incongruity with cultural practices of adoption and with Jewish notions of sonship. Clear elements of congruity include the metaphors’ emphases on status within the familia, on familial relationships, and inheritance. However, numerous elements of incongruity are present in the adoption metaphors, and these incongruities are theologically significant. For example, in Romans 8, Paul seems to zealously guard the title “firstborn,” reserving it for Christ alone. Although those who live by the Spirit have received the Spirit of adoption, Christ is “firstborn” among the many adopted brothers and sisters (8:29). In this passage, there is a subtle shift from the metaphor of adoptive kinship predicated of believers (whether Jew or gentile) to the metaphor of biological kinship (prōtotokos) predicated of Christ.19 Moreover, it is important to point out that families who had a biological firstborn son did not often seek out another son, let alone many other sons to adopt, as implied 18. See Heim, Adoption in Galatians and Romans, 138–144; see also Lily Ross Taylor, The Divinity of the Roman Emperor (Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1975); Peppard, The Son of God, 69; Elio Pasoli, Acta Fratrum Arvalium (Bologna: Zuffi, 1950), 76–77; Christopher Howgego, Ancient History from Coins (London: Routledge, 1995), 80–82, plate no. 132; Peter Herrmann, New Documents from Lydia (Vienna: Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2007), 31–32; Marie-France Auzépy, “Campagne de prospection 2007 de la mission Marmara,” Anatolia Antiqua 15 (2007): 342–43. 19. By “metaphor of biological kinship,” I am by no means implying that Christ is a creation or the “biological Son” of the Father. However, prōtotokos, as a term from the semantic domain of biological kinship, suggests that the Son’s relationship to the Father is of a qualitatively different category than the adoptive sonship of believers.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 134

3/13/18 1:14 PM

In Him and Through Him from the Foundation of the World  135

in Romans 8. This act would have diluted the inheritance of the firstborn son, and would possibly have jeopardized the future of the family because of ambiguity over which son was considered the “firstborn.” Yet Romans 8 shows the Father willingly extending the inheritance to any son who possesses the Spirit of adoption, while simultaneously upholding Christ’s status as firstborn. Furthermore, Romans 8:15–23 speaks of those who have the Spirit of adoption groaning in labor pains along with the birthing creation, straining for the full expression of their adoption that comes with the redemption of their bodies rather than at the time of the father’s death, as was customary in first-­century Roman adoptions. This combination of birthing and adoption imagery is admittedly jarring. Yet it draws attention to the intertwined destinies of humanity and creation—­who groan in labor—­while also pointing to the sovereignty of God to bring about the final redemption at the end of the age. Significantly, in Romans 8:22–23 God is not in the throes of labor alongside creation; rather, he acts freely and sovereignly to bring about adoption. Different incongruities exist in Romans 9:4 and in Galatians 4:5. In Romans 9:4, adoption is extended to a whole group of people, the Israelites, rather to an individual heir. This use is also a departure from Israel’s typical designation as the “firstborn” of YHWH, and that designation is reserved for Christ who is called “firstborn” in 8:29, which again draws attention to the qualitative difference between Christ as the Son and the sonship of Israel that is by means of adoption. Likewise, Galatians 4 juxtaposes an adoption metaphor (4:5) with an analogy that features the biological heir of a household, who would therefore have no need to be adopted by the father of the estate (4:1–2), yet this analogy is juxtaposed with the mission of the Son who is sent to make sons of the Father by adoption (4:4–5).20 This image disrupts the previous analogy, drawing attention to the free act of God, who in Christ brings about the adoption of sons. In Ephesians, the adoption of the children is predestined in love before the foundation of the world. Although this may not seem like an incongruity with cultural practices, adoption in the ancient world was a remedy for chance and an 20. There are a growing number of scholars who advocate for huiothesia in Galatians 4:4–5 referring only to Paul’s gentile audience (e.g., Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem [New York: Oxford University Press, 2016], 105–60; Caroline Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007]; John Taylor, “The Eschatological Interdependence of Jews and Gentiles in Galatians,” Tyndale Bulletin 63, no. 2 [2012]: 291–316). However, the majority of scholars argue that both Jews and gentiles are included in huiothesia (see Heim, Adoption in Galatians and Romans, 158–61; A. Andrew Das, Paul and the Stories of Israel: Grand Thematic Narratives in Galatians [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016], 33–64).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 135

3/13/18 1:14 PM

136  Erin M. Heim

opportunity to form expedient and advantageous alliances. Yet the metaphor in Ephesians suggests that these adoptions were how God always intended to create family (i.e., it was not a way of remedying a failure in biology). Moreover, these adoptions were not a cool, calculated, or savvy political move as in many Roman adoptions; rather, they were an expression of the love, good pleasure, and glorious grace of God, who bestows sonship on both Jews and gentiles (Eph 1:5–6). When the congruities and incongruities in each of these texts are considered carefully, they point us toward the text’s theological underpinnings. Thus, we must ask what sort of theological framework is operating if the Father is adopting a multitude of children from every nation, whom he chose before the foundation of the world according to his grace and love, to become coheirs alongside his firstborn Son, who holds their adoption together? What does such an action say about the God who carries it out, and what does it communicate about the purpose and destiny of creation and humanity? I now turn to this framework.

The Trinity and the Act and Locus of Adoption Ephesians 1:4–5 presents Christ as the locus of adoption. The children of God are chosen “in Christ before the foundation of the world,” “destined for adoption,” and the Father lavishes his blessings on his children (1:6–7), chief among them the seal of the Spirit, which is the promise of their future inheritance (1:13–14). Adoption takes place “through Jesus Christ,” who in the “fullness of time” will gather all things in heaven and on earth in himself (1:5, 10). The composite picture of the passage as a whole reaches back to a time before even the creation narrative in Genesis to the earliest actions of the economic Trinity, who in the act of predestination turn toward creation. Moreover, in addition to revealing the earliest actions of the divine economy that take place even before creation, the adoption metaphor in the lavish prayer of Ephesians 1 also provides a window for reflection on the immanent Trinity.21 Although there is not space in this essay to comment exhaustively on 21. A statement about the “immanent Trinity” in Eph 1:3–4 will undoubtedly be labeled “anachronistic” by some within biblical studies, but I observe that this criticism only sticks if one artificially separates the “historical Jesus” or the “Pauline Jesus” from the “Christ of faith” in whom the writers of the creeds trusted. See Chris Tilling’s excellent treatment of this topic (Paul’s Divine Christology [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015], 259–72); see also Wesley Hill, Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 136

3/13/18 1:14 PM

In Him and Through Him from the Foundation of the World  137

the immanent Trinity, it is worth noting briefly that the adoption metaphors reveal who God is in himself.22 As T. F. Torrance states, The economic forms of God’s self-­communication to us in history derive from and repose upon a communion of Persons immanent in the Godhead. It is as our knowing of God passes from what is called the ‘economic Trinity’ to the ‘ontological Trinity’ that we have theologia in the supreme and proper sense.”23

The adoption metaphors in the Pauline corpus not only reveal the economic act in which God brings humanity into proper relation with himself; they also reveal God as the One who adopts that which is not God. This necessarily leads us to ask: what can be gleaned about the immanent Trinity from the Pauline adoption metaphors? According to Ephesians 1:5, the God who destines for adoption is wholly distinct from creation; is eternally existent in three persons, the Father, Christ, and the Spirit; is loving, benevolent, and lavishly gracious; and is utterly free from any constraint. Furthermore, the adoption metaphors affirm Christ’s personhood and Christ’s humanity in the incarnation by linking believers’ adoption to the historical particularity of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection (Gal 4:4–5). The order we treat these topics in is important, and it is necessary to begin by examining what the adoption metaphors reveal about the triune God before we proceed to what they reveal about the creatures God has made. Although the soteriological distinction between God’s Fatherhood of all people and God’s special Fatherhood of believers in Jesus has been the subject of rigorous theological inquiry,24 it has often not been observed that the 22. In claiming that the act of adoption reveals who God is in himself, I am not arguing that “adoption” is somehow part of God’s being, nor am I claiming that any part of God’s being is “adopted” (as I will argue in detail below). 23. T. F. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), 24. 24. The Candlish/Crawford debate of the 1860s highlights this focus well. See R. S. Candlish, The Fatherhood of God: Being the First Course of the Cunningham Lectures, Delivered before the New College, Edinburgh, in March 1864, 5th ed. (Edinburgh: A&C Black, 1870); Thomas Crawford, The Fatherhood of God, Considered in Its General and Special Aspects and Particularly in Relation to the Atonement, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1868). In addition to being concerned with the qualitative distinction between God’s general and special fatherhood, Candlish and Crawford also debate whether Christ has a twofold sonship (human and divine). Crawford’s approach, however, does not take into account the use of huiothesia in the Pauline passages, which always refers the sonship of created humans and never to Christ’s own sonship.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 137

3/13/18 1:14 PM

138  Erin M. Heim

adoption metaphor in Ephesians 1:4–5 also highlights the radical distinction between the uncreated God (Father, Son, and Spirit) and the created order. In this passage, the Father, Christ Jesus, and the Spirit are active in choosing and destining creaturely human beings “before the foundation of the world.” Here the adoption metaphor points to a God who is gracious, loving, and exists in fullness entirely distinct from the created order. Moreover, in Ephesians 1 the God who destines children for adoption is incommensurate with creation. The adoption metaphor implies a qualitative distinction between God and creation. Drawing from the cultural assumptions regarding adoption outlined above, it is clear that human adoptive fathers are not “naturally” related to their adopted children; instead these fathers and children come from distinct and identifiable families of origin. However, the adopted children in Ephesians 1 come not only from a different family of origin than the Father, Son, and Spirit but also from an origin that is fundamentally incommensurate with the being of the Godhead. The incommensurability between God and humanity reveals itself in key places in the passage: the children are chosen before the foundation of the world (v. 4), the children are destined to adoption by the good pleasure of God’s will (v. 5), the children are redeemed through Jesus’s blood (v. 7), and the children live for the praise of God’s glory (v. 12). Unlike Roman practices of adoption, the act of adoption in Ephesians 1 is not mutually advantageous for the Father and the children; instead, the children are depicted as wholly dependent on and wholly incommensurate with the Godhead. Furthermore, in Ephesians 1 the adoption of children is not only carried out by all three members of the Godhead, but adoption actually holds together in the Godhead. Adoption occurs “through Christ” as a result of being chosen “in Christ,” who in the fullness of time will gather all things in himself (v. 10). In this passage, God is wholly distinct from creation, perfectly benevolent, and perfectly loving. And out of the fullness of his love, he graciously and freely turns toward humanity and destines them for adoption, which will come to its full expression when he gathers all things to himself in the fullness of time. In Ephesians 1, God is entirely free in bringing about the act of adoption. God is not constrained by anything in creation, nor does God adopt children because of a deficiency in his being. Rather, adoption expresses the “glorious grace” he has freely bestowed in Christ, who is called “the Beloved” (v. 6). God adopts out of the fullness of the divine love that he is in himself. The economic

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 138

3/13/18 1:14 PM

In Him and Through Him from the Foundation of the World  139

act of adoption reflects the graciousness that permeates and interpenetrates the self-­giving love of the Trinity. It is out of the fullness of relations between the persons of the immanent Trinity that God acts.25 Torrance remarks, Grace is to be understood as the impartation not just of something from God but of God himself. In Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit God freely gives himself to us in such a way that the Gift and the Giver are one and the same in the wholeness and indivisibility of his Grace.26

In this passage, there is no question that adoption is a free and unconstrained act of God whereby in grace God brings humanity into relation with himself. Certainly, humans did not influence or constrain God’s action; the destining for adoption took place before humans were created, and indeed before the world was created. Nor does Ephesians give any hint that the children were destined because of any merit or ability they possessed. In contradistinction from cultural assumptions regarding adoption, where potential heirs were chosen because of their wealth, political prowess, or social advantage, the children in Ephesians 1 were chosen solely for the pleasure and goodwill of God (1:5, 9). Romans 8 likewise presents adoption as expression of God’s free and self-­ giving generosity. In this passage, adoption extends to the children of God, who become coheirs together with Christ. Thus, in the act of adoption, God extends an invitation to the children to become partakers in the glorious inheritance in Christ. By rights, and in keeping with the historical/cultural background of the metaphor, this should dilute the inheritance of Christ as firstborn, but there is no suggestion that the inheritance in Christ is diminished or diluted with the influx of adopted brothers and sisters. Rather, the heirs receive a full and abundant inheritance that is provided and guaranteed by God, who acts in fullness and generosity in adoption. Through adoption, the children of God are able to know and belong to the God who moves toward us in the self-­giving love of the Son, which enables us, by the power of the Spirit, to cry out, “Abba, Father.” Torrance remarks, “The incarnation also means that the very God who has graciously condescended to be one with us in Jesus Christ in space and time grants us communion with himself in his Spirit in such a way that . . . we may 25. See also John Webster, God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology, vol. 1 (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 13–28. 26. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 14–15.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 139

3/13/18 1:14 PM

140  Erin M. Heim

really know him in his eternal divine Reality which infinitely transcends all space and time.”27 This act of addressing God as Father through the Son and the Spirit is the creaturely declaration of God’s benevolence in adoption and an affirmation of our creaturely dependence upon God for his sustaining grace. Several of the Pauline adoption metaphors also shed light on the nature and humanity of Christ. In Romans 8, Christ is the “firstborn” among the adopted brothers and sisters and the locus of their adoption.28 Christ is like us in that he is our brother and coheir, yet Christ is firstborn, and his siblings are children through adoption. The incongruous interspersing of adoption metaphors and language of natural descent in Romans 8 again draws our attention to the incommensurability between Christ and creatures, and as it does so, it also highlights their common humanity. In the incarnation, humanity experiences the true presence of God in Christ who is “with us” as he is “for us,” yet the adoption metaphor underlines the fact that, as Torrance insists, “he is unlike us, not unlike us as to the humanity of his human nature, but in the unique union of his human nature to the divine nature in the one person of God the Son.”29 In addition, the adoption metaphors in Galatians 4:4–5 and Romans 8 shed light on Christ’s deity and humanity which has profound implications for Christocentric anthropology. T. F. Torrance insightfully argues, “Everything hinges on the reality of God’s self-­communication to us in Jesus Christ . . . so that for us to know God in Jesus Christ is really to know him as he is in himself.”30 Galatians 4:4–5 speaks of Christ as the preexistent Son who, through the will of the Father, joins himself with humanity in order to redeem them.31 Here, the Son was “born of a woman, born under the law, in order to 27. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 37. 28. I acknowledge here that one can be “firstborn” through an act of adoption; indeed an adopted son would become “firstborn” in terms of family position. However, the vocabulary of adoption is never used of Christ, and by juxtaposing “firstborn” (prōtotokos) and “adoption” (huiothesia), Paul seems to make clear that there is a qualitative difference between Christ’s sonship and the sonship of humanity. 29. Torrance, Incarnation, 230. 30. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 23. 31. James Dunn insists that the thrust of Gal 4:4–5 is soteriological rather than christological and that “Paul has no intention here of arguing a particular christological position or claim, incarnation or otherwise” (Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, 2nd ed. [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996], 42). However, Longenecker argues that “the expression ‘God sent his Son’ may well have been understood by Paul to include the idea of preexistence of the Son” (Galatians, World Biblical Commentary [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015], 170), and I would add that although Dunn may be correct that it is not Paul’s intention to argue for a particular christological position, it is nevertheless artificial to separate Christology from soteriology here or anywhere in Paul’s letters.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 140

3/13/18 1:14 PM

In Him and Through Him from the Foundation of the World  141

redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive the adoption.” Romans 8 likewise begins with a strong statement about sending the Son “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (v. 3), so that those who walk by the Spirit might have life and peace (v. 6). Further on in Romans 8, those who receive the Spirit of adoption are called “coheirs,” who will be glorified with Christ only if they share also in Christ’s suffering. The connection to Christ’s suffering is a connection to the historical particularity of Christ’s crucifixion and death; likewise, the connection to Christ’s glory is a connection to the particularity of the resurrection (v. 23). In each of these passages, the personhood of Jesus is not “in the abstract,” and neither is the historical particularity of Jesus incidental to his identity as the Son of God. Instead, his historical particularity is the “result of the eternal outgoing movement of his Love.”32 These passages affirm that the historical particularity of Jesus reveals, I would argue, who the preexistent Son is in himself.33 In Ephesians 1:4 those destined for adoption are chosen “in Christ” before the foundation of the world.34 In the words of Torrance, “Jesus Christ is identical with God’s decision and man’s election in the divine love.”35 Thus, it is not enough to speak of Christ’s “genuine humanity” in an abstract sense, nor does Ephesians 1 speak of preexistent Son apart from Jesus Christ, as if the man Jesus in his historical particularity were a mere implement of God. Rather, Ephesians 1 identifies the preexistent Son as the person Christ Jesus in whom the children of God are destined for adoption, and who in his incarnation was, according to Galatians 4:4–5, “born of a woman, born under the law.” Or as Paul Molnar aptly states, “enhypostasis emphasizes Jesus’s particular humanity as the humanity of the Word.”36 The personhood of the Son is therefore identical to Jesus Christ, who is who God is in himself. In the incarnation, God in Jesus unites himself with humanity, and thus the Godhead now includes the particular humanity of Jesus of Nazareth, who was born a Jew, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried, 32. T. F. Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God: One Being, Three Persons (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 108. 33. I am not arguing here that the historical particularity constitutes the being of the second person of the Trinity, which in my view undermines the genuine preexistence of the Son. See also Paul Molnar, Faith, Freedom, and the Spirit: The Economic Trinity in Barth, Torrance and Contemporary Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), 225–59. 34. The pronoun autō in v. 4 is clearly anaphoric to “Christo” in v. 3. 35. T. F. Torrance, Incarnation, 178. 36. Molnar, Faith, Freedom, and the Spirit, 230, emphasis added.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 141

3/13/18 1:14 PM

142  Erin M. Heim

who rose from the dead on the third day, who ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father in glory, and will one day physically return to rule in power. Neither did the ascent to glory erase the historical particularity of Jesus’s earthly existence; it vindicated it, showing that “what God is in eternity, Jesus Christ is in space and time, and what Jesus Christ is in space and time, God is in his eternity.”37

Adoption and Christocentric Anthropology: The Telos of Humanity It was necessary to begin with a discussion of what the adoption metaphors reveal about who God is in himself, and particularly who Christ is in himself, before moving to a discussion of what the adoption metaphors contribute to a Christocentric anthropology. Without first grounding our anthropology in Christ, we risk projecting an anthropocentric account of humanity onto Christ’s humanity. As we saw above, although Christ is human, we as humans are categorically unlike Christ. Christ is the firstborn, and we are children by adoption. This distinction is crucial to bear in mind in the discussion that follows. Moreover, as we move into a discussion of anthropology, we do not leave behind our discussion of Christology and the Trinity. Humans, as created beings, cannot be spoken about apart from their Creator from whom they derive significance. The adoption metaphors in Romans 8:15–23 and Ephesians 1:5 present adoption as the telos of humanity, meaning that it is the proper end to which humans were created.38 Romans 8:15–23 portrays all of creation groaning with those who have the Spirit, yearning and longing toward that end. Sarah Coakley observes that this longing and groaning is the proper reorientation toward God, who is the progenitor of desire.39 Ephesians 1 reaffirms the object of this desire, portraying the telos of adoption as God’s intended purpose for humanity before the foundation of the world (1:4). Thus we must now ask, 37. Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 241. 38. Helmut Thielicke makes a similar argument to the one I will make in this section, but Thielicke’s focus is on the imago Dei more generally (Theological Ethics, vol. 1, ed. William H. Lazareth [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966], 150–60). 39. Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 6; Coakley, “Knowing in the Dark: Sin, Race and the Quest for Salvation, Part I: Transforming Theological Anthropology in a Théologie Totale,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 32 (2015), http://wayback.archive-it.org/3507/20160210133513/http://psb.ptsem.edu/coakley/.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 142

3/13/18 1:14 PM

In Him and Through Him from the Foundation of the World  143

what does it mean that humanity was created for adoption? I wish to give two preliminary answers to this question, both of which could be more fully developed in longer treatments of this topic. First, adoption is a symbol of humanity’s creaturely dependence upon God, and second, adoption is an affirmation of the ongoing embodied particularity of human beings.

Adoption and Creaturely Dependence In Ephesians 1, the adoption metaphor underscores the dependence of humanity upon God, who through predestination moves them in divine grace toward adoption. Significantly, this adoption metaphor occurs in the context of a lavish and effusive eulogy, which is the only appropriate response a dependent creature can offer when confronted with the majesty of God’s act in Christ.40 In this text, humanity’s dependence upon Christ precedes even creation, since those destined for adoption were chosen “in Christ before the foundation of the world” (Eph 1:4). Moreover, in Ephesians 1, those chosen in Christ are carried along to final restoration by Christ, who at the end of the age will “gather up all things” in himself (Eph 1:10). Thus, in Ephesians 1, the entire history of the cosmos, humanity included, derives its significance from Christ and is dependent upon Christ, who gathers and sustains the created order. Galatians 4 and Romans 8 display a different but no less significant form of dependence upon Christ. In each passage, the final state of humanity’s restoration is brought about by Christ’s assumption of humanity, which enables the adopted children to join the familia Dei through participation in the Son’s own narrative.41 In both of these passages, “salvation” is best thought of as “teleological anthropology,” and in both passages Christ’s own narrative conditions the telos of humanity. In Galatians 4, the mission of the Son who is sent by the Father is to bring about the adoption of children (sons), both Jew and gentile.42 Here the Son takes on human flesh and is revealed in the historical particularity of Jesus of Nazareth, “born of a woman, born under the law” (4:4), in order to bring about the inclusion of the adopted children (sons) in the familia Dei. The adopted children (sons) share in the cry of the 40. See Andrew Lincoln, Ephesians, World Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word, 1990), 10–19. 41. Richard Hays’s study of the narrative substructure of Galatians is still the most thorough treatment of the subject. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). 42. A discussion of the pronouns and their referents in Galatians 3–4 falls beyond the scope of this essay. See Heim, Adoption in Galatians and Romans, 149–63; Das, Paul and the Stories of Israel, 33–64.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 143

3/13/18 1:14 PM

144  Erin M. Heim

Son, dependent on his words to express their belonging.43 Sealing the children’s status through their participation in the Son (Gal 3:28–29), the Spirit calls out Abba, Father from within the hearts of the children of God (4:6). Romans 8 even more explicitly connects anthropology with soteriology. In Romans 8 the adoption metaphors root the story of believers firmly in Christ’s own story which culminates in conformation to the imago Christi—­that Christ would be “firstborn” among many brothers and sisters (Rom 8:29). Here dependence is teleological. Humanity, which has been marred by sin (Rom 8:3), must be restored to the familia Dei through adoption. As in Galatians 4, the Spirit in Romans 8 testifies that the believers are God’s children. Michael Gorman remarks, “The Spirit . . . links Paul to the cross, and via the cross to Christ in suffering and to others in love.”44 As members of the familia Dei, the children of God are assured that they will be glorified with Christ if they participate in Christ’s suffering (8:17). In other words, their teleological restoration necessitates their temporal participation in Christ’s story through faithfulness and perseverance through hardship. Adoption, then, places humanity not only within a family but also within a story. The shape and scope of humanity’s restoration, which in Romans 8 is as much anthropological as soteriological, is conditioned solely by Christ’s narrative of suffering and glorification. Moreover, the groaning and yearning in Romans 8:22–23 is evidence that humanity’s narrative has not yet reached its final conformation to Christ’s story. The groaning signifies the disconnect and distance between Christ’s perfect humanity and our own marred derivative. Furthermore, although Romans 8 is quite clear that it is only believers in Christ who will progress toward humanity’s telos, this telos is still the end goal for all people since Christ’s image is determinative of what constitutes a restored humanity.45 Put simply, humanity was created to be conformed to the imago Christi and to participate in the familia Dei as children of God. 43. See James Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit (London: SCM, 1975). 44. Michael Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 57, emphasis original. Gorman further adds, “The Spirit is the Spirit of cruciformity. The Spirit marks and ‘seals’ people as God’s own children . . . but only inasmuch as they are marked by conformity to the death of Christ.” 45. I recognize that there is a diversity of opinion regarding election and the freedom of God that conditions our understanding of whether all people will eventually be swept up in the grace of God and conformed to the image of Christ. Although this is an important question to consider, my point here is that whether we think “all” are elect, only some are chosen, or our election is grounded in God’s foreknowledge of our own belief, Scripture is clear that the proper telos of humanity is communion with God secured through adoption.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 144

3/13/18 1:14 PM

In Him and Through Him from the Foundation of the World  145

Theosis and the Imago Christi In Romans 8, Galatians 4, and Ephesians 1, humanity is dignified and set apart from the rest of the created order, and the dignity of humans derives from their dependence upon Christ and their participation in Christ’s story, which reaches its zenith in the glorification. However, conformation to the image of Christ does not mean that we become like Christ in all respects. Indeed, the use of an adoption metaphor specifically points to the qualitative difference between Christ and his brothers and sisters. Moreover, “adoption” communicates that the telos of humanity, which is ultimately conformation to the image of the Son, maintains this qualitative difference. As Helmut Thielicke remarks, and as the presence of adoption metaphors underscores, “Divine likeness is exclusively a teleological and not an ontological concept . . . what we have here is a state of relation and not a state of being.”46 In his trilogy of works on cruciformity and theosis in Pauline literature, Michael Gorman sporadically incorporates the Pauline adoption texts in connection with his larger argument regarding theosis.47 Significantly, Gorman argues, “Theosis is about divine intention and action, human transformation, and the telos of human existence.”48 Moreover, Gorman rightly points out that the telos of humanity (conformation to the image of Christ) is realized through “full identification with and participation in the God revealed in Christ crucified”49 so that the story of the Son is lived through the stories of individuals and communities that are shaped by the Son’s narrative.50 Gorman also rightly acknowledges that theosis is a little-­understood term in Western Christianity, and one that often is met with at least a degree of suspicion. Taking a cue from Gorman here, I wish to put forth the suggestion that the Pauline adoption metaphors, particularly those in Romans 8 and Ephesians 1, add a measure of precision and clarity to the concept of theosis that both highlights the ongoing qualitative difference between God and humanity and affirms the ongoing particularity of individuals.51 46. Thielicke, Theological Ethics, 154. 47. See Cruciformity, 11, 13, 56, 69, 72, 220; Inhabiting the Cruciform God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 8, 65; Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation and Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 286. 48. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God, 5. 49. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God, 8. 50. Gorman, Becoming the Gospel, 1–49. 51. Theosis also emphasizes humanity’s vocational role within creation as stewards and image-bearers of Christ, but there is not sufficient space to treat the connection between adoption and vocation in this short essay.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 145

3/13/18 1:14 PM

146  Erin M. Heim

As noted above, in the Pauline adoption passages the children of God are made children through “adoption,” while Christ alone is the firstborn (Rom 8:29). In Christ’s incarnation, faithful death, and resurrection, Christ embodies God’s faithful action toward us and humanity’s faithful obedience for God.52 The Pauline adoption texts communicate that humanity, by being “in Christ,” can participate in the faithful obedience that Christ displayed in his incarnation in human flesh, thereby being taken into the divine life as God’s adopted children. However, the incongruity between God and humans remains because humans can never participate in Christ’s divine “God-­for-­us” but only ever in Christ’s human “us-­for-­God.” Thus adoption, when combined with theosis, underscores humanity’s participation in the divine life and the familia Dei and underscores the qualitative difference between God and creation seen in the unconstrained action in Christ to bring about this inclusion. The qualitative difference between God and humans is further seen in the incongruities between the cultural practices of adoption and the metaphors as they appear in the biblical texts. In each text, the telos of humanity is not to assume the role of the paterfamilias upon the father’s death, which would have been the case in Greco-­Roman adoptions, because, indeed, in Paul’s metaphors the Father does not die. Rather, the telos of humanity is to become like the firstborn Son but not to usurp his position as firstborn. Thus, these metaphors maintain the distinction between the Son and the adopted children by emphasizing the ongoing preeminence of Christ in the familia Dei.

The Imago Christi and Particularity It should be a fairly uncontroversial observation that there is continuity of personal identity when a person is adopted from one human family into another human family. The change in relation does not entail an entirely new person being created and an old one being extinguished. Indeed, as noted above, Greek and Roman adoption practices entailed the continued recognition of both sets of the adopted child’s lineage. Instead, what occurs is a change in relation. This “change in relation” is certainly mirrored in the Pauline adoption metaphors, and this too is uncontroversial. However, because of the prevalence of “new creation” language in the Pauline letters (e.g., Gal 5:1–6:18; 2 Cor 3:1–6:2), it cannot be assumed outright that Paul intends 52. Gorman, Cruciformity, 120.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 146

3/13/18 1:14 PM

In Him and Through Him from the Foundation of the World  147

to communicate a continuity of personal identity in his use of the adoption metaphors. Thus, the redemption of Christ’s body in the resurrection must be the standard by which we determine what constitutes “bodily redemption” and, in turn, what is entailed in the adoption metaphors concerning embodiment and personal identity. It is clear that, for Paul, the resurrection of the Son did not erase his historical particularity. Paul’s “Christ of faith” is none other than Jesus of Nazareth, who was “born of a woman” and “born under the law” (Gal 4:4). In the incarnation, the historical particularities of Jesus revealed the personhood of the eternal Son. In the resurrection and the ascension, these historical particularities were taken up into the divine life. The eternal Son bears the scars of the crucifixion, retains the lineage of David, and is recognizable in form as Jesus. Thus it is plain that Jesus’s bodily redemption includes the particularities of his embodiment. However, what is true of Christ’s resurrected body is not necessarily true of a Christian’s resurrected body. Commentators on Galatians and Ephesians often remark that Paul’s “in Christ” language obliterates the distinctions of ethnicity and gender. For example, J. Louis Martyn remarks that in Christ, believers are “stripped of their old identity” and become “one new person by being united in Christ himself.”53 It might be possible to conclude from Paul’s letters that although Christ’s redemption includes his embodied particularities, the same is not true for Christians who have had these particularities “stripped” in Christ. In this way, Christians become “ahistorical,” having no distinguishing features of their former lives. Perhaps their former particularities have been replaced by Christ’s own particularities, but Paul at least seems to appeal to the ongoing salience of ethnic particularities in several significant places. He boasts of his own credentials (Phil 3:5–6), which he regards as loss (Phil 3:7–8), yet they remain identifiable enough for Paul to use them in service of his point. Likewise, in Romans 11, Jews and gentiles are grafted into the same tree, yet they are still distinguishable as “natural” and “wild” branches (Rom 11:17–24). When we compare these statements to Greek and Roman adoption practices, a coherent picture emerges in which personal identity and embodied particularities now appear in the context of familial relatedness. In Romans 53. J. Louis Martyn, Galatians, Anchor Books (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 347.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 147

3/13/18 1:14 PM

148  Erin M. Heim

8:23, Paul writes that believers eagerly long for “adoption, the redemption of [their] bodies.” Later in Romans 8, Paul writes that those believers were “predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters” (8:29 NIV). In this passage, the redemption of the body, conformation to the imago Christi, and belonging in the familia Dei proceed from the act of adoption in Christ (8:15, 23). Therefore, being conformed to the imago Christi through adoption entails the redemption of our bodies in a manner analogous to Christ’s own redeemed body. Just as Christ’s redemption did not extinguish his historical particularities of embodiment, so too our adoption implies that our embodied identities will be maintained and conformed to the imago Christi.

Adoption and Christocentric Anthropology: Some Implications If being “in Christ” does not extinguish personal identity, then the restored humanity of believers maintains their personhood and historical particularity. Indeed, we can conclude that the adoption metaphors assume the continuity of personal identity while highlighting a change in status and relation in regard to familial belonging. This construal of a Christocentric anthropology has several important implications regarding the relationship between Pauline adoption and creaturely existence, which can only be briefly sketched here. Perhaps most significantly, ethnicity, gender, social location, and other aspects of embodied identity are not peripheral to a Christocentric anthropology because they are not discarded in Christ. To be sure, Paul is emphatic that the sinful hierarchies built upon gender, class, race, and so forth have no place within the body of Christ. Rather, Paul’s vision of adoption communicates that the diversity that exists among human persons is taken up into the divine life and sanctified through participation in Christ, the firstborn Son, as brothers and sisters of a diverse family. Theosis is therefore a relentlessly embodied concept, and in theosis persons of all races, genders, classes, locations, and so forth are sanctified as historically particular and embodied expressions of the imago Christi. Since adoption entails a continuity of personhood and therefore ongoing diversity in the familia Dei, Christocentric anthropology mandates the recognition and celebration of social and anthropological diversity in the world. Beginning with adoption, conformation to the image of Christ is carried out

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 148

3/13/18 1:14 PM

In Him and Through Him from the Foundation of the World  149

within the context of a family (Rom 8:29) and is forged through participation in the suffering and glorification of Christ (Rom 8:17). In this regard, it is a communal activity. As Gorman states, “Cruciform love and power are ways of being for others, expressions of commitment to the weak, to the larger body, and to enemies.”54 I would add that cruciform love and power must be rooted in a recognition, celebration, and solidarity precisely with the embodied identities of those whose embodied experiences are different from our own.55 In order for celebration to take place, storytelling must be an essential part of cruciform communities.56 Christocentric anthropology roots the many stories of the people of God in the one story of Jesus the Son, which unifies their stories in one rich and varied family history. Thus, without storytelling, the diverse experiences of embodied existence within the body of Christ risk being reduced to mere labels and classifications. A Christocentric anthropology must therefore resist reductionist accounts of diversity and instead attend to “the other’s needs, feelings, memories, and stories.”57 As the Pauline adoption metaphors show, embodied identity is not a “container” or a “vehicle” that carries a human along toward conformation to the imago Christi and is then discarded at the end of the age. Rather, these particularities are transformed through cruciform conformation to the imago Christi and expressed through treating one another as siblings who practice cruciform living together.58

54. Gorman, Cruciformity, 350. 55. This is certainly not a novel thought, and has been widely and powerfully written about by feminist, womanist, queer, Latino/a, and black theologians for decades. These authors are keenly aware of the intersection between theology and embodied experience (see esp. M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010]). My point here is simply to note that the adoption metaphors result in a Christocentric anthropology where this embodied experience is central to theosis. 56. Michael Saracino, Being about Borders: A Christian Anthropology of Difference (Collegeville: Liturgical, 1996), 139. 57. Saracino, Being about Borders, 115. 58. Gorman, Cruciformity, 363.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 149

3/13/18 1:14 PM

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 150

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter EIGHT

Paul, Christ, and Narrative Time C H R I S T I L L I NG

I

n responsible accounts of Pauline theology, the exegete pursues the task of historical-­critical work in part by elucidating the wider narrative world in which Paul lived, moved, and had his being. This is a vital part of the task of explicating Paul’s historical particularity, which remains an irreducible part of the historian’s project. However, such attempts at Pauline commentary are not without problems. In particular, they can distract attention from the details of Paul’s own rhetoric, resulting in problematically eisegetical proposals.1 This happens by pulling into Paul certain schemes absent from his letters themselves, via the loading of terms with conceptual freight constructed elsewhere. The procedure is justified by (legitimately) locating Paul as an instance of a particular historical moment and by (legitimately) speaking of Paul’s theology in terms of its own wider narrative context. It arguably goes awry, however, when the narrative arc is understood in “telic” terms, a move supported by loading narrative sequence, beginning at creation, with a particular hermeneutical significance.2 The case this essay makes, grounded on a Pauline account of the relation between the story of creation and Christ, is that alternative narrative-­historical projects should be preferred. Such alternatives befit not only the historical-­exegetical task but also the theological. 1. To speak of exegesis as “reading out” of Scripture and therefore desirable, and eisegesis as “reading into” Scripture and therefore to be avoided is overly simplistic as all exegesis, which is the work of historically located and particular humans, involves eisegesis. Hence, I target that which is “problematically eisegetical.” Not all eisegesis is equal. 2. A telic narrative is one in which key truth claims are locked into the beginning, such that no recourse to a later event is required to establish these truths as axiomatic. For this phrasing, see Douglas A. Campbell, A Pauline Dogmatics in Outline (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), ch. 3, “The Plan.”

151

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 151

3/13/18 1:14 PM

152  Chris Tilling

Paul and Narrative One of the most brilliant accounts of Pauline theology to have been penned in recent decades is N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God (hereafter PFG). It is constructed upon a narrative foundation that Wright outlines in the seventh chapter of PFG, entitled “The Plot, the Plan and the Storied Worldview.”3 Three points shall be mentioned, directly relevant to the task of the present argument. (1) Wright exemplifies the desire to pursue an account of Paul in historical terms. Hence, he writes that whatever one wants to say about aspects of Pauline theology, it can only be understood—­by the historian—­when situated within Paul’s (narrative) worldview. In other words, in order to understand Paul as a figure of the past, attention to that figure’s own particular narrative locatedness is required. And this makes a good deal of sense. After all, if Paul’s letters were to be divorced from Paul’s own conceptual milieu, other interpretative stories will be imported to fill the narrative vacuum created, which is likely to result in interpretative mischief. (2) Wright then explicates this narrative in such a way that locks key interpretative motifs into the beginning, thus setting in motion a telic narrative based upon a series of largely sequential episodes. Wright’s account of what he perceives to be a grand narrative with three subplots not only deserves attention due to its scope but also because of the way it drives his project as a historian. A brief summary of its contours thus follows. The “outer story,” which speaks of “God and creation,” is established first, and as such it frames everything else.4 Because this story makes clear that “God made a world with a purpose, and entrusted that purpose to humans,” this signals “the beginning of the story.”5 But that purpose, entrusted to humans, confronts human rebellion.6 So a problem is established which structures the rest of the story; hence, it begins a telic narrative. The “two ages” view of history, involving time split between the present evil age and the coming new creation, expresses this narrative neatly. God will defeat all the hostile powers that have spoiled his work and so reclaim his sovereign rule over the world. 3. 4. 5. 6.

N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 456–537. PFG, 475–85. PFG, 476. PFG, 476.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 152

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Paul, Christ, and Narrative Time   153

Indeed, this “is how the large story always ends: with Israel’s God dealing firmly and decisively with everything that has distorted and corrupted his good creation.”7 Within this “main, overarching plot” are three “subplots.”8 The first subplot concerns human creatures, which relates directly to the construal of the issues in the main plot.9 So Wright explicitly ties sin to humans not fulfilling their vocation. As we shall see below, this plays out directly in his account of sin in Pauline theology. The second subplot, which is controlled now both by the main plot and the first subplot, is the “story of Israel.” Hence, “Israel’s original vocation, to bring blessing to the world” was “poisoned by idolatry, pride and violence.”10 Wright, therefore, emphasises themes across Paul’s letters that he proposes foreground this subplot. For example, he writes that “in Romans 4, Paul has set up the whole discussion in terms of an historical sequence, beginning with God’s promises to Abraham.”11 The third subplot, the story of the crucified and risen Messiah, though framed and determined by the rest, “makes sense of all the others.”12 It is this “play within the play . . . through which at last all the other layers of drama will find their resolution.”13 And by “resolution,” Wright means something specific. The story of Jesus is always articulated and understood within one or more of the other stories already enumerated,14 and this means that the story of Jesus “makes the sense it does as the crucial factor within those other narratives.”15 It is “always the story of how Jesus enables the other stories to proceed to their appointed resolution.”16 Wright portrays Jesus as “Israel-­ in-­person,”17 as the “truly human one,”18 and thus as the faithful Israelite through whom the blessing of Abraham might be realised.19 The upshot is 7. PFG, 482. 8. PFG, 485. 9. See PFG, 489. 10. PFG, 503. 11. PFG, 423. 12. PFG, 502. 13. PFG, 516. 14. PFG, 517. 15. PFG, 517, emphasis his. 16. PFG, 517, emphasis suppressed. 17. PFG, 521. 18. PFG, 521. 19. PFG, 525. One sees this especially in Wright’s exegesis of Romans 1–4.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 153

3/13/18 1:14 PM

154  Chris Tilling

that “the gospel announcement of Jesus as the crucified and risen Messiah means what it means within the larger story of Israel, within the story of the whole human race which is larger still, and within the story of the whole world which is the ultimate narrative horizon.”20 Otherwise put, elements of the “Messiah-­narrative” are “brought in to complete the blanks in one of the three main narratives.”21 (3) This construal of narrative dynamics in Wright’s project is repeatedly contrasted with those attempts that suggest that Jesus enters “Paul’s world without visible antecedents.” In terms of modern interlocutors, Wright targets mainly “apocalyptic” readings of Paul.22 Such nonnarrative strategies present a “radical deJudaizing” of Paul’s theology23 because they ignore those “larger narratives,” which “reminded people too much of the large, powerful story told by the Jews.”24 In contrast, apocalyptic readings are “the breaker of ‘narrative,’ ” by emphasising “the saving divine power ‘invading’ the world vertically from the outside without connection to anything that has gone before.”25

Towards an Alternative Narrative Method Such narrative methods have much to commend them. Recourse to Israel’s Scriptures and wider narratives are legitimate and serve important interpretive goals. Not only does this approach take seriously the Christian canon, but it also seeks to read Paul in terms of a narrative that the apostle himself would have recognised. It rightly attempts, then, to execute the historical task of understanding Paul in terms of his own particularity. All such scholarly endeavours are thus vital contributions to contemporary New Testament scholarship.26 One area of possible concern, however, is whether such narrative methods give sufficient weight to the detail and overlapping network of the distinctively 20. PFG, 525. 21. PFG, 535. 22. PFG, 460, 527. 23. PFG, 458, emphasis suppressed. 24. PFG, 459. 25. PFG, 460, emphasis added. 26. For an overview of related projects and their importance, see Ben C. Blackwell, John K. Goodrich, and Jason Maston, “Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction,” in Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination, ed. Ben C. Blackwell, John K. Goodrich, and Jason Maston (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 12–17.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 154

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Paul, Christ, and Narrative Time   155

Pauline themes. To take one example, Wright’s account of sin makes much recourse to the language of “exile,” faithlessness to a “vocation” and the metaphor of “disease” or “sickness,” as one would expect given his account of the interpretative significance of the narrative that runs from creation, to Adam, to Abraham (in Genesis). But such language, insofar as it portrays sin in Pauline theology, does not find significant purchase in Paul’s letters themselves and correspondingly tends to underestimate that which Paul foregrounds (namely, sin as that which enslaves).27 It is at least possible that this is the result of executing the narrative-­historical task in telic terms, such that key truth claims for the interpretative task are locked into the beginning, where creation and a proposed problem set the hermeneutical agenda for the whole. The upshot would then be that interpretative priority, in the inevitable oscillation between the constructed “backstory” and Paul’s letters, will tend to be resolved in terms of the former. The logic behind this claim is simple and runs as follows: Here is construct A (which involves a description of a set of narrative sequences). Here is B (Paul’s letters); in light of B, construct A is rethought. It follows that A determines the agenda and remains the subject matter, even if it is deeply informed and reimagined in light of B.28 When Paul, to continue our hamartiological example, speaks of sin, the hermeneutical oscillation between the language network of sin within Paul’s letters on the one hand, 27. For more on this critique of Wright, see Chris Tilling, “Paul and the Faithfulness of God. A Review Essay (Part 1),” Anvil 31, no. 1 (March 2015): 45–56; Chris Tilling, “Paul and the Faithfulness of God. A Review Essay (Part 2),” Anvil 31, no. 1 (March 2015): 57–69. It must also be immediately added that I would never deny that Paul also speaks of sins and transgressions (plural) as “individual infractions of the divine will.” See now Simon Gathercole, Defending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015); Jason Maston, “Plight and Solution in Paul’s Apocalyptic Perspective: A Study of 2 Corinthians 5:18–21,” in Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination, ed. Ben C. Blackwell, John K. Goodrich, and Jason Maston (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 308–10. Despite this helpful corrective to certain readings, I have reservations about aspects of their proposals. For a discussion of the former, see Chris Tilling, “Review Article of Simon Gathercole, Defending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul,” Journal of Theological Studies 67, no. 1 (2016): 251–54. See also the discussion in Chris Tilling, “Paul, Evil and Justification Debates,” in Evil in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Chris Keith and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (Tübingen: Mohr, 2016), 190–223. 28. For a similar judgment on the hermeneutical pressure particularly in Wright’s project, see Blackwell, Goodrich, and Maston, “Introduction,” Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination, 16–17; Douglas A. Campbell, “Panoramic Lutheranism and Apocalyptic Ambivalence: An Appreciative Critique of N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God,” Scottish Journal of Theology 69, no. 4 (2016): 453–73.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 155

3/13/18 1:14 PM

156  Chris Tilling

and the backstory which portrays sin in particular terms on the other, tends to be resolved in terms of the backstory, not Paul’s letters. Thus in telic approaches the direction of the narrative, beginning with creation, is hermeneutically significant. To return to Wright, it is to be noted that he leans heavily on two figures in the world of narratology.29 First is Vladimir Propp, who elaborated the types of narrative sequences he classified within Russian fairy tales. Propp posited several ways a narrative would typically develop, crucially, after an initial situation.30 Second, and even more important, is Wright’s deployment of A. J. Greimas’s work, particularly his actantial model. Wright summarises the significance of that model as follows: A basic and typical story may be divided up into three moments. There is the initial sequence, in which a problem is set up or created, with a hero or heroine entrusted with a task which appears difficult or impossible; the topical sequence, in which the central character tries to solve the problem thus set and eventually manages to do so; and the final sequence, in which the initial task is finally completed.31

It is to be noted how these dialogue partners set in motion a hermeneutical agenda that concerns a construal of narrative time, one stretched over a sequential template of beginning, middle, and end. As such it thereby locks key truth claims about the whole into the beginning (“a problem is set up or created, with a hero or heroine entrusted with a task”). Creation and what immediately follows, then, by force of being first, contains key or axiomatic truths for the articulation of the whole. For this reason, some measure of less helpful eisegesis may be introduced into the exegetical endeavour. But are there alternative approaches to narrative that could foreground Paul’s letters in the hermeneutical task, thereby avoiding some of the potential problems involved in telic construals of narrative method? In what follows, 29. See the discussion in N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London: SPCK, 1992), 69–73. Of course, Wright is not alone in leaning on the following figures. My case, simply, is that this is profoundly significant for Wright’s whole project, for it underscores the problems associated with Wright’s conception of time in Paul. 30. See, e.g., Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd ed., ed. Louis A. Wagner, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). 31. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 71, emphasis his.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 156

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Paul, Christ, and Narrative Time   157

without pretending to present another method in toto, a three-­point argument is developed that gestures towards an alternative account of narrative. First, although it hardly needs explication, Christ is central in Paul’s letters. This is so not only because of the frequency of christological titles and due to the content of specific Pauline arguments across his literary corpus32 but also in terms of the concern and burden of Paul’s life and exhortations. For example, service of the Lord is spoken of in terms of his boiling over in the spirit (Rom 12:11). He exhorts an eager waiting for the Lord (1 Cor 1:7). Ethical instruction about marriage is given to facilitate undistracted devotion to the Lord (1 Cor 7:32–35). He encourages all to excel and abound always in the work of the Lord (1 Cor 15:58). Every thought is to be taken captive into the obedience of Christ (2 Cor 10:4–5), and all are to be unswervingly and single-­mindedly committed in their devotion to Christ (2 Cor 11:2–3). Christ’s exaltation is Paul’s eager expectation and hope, one that he wishes will find expression in the totality of his existence (Phil 1:20). Indeed, for Paul, life itself is summed up in Christ—­everything he does is done for Christ (Phil 1:21). Even more poignantly, Paul ultimately desires and yearns for Christ’s presence, which is more important than life itself (Phil 1:23; see also 1 Thess 4:17–18; 5:10–11). And so on. The point is that any reading of Paul’s letters must reckon with the centrality of Christ, with the force of Paul’s Christ-­directed fervor. Second, Paul’s Christ seems to disrupt those sequential notions of narrative time that undergird the hermeneutical pressure of certain telic narrative approaches. This second claim is significant to the extent that the first point about Christ’s centrality for Paul is correct. Most speak of an overlap of ages in Paul’s letters, specifically the end coming into the middle of time, which suggests some measure of Pauline time-­related jiggery-­pokery.33 But the relations between notions of “before,” “middle,” and “after,” in terms of Christ, are a little more complex than this suggests. A few examples will suffice to demonstrate my claim, presented in (i) through (v). (i) Paul seems to think of Christ’s past as constituting the present. Romans, for example, can complicate temporal matters in relation to Christ. So Paul explains to these (largely) gentile Roman Christ-­followers, 32. The examples would be not only too numerous but also tediously obvious to list here. 33. As Wright articulates the matter in his important chapter on narrative: “Paul’s specific contribution to this overarching narrative is to insist that the ‘coming age’ has already been inaugurated (though not yet completed) through Jesus” (Wright, PFG, 477).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 157

3/13/18 1:14 PM

158  Chris Tilling

who presumably—­let it be recalled—­did not hear about this gospel until approximately the late 40s, that: “you have died to the law through the body of Christ” (7:4). These Christ-­followers die to the law through Christ’s body in a manner which evokes the death of Christ himself.34 And while it is tempting to think that Paul must be speaking about the present-­day salvific effects of Christ’s death in the past,35 this could be misleading. Rather, following Romans 6, a text which speaks of dying and rising with Christ (“united with him [σύμφυτος] in a death like his . . . we have died with [σύν] Christ,” etc.), it is as if Paul speaks of Christ-­followers as inscribed into Christ’s time, and this forms the logical basis for Paul’s instructions. Hence, Christ-­followers ought to consider themselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus because the death Christ died, he died to sin, once for all, and the life Christ lives, he lives to God (see 6:10–11). Ann Jervis thus insightfully observes the way, for Paul, those living in Christ live in Christ’s time.36 But the upshot is that the Christ-­story of the past (life, death, and resurrection) is the present. This is why Paul can write that the result of the (false) premise “if Christ has not been raised” means that “your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17). For if Christ’s past were conceivably other, the present likewise alters. Paul’s language is probably not best understood simply in terms of the Heilswirkung of Christ’s substitutionary death.37 Instead, it likely points to a temporal identification of Christ’s past and Christ-­followers in the present.38 Likewise, Paul’s present is defined by Christ’s past in that famous confession in Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ” (2:19–20; see also 6:14). Or again, Paul speaks to the Colossians that “with Christ” (σὺν Χριστῷ) they died to τῶν στοιχείων τοῦ κόσμου (2:20). Similarly, these Colossian 34. See, e.g., Ulrich Wilckens, Der Brief an die Römer (Studienausgabe), Evangelisch-Katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2010), Teilband 2:64–65; Michael Wolter, Der Brief am die Römer. Teilband 1: Röm 1–8, Evangelisch-Katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Theologie, 2014), 415. 35. See, e.g., Wolter, Römer 1–8, 415. 36. Commenting on Romans 8:9, with emphasis on the verb “to dwell,” she writes that Christfollowers “live the kind of time that Christ lives,” for they dwell in Christ, and to dwell “is to live somewhere—in time.” See L. Ann Jervis, “Time in Romans 5–8: From Life to Life,” in The Unrelenting God: God’s Action in Scripture. Essays in Honour of Beverley Roberts Gaventa, ed. David J. Downs and Matthew L. Skinner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 140. 37. Cf. Eckhard J. Schnabel, Der erste Brief des Paulus an die Korinther (Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 2006), 915. 38. See the suggestive and insightful remarks in Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians. A Commentary on the Greek Text (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000), 1220.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 158

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Paul, Christ, and Narrative Time   159

Christ-­followers “were buried with him [συνταφέντες] in baptism” (2:12), which further suggests that a moment in their past (baptism) was participation in the death of Jesus. Paul can thus say that the death of Christ is (the time of) death for all (cf. 2 Cor 5:14).39 (ii) And this is only one aspect of the way time, for Paul, does strange things when orbiting Christ. For there is also a sense in which the past of Christ is not just the present but also the future for Christ-­followers. So in 2 Corinthians 4:14 Paul writes, “The one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus [σὺν Ἰησοῦ].” Christ’s past is the future resurrection.40 It is not raised “like” Jesus but “with” him, constituting—­to use Wolter’s language—­an Ergehensgemeinschaft41 of Christ and his followers. And how can this exist except in shared time? (iii) The flip side of this is that the future of Christ-­followers is inscribed in the past. This comes to particular expression in Colossians and Ephesians, which are of course both of disputed authenticity, partly due to what some have called their “realised eschatology.” But it may be that this is an aspect of pastoral emphasis demanded by the needs of these communities,42 so I simply leave it to the reader to discern the value of these insights. But Ephesians 2:6 states that God “raised us up with him.” Colossians is just as direct: “You were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead” (2:12; see also 3:1, 3). So Christ-­followers have been raised in the past because Christ was raised in the past, even though their resurrection, at least in some sense, remains in the future. (iv) It is also necessary to factor in the claim that Paul’s Christ is preexistent, indeed eternally so. This Christ, who was “born of a woman, born under the law” (Gal 4:4) and recently crucified, was likewise present in the past. 39. See the helpful observations in Ben C. Blackwell, Christosis: Engaging Paul’s Soteriology with His Patristic Interpreters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 220–21. Cf. Emmanuel L. Rehfeld, Relationale Ontologie bei Paulus: die ontische Wirksamkeit der Christusbezogenheit im Denken des Heidenapostels, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Reihe 2, 326 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 302, which speaks of the “Todesverbundenheit des Mit-Christus-Gekreuzigt-Seins . . . als einem ‘existentiellen Dauerzustand’” (the “connectedness-in-death of the being-crucified-with-Christ-ness as an ‘permanent existential condition’”). Even this might not be going far enough. 40. See Michael Wolter, Paulus: ein Grundriss seiner Theologie, Neukirchener Theologie (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlagsgesellschaft, 2011), 248–49. 41. This is difficult to translate into English, but in context Wolter means to denote a simultaneity of event-experience. 42. See G. F. Wessels, “The Eschatology of Colossians and Ephesians,” Neotestamentica 21 (1987): 183–202.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 159

3/13/18 1:14 PM

160  Chris Tilling

So in 1 Corinthians, Paul states that “our ancestors [πατέρες ἡμῶν]” (10:1) “drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ” (10:4).43 This shows that for Paul, as A. Bandstra argues, “Christ himself, the pre-­existent Christ, was present with the Israelites on their wilderness journey.”44 A few verses later Paul, with allusion to an episode detailed in Numbers 21 and mediated via Psalm 77 (LXX), instructs the Corinthians not to put “Christ to the test,45 as some of them did” (10:9). The preexistent state of Christ may also be alluded to in 2 Corinthians 8:9 (“though he was rich”), a subject expressed more plainly in both Ephesians (“just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world” [1:4]) and Colossians (“All things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things. . . . He is the beginning.” [1:16–17, 18]). Indeed, the Colossians passage, as well as 1 Corinthians 8:6, speaks of creation through Christ, which suggests creation and what follows are the smaller stories, the subplots encompassed by God and Christ. The upshot is that creation does not happen before Christ but in some sense after.46 (v) The entrance of Christ in Paul’s discourse sends ripples of temporal disruption in ways that are more difficult to classify. In Romans 16:26–27, for example, Paul speaks of the revelation that is “now” disclosed in Christ but is precisely so “through the prophetic writings.”47 Romans 1:2–3 is similar, although stated with less force. In it, Paul speaks of the “gospel concerning his Son,” “promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures.” Rather revealingly, Robert Jewett explains that here “the prophets articulated the gospel of God in the period before Christ.”48 Jewett at least attempts to make 43. Attempts to deny the import of preexistence language in Paul, e.g., via recourse to “wisdom” categories (see, e.g., James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation [London: SCM, 1989], 195; James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998], 274) founder on the importance of divine Christology throughout Paul’s letters (see Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015]). Indeed, when what counts as properly theological, for Paul, is foregrounded (i.e., relationality), Christ’s eternal preexistence is seen as a necessary deduction, even if it is only expressed on a couple of occasions more or less explicitly. Preexistence language thus points towards eternal preexistence. 44. Cited in Thiselton, Corinthians, 729. 45. The reading “Christ” over “Lord” is preferred by almost all modern commentators. Cf. especially David E. Garland, 1 Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 470–71; Schnabel, Korinther, 524. 46. We could go further, here, and suggest that temporal words such as “before” and “after” are best understood in metaphorical terms, especially if it is accepted that time, as a creature of God, emerges with the rest of creation. 47. On the problems here, see T. J. Lang, “Time in Paul,” unpublished lecture, Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD, November 2013. 48. Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 103, italics mine.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 160

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Paul, Christ, and Narrative Time   161

sense of the temporal episodes, but his approach remains problematic because it makes a judgment about who Christ is (and is not) for Paul, which founders exegetically. Indeed, because Paul sees Christ as fully divine,49 speaking of a “period before Christ” is quite un-­Pauline and thus does not wrestle adequately with the temporal disruption generated by Christ.50 These points (i–­v) suggest that for Paul time bends around Christ such that the past story of Christ is the present. The past Christ is bound up with the Christ-­follower’s future and, corresponding to this, the future of such followers is in Christ’s past. Furthermore, the Christ who is born “in the middle of history” also exists beforehand in Israel’s wilderness wanderings and is even bound up with the life of the “eternal God” (Rom 16:26). Robert Jenson manages to capture something of this temporal strangeness in the following: “Time, in any construal adequate to the gospel, does not in fact march in this wooden fashion. Time, as we see it framing biblical narrative, is neither linear nor cyclical but perhaps more like a helix, and what it spirals around is the risen Christ.”51 We may question whether it spirals only around the “risen” Christ, but Jenson’s broad point perhaps captures something profoundly Pauline. Famously, Barth put it as follows: [Christ] lives in His time, and while it does not cease to be His time, and the times of other men do not cease to be their times, His time acquires in relation to their times the character of God’s time, of eternity,52 in which present, past and future are simultaneous. Thus Jesus not only lives in His own time, but as He lives in His own time, and as there are many other times both before and after Him, He is the Lord of time.53 49. Or as I would put it, God’s unique Godness is expressed in both the God-and Christ-relation data in Paul. See Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology. 50. With more space, comment could also be made about Gal 4:8, 9; 1 Cor 2:7; 4:5; 13:10; 2 Cor 5:17. 51. Robert W. Jenson, “Scripture’s Authority in the Church,” in The Art of Reading Scripture, ed. Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 35. My thanks to Lincoln Harvey for drawing my attention to this passage. 52. This suggests that God both relates to, yet also in some sense transcends, the previously enumerated sequential scheme. (This language leans on two studies on time in relation to the theology of Karl Barth, namely Daniel M. Griswold, Triune Eternality: God’s Relationship to Time in the Theology of Karl Barth [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015]; and James J. Cassidy, God’s Time for Us: Barth’s Reconciliation of Eternity and Time in Jesus Christ [Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2016]). As Christ is fully divine as the Father is divine, for Paul, Barth’s language presents tremendous exegetical insight. 53. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, ed. T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1969–80), 440, emphasis added.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 161

3/13/18 1:14 PM

162  Chris Tilling

Jenson and Barth are attempting to express something Pauline, namely that with the man Jesus Christ, temporal tremors are felt as metaphysically tectonic plates move around to accommodate the oddness of the crucifixion of none other than the Lord of glory (1 Cor 2:8). It is as if the divinity of the crucified Christ does not simply press into the imagination of Paul as a puzzle piece, which makes sense of other issues, but as more of—­if we are to continue using metaphors—­an alarm clock that wakes one from a nightmare with a start. Indeed, precisely such metaphorical language is deployed by Paul in speaking about time in such participatory terms: “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep” (Rom 13:11). This time is the time of Christ, the grandest narrative of all. Of course, Paul normally understands time in terms of the past (which is now gone), present, and future (which is hoped for, not seen).54 Entirely typical notions of time are thus present. But telic narrative approaches, which read hermeneutical significance into sequence, have more trouble handling these Pauline temporal tremors as they orbit the person of Christ. And this is the crucial point: the degree to which Christ is central to Paul’s letters is the degree to which there will be disruption of telic narrative logic. Third, the upshot is that for Paul, Christ and creation ought to have a different hermeneutical relation than that portrayed in telic narratives. Simply put, such observations suggest that interpretive pressure from outside Paul’s letters needs to be held more tentatively than happens in telic approaches. Time does not always “behave” around Jesus Christ for Paul; it is not business as usual. The whole sequence of temporal phases is often best seen as a servant 54. To take just Romans as an example—and the evidence would multiply if we had space to canvas the entire Pauline corpus—the past is the place in which sins were previously committed (3:25) and is the temporal location of characters in Scripture, such as Isaiah’s prophecies (9:29; 15:12), Adam’s trespass (5:16), through which “death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses” (5:14), Abraham (4:1, “our ancestor”), and God’s promise to Abraham (4:13; 9:9), which also specifies past time in terms of sequence: before-and-after-circumcision (4:10–11). It is the time Jews were “entrusted with the oracles of God” (3:2) and given the law (9:4), which lead to knowledge of sin (3:20) and the revival or multiplication of sin (5:20; 7:9). They are elected and judged (11:4–8). In the past, the mystery “was kept secret for long ages” (16:25). Certain Christ-followers were “in Christ before” Paul (16:7), and this past has gone such that only things present and things to come could attempt (in vain) to separate Christ-followers from the love of God (8:38–39). There is a “now” for Paul in which judgment, revelation, and justification happens (3:21, 26; 5:9; 11:25; 16:26), when Christ-followers experience sufferings (8:18–21) yet are “discharged from the law” (7:6), such that there is now no condemnation (8:1). There is a remnant chosen in the present (11:5, ἐν τῷ νῦν καιρῷ). There is likewise a future involving wrath (5:9), judgment (2:16; 14:10), salvation, resurrection, adoption, and redemption of bodies (5:9; 8:11, 23; 11:26). Precisely so, this future needs to be awaited and hoped for as it is not seen (8:24–25), for then a glory will be revealed (8:18). Eternal life and glory to God is to come (6:22; 16:27).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 162

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Paul, Christ, and Narrative Time   163

of christological discourse. Likewise, the necessary lines of continuity between Paul and his proposed “backstory” need to be held in hermeneutical oscillation so that they do not resolve in terms of the beginning of the story, particularly when it is understood in terms of creation and the supposed problem that is there set in motion (via a particular reading of the opening chapters of Genesis). Such matters should not be ignored, of course, for that would also resolve the interpretive task ahead of that necessary hermeneutical oscillation. In the task of foregrounding Paul’s own letters, what is required is keeping Christ central and thus emphasising that the time of Christ encompasses all time, from creation right through to the end. Such claims, therefore, lend some legitimacy to what can be called epiphanic narrative methods. Douglas Campbell helpfully distinguishes between “epiphanic” and “telic” narratives. Epiphanic stories are those which do not insist on the hermeneutical priority of sequence. Rather, in “light of a definitive moment of revelation—­an epiphany—­the author grasps a trajectory that had until then been obscure or even completely hidden,” which means that “readers are made explicitly aware of this narrative arc as the past is reread in the light of the epiphany retrospectively.”55 The centrality of Christ in Paul’s letters suggests that this method is a potentially fruitful way to hold the hermeneutical pressure of narrative sequence with appropriate “lightness.” Indeed, it should be noted that, despite certain claims to the contrary, Campbell also desires to draw lines of continuity between Paul and Israel’s Scriptures. Whether he does this convincingly is not the issue for now, simply that he does so. Opening his Deliverance of God almost at random, one may alight upon at his exegesis of Romans 3:21–26. There Paul’s language is explained with reference to a Jewish tradition of martyrdom, with special reference to 4 Maccabees in terms of Yom Kippur.56 Turning the page leads to an extended discussion about the Akedah story, or “the binding of Isaac” (in Genesis 22).57 Thumbing ahead a few more pages, one will discover a discussion relating to the meaning of δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ, which involves an extended analysis of a king’s “right action” in Psalms, all of which is taken to clarify the meaning of such language within the Pauline corpus (with special 55. Campbell, A Pauline Dogmatics in Outline, ch. 3, “The Plan.” 56. E.g., Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 651. 57. Campbell, Deliverance, 652–56.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 163

3/13/18 1:14 PM

164  Chris Tilling

reference to Psalm 98:2).58 The point is that Campbell, a key representative of apocalyptic readings, does not shy away from drawing lines of continuity. Instead, he presents and deploys them on different terms.59 Rather than a telic narrative method, here we see what an alternative narrative—­namely, epiphanic—­could look like. When Paul’s letters remain at the forefront of explications of Pauline theology, it quickly becomes obvious that these texts consistently stress that epiphany of Jesus Christ. This suggests that the hermeneutical oscillation between a proposed backstory and the exegetical task of elucidating Paul be pursued in a way that respects narrative sequence but not in such a way that the epiphany ceases to function as epiphany. The upshot is that the exegete should deploy narrative claims, as hermeneutical devices, with a degree of provisionality.

The Historical and Theological Task If the previous argument justifies an alternative narrative methodology, it can also be maintained that it has more in common with the historical task of writing a Pauline theology; it should not be seen as the result of the dogmatic imposition of a “Barthian” or “revealed theology” or some other such epithet. After all, it takes its cue from the desire to foreground Paul’s letters, including that Pauline network of overlapping themes that constitute his rhetoric. Precisely these centralise Christ so thoroughly. It need not be denied that there is, consequently, tremendous correspondence between the historical task, so understood, and the theological task as portrayed by Barth and others. Just as the preferred narrative posture warns against the telic front-­loading of the interpretative task with anything not explicit in Paul,60 so too does a theology which seeks to be obedient to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. To be noted is Samuel Adams’s controversial apocalyptic theological critique of Wright’s Christian Origins and the Question of God series.61 Any project 58. Campbell, Deliverance, 693–704. 59. This is not to take a stance on the appropriateness or not of reconstructing a Pauline worldview. It is merely to reject the claim that apocalyptic readings, which Campbell instances, operate as if there is no connection to anything that has gone before. 60. Of course, this is to confirm, albeit by different means, some of the claims about the disruptive nature of the cross in Roy A. Harrisville, Fracture: The Cross as Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). 61. Samuel V. Adams, The Reality of God and Historical Method: Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N. T. Wright (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 164

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Paul, Christ, and Narrative Time   165

concerned with the “Question of God,” namely any theological task, must give primacy to the revelation of God. If anything other than this epiphany controls the agenda, then the theological task risks courting abstractions or claims to know God apart from God. And this would immediately undercut a theological project as theological.62 If the revelation of God is conditioned by something other than the reality of God in Jesus Christ, then that which conditions it has become its true lord. Indeed, because of human sinfulness and rebellion, such constructed interpretative lords are prone to idolatry; hence, Adams emphasises the necessity for the activity of God in gracious revelation to contextualise the interpreter.63 This suggests that proper historical method and (apocalyptic) theology go hand in hand. Admittedly, this may not be the impression one gets from a reading of Adams’s critique of Wright. Not just a few will wonder if Adams’s approach is an example of the discipline of theology trumping biblical studies, all in the name of keeping the free Word of God as sole Lord. After all, Adams’s constructive conversation partners are mainly, whether of systematic or philosophical stripe, theologians. In particular, Adams seems to suggest that contextualising the “revelatory experience” (which biblical scholarship arguably must attempt)64 is effectively the same as conditioning (or controlling) the same.65 I have made the case elsewhere, however, that Adams’s central concerns need not be so construed.66 But rather than rehearse that argument here, it will suffice to suggest that there is a vital difference between conditioning Paul’s Christ-­talk according to an external construct and contextualising the same, both in terms 62. Adams, The Reality of God and Historical Method, 74, 80. 63. For critical reflections on Adams’s argument, see Chris Tilling, “From Adams’s Critique of Wright’s Historiography to Barth’s Critique of Religion: A Review Essay of Sam Adams’s The Reality of God and Historical Method,” Theology Today 73, no. 2 (2016): 168–77. For an analysis of the way contemporary systematic theological discourse tends to condition God-talk, see Tilling, “Knowledge Puffs Up, But Love Builds Up: The Apostle Paul and the Task of Dogmatics,” in The Task of Dogmatics: Explorations in Theological Method, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017). 64. It is hard to imagine biblical studies existing as a separate discipline without steady recourse to historical criticism (broadly understood). See, e.g., Stanley E. Porter, “Introduction to Criticism and Interpretation of the Bible,” in Dictionary of Biblical Criticism and Interpretation, ed. Stanley E. Porter (London: Routledge, 2015), 1–3. 65. In conversation with Jamie Davies, whose work on apocalyptic and Paul is now one of the most important scholarly contributions (see Jamie Davies, Paul Among the Apocalypses? An Evaluation of the “Apocalyptic Paul” in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature, Library of New Testament Studies [London: T&T Clark, 2016]), Adams maintains that the work of biblical studies that seeks to contextualise revelation can be targeted by Barth’s critique of Emil Brunner’s Offenbarungsmächtigkeiten (see Adams, The Reality of God, 120). 66. See Tilling, “Adams’s Critique,” 174–77.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 165

3/13/18 1:14 PM

166  Chris Tilling

of the contingencies of Paul’s own first-­century world and our own.67 Indeed, contextualisation can be seen as an ingredient of the gospel itself.68 Hence, apocalyptic “revealed theology” (or whatever one wants to call it) and historical-­critical readings of Paul can find common ground in their distinct but overlapping tasks. Where the former wants to foreground the story of Jesus Christ as determinative for all others, the latter seeks to foreground Paul’s letters, which themselves emphasise the centrality of the story of Jesus Christ.

Conclusion Time does not always behave as one would expect in Paul, at least when it orbits Jesus Christ. Strange things happen, such that creation and what follows can be seen as a story within the story of a first-­century Jewish man’s life, death, and resurrection—­a position which seems counterintuitive to say the least. But it is for this reason that the systematic theologians who are worth that name feel the pressure to reimagine notions of time, or at least show awareness of the problems involved. We have noted this already in relation to the theologies of Robert Jenson and Karl Barth, but one of the most shocking examples, penned by one of my own colleagues, illustrates the issue with particular sharpness. As part of a christological argument relating to the nature of rules, Lincoln Harvey writes: “As the first of God’s works, God summons the world into existence by speaking ‘Jesus,’ and the Son and the Spirit thereby, in obedience to the Father, establish and perfect a time and a place for the coming Son of God, or—­to shatter the metaphysics!—­the act of creation happens within the womb of Mary.”69 How on earth does one get to the claim that the “when” and “where” of creation is the womb of Mary? Quite simply, comes the response, by taking seriously the claim that Jesus is the Word of God. And even if one does not wish to state things in precisely Harvey’s terms, the argument of this essay is that a healthy narrative-­historical posture will feel the pressure of the name “Jesus Christ” in understanding the relation between time and creation, whether that be presupposed, implied, or explicit. 67. Of course, these two worlds are intimately related, such that what we seek to elucidate in terms of Paul’s own world will reflect our own situatedness in our world. 68. On this, see the helpful remarks in David W. Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 558–59. 69. Lincoln Harvey, “Jesus Christ and the Rules of the Game,” The Other Journal 26 (2016): 98, italics mine.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 166

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter NINE

For Better for Worse Solidarity M A R I LY N M C C OR D A DA M S

Incarnation: How Relevant to Creation? A world exists. Cosmological reasoning makes obvious what difference God makes to the world: if God did not exist and exercise divine causal powers to create, the cosmos would not exist or get organized at all! But what difference does Christ make to creation? Could God accomplish divine purposes in the world as we know it without an incarnation? Does the Word have to become flesh for the world to be as the physical sciences discover it to be? Is the incarnation essential to the doctrine of creation, or is its relevance quarantined to soteriology and eschatology? These are questions about which Christian philosophical theologians—­traditional and contemporary—­disagree. One instructive exercise is to compare traditional answers about whether the incarnation is central to God’s original creative purpose—­put otherwise, whether a God-­man was “Plan A” or “Plan B”?

Anselmian Reluctance Anselm argued that the incarnation was necessary but only conditionally necessary.1 In creating the world, God was aiming at eternal life together with a perfect number of rational creatures who are as godlike as it is possible for a creature to be—­rational creatures who are somehow self-­determined in their stable orientation to justice. If all rational creatures had seized the 1. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, in Anselmi Opera Omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1946–1961), 2.39–133.

167

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 167

3/13/18 1:14 PM

168  Marilyn McCord Adams

initial God-­given opportunity, if—­from the beginning and steadfastly—­a ll rational creatures had refused to will more advantage for themselves than God willed them to will, then there would have been no sin, and there would have been no need for incarnation. But, like some angels, the primal ancestors of the human race (supposedly, Adam and Eve) sinned. And sinners are unfit for heaven unless they make satisfaction for sin. Sin is an obstacle to divine purposes. Anselm insists that the purposes of an all-­wise, all-­powerful God must succeed. Since the only way to solve “the sin problem” was for God to join Adam’s race and make satisfaction, the incarnation is necessary. But the incarnation is only conditionally necessary because if Adam had not fallen, no satisfaction would have had to be made. For Anselm, God’s “Plan A” creative purposes do not require incarnation. Moreover, “the size-­gap” between God and creatures sets up a metaphysical presumption against it. Surely it is prima facie unreasonable for a being a greater than which cannot be conceived2 to join itself in hypostatic union to a creatable nature that is “almost nothing”!3 Given Adam’s fall, however, the incarnation makes all the difference between failure and success for God’s purposes in creation and so becomes integral to “Plan B.” Of course, even though God’s “Plan A” creative purposes in and of themselves require neither sin nor incarnation, God’s all-­seeing providence eternally knows about Adam’s fall, so that God’s eternal providential plan will include incarnation as the remedy.

Incarnation Anyway? Granted that Christ does in fact solve the sin-­problem, twelfth-­century Western theologians began disputing whether God would have become incarnate anyway apart from sin.4 Where Anselm’s Augustinian Platonism made incarnation seem metaphysically bizarre, twelfth-­century theologians appropriated Pseudo-­Dionysius’s conception of goodness as essentially self-­diffusing, as essentially including a positive tendency to share itself out, to pour into others as much excellence as they can receive. Even apart from sin, they argued, 2. Anselm famously arrives at this conception of God in Proslogion, c.2; Schmitt, 1.101. 3. Anselm, Monologion, cc.28, 31; Schmitt, 1.46, 49. 4. Their arguments are summarized by Robert Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, ed. Richard C. Dales and Edward B. King (London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1986), 3.1.1–3.2.4, pp. 119–135. They are also rehearsed by Bonaventure, In Quatro Libros Sententiarum 3.1.2.2, in Operum Ominum (Ad claras Aquas [Quaracchi]: Ex typographia Colegii S. Bonaventurae, 1882), 3.20–26 (hereafter Quaracchi).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 168

3/13/18 1:14 PM

For Better for Worse Solidarity   169

incarnation would be necessary to the perfection of the universe. First, the capacity to be hypostatically united to a divine person is creation’s most excellent capacity. Surely a God who has not passed up the chance to create worms would not hold back from actualizing it. Second, even apart from sin, God would want to unite the whole cosmos under a single head. But a head must share the nature of what it heads. And goodness pours itself out in a great chain of being and goodness, beginning with immaterial creatures and trickling down to material beings. Merely divine persons share no genus with creatures. Mere angels cannot head the cosmos because it would be inappropriate for them to lord it over human beings, who are (allegedly) their metaphysical equals. A God-­angel would not suffice because it would share no genus with material things. By contrast, human nature straddles the metaphysical border: the intellectual soul shares a genus with immaterial creation, while the human body includes all of the material elemental kinds. God the Son hypostatically uniting with a human nature fits the bill!5

Cosmic Hesitations Despite patristic precedents and biblical proof-­texts, Aquinas and Bonaventure held back from endorsing these twelfth-­century arguments. They felt that the weight of Scripture and tradition favored Anselm’s hypothesis that God became incarnate primarily to solve the “sin problem.” Christ is first and foremost the savior and only incidentally or consequentially the cosmic Christ. Turning to the philosophical arguments, Aquinas and Bonaventure insisted that perfection has to do with natural completion, whereas hypostatic union is something supernatural to which a creature submits out of obediential potency.6 Moreover, experience contradicts the Pseudo-­Dionysian maximizing principle. God does not in fact flood creatures with as much excellence as they are able to receive. Some creatures fall short of species-­norms (e.g., three-­legged sheep), while others could be endowed with better accidents than they have (e.g., Socrates could have been tall, dark, and handsome, instead of short, snub-­nosed, and ugly).7 Bonaventure adds an argument from piety: people 5. Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, 3.1.25.29; 3.1.28.131. 6. Bonaventure, In Quatro Libros Sententiarum 3.1.2.2 and 3.2.1 (Quaracchi 3.25–26 and 3.37–38). Aquinas, Sent. 3.1.1.3, ad. 4; Summa Theologica 3.1.3, ad. 3. 7. Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1.25.5, co. and ad. 3.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 169

3/13/18 1:14 PM

170  Marilyn McCord Adams

are more apt to be inflamed with love for God by the thought that the Word became flesh to save them from their sins than by the reflection that God became incarnate to perfect the universe.8

Christ as the Point of Creation John Duns Scotus9 joins other bold Franciscans to defend the opposite conclusion: Christ is God’s chief aim in creation; the whole world was made for Christ’s sake! Combining Anselm’s insistence that sin is the worst that rational creatures can do with the twelfth-­century theme that incarnation is the greatest excellence God can confer on creation, Scotus argues against the idea that God became incarnate just to solve the sin problem. Surely the very best thing that God does in creation cannot be driven by the very worst thing that we do. Scotus agrees with Aquinas and others that creation is contingent: it was within divine power, even consistent with divine goodness, not to create anything at all or to create something else instead. Scotus agrees that an immutable God eternally wills the divine whole providential plan. Nevertheless, Scotus finds it instructive to analyse the natural priorities and posteriorities within God’s creative purposes. First, God wills that some creature loves God as much as a creature can, and elects the soul of Christ as the rational creature to do it. Second, God wills hypostatic union, infused charity, and other upgrades to fit the soul of Christ for that role. Third, just as the divine persons love the divine essence with nonjealous friendship-­love (amor amicitiae) that desires more co-­lovers for the beloved, so the soul of Christ loves the Divine essence with friendship-­love and so wills still more created co-­lovers. Fourth, God follows through to make Christ the head of many created co-­lovers by creating and predestining angels and other humans’ souls. Fifth, because human souls are substance-­fragments, God wills the material world, so that human beings can be ontologically complete and engage in their natural functions as rational animals.10 Thus, Godhead’s first priority is to create the soul of Christ to expand the circle of co-­lovers; angels and other souls, the material world are all made for Christ’s sake. 8. Bonaventure, In Quatro Libros Sententiarum 3.1.2.2 (Quaracchi 3.28). 9. Scotus, Opus oxoniense (hereafter Op.Ox.) 3.13.4.8, in Opera omnia, ed. Lucas Wadding (Paris: Laurentius Durand, 1639), 7.267 (hereafter Wad). See also Op.Ox. 3.7.3–4 in Scotus, Theologiae Marianae Elementa, ed. Carolus Balic, OFM (Sibenik, Yugoslavia: Kacic, 1933), 8, 12, 14–15. 10. Scotus, Op.Ox. 4.46.1.7; Wad 10.252.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 170

3/13/18 1:14 PM

For Better for Worse Solidarity   171

Material Creation: How Relevant to Incarnation? Tradition is not of one mind about what incarnation has to do with creation in general. But what the physical sciences study is material creation. It is worth pausing to notice how traditional theories see incarnation in relation to it.

Marginalizing the Material For both Anselm and Scotus, divine objectives in creation focus on rational creatures. God wants to include them in a society of co-­lovers, who love God above all and for God’s own sake. For Anselm, material creation enters the soteriological plot obliquely insofar as it makes solving the sin-­problem possible for Adam’s race. The Savior must restore sinners to their original dignity as rational creatures and competent clients subordinate to no one but God. This is possible for human sinners because humans—­as body-­soul composites—­come in families. Just as individual members participate in the ruin brought on by Adam the primal paterfamilias, so too can they participate in the benefits won by the second Adam. If God becomes a member of Adam’s race, the God-­man can make satisfaction on behalf of the whole family and thereby confer on Adam’s race the dignity of paying what it owes. Human beings will not be indebted to an alien savior, because the God-­man is a descendant of Adam. Human beings will not be subordinate to another mere creature because the God-­man is God! By contrast, immaterial angels do not come in families, and—­in sinning—­they lose their ability to make satisfaction for themselves. Another angel, even a God-­angel who made satisfaction on their behalf, would be an alien savior who could not confer on them the dignity of paying what they owe. Thus, it is the materiality of human sinners that makes salvation possible, and it is the materiality of human beings that makes the hypostatic union an incarnation.11 For Scotus, divine intention that there should be a material world is posterior to divine intention that God the Son should make the soul of Christ his own. The material world enters God’s creative purposes only because God’s best beloved creature is a human soul, which is by nature the dominant substantial form of a human composite. Material creation is not God’s principal objective but a skillful means to honoring the soul of Christ with metaphysical completion. 11. See Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 2.21; Schmitt 2.132.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 171

3/13/18 1:14 PM

172  Marilyn McCord Adams

Great Chains and Cosmic Likenesses For Origen, the real puzzle is why there should be any material world at all. (Its absence would not mean unemployment for scientists because their real job would be to pursue mathematics!) On Origen’s reckoning, God’s “Plan A” was to produce only creatures of the best kind, that is, immaterial spirits. “Plan B” adds the material world as a sort of rehabilitation center for the spirits who turned away from God. Aquinas follows Augustine in rejecting Origen’s proposal. Aquinas agrees that immaterial spirits are the best kind of creatures. Nevertheless, he reasoned, God created the material world because there isn’t enough to finite spirits to reflect the whole of divine perfection. For the cosmos to be a tolerable collective godlikeness, it must be constituted by a variety of creatable natures that form a great chain of descending excellence, including immaterial and material beings, with human nature straddling the metaphysical border.12 It is because cosmic godlikeness requires material as well as immaterial creation that headship and hypostatic union take the form of incarnation as a human being.

Material Creation: Front and Center My own view is that the material world, the world that the physical sciences study, is a priority in creation.13 But divine purposes for material creation exceed what the physical sciences can conceptualize or explain. Because God demands more of material stuff than it is able to naturally deliver, incarnation is key to the success of God’s projects. It is not that incarnation is a means to divine ends but rather that incarnation is God’s way of loving material creation and at the same time God’s way of loving us. The Bible admits what Christian experience testifies: the world as we know it has a bright side and a dark side. Incarnation manifests divine solidarity with material creation, for better for worse.

The Bright Side God loves material creation. It wouldn’t exist if God didn’t love it. Creation is optional. God can create or not, and God can create whatever God wants. 12. Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1.22.4, co. 13. I elaborate my views at length in Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 172

3/13/18 1:14 PM

For Better for Worse Solidarity   173

Like good parents with their children, God wants the material world to be as godlike as possible while still being itself. Because God is active, God makes material stuff dynamic. Because God is living, God lets material stuff evolve and (where necessary) nudges it to form structures that can host life. Because God is personal, God nudges it again to evolve the big brains and other biological structures that support personal life. Meaning-­making is an essential function of persons. The divine persons are meaning-­makers with aims and purposes for creation. But the Trinity do not want to be the only meaning-­makers: angels and humans fulfil divine purpose as “insider” meaning-­makers trying to make their own kind of sense of the world in which they live and move and have their being. Moreover, the Trinity are not satisfied with leaving finite meaning-­makers who make their own independent sense of this world. The Trinity are out for shared meanings. They want to pursue projects and purposes that divine and created persons work out together. The Trinity aim for this to culminate in functional indwelling, where created personality is ultimately restructured to make partnership with Godhead its functional core. God’s overarching purpose is to sanctify matter, to make it holy first and foremost by indwelling material persons. Functionally indwelt material persons—­so far as we know, human beings, although in the vast expanse of interstellar space there may be others—­are the place where material stuff becomes as godlike as material stuff can be while still being itself. The Trinity are not satisfied with indwelling other persons. Because love seeks union with its object, God the Son becomes part of material creation by uniting to a particular human nature as his own. Incarnation is the way God becomes as much like material creation as possible while still being Godself!

The Dark Side God’s creating human beings in this world is not an exotic choice. This material world is our natural home, the context in which our species evolved. The bright side is that material stuff can be so structured as to host personal life. The dark side is that such structures are highly fragile, easily damaged, wrecked, or distorted. The bright side is that material stuff can host meaning-­ makers and meaning-­making. The dark side is that material persons in this material world are radically vulnerable to forces that stale-­mate their meaning-­ making functions, to eventualities (I call them “horrors”) that make it prima facie impossible for them to make positive sense of their lives. The bright side

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 173

3/13/18 1:14 PM

174  Marilyn McCord Adams

is that material stuff can be formed in God’s image. The dark side is that radical vulnerability to horrors turns human being in this world into a curse rather than a blessing. The very heart of darkness is that horrors seem sure to defeat God’s positive purposes for material creation. Horrors come in many varieties. Sensational examples feature the rape of a woman and axing off of her arms, psychophysical torture that aims at the disintegration of personality, child abuse of the sort narrated by Ivan Karamazov, cannibalizing one’s own offspring, participation in the Nazi death camps, and the exploding of nuclear bombs over populated areas. “Mundane” horrors include corporate cultures of dishonesty co-­opting workers into betraying their deepest values, parental incest, school-­ground bullying, being the accidental and/or unwitting agent in the disfigurement or death of those one loves most, schizophrenia and severe clinical depression, and degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis that unravel or imprison the person we once knew. Participation in horrors furnishes reason to doubt whether the participant’s life can be worth living because it engulfs the positive value of his/her life and penetrates into her/his meaning-­making structures seemingly to defeat and degrade his/her value as a person. Little wonder, when individual horror participants not only see no reason to go on but wish that they had never been born in the first place! Horrors attack on the inside when they traumatize, distort, or destroy the individual’s psychological capacities for meaning-­making. PTSD robs traumatized individuals of their ability to integrate their experiences into coherent narratives. Others (e.g., paranoid schizophrenics) are still able to analyse, scan, and try on different interpretations and scenarios, but brain chemistry renders their calculations bizarre. For still others, cost-­benefit calculations become pointless because depression keeps them from experiencing anything as good or worth having. Horrors attack on the outside when they threaten or destroy the social framework within whose roles we find much of our reason for being, and/or when they significantly change the material environment presupposed for those ways of being in the world. Think of the Amazon dwellers whose forests are felled by American companies after natural resources, or white southerners in the wake of reconstruction, or of DDR propagandists in the throes of German reunification. Unlike Adam’s putative primordial fall, horrors are not optional or accidental but inevitable for material persons in this material world where material

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 174

3/13/18 1:14 PM

For Better for Worse Solidarity   175

stuff for the most part behaves the way the physical sciences describe. They are not so much a function of individual human choices, but a systemic consequence of what material stuff is and the kind of thing human beings are. Popular science declares what experience shows: material life is neither permanent nor self-­sustaining. Life-­hosting material structures are vulnerable to destruction by a variety of natural forces. Just as complex material structures evolve by “cannibalizing” simpler ones, so—­while they last—­plants and animals live by consuming and hence destroying something else. Evolutionary biology informs us that as material persons, human beings inherit (what we may call for short) “Darwinian” motivational tendencies. Animal nature builds in an instinct for life that drives the animal to do anything to secure it. And animal nature carries the inevitability of death, which makes the struggle for pursuit of individual and species-­preservation desperate. Given real and apparent scarcities, these give rise to the proverbial struggle for existence in which only the fittest survive. Moreover, human being ties personality to an animal developmental life cycle. The prolonged dependence on adult caretakers required to grow our superior human brains leaves us for years at the mercy of neurotic adults who evoke and decisively shape our personalities. The process of psychological development is itself extremely fragile, easily interrupted, and distorted in ways that mark us for life. Even at their best, human psychic capacities are insufficient to personify material structures permanently, as not only death but antemortem dementia show. Social psychology exposes how limited imagination and Darwinian motivation renders human beings politically challenged. Humanly devised social systems invariably spawn systemic evils, giving rise to structures of cruelty that privilege some and degrade others. Ethics and mores work to mould individuals into useful citizens by fostering cardinal and other virtues. But these turn out to be localized tendencies to minimize in-­group harms in ordinary time. Such virtues do not reliably hold people back when governments urge out-­group ethnic cleansing (as in Nazi Germany, Serbia, Rwanda, and Darfur). Nor do such character traits keep citizens from defaulting to “everyone for themselves” in natural disasters.14 Moreover, since societies are always competing with 14. See Robert Merrihew Adams, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), ch.9, 144–70; James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Kathleen Taylor, Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 175

3/13/18 1:14 PM

176  Marilyn McCord Adams

one another for scarce resources, high cultural goals and achievements are built on an underbelly readiness to go to war to defend our way of life by perpetrating horrors on our enemies. Military codes of conduct and “just” war theory can be more accurately redescribed as bestiality containment. We resolve to rise above the beasts by committing atrocities only as allowed by the Geneva conventions. No one who lives in society can escape collective horror participation. To the extent that we benefit from social institutions, we are complicit; to the extent that we identify ourselves with the society (“I am an American”), we have ownership in the horrors it perpetrates (e.g., dropping atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki)—­and this even if our individual decisions had no input into such horror-­productive social arrangements or collective policies (e.g., because they were put in place before we were born). In the world as we know it, no precautions we can take will guarantee us against individual horror-­participation. Some have the good fortune to avoid it, but millions of individual horror participants have died reasonably believing that their lives were not worth living.

For Better for Worse Solidarity Owning a human nature is part and parcel of God’s love affair with material creation. Once again, incarnation is God’s way of loving material creation by loving us. The Word became flesh. God the Son claimed life as a material person, handing himself over to the chances and changes of this material world. In his human nature, Christ became a vulnerable infant entrusted to the care of imperfect adults. In his human nature, Christ grew up in a particular human culture, which he allowed to shape the values and outlook of his immature human subjectivity. Christ wrestled to conceptualize his human vocation in terms of the savior-­roles on offer in Second Temple Judaism. Christ became complicit in the systemic evils of his social surround. Christ embraced a prophetic vocation to shatter the caricaturing meaning-­making systems of his enemies and thereby leave in shambles the positive sense they had made of their individual and collective lives. His religious establishment enemies returned the favor. Death by crucifixion would destroy the positive significance of Jesus’s career by giving the lie to his messianic pretensions. One who dies by hanging from a tree is cut off from God and the people of God (Deut 21:23; Gal 3:13). The God-­man’s becoming an individual horror

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 176

3/13/18 1:14 PM

For Better for Worse Solidarity   177

participant is an act of solidarity with material persons in this material world. By sharing our prima facie ruin, the God-­man proves himself to be Emmanuel, God-­with-­us for better for worse, always. Anselm is right: God’s purposes must succeed. An all-­wise God would not start anything God could not finish. And an all-­powerful God can finish anything God starts. Horrors prima facie defeat the positive significance of individual horror participants’ lives. The only hope for horror-­defeat is for the individual’s horror participation to be caught up and integrated into something incommensurately good for the individual in question. Relationship with God that is on the whole and in the end beatific will be incommensurately good for created persons. Christ’s solidarity with us in horror participation makes our horror-­participation part and parcel of our relationship with God. Divine irony resolves the plot. The prima facie ruin of the God-­man’s human life defeats the prima facie ruin of individual horror participants’ lives. And the fact that the God-­man’s prima facie ruin defeats our prima facie ruin means that the positive significance of Christ’s human career is not ruined because Christ is the savior after all.

The Material World as the Physical Sciences Discover It? If what God wants is for material creation to be as godlike as possible while still being itself, it is reasonable to wonder whether God’s purposes can be achieved. For letting the material world be itself—­a llowing it for the most part to behave as the physical sciences describe—­inevitably wrecks and ruins the image of God in material persons by making them radically vulnerable to horrors. Divine aims for material persons demand of material stuff more than it can naturally deliver. Incarnation goes beyond what the physical sciences can conceptualize or explain. It requires supernatural divine action. Moreover, incarnation and for better for worse solidarity have to be factored into Plan A. Otherwise, an all-­wise God would eternally know that divine aims for material creation could never be achieved. Nevertheless, incarnation and solidarity in horror participation are only a necessary condition; they are not sufficient for divine success. The God-­man’s solidarity with us in horror participation is the objective basis for lending our horror-­participation positive significance. The divine meaning-­maker is able to grasp the range of positive meanings it can confer. But divine purposes for material creation involve material persons exercising their subjective capacities

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 177

3/13/18 1:14 PM

178  Marilyn McCord Adams

to make positive sense of their lives in God’s world and to partner with God in creative projects. This requires healing of the horror-­participant’s subjective meaning-­making capacities. Since, for millions, this hasn’t happened antemortem and cannot be achieved by any merely natural processes that the physical and social sciences can envision, it seems that a postmortem career and miracles will be required. Ancient and modern science suggest that securing the godlikeness of material stuff will require God not only to go beyond but positively to curtail material functioning. After a season of allowing material creation to be fully itself at great cost to the godlikeness, God will have to reverse policies and emphasize the godlikeness with the result that material creation is not allowed (like a domesticated pet) to be fully itself. Not only are human psychological powers insufficient to personify material stuff for very long. The laws of thermodynamics suggest that the material stuff in this world is headed for entropy: a state in which all material complexity—­including life-­hosting structures—­will be unravelled, and even the dynamism of material stuff will be toned down to equilibrium.15 Happily-­ever-­after life together of God with material persons requires the permanent preservation of complex personal-­ life-­hosting material structures. To stabilize the godlikeness of material stuff, God will have to abort the eschatology of the physical sciences and replace it with God’s own.

15. John Polkinghorne problematizes this issue at length in his The God of Hope and the End of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 178

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter TEN

Our Chalcedonian Moment Christological Imagination for Scientific Challenges JA M E S K . A . SM I T H

Introduction: Embracing Conflict The so-­called “conflict myth” about the relationship between science and religion has given rise to a remarkable cottage industry. In one sector of this industry, journalists and intemperate scholars foment a story of perennial conflict between science and religion, most often between Christianity and evolutionary accounts of our world. This, in turn, gives rise to another sector of the industry that is bent on pacifying this conflict by demythologizing it—­unveiling the loaded assumptions and misunderstandings of both “science” and “religion” that have generated a false dichotomy. These efforts are most often undertaken by Christian scientists, philosophers, and theologians who have a vested interest in maintaining the viability of their theological convictions while also retaining the respectability that comes with affirming “science” (Science). The conflict myth rightly deserves deconstruction. Peter Harrison’s recently published Gifford Lectures, The Territories of Science and Religion, are a particularly incisive critique of how the conflict myth has been deployed. There could not be a perennial conflict between “science” and “religion,” he demonstrates, because what these terms name has shifted and changed over the centuries, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “While it is clear that there cannot have been a perennial warfare between science and religion,” he concludes, “the conflict myth continues to serve the role for which it was originally fashioned in the late nineteenth century, of establishing and 179

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 179

3/13/18 1:14 PM

180  James K. A. Smith

maintaining boundaries of the modern conception of ‘science.’ ”1 The debates between “science” and “religion” carried out in our op-­ed pages, Harrison observes, “are often proxies for more deep-­seated ideological or, in its broadest sense, ‘theological’ battles.” He continues, For their part, what religiously motivated antievolutionists fear is not the “science” as such, but the secularist package of values concealed in what they perceive to be the Trojan horse of evolutionary theory. Perhaps these skirmishes should be thought less in terms of conflict between science and religion, and more as theological controversies waged by means of science. Such conflicts are, again, irresolvable, not because there is any inherent incompatibility of science and religion, but because the underlying value systems—­which are “natural theologies” of a kind—­are ultimately irreconcilable.2

Just when you think Harrison’s goal is to debunk the conflict myth, he proceeds to relocate the conflict, even revivify it, cautioning that in our rush to reconcile “science” and “religion” we may be papering over what are salutary tensions. Advocates of positive relations between science and religion, who argue that science supports religious belief, also act to reinforce the modern boundaries of “science” and “religion.” Much like the “secular theologians” of the early modern period, their urging of a consonance between science and religion has the potential to reinforce the very conditions that make conflict possible. Advocates of constructive dialogue are thus unknowingly complicit in the perpetuation of conflict. Often, they concede the cultural authority of the sciences, the propositional nature of religion, and the idea of a neutral, rational space in which dialogue can take place. [But a]s we have seen, each of these developments is relatively recent.3 1. Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 196–97. A key facet of Harrison’s argument is that Christians ceded too much to science in its early modern beginnings, thus relinquishing “territory” that once belonged to theology. For discussion, see my review of Harrison: “A Therapeutic Cartography,” Los Angeles Review of Books (July 19, 2015), www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-therapeutic-cartography/. 2. Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion, 197. 3. Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion, 197–98.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 180

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Our Chalcedonian Moment  181

Harrison is focused on showing the contingent, historical emergence of these categories precisely in order to complicate any neat-­and-­tidy “reconciliation.” In this chapter, I shall build on his work by articulating what I expect is a minority position: I shall argue that it is precisely because Christians confess with Scripture that “all things hold together” in Christ (Col 1:17) that we should expect tensions and even conflict between a Christian understanding of creation and the sort of worldview purveyed under the (admittedly contingent) banner of “science.” It is precisely because we believe all of creation coheres in the Son that we should be wary of (too) hasty conciliation. The christological imagination is not a way to simply say “yes” to “science”; it is what enables us to say “Amen” to the God-­man who confounds our logics and metaphysics.

“In Him All Things Hold Together”: Beyond Functional Deism Christian convictions can generate “good” problems. For example, it is precisely biblical convictions about the goodness of creation and human culture-­making that have propelled a generation of evangelicals to embrace scientific exploration of God’s world, rightly seeing this as yet another vocation that can honor the Creator. As we pursue that vocation, rooted in these biblical convictions, we encounter challenges: sometimes it seems the “book of nature” is telling us something different from what we’ve read in the book of Scripture. And so we find ourselves in what philosopher Charles Taylor describes as a “cross-­ pressured” situation: our dual commitment to the authority of Scripture and the affirmation of science places us in a space where we seem to encounter two competing accounts of human nature. Thus we often hear that Christians find themselves in another “Galilean” moment: a critical time in history where new findings in the natural sciences threaten to topple fundamental Christian beliefs, just as Galileo’s proposed heliocentrism rocked the ecclesiastical establishment of his day. This parallel is usually invoked in the face of genetic, evolutionary, and archaeological evidence about human origins and development that presses traditional Christian understandings of human origins. Since we now tend to look at the church’s response to Galileo as misguided, reactionary, and backward, this “Galilean” framing of the new origins debate does two things: First, it casts scientists—­and those Christian scholars who champion such science—­as

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 181

3/13/18 1:14 PM

182  James K. A. Smith

heroes and martyrs willing to embrace progress and enlightenment. Second, and as a result, this framing of the debate associates concerns about Christian orthodoxy as backward, timid, and fundamentalist. This “Galilean” framing of the dialogue between theology and science is a loaded one. It assumes a paradigm in which science is taken to be a neutral “describer” of “the way things are,” whereas theology is a kind of bias, a “soft” take on the world that has to face up to the cold, hard realities disclosed to us by the natural sciences and historical research. Christian scholars and theologians who (perhaps unwittingly) buy into this paradigm are often characterized by a deference to “what science says” and become increasingly embarrassed by both the theological tradition and the community of believers who are not so eager to embrace scientific “progress.” The result is that the Christian theological tradition is seen to be a burden rather than a gift that enables the Christian community to think through such challenges and questions well. While we might agree that the church (and evangelicalism in particular) is at a critical juncture in the history of Christian thought, before we can “solve” the tensions at the intersection of Scripture and science we need to first “hit the pause button,” as it were, and consider just how the Christian community can work through such issues. The “Galilean” metaphor is unhelpful and unproductive in this regard because it tends to be a conversation stopper. Instead of fostering theological imagination, this approach tends to assume that the issues are settled and we just need to “get with the program”—­which usually requires relinquishing some key theological convictions. In contrast to this “Galilean” framing of the issues, Christian scholars can find an older model and paradigm in the ancient resources of Chalcedon. As Mark Noll has recently argued in Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, Christian scholarship is not rooted in merely “theistic” claims—­and should certainly not be rooted in a functional deism. Rather, the proper place for Christians to begin serious intellectual labor “is the same place where we begin all other serious human enterprises. That place is the heart of our religion, which is the revelation of God in Christ.”4 Noll’s point isn’t just pious invocation of Jesus; rather, as he goes on to show, what’s of interest in Chalcedon is the way the church navigated contemporary challenges with a theological imagination that was able to retain core christological convictions while at the same time 4. Mark Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), xii.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 182

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Our Chalcedonian Moment  183

taking seriously the “science” (natural philosophy) of the day. A “Galilean” approach might have simply said: “Look, based on our current philosophical knowledge, it’s impossible to affirm that someone is both human and divine. So you have to resolve this tension in one direction or the other: either Jesus is human or he is divine. But he can’t be both.” But of course that is just the approach that Chalcedon refused. Feeling the tension and challenge, the Council of Chalcedon exhibited remarkable theological imagination and generated what is now one part of the heritage of the church: the doctrine of the hypostatic union—­that in the one person of Christ subsists two natures, divine and human. This is not a theological development that could have been anticipated before the church worked through the issues. The conversation at the intersection of science and Christian theology too often lapses back into two related ruts. On the one hand, we tend to adopt a rather static understanding of science that is focused on its products, taking the data generated as “the way things are.” In doing so, we adopt an epistemological posture that treats science as something of an atemporal “black box” that generates data and findings from within a closed universe. In this way, we tend to dehumanize science; we forget that there is no such thing as generic “science” but instead a constellation of sciences (in the plural), each of which represents a contingent, historical repertoire of practices for attending to the physical world. On the other hand, we adopt a functionally deistic posture, even if we ardently assert the reality of the “miraculous.” The “god” we invoke as lord of the natural world is largely superfluous and epiphenomenal—­a transcendent creator not precluded by what we know scientifically. Too often “Jesus” is just another name we give to the deistic god we think “science” will let us believe in. A more truly christological imagination, I want to suggest, will require an epistemological posture that is both more trenchantly critical and integrally biblical. As Stanley Hauerwas put it in his Gifford Lectures, “The God we worship and the world God created cannot be truthfully known without the cross, which is why the knowledge of God and ecclesiology—­or the politics called the church—­are interdependent.”5 But the God and the world we know in the Crucified is not simply synonymous with the world imagined by scientific practice. Grappling with this requires that we first take seriously 5. Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (London: SCM, 2002), 21.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 183

3/13/18 1:14 PM

184  James K. A. Smith

the practiced nature of science. I then want to turn to consider Christology in practice, which is the life of the body of Christ, the church—­and why this generates a very different epistemological posture.

Appreciating the Role of Practices The conversation about science and theology should stop thinking of “science” as a static body of findings and instead consider science as a dynamic process of finding. The “science” in the science and theology dialogue is a remarkably disembodied phenomenon—­as if there were no laboratories, instruments, or communities. But science is not just the results of science, the data sets or images that get produced at the end of a very long process. Nor is science just a matter of theory. Rather, “science” is perhaps best identified as the practices that yield such fruit. Science is a deeply social, communal project, composed of material practices and rituals that are handed on as traditions, absorbed as habits, and enacted in experimental performance that, literally, create worlds.6 With its own rituals and traditions, science is not unlike religion. The philosopher Robert Crease emphasizes that science is not just theory; it is actually defined by experimentation that is a kind of “performing art.”7 A scientific entity does not show up in a laboratory the way an airplane shows up on a radar screen, a fully formed thing out there in the world whose presence is made known to us by a representation. Nor is a scientific entity like a smaller version of the airplane, which could be perceptible if only scaled up large enough. Nor, finally, is a scientific entity like some distant and unknown object on the radar screen that when closer becomes perceptible. A scientific entity becomes perceptible only in performance.8

While science seeks to be disciplined by nature, there is also a sense in which science creates its own phenomena. It constitutes its world through experimental 6. I think this is well attested by Bruce Alberts’s recent editorial, “Designing Scientific Meetings,” Science (15 February 2013): 737. 7. Robert P. Crease, The Play of Nature: Experimentation as Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), esp. 74–102. My thanks to Arie Leegwater and Matt Walhout for pointing me to this resource. 8. Crease, The Play of Nature, 85–86.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 184

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Our Chalcedonian Moment  185

performance, which is a learned performance requiring its own set of virtues and skills, deft employment of instrumentation, and a kind of “know-­how” that is not theoretical, and perhaps not even “intellectual.” Thus Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, in his stunning philosophical history of the protein synthesis, notes the way in which the “stuff” of science—­“epistemic things” or “research objects”—­in some ways emerge because of experimental conditions that are created by “technical objects” (such as instruments). The epistemic things “articulate” themselves “through” a “wider field of epistemic practices and material cultures,” which include both instruments and theories.9 In important ways, the “epistemic things” that emerge “usually cannot be anticipated when an experimental arrangement is taking shape.”10 Thus “Experimental systems are necessarily localized and situated generators of knowledge.”11 What science finds significant is determined not just by what science goes looking for, but how it looks, and what it looks with. And that “how” is not primarily a theory but a constellation of practices that constitute an experimental system. As these systems build up over time and generate linkages with other experimental systems, there emerge what Rheinberger calls “experimental cultures,” which “share a certain material style of research” or “laboratory style.”12 At that point, experimental systems begin to take on a life of their own. They generate epistemic things by generating microworlds—­ which are responses to nature but should not be identified with nature.13 Thus it is important not to mistake “science” for nature. In Rheinberger’s concluding caveat, he cautions that this is not meant to thereby reject science: To characterize science as practice and as culture does not amount, as far as I apprehend it, to determining the social influences hindering or furthering the sciences. It does not amount to a critique of ideologies of science in the traditional sense. Rather, it amounts to characterizing the sciences themselves as cultural systems that shape our societies and 9. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 28–29. 10. Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things, 74. 11. Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things, 76, emphasis added. 12. Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things, 138–39. 13. Rouse rightly emphasizes, “There is no such thing as the ‘social world’ (or the ‘natural world’) except as reified abstractions from the world.” Joseph Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 173.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 185

3/13/18 1:14 PM

186  James K. A. Smith

all the while trying to find out what makes the sciences different and confers on them their peculiar drive, not privileging them with respect to other cultural systems.14

This priority of practice to theory should make us attentive to the nature of scientific practices, which is what defines the landmark (but underappreciated) work of Joseph Rouse.15 Rouse emphasizes a “normative” understanding of practices that attunes us to just how “loaded” scientific practices are. “What a practice is,” he emphasizes, “including what counts as an instance of the practice, is bound up with its significance, in terms of what is at issue and at stake in the practice, to whom or what it matters, and thus with how the practice is appropriately or perspicuously described.”16 What’s at stake and what’s at issue is embedded in the practices and constitutes a particular hermeneutic construal of the world. There is always a normativity at work in practices, including experimental practice. Practices are “defined” not just by the specific activities that “compose” them but also “by what those activities are about (what is ‘at issue’ in the practices) and by what is at stake in their success and continuation.”17 This is the basis for Rouse’s core thesis: practices matter. Practices have something at issue and something at stake.18 “One has not understood a practice unless one has grasped the point of the practice, that is, what is at issue and what is at stake. The recognition that practices are focused by such issues and stakes does not, however, challenge my earlier insistence on the openness of the practice.”19 This means that scientific practices are not just pure conduits of a “given” world of “facts” but rather are world-­constituting. It is practices that “give meaning,” and thus scientific practices—­as cultural institutions—­are as “meaning-­giving” as those of theology. So we have to reconnoiter how we have 14. Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things, 140. 15. I can’t begin to do justice to Rouse in this context. For further discussion that is particularly relevant in this context, see Matthew Walhout, “Looking to Charles Taylor and Joseph Rouse for Best Practices in Science and Religion,” Zygon 45 (2010): 558–74. 16. Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter, 175. 17. Joseph Rouse, “The Significance of Scientific Practices,” in Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 142. I think one of the great missed opportunities, so far, is the lack of any serious engagement between Rouse and MacIntyre, which I think would prove especially important to Christian theorists. 18. This sounds like teleological language to me—which is why Rouse immediately emphasized that claiming that practices have something at issue/at stake does not challenge his earlier claim to their openness (Rouse, “The Significance of Scientific Practices,” 142). I would agree: teleological orientation does not equate to “shutting down” surprise (contra Derrida). 19. Rouse, “The Significance of Scientific Practices,” 142.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 186

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Our Chalcedonian Moment  187

traditionally understood the theology/science distinction. Scientific practices are not merely passive, “observational” practices that simply yield “facts.” Like theology, they also give meaning; they render significance. The encounter between religion and science can’t be a division of labor whereby science discloses the “facts” and then faith renders a “meaning” consistent with those facts. While there is no inherent conflict between religious faith and science20 (where science is understood as the human cultural practice of attending to and understanding the natural world), we need to recognize that there can be conflict between the different meanings they assign to the natural world—­such conflicts arise precisely when we’re dealing not with science but scientism. Sometimes in our eagerness to dispatch with simplistic, unproductive models that posit a battle between science and faith, we too quickly try to reconcile what really are competing visions of the world. Recognizing science as culture should at least grant us permission to demur from the magisterial authority that science assumes in its disclosure of “the facts of the matter.” But it should also enable us to recognize when science as a cultural institution begins to assume roles that other cultural institutions have generally assumed. I don’t think it’s too outlandish to suggest that scientism is a way to describe the cultural phenomenon whereby science (really: scientism) takes over the role of religion, functioning as a religion that offers ultimate explanations.

Scientism as the Master Narrative of “Exclusive Humanism” The Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, in his monumental genealogy of our “secular age,” provides some tools to understand how this happened. On Taylor’s account, scientism is exactly what “exclusive humanism” needs: a way to account for what’s ultimate without any appeal to transcendence—­an account of “the way things are” that is solidly within the “immanent frame.” This is why the Enlightenment is still with us, despite our so-­called postmodern moment. Taylor diagnoses its endurance in a fragilized secular age through a fascinating little psychoanalysis of a convert—­not a convert to religious faith but rather someone (or even a culture) that has converted to unbelief. 20. See Alvin Plantinga’s robust argument in Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 187

3/13/18 1:14 PM

188  James K. A. Smith

If someone tells you that they’ve converted to unbelief because of science, don’t believe them. Because what’s usually captured them is not scientific evidence per se, but the form of science: “Even where the conclusions of science seem to be doing the work of conversion, it is very often not the detailed findings so much as the form.”21 Indeed, “The appeal of scientific materialism is not so much the cogency of its detailed findings as that of the underlying epistemological stance, and that for ethical reasons. It is seen as the stance of maturity, of courage, of manliness, over against childish fears and sentimentality.”22 But you can also understand how, on the retelling, the convert to unbelief will want to give the impression that it was the scientific evidence that was doing the work. And the belief that they’ve converted from has usually been an immature faith that could be easily toppled. So while such converts to unbelief tell themselves stories about “growing up” and “facing reality”—­and thus paint belief as essentially immature and childish—­their “testimony” betrays the simplistic shape of the faith they’ve abandoned. “If our faith has remained at the stage of the immature images, then the story that materialism equals maturity can seem plausible.”23 But in fact their conversion to unbelief was also a conversion to a new faith: “faith in science’s ability.”24 Such tales of maturity and “growing up” to “face reality” are stories of courage—­the courage to face the fact that the universe is without transcendent meaning, without eternal purpose, without supernatural significance. So the convert to unbelief has “grown up” because she can handle the truth that our disenchanted world is a cold, hard place. But at the same time, there can be something exhilarating in this loss of purpose and teleology, because if nothing matters, and we have the courage to face this, then we have a kind of Epicurean invulnerability. While such a universe might have nothing to offer us by way of comfort, it’s also true that “in such a universe, nothing is demanded of us.”25 Now the loss of purpose is also a liberation: “We decide what goals to pursue.” God is dead; viva la revolution.26 21. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 363. 22. Taylor, A Secular Age, 365. 23. Taylor, A Secular Age, 365. 24. Taylor, A Secular Age, 366. 25. Taylor, A Secular Age, 367. 26. One gets the sense, however, that Taylor thinks there are diminishing returns on this: that something in the universe is going to keep pushing back, and that something in ourselves is not going

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 188

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Our Chalcedonian Moment  189

In the “liberating” power of the loss of meaning, one can already see burgeoning hints of what’s coming: Nietzsche and other “post-­Schopenhauerian” visions.27 What we get here, according to Taylor, is an internal critique of modernity, the “immanent counter-­Enlightenment” which turns against the values of the Enlightenment precisely insofar as those values were secular analogues of a Christian inheritance (think: Geneaology of Morals, which targets Kant and Jesus, Hegel and Paul). What we get here is a critique of that strand of exclusive humanism which secularized agape, giving us the universalized “agape-­analogue.”28 What we get from this Enlightenment formalization or secularization of Christian sensibilities is “a secular religion of life,” and it is that to which the post-­Schopenhauerian strains of counter-­Enlightenment are reacting.29 On their account Kant is still immature, still blind to the harsh realities of our cold, cruel universe, and thus still captive to slave morality and unable to be a hero.30 It is worth noting that this post-­Schopenhauerian vision is still a minority report in contemporary Western culture. But one can see the countermovement already within modernity itself. We have arrived at a new place in human history: “A race of humans has arisen which has managed to experience its world entirely as immanent. In some respect, we may judge this achievement as a victory for darkness, but it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless.”31 But Taylor also gives us reason to suspect that scientism is ultimately not viable—­that there is a “fullness” and persistent transcendence that haunts us, even in our secular age. Such a closed “take” on the world can’t seem to get rid of a certain haunting, a certain rumbling in our hearts. There is a spectre haunting our secular age, “the spectre of meaninglessness”—­which is, in a sense, a dispatch from fullness.32 And because this won’t go away but rather keeps pressing and pulling, it generates “unease” and “restlessness.”33 That pressure tends to make scientism shout all the more loudly. We can bear witness to transcendence, not by shouting back, but by patiently carefully to allow us to be satisfied with what looks like “freedom.” One might suggest that Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom gets at the same malaise. 27. Taylor, A Secular Age, 369. 28. Taylor, A Secular Age, 369–70; cp. 27. 29. Taylor, A Secular Age, 371. 30. Taylor, A Secular Age, 373. 31. Taylor, A Secular Age, 376. 32. Taylor, A Secular Age, 717. 33. Taylor, A Secular Age, 711, 726.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 189

3/13/18 1:14 PM

190  James K. A. Smith

pointing out the problem with scientism, thereby leveling the playing field and making room for our age to hear a still small voice that whispers beyond the molecules, inviting us to so much more.

“And He Is the Head of the Body, the Church”: Christology in Practice Taylor’s account intersects with an important part of Peter Harrison’s argument about the mutual impact of the encounter between—­yea, the very creation of “science” and “religion” in modernity. He is particularly interested in the resulting “propositionalization” of religion: These friendly overtures on the part of the natural philosophers had the unforeseen consequence of raising the profile of certain elements of Christian religion—­namely, those propositions to which natural philosophy could lend its support. In this manner, the attentions of the natural philosophers further promoted the reification of religion, and shifted attention away from the formative dimension that had once been central to both enterprises.34

This brings me to my second and final theme: just as we forget that science is a constellation of practices and rituals, so too the reification and propositionalization of Christianity entails what Taylor calls the “excarnation” of Christianity. This disembodiment of the faith is synonymous with a diminishment of the ecclesia as the body of Christ. Our christological imagination is stunted just to the extent that we no longer understand the church as his body. As a consequence, we miss the significance of the epistemological posture cultivated by the practices of the body—­and their tension with more reductionistic modes of knowing. Knowing “creation” is not synonymous with the mere “study” of nature. If all things are created by Christ (Col 1:16) and not merely kick-­started by a deistic architect, then it is the self-­revelation of the One who is the image of the invisible God that is integral to a proper understanding of creation. But that also means the incarnation, cross, and ascension are integral to understanding 34. Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion, 113.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 190

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Our Chalcedonian Moment  191

creation. Thus, as Norman Wirzba has recently argued in his important new book, From Nature to Creation, “To perceive the world as God’s creation, it is crucial that people develop the postures and practices made manifest in Jesus, the true icon of God who reveals to us in his flesh God’s way of being with creatures.”35 This is the pivot point of my argument: to take Christology seriously entails taking ecclesiology seriously. Ecclesiology is Christology in practice. Christology is not simply just another set of propositions to “apply” or “position” natural insights. Our Christology is carried in the formative practices of his body. The hymn that extols Jesus as the “image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15), and emphasizes that “in him all things hold together” (v. 17) then immediately emphasizes that “he is the head of the body, the church” (v. 18). I’m not sure that the conversation between science and Christian theology has adequately absorbed the implications of this revelatory insight. This is to recover a sense of what Augustine called the totus Christus, the “whole Christ,” the enacted conviction that Christ = head + body, that the church is, in some sense, an extension of the incarnation. Augustine invokes this, for example, in one of his sermons on the Psalms: “Adam was a type of Christ. God sent a deep sleep upon Adam, in order to fashion a wife for him from his side. . . . In Christ’s case, a bride was made for him as he slept on the cross, and made from his side. With a lance his side was struck as he hung there, and out flowed the sacraments of the Church” (En. in Psalms, 56.11). The church, Augustine emphasizes, is God’s hospital precisely because it is the body from which the grace of Christ flows. Why does that matter for us? Because it is precisely our perceptual capacities that need to be healed. Our inherited epistemology is weak and stunted and fails to thrive. But the body of Christ is an “eye clinic,” we might say, a hospital for modern36 minds. Wirzba captures the point: “To recognize that our ways of seeing grow out of and perpetuate ways of being in the world is also to recognize that a transformation of vision goes hand in hand with a transformation of life. . . . We cannot learn to perceive the world as God’s creation if we do not make that kind of perception possible.”37 Biblical 35. Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World, The Church and Postmodern Culture Series (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), 63. 36. For a succinct account of the myopia of modern perception, see Wirzba, From Nature to Creation, 63–70. 37. Wirzba, From Nature to Creation, 72–73.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 191

3/13/18 1:14 PM

192  James K. A. Smith

knowing “in Christ” is less like the acquisition of information and more like participation in a way of life—­the way of life that is his body, the church. Thus Wirzba continues: Seeing creation is no small or easy thing, because much more is at stake than a few ideas about how we think the world began. Viewed biblically, the term “creation” designates a moral and spiritual topography that situates all things in relationship with each other and with God. That means the teaching of creation is about the “character” of the world and the health of the relationships that are operative within it. As Paul Blowers has recently shown, among early church writers creation was understood in an expansive way as the cosmic sweep of God’s cosmic redemptive activity. As such, creation was a Triune act and could not be understood apart from the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit to lead creation toward its fulfillment and perfection. To commit to seeing the world as creation, therefore, had the practical effect of calling people to participate in God’s redemptive work.38

Conclusion Knowing creation takes practice. More specifically, it takes the practices of the body of Christ in whom all things hold together. This means that congregations are significant. It’s not simply that pastors and parishioners in congregations need more knowledge about science. Rather, it is in congregations that we find the way of life Wirzba is talking about—­the practiced prescription to heal our bad epistemological habits, many of which are fascinated by a particular mode of scientific fixation on the spectacle.39 It’s not just that congregations have something to learn; they have something to teach, and what is “taught” there is caught in the practices of the sacramental body. The christological convictions of Christian intellectual tradition are uniquely “carried” in the practices of Christian worship. Liturgy, worship, and common practices of prayer are a central, formative resource for thinking well as Christians. It is in the prayers and worship of the church that we are 38. Wirzba, From Nature to Creation, 73. 39. I’m thinking of the way scientific “focus” is yet another instantiation of what Guy DeBord called “the society of the spectacle.” For relevant discussion, see Wirzba, From Nature to Creation, 64–65.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 192

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Our Chalcedonian Moment  193

immersed in the Word and our imaginations are located in God’s story of God in Christ reconciling all things to himself. If we need theological imagination to grapple with difficult issues, then the practices of Christian worship (and related spiritual disciplines) are fuel for such imagining and creative theological work. Intentional liturgical formation ought to be the sine qua non for rigorous Christian scholarship.40 It is in the church—­Christology in practice—­that we will find the wisdom to see beyond the “Galileo” frame to see our challenges with a Chalcedonian imagination.

40. These claims and convictions are unpacked in much more detail in James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009) and Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 193

3/13/18 1:14 PM

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 194

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter ELEVEN

Convictional Knowledge, Science, and the Spirit of Christ PAU L K . MO SE R

K

nowledge comes in various forms, and we should be open to some distinctive features in any knowledge of a morally perfect God, the kind of God acknowledged by Jesus. In particular, if God is not an object of science, we should expect knowledge of God to differ in significant ways from scientific knowledge of creation. We shall see that God’s redemptive and moral purposes involve a desired conviction of humans toward God’s moral character and that the relevant convictional knowledge of God cannot be captured by scientific knowledge. Such convictional knowledge involves interpersonal knowledge of an intentional will, and its distinctive evidence does not need to be public, or socially shared by humans. We shall see how this kind of knowledge contrasts with knowledge in the natural sciences.

Inquiry and Its Objects For better or worse, we humans inquire about the nature and the reality of objects, from electrons to insects to gods. Our inquiries stem from a range of purposes, not all of which reduce to our acquiring truth and avoiding error. An important purpose for many of our inquiries is explaining, or making good sense of, our experience and our situation in this world. So we value explanatory truth, at least in some cases, in inquiry. 195

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 195

3/13/18 1:14 PM

196  Paul K. Moser

The idea of “explaining” or “making good sense” prompts attention to what we are to explain or make good sense of. It raises the question of what exactly is to be illuminated by explanation in our quest for important truth. In doing so, it involves us with such an explanation-­seeking why-­question as the following: Why is my current or overall experience as it is in its experienced content, rather than having different content or no content at all? This kind of question looms large in responsible inquiry about oneself and the world. Regarding an indication for us of God’s reality, we would need to attend to the suitable places or aspects for such an indication in human experience (understood broadly), and we would need to attend in the right way, given that God would care about how we respond. We cannot plausibly assume that just any aspect of our experience will serve here, as if all aspects would reveal a purposive God worthy of worship. God would be morally unique as a morally perfect agent worthy of worship and therefore would bring a distinctive, morally relevant influence on human experience, but not necessarily on all aspects of human experiences. For instance, a toothache could still be just a toothache, regardless of God’s intervention elsewhere in one’s experience. Inquiry will fail to the extent that inquirers fail to attend to the nature or character of the actual object, or at least the actual subject matter of an inquiry. In particular, inquiry about God will fail if inquirers fail to accommodate the nature or character of the kind of God under inquiry; they then will be inquiring in the wrong direction, about the wrong kind of object. Fittingly, Aristotle suggested, in the Nicomachean Ethics (1094b13), that inquirers are to seek the amount of precision available in their actual subject matter without assuming that all topics of inquiry allow for the same exacting precision. Likewise, inquirers should attend, for the sake of responsible inquiry, to the kind of indications in experience actually suited to an object or a subject matter under inquiry. This is particularly true of inquiry about a God whose moral character is sui generis in its perfection. In the case of inquiry about God, where the title “God” connotes worthiness of worship and hence moral perfection, inquirers should consider indications of an intentional agent with morally perfect purposes for the good of humans. If God is sui generis in perfect moral character, we should expect distinctive, even unique evidence for God’s reality and nature. God would be not just an object of human inquiry, in any case, but also a subject whose perfectly good purposes entail some elusiveness toward humans. Such purposes

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 196

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Convictional Knowledge, Science, and the Spirit of Christ  197

would not fit with any simple story about our controlling or predicting evidence for divine reality. We shall see how this bears on responsible inquiry about God.

Scientific Inquiry Many writers characterize scientific inquiry as directed toward a distinctive vision of the world. This proposed vision omits what is distinctively personal or interpersonal, including agency, intentionality, and purpose, for the sake of something more impartial or objective. It thus contrasts with an image of science offered by Michael Polanyi, who suggests that science must be understood in terms of the personal commitments of inquirers.1 Jerry Fodor remarks, “I think that sometimes, out of the corner of an eye, ‘at the moment which is not of action or inaction,’ one can glimpse the true scientific vision; austere, tragic, alienated, and very beautiful. A world that isn’t for anything; a world that is just there.”2 A world that “isn’t for anything” would be a world without intention or purpose and thus a world without personal agents. It would correspond to eliminative scientism, the austere view that the sciences will ultimately and comprehensively capture what is factual but make do without talk of intentional entities, including personal agents and personal commitments. Eliminative scientism may attract some who are inquirers favorably disposed toward desert landscapes, but it eliminates too much for its own good. In taking intentional scientists out of actual science, it removes an indispensable source of actual science, including scientific knowledge: namely, scientists who intentionally theorize for the sake of important explanatory truth about the empirical world. Whatever else scientific inquiry and theory are, they are a result of intentional agents who theorize about the empirical world, and omitting those agents would only obscure what science is, at least as a process with an intentional human source. Fodor’s suggested vision for science thus risks removing the content of science from its purposive source, thereby leaving its origin a mystery at best. The result would be an impediment to explaining science itself as an intentional human process of inquiry. A desire for a kind of explanatory monism has impeded good judgment here. Having favored eliminative scientism in some of his early writing, W. V. 1. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 2. Jerry Fodor, In Critical Condition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 169.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 197

3/13/18 1:14 PM

198  Paul K. Moser

Quine departed from a physicalist version of the position as follows (note his talk of the “purposes” of science): Nowadays the overwhelming purposes of the science game are technology and understanding. . . . The science game is not committed to the physical, whatever that means. . . . Even telepathy and clairvoyance are scientific options, however moribund. It would take some extraordinary evidence to enliven them, but, if that were to happen, then empiricism itself—­the crowning norm . . . of naturalized epistemology—­would go by the board. For remember that that norm, and naturalized epistemology itself, are integral to science, and science is fallible and corrigible.3

Quine thus suggests that science is not logically committed to physicalism or even to empiricism. His use of the term “science” here is not limited to empirical science, in the usual sense, because it allows that empiricism could “go by the board” in science as the result of our discovering extraordinary evidence of telepathy and clairvoyance. He does not regard, however, such (potential) extraordinary evidence as entailing our moving outside of “science” or against “science.” Instead, he finds such evidence compatible with science as a fallible and corrigible pursuit of human understanding or explanation on the basis of evidence. Evidence runs the show of science, and it need not be strictly empirical or physicalist if Quine is right. We can grant Quine his broad use of “science,” and sidestep undue haggling over the term. Even so, the so-­called “natural sciences” involve a distinctive kind of understanding or explanation that merits attention. Consider physics, chemistry, biochemistry, and physiology as textbook examples of the natural sciences. They offer explanations only in terms of things or processes that are not personal agents: photons, electrons, atoms, quantum effects, molecules, enzymes, (bio)chemical reactions, metabolic processes, and so on. None of these things or processes has intentions and thus qualifies as a personal agent. The relevant explanatory work, in terms of its informational content, comes solely from nonpersonal phenomena in the domain of the natural sciences. This limitation is no defect so long as these sciences offer explanations only of nonpersonal data, without any claim to a monopoly on explanation or reality in general. 3. W. V. Quine, Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 20–21.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 198

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Convictional Knowledge, Science, and the Spirit of Christ  199

The main point here is not the false claim that the natural sciences can offer only (de dicto) knowledge that something (some fact) is the case. They can accommodate de re knowledge of objects and processes, so long as those objects and processes are in the natural science domain of nonpersonal objects and processes. Such knowledge would include a direct acquaintance relation to a nonpersonal object or process, and thus would qualify as what Martin Buber has called an “I-­It” relation, rather than an “I-­Thou” relation.4 It would not include direct acquaintance with an intentional, guiding will as a personal object of experience. So it would not include direct acquaintance with a personal agent in the subject matter of the natural sciences. As a result, the natural sciences will not include God in their subject matter and thus will not offer direct knowledge of God’s inherently personal reality or moral character.5

Interpersonal Inquiry Some human inquiry goes beyond the natural sciences to include inquiry about irreducibly personal features in experience, such as the role of an intentional will in the experienced data needing explanation. Some of the social sciences, including segments of psychology and sociology, go beyond the natural sciences in that manner, but, given their disciplinary scope, they stay clear of theology. Inquiry about God, when responsible, also takes inquirers beyond the natural sciences. It assumes that God inherently would be a personal agent with intentions and plans. In such inquiry, one personal agent asks about the nature or reality of another personal agent, and, at least in that regard, we have interpersonal inquiry. If God is inherently a morally perfect intentional agent and aims to guide humans toward perfect goodness, then direct evidence of God’s nature or reality would include direct acquaintance with a morally perfect guiding will. In that case, morally imperfect human agents would have the opportunity for direct experience of a morally perfect agent. Such experience would be irreducibly interpersonal and fall into the category of a direct “I-­Thou” relation between a human and God. If God is the “Lord” over humans, as many of the biblical writers claim, we should expect God to seek to guide cooperative humans toward what is best for them, all things considered, including what 4. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1923). 5. For further discussion of the general contrast here, see Alan Richardson, Science and Existence (London: SCM, 1957).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 199

3/13/18 1:14 PM

200  Paul K. Moser

is morally and spiritually best for them. Mere information could not serve the needed role of personal guidance for humans. God would not be the Lord, at least in practice, over humans without some effort to lead them toward what is good, and this effort would emerge somehow in human experience under certain circumstances. Divine lordship over humans includes this effort at its core, and it offers an opportunity for a kind of divine experiential immanence at odds with typical deism. We need to contrast this experiential immanence with knowledge in the natural sciences if we hope to understand human knowledge of God in Christ. A morally perfect God would seek to engage humans redemptively as agents, not just as thinkers, toward reconciliation with God for their moral and spiritual good. The apostle Paul thus sums up the Good News as follows: “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us” (2 Cor 5:19). In honoring human agency, such reconciliation seeks human cooperation with, and fellowship in, God’s will without divine coercion of the human will.6 We thus should expect evidence of God’s reality and character to be volitionally sensitive to individual persons and thus elusive, variable, and morally challenging toward human reconciliation and fellowship with God. Such evidence would come through a moral challenge, with the human will uncoerced by God’s intentional will, rather than through mere casual reflection on evidence. So we should doubt any suggestion, such as that of Richard Dawkins,7 that the evidence for God’s existence ought to be treated exactly like evidence for a scientific hypothesis. As a morally challenging personal agent, God would differ in significant ways from typical scientific objects, and this would yield a relevant difference between scientific evidence and the interpersonal evidence for God. We beg a decisive question if, with Dawkins, we simply assume otherwise. David Forrest points us in the right direction: God verifies Himself not as an idea, but as a power “to kindle or restrain” in every impulse, resolve, and aspiration. We are sure of Him, because of what He is to us, because of the place He has in our life, ruling, rebuking, 6. On the relevant kind of reconciliation and fellowship, see Paul Moser, The God Relationship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 7. Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 52, 59.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 200

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Convictional Knowledge, Science, and the Spirit of Christ  201

uplifting. It was this inward and indisputable knowledge which Christ Himself had and which He strove to realise in others.8

The key idea is that God would be self-­authenticating in divine intentional power toward humans, at least toward humans willing to consider such power without opposition. This fits with the biblical theme that God authenticates himself for humans: “When God made a promise to Abraham, because he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself” (Heb 6:13; cf. Gen 22:16; Isa 45:23). The main question becomes what the relevant divine power would look like in human experience. God would have unmatched causal power, but what kind of power would serve for divine self-­authentication in human experience? Such questions rarely emerge in theology and the philosophy of religion, but they are crucial to responsible inquiry about God. The divine power in question belongs to a morally perfect will, given that God inherently would be an intentional agent worthy of worship and hence morally without defect. Being morally perfect, God would seek the moral perfecting of humans, at least humans willing to cooperate, in a manner that depends on God’s experienced power. Such perfecting would enhance human reconciliation and their fellowship with God and serve the overall good of humans, including their relationships with each other. The relevant kind of perfecting emerges in the New Testament with various expressions. The writer of 1 John, for instance, comments on being “perfected” in divine love: “If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected [τετελειωμένη] in us” (1 John 4:12). God, as redemptive, might do something to try to bring a human moral character into agreement with God’s moral character for the sake of divine-­ human reconciliation and fellowship. I say “try to” because this would be a cooperative rather than a mechanical process. God would honor the purposive agency of humans, which entails honoring their potential decision to resist conformation to God’s moral character. Otherwise, there would be no genuine agents to be reconciled to God. We then would have nondivine persons as mere extensions of God’s all-­encompassing will, and no nondivine persons with their own wills, at least in divine-­human relations. This is not, however, the picture offered by the common human experience of agency in action or by the biblical writers, who assume human agency in their frequent moral injunctions to readers. 8. David W. Forrest, The Authority of Christ (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1906), 107.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 201

3/13/18 1:14 PM

202  Paul K. Moser

The perfection of divine love in a human need not occur all at once but could be a process over time. So the perfecting could be partial or incomplete at a particular time. In that case, it would not make a human perfect overall (see 1 John 1:8), but it would make perfect some feature of a person, such as an act or attitude of love. Humans thus need not be perfectly loving to be in the process of being perfected in divine love. They could be an incomplete work, progressing toward overall perfect love, just as divine love is in the process of being perfected in a person overall. We find a central role for a perfecting process over time in Paul’s following remark: Not that I have already . . . reached the goal [τετελείωμαι]; but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. (Phil 3:12–14)

An implication of Paul’s remark is that he has not been made perfect or fully mature, even if God has perfected some aspect of him. With a similar emphasis, Paul talks of a cooperative process of “making holiness perfect [ἐπιτελοῦντες ἁγιωσύνην] in the fear of God” (2 Cor 7:1). The righteous love in agapē includes the “holiness” Paul mentions, which includes willingly belonging to God, and God could foster it through a developmental process that honors the maturing of human moral character and agency over time. We may propose that, if real, God is perfectly loving and wants humans to be cooperative works-­in-­progress pursuing God’s moral character. In that case, the central goal of the process would be the cooperative perfecting of all humans in divine love, in relationship with God and other humans. This goal would be primary and intrinsically valuable, even if its realization is uneven and difficult among humans. The love in question would need to be uncoercive, universal, and relational; otherwise, it would face a moral defect and thus be inappropriate to a God worthy of worship. In leaving room for human cooperation and thus human agency, God would have no need to perfect divine love in a person synchronically or instantaneously. Instead, God’s effort could be diachronic, thus attending to the cooperative maturation of humans

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 202

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Convictional Knowledge, Science, and the Spirit of Christ  203

over time in relation with God’s morally perfect character. In that case, time would be a sacred opportunity for a divine goal approached diachronically, if unsteadily, by humans.

Perfecting through Being Convicted We still need to clarify how the uncoercive perfecting of divine love functions in interpersonal divine-­human action. Otherwise, we will fail to understand the direct evidence for God’s reality and character. In that case, we will lack an adequate religious epistemology, including an adequate phenomenology of religious experience. Because evidence for God, who is worthy of worship, is inseparable from evidence for God’s moral character, we should expect the relevant evidence to be associated with the self-­manifestation of God’s morally perfect goodness, including divine love for all other agents. God’s perfect moral character would not be just another feature of God, as if it could be set aside in relating to God. In particular, the idea of inherent moral perfection is central to the meaning of the perfectionist title “God” as one worthy of worship. The divine power that serves as direct evidence would be the power of God’s morally perfect character as self-­manifested in perfect love to agents for the sake of divine-­human reconciliation and fellowship. This power represents God’s inherent character without coercing humans in their response, or lack of response, to God. Such power would not be easily copied by false gods because they would lack the needed moral character. What is morally imperfect will fall short of the divine power of moral perfection. We can benefit from some clarification of such morally loaded power. It would be a serious mistake by an intellectualist to reduce divine self-­ manifestation to (de dicto) propositional truths (that something is the case). That would omit the underlying nonpropositional reality of such truths: God’s actual moral character of perfect goodness, including perfect love for all other agents. Wilhelm Herrmann has noted a danger here: “Information concerning God, although it may claim to be of divine revelation, can only bring that troubled piety that lives by no delivering act of God, but by men’s own exertions.”9 We shall identify the core of the relevant “delivering act of God” in individual human experience, in terms of cooperative human conviction 9. Wilhelm Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, trans. J. S. Stanyon (London: SCM, 1972), 58.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 203

3/13/18 1:14 PM

204  Paul K. Moser

by God’s self-­manifesting Spirit toward God’s moral character. Herrmann himself, however (like so many others of his time), did not give due attention to its pneumatic source and significance. The self-­manifestation of divine love to a human person does not require the expression of a de dicto judgment that God loves a human person. Instead, it can be an expression of divine love in statement-­free manifestational action toward a human person. This seems to be part of an announcement attributed to God in Romans 10:20, citing Isaiah 65:1: “I have shown myself [ἐμφανὴς ἐγενόμην] to those who did not ask for me.” We have a case of de re self-­ manifestation in the human domain when, for instance, one human displays remarkable kindness toward another person without saying anything. In general, intentional agents can display their moral character without using language to do so. The de re self-­manifestation of God’s moral character can be joined with a de dicto interpretive accompaniment (such as a good news message in the Gospel), but that is optional. The ultimate reality would be the divine moral character capable of self-­manifestation and not an interpretive statement about it. We gain understanding by thinking of the self-­manifestation of God as intentional with a unique goal—­that is, intentional toward the goal of having persons being convicted by God in a redemptive manner and thereby being led by God toward (increasing) reconciliation and fellowship with God and others. Such “being convicted” figures in John 16:8: “When [the Spirit] comes, he will convict [ἐλέγξει] the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (RSV, using “convict” as an alternative translation). It also emerges in Revelation 3:19: “As many as I love, I convict [ἐλέγχω] and instruct [παιδεύω]” (my translation). The talk of “conviction” here suggests an intentional power at work in human experience beyond mere thought and talk. God’s conviction can challenge a person against sin, but God’s conviction can also challenge a person toward righteousness, including righteous love toward God and others. In keeping with what we suggested about being led by God, one’s being thus convicted would have a passive component but would not coerce a human will. So a human agent still would need to decide or resolve in favor of God’s will, perhaps more than once. God would not settle this matter for a genuine agent responsible to God. Cooperative conviction would figure in the divinely initiated process of reconciliation and fellowship among agents. The ideal Christian model is Jesus in Gethsemane (Mark 14:32–39)

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 204

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Convictional Knowledge, Science, and the Spirit of Christ  205

and in his self-­giving yielding to God, and the cooperative yielding is, ideally, filial in spirit.10 The passive component in one’s being convicted by God would include one’s being nudged or challenged with uncoercive volitional pressure toward God’s perfect moral character and will. Ernst Käsemann remarks that “God’s power, in contrast to the power of the false gods, . . . speaks to us in love and judgment so that we experience the pressure of its will, and, by means of the Gospel, sets us in the posture . . . ‘before the face of Christ.’ ”11 This power, however, would not have the kind of coercive role suggested by Käsemann.12 It would not be mechanical, but would be genuinely interpersonal in honoring human agency, including the agency to suppress and to reject God’s challenge. The self-­presentation of God’s moral character and will to someone would provide uncoercive nudging or challenging, if by way of sharp contrast with one’s present character and will. It could occur in one’s conscience when one experiences, or has one’s attention attracted by, a sharp contrast between divine love toward oneself (as a kind of opponent or enemy of God) and one’s lack of love for one’s enemies. If a person is cooperative and does not suppress the divine pressure, this self-­manifestation would create a conflict of conscience and an existential dissonance for that person, and thus call for a resolution, either in favor of enemy love (and God) or against it (and God). God would self-­manifest the standard in morally perfect personality or character to a human, and this indicative state for a person could ground an imperative for that person to be led by, or conformed to, God’s moral character. So a vital moral duty could arise from divine self-­manifestation by which a person is cooperatively convicted. As direct evidence for God’s reality and character, one’s being convicted toward perfect goodness would not be a purely physical process but would be inherently purposive. The purposive or intentional component in being convicted by God could emerge saliently in experience, with human cooperation, as the goal-­directedness of being convicted emerges. If God seeks the perfecting of divine love in humans over time, and if they cooperate with divine conviction toward that end, then their experience will feature an increase in loving 10. On the relevant sense of “filial” and its relation to knowing, see Paul K. Moser, The Elusive God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 11. Ernst Käsemann, “‘The Righteousness of God’ in Paul,” in New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W. J. Montague (London: SCM, 1969), 176–77. 12. Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 226.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 205

3/13/18 1:14 PM

206  Paul K. Moser

others in depth and in scope. This increase would rest on one’s increasingly being convicted by God toward perfect moral goodness, including the love of one’s enemies. Hebrews 10:22 links the perfecting of human conscience by God with the proper human worship of God, something that would be inherently valuable for humans. Such worship may figure in proper human love and fellowship toward God. The increase in loving others, under increasing conviction, would enable an increase in one’s reconciliation and fellowship with God. Being intentional, it would make salient the role of a morally perfect intentional agent in one’s moral transformation, indicating that this process is not just physical or otherwise nonpersonal. In addition, in including love of my enemies, it would counter any suggestion that the process merely follows from my ordinary desires or imagination. It would in fact go against my natural desires. We thus might say that divine love is bigger than we are in a way that requires us to be led into this love by being convicted toward it by the morally perfect agent who has it. A redemptive God would want not only our being suitably informed about God but also our cooperatively being led and convicted toward a better life in reconciliation and fellowship with God and others, even our enemies. We now approach a vital topic that has been unduly neglected in theology, at least since the early twentieth century: Christian pneumatology’s role in a pneumatic theistic epistemology. According to the apostle Paul, being an adopted child of God is to be led by God’s Spirit: “All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God” (Rom 8:14). In Paul’s portrait, being thus led requires human cooperation with God’s Spirit. Paul thus advises human “sowing to the Spirit [σπείρων εἰς τὸ πνεῦμα]” (Gal 6:8), and he urges his readers to “walk by the Spirit” [πνεύματι περιπατεῖτε]” (Gal 5:16). This kind of talk would make no sense if being led by the Spirit omitted a cooperative human will. Paul identifies a central feature of the Spirit’s uncoercive intervention in human experience as follows: “Hope [in God] does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5:5). Paul would say the same of faith in God, and he has in mind at least a denial of cognitive or epistemic disappointment. That is, he has in mind a unique evidence offered by divine self-­manifestation in God’s Spirit: the powerful love integral to God’s moral character. The self-­ presentation of such love by God’s Spirit shows God’s character in a way that gives unique evidence of God’s reality and character to cooperative humans.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 206

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Convictional Knowledge, Science, and the Spirit of Christ  207

This evidence would not be a mere statement or claim but an intentional power that convicts a cooperative human by way of contrast with inferior human love and hate toward others. It would lead such a human toward sharing in and thus conforming to God’s morally perfect character. We now can introduce a notion of direct convictional knowledge of God that is grounded directly in the convicting self-­manifestation of the divine character of morally perfect love to a cooperative human. This kind of de re knowledge of God, involving a direct I-­Thou acquaintance relation, differs significantly from theoretical knowledge that God exists, even though it can be the basis for knowledge (and well-­grounded belief) that God exists. A redemptive God would prefer direct convictional knowledge over theoretical knowledge for the following reason noted by David Forrest: It is easy to disregard the divine when it is conceived as a theoretical truth, however conclusive the demonstration of it may seem to be, but not when it discloses itself as involved in what we are. It then becomes a “presence not to be put by,” because the commonest incidents of every day contain intimations and reminders of it.13

A perfectly loving God would not want to be easily disregarded by humans in need of God. The rationale for God’s preference for direct convictional knowledge would be a divine aim for moral transformation and fellowship from humans, based on divine leading toward God for human good. As perfectly good, God would be resolute toward such transformation and fellowship and therefore would need to engage humans at a deep motivational level, with due respect for their cooperation as agents. Cooperative conviction would serve this divine purpose in a unique way, despite its widespread neglect in the literature of theology and the philosophy of religion. An excessive stress on the intellectual component of faith has led to the neglect of such conviction. Now we can see why morally transformative, convictional knowledge of God cannot be “impartial” in a way that omits human affections and volitional cooperation. Robust moral transformation of a person involves not only one’s thoughts but also one’s affections and will, and one must thereby be sympathetic 13. Forrest, The Authority of Christ, 385.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 207

3/13/18 1:14 PM

208  Paul K. Moser

in cooperation toward the moral goodness on offer. Here we find a contrast between theoretical scientific knowledge, as typically characterized, and morally transformative interpersonal knowledge. If convictional knowledge of God’s reality and character is inherently morally transformative, then it resists being included in theoretical scientific knowledge, owing to the role of one’s affections and will in being cooperatively convicted. Partiality toward the goodness offered in being convicted by God would be no impediment to convictional knowledge of God and, in fact, would be a requirement. This follows from the role of sympathetic interpersonal cooperation in such knowledge. One’s motivational base thus would be as important as one’s informational base in convictional knowledge. Convictional knowledge of God calls for a distinction between private and public evidence of God’s reality and character. One can be cooperatively convicted by God without anyone else sharing in the evidence from one’s experience of being thus convicted. So convictional knowledge of God would not have to be socially shared knowledge. Even so, it could be socially shared by people who cooperate with being similarly convicted by God. As a result, convictional knowledge could be edifying for a group of people and thereby contribute to a flourishing community. It can have a vital social role without being inherently social among humans. In convictional knowledge of God, one knows God directly and not just the effects of God. Such knowledge thus differs from the kind of knowledge typically proposed by natural theology, on the basis of arguments affirming a first cause of contingent events, design in nature, fine-­tuning in nature, and consciousness in humans. The inherently personal moral character of God is missing from the proposed evidence underlying such arguments of natural theology. This omission prevents the evidence from having the personal and moral robustness required of a God worthy of worship, and leaves one at best with a lesser god. A First Cause, Designer, or Fine-­Tuner from natural theology gives no indication of having the kind of moral perfection required for worthiness of worship. Thus each falls short of the morally perfect God acknowledged by Jesus. In addition, getting to a lesser god—­if natural theology can—­offers no firm advance toward a God worthy of worship. The true God would have no need of the speculative arguments of natural theology. If there is human knowledge of God available from the created world, it includes evidence of God’s morally perfect character. Otherwise, the evidence

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 208

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Convictional Knowledge, Science, and the Spirit of Christ  209

would not be evidence of a God worthy of worship, the true God. So the question is whether God could self-­manifest the divine moral character through the created world. An affirmative answer would not yield natural theology of a traditional sort because it would not assume that the created world by itself (that is, as a strictly natural world) yields a good argument for God’s reality. Instead, it assumes that God would self-­manifest the divine moral character through some part of the created world. This fits with Paul’s view in Romans 1:19 that God shows himself through the created world, without any assumption that the created world by itself does this or somehow yields a good argument for God’s reality based on strictly natural considerations. A good place to look for evidence of God’s reality in the created world is in the personal agents being cooperatively conformed to God’s moral character. This fits with Paul’s question to Christians at Corinth: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Cor 3:16). A second remark to the Corinthians agrees: “You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Cor 3:2–3; cf. Matt 5:16; John 13:35). These considerations point to inherently interpersonal evidence of God, beyond any nonpersonal effects of God. Elsewhere I have called this “personifying evidence of God’s reality” and offered it as an alternative to natural theology.14 Convictional knowledge of God figures centrally in this alternative.

Obstacles to Convictional Knowledge Given that convictional knowledge of God is inherently interpersonal, and not mechanical or coercive, human agents can miss out on it under certain circumstances. In particular, they can miss out on the relevant direct evidence of God’s reality and moral character. In fact, owing to the sharp contrast between God’s moral character and typical human moral characters, we should expect some difficulty, struggle, and stress in the human appropriation of divine self-­manifestation as evidence for God. We have no reason to suppose that the process should be easy or challenge-­free. 14. Paul K. Moser, The Evidence for God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 209

3/13/18 1:14 PM

210  Paul K. Moser

One expected requirement is that we would need to discern, attend to, and ultimately cooperate with the divine self-­manifestation on offer, and this demands that we look in the right place, where God’s moral character would be self-­revealed by God. We may not want to go there, however, preferring instead to avoid being convicted by God. So, with bluntness appropriate to at least some cases, John’s Gospel remarks, “All who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed [ἐλεγχθῇ; convicted]” (John 3:20). We may think of this as a common human tendency toward conviction-­avoidance and agapē-­avoidance. This tendency, given the nature of convictional knowledge, can block a person from having direct evidence of God’s reality and moral character. We may prefer at times a mode of self-­conviction or self-­convincing to being convicted by God, owing to the moral and spiritual rigors of divine conviction. In that case, we may risk our own self-­deceiving in omitting vital, existential truths about ourselves in relation to God. So we sometimes may experience the hardness, even severity, of learning to cooperate with God in being convicted toward a life of agapē.15 We decide in favor of an alternative in some cases and thereby avoid the kind of direct interpersonal experience of God found in cooperative conviction by God. We thus sidestep the important cognitive lesson of John 7:17 about Jesus and his Father: “Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know [γνώσεται] whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own.” Resolving to do the will of God can have not only moral value for humans but also cognitive value. It can be the cooperative doorway to receiving salient evidence of God’s reality and moral character. Indeed, it may be the opening to God’s providing a sui generis self-­authentication and defense of divine reality and goodness. In this perspective, the ultimate apologetics for theism comes in cooperative convictional knowledge and not in anything speculative or abstract.16 It comes from the intervening Spirit of God who self-­manifests the perfect character of God in agapē poured out in cooperative humans. This kind of cognitive process is no mere academic matter. It makes a person new, after the character of God in Christ. The remaining question is whether humans are willing to cooperate. 15. On such severity, see Paul K. Moser, The Severity of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 16. For elaboration, see Moser, The God Relationship, ch. 5.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 210

3/13/18 1:14 PM

C h a p t e r T W E LV E

Explaining the Created Order Scientific and Personal Images J. B . S T U M P

T

he proper starting point for Christians in any area of theoretical inquiry is Jesus Christ. So when the topic is creation, a good place to start is the classic passage in Colossians about the supremacy of Christ and his role in creation: He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—­a ll things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Col 1:15–17)

There is some discrepancy among English translations about the proper way to interpret the Greek prepositions (the NIV says “by him” instead of the NRSV’s “in him” and “through him”). But there is no doubt Colossians affirms that Christ—­whom we know as the second person of the Trinity—­is deeply involved in creating “all things.” I see no justification for relegating what this passage affirms to the level of culturally bound assumptions of the human author (like we do with passages about the firmament and greeting one another with a kiss). This Christocentric starting point, then, forces us to consider the relationship between this theological explanation for the created order and scientific explanations for the same thing. Some people think we should bracket off our theological commitments when considering the workings of the created order. Others think we cannot accept scientific explanations if they seem to leave no space for the activity of 211

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 211

3/13/18 1:14 PM

212  J. B. Stump

God. I’ll claim that affirming both leads us to a more nuanced epistemological position with respect to God’s involvement in the created order. My argument will proceed by way of the problem of personal action, which hinges on the relationship between two different kinds of explanation. I enter that argument by affirming two claims about the created order that some people believe to be mutually exclusive: 1. God intentionally created human beings. 2. Evolution is the best scientific description for how human beings came to be. Of course, some people think evolution is fundamentally incompatible with a creator God because of a commitment to a certain form of biblical literalism. I’m not concerned about addressing that commitment here. Instead, I want to address a more philosophically sophisticated objection to this conjunction of claims that hinges on the nature of intentional action: if evolution is taken to be a correct description of the origins of human beings, then it could not have been the result of intentional action. One way of answering this alleged incompatibility is through the science of evolution itself. Perhaps the phenomenon of convergent evolution can be leveraged to show that creatures like us were inevitable outcomes of evolution.1 Then God’s intention to create us might be explained by a version of structuralism that claims there are underlying mechanisms and regularities intentionally packed into evolution at the beginning with the goal that the processes would give rise to sentient, morally responsible creatures like us. I’m intrigued by such a prospect, but I’m not a scientist who could make that kind of argument with much credibility. I’m a philosopher, so I want to address the problem through philosophy. I’ll develop my overall argument by giving a series of propositions (P1, P2, P3 . . . ) and my rationale for affirming these. Two conclusions (C1 and C2) are drawn from the propositions, which—­if I am correct—­show that there is no incompatibility between the two claims above because they stem from different systems of representation.2 1. The customary reference for a defense of this position is Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 2. While I intend the conclusions to reasonably follow from the propositions, I have not supplied all the premises required to prove logical validity. In most cases, the implied premises are obvious and

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 212

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Explaining the Created Order  213

I begin my argument by situating the discussion within the broader context of personal action. So my first proposition is P1. God’s intentional action is a species of personal action. This claim follows from the orthodox position that God is a personal being. I’ll not argue for P1 in this context but merely take it as given. It is worth listing explicitly, though, so we see it is one of the claims upon which my conclusion depends. Thus if my conclusion is thought to be unacceptable, there is always the option of rejecting this proposition and treating God as something other than a personal being. I also want to acknowledge with this proposition that there is some danger of anthropomorphism and ascribing to God qualities that are uniquely human. There may be some relevant differences between human action and divine action, so we need to guard against drawing the comparison too tightly. But the ability to act intentionally is one of the necessary conditions of personhood in my judgment. Perhaps God’s intentional action is more extensive in scope (or maybe more limited) than human intentional action is, but all I need for this argument is that God is capable of acting for reasons. As such we can discuss the more general case of personal action. My next proposition is P2. There is a problem with understanding personal action that can be articulated in terms of the relationship between two pictures or images we have of the world: the personal and the scientific. As a first approximation of what I mean by “images,” consider the difference between “seeing that” and “seeing as.” There is a difference between seeing that there are a bunch of pixels lit up on a screen versus seeing those pixels as a spreadsheet or a person’s face. The intuitive thrust of this distinction is that we conceptualize our experience in a way that goes beyond the mere sensory stimulation. The “seeing as vs. seeing that” distinction also opens the door to the possibility that there could be different ways of conceptualizing our experience. Two people might have the same visual stimulation but see it “as” different uncontroversial (requiring only synonymous expressions to be supplied). The move from P3 and P4 to C1 is looser, and I discuss my rationale in the footnote to C1.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 213

3/13/18 1:14 PM

214  J. B. Stump

things depending on their background experiences. Someone who grew up without exposure to computers or professional accounting tools would not see the illuminated pixels on a computer screen as a spreadsheet. I’m suggesting that something similar is at work in the two dominant ways we have come to conceptualize things. The idea that we have two different images of the world was expressed in a classic paper by mid-­t wentieth-­century philosopher Wilfred Sellars. In “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” he observed, The philosopher is confronted not by one complex many-­dimensional picture, the unity of which, such as it is, he must come to appreciate; but by two pictures of essentially the same order of complexity, each of which purports to be a complete picture of man-­in-­the-­world, and which, after separate scrutiny, he must fuse into one vision.3

Sellars called the two images the “manifest” and the “scientific.” There is still some currency for his term “manifest,” but I’ll use “personal” for that cluster of concepts. Consider the two images with respect to our understanding of a human being. The personal image conceptualizes and organizes our experience in such a way that we can see a human being “as” a personal agent who acts intentionally, has free will, and is morally responsible. We see her as a subject and explain what she does by appeal to the reasons she had for her behavior. But then we can examine the same human being and recognize that she is a complex material organism made of particles of matter that obey physical laws. This way of conceptualizing and organizing our experience of her is represented as the scientific image, and when we see her as an object, we explain her actions by appealing to the kinds of causes recognized in the various sciences. Consistent with this, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber said, “The world is two-­fold for man in accordance with his two-­fold attitude.”4 He called these images the “You-­world” and the “It-­world” depending on whether we treat our experiences as originating from a subject (a You) or an object (an It). He described our two-­fold experience of other human beings as follows: 3. Wilfred Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 4–5. 4. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Touchstone, 1970), 82.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 214

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Explaining the Created Order  215

When I confront a human being as my You and speak the basic I-­You to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. . . . Even as a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words, nor a statue of lines—­one must pull and tear to turn a unity into a multiplicity—­so it is with the human being to whom I say You. I can abstract from him the color of his hair or the color of his speech or the color of his graciousness; I have to do this again and again; but immediately he is no longer You.5

It is difficult for us to see how these two images of human beings can be integrated. How is it that a decision, say, to build a fire—­a decision that was motivated by reasons—­can result in electrical impulses in my nervous system that result in gathering fuel, igniting the flame, and producing chemical reactions in the burning wood? On the face of it, we might think, like Descartes, that the decisions and reasons belong to a different kind of substance than the electrical impulses and chemical reactions. On that view, there are minds that think on the one hand, and there is brain matter that is extended in space and follows laws, on the other. While this could help us understand why we have two images (viz., they purport to track different “parts” of the human), it doesn’t help us solve the problem of personal action, of “fusing into one vision” (as Sellars charged the philosopher to do) these two different images. All it does is give the problem a different name: the problem of interaction. It is by this name that we most clearly understand the problem of God’s action in the created order. There is one being—­God—­who exists as an uncreated being and has thoughts, desires, intentions, and will that are in some sense analogous to our own personal characteristics. And yet that being created a wholly different kind of being—­nature—­that can be described with elements of the scientific image: force, particle, law, etc. The question for divine action, then, also arises because our two different images map directly onto God and nature, and we don’t understand how they could interact with each other. So we are left with my two original claims: “God intentionally created human beings,” and “evolution is the best scientific description for how human beings came to be.” But we don’t understand how to fit these together into the same explanation. This is the problem of personal action, whether human or divine. 5. Buber, I and Thou, 59.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 215

3/13/18 1:14 PM

216  J. B. Stump

At this stage of the argument, I’ve only discussed the images epistemologically: they are ways of thinking about the world, or instances of seeing something “as” another thing. A question ought to arise about what the images imply for ontology. Do the images describe the world as it really is? My next proposition is P3. If these images are both literal descriptions of reality, then they should be able to be integrated into one coherent account. What would it mean for something to be a literal description of reality? I mean it in the sense of the relationship between language and reality that emerges from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. For example, “We picture facts to ourselves” (§2.1) and “A picture is a model of reality” (§2.12).6 His terminology fits with my use of “image” so far. But then the general thrust of his book is that the logical structure of our language must map directly onto the logical structure of the world. The world consists entirely of facts (§1.1f), and for our propositions about the world to be true, their logical structure must mirror that of the world. “There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts” (§2.161), and that is its “pictorial form” (§2.17). The pictorial form of language is its expression of the possibility of existence or nonexistence of the facts or states of affairs that constitute the world (§2.201). And “Propositions can represent the whole of reality” (§4.12). I’m not claiming here to give an interpretation of the nuances of the early Wittgenstein’s theory of language, but merely to say that something like the above paragraph is what appears to be assumed in most discussions of the problem of personal action: terms like “intention,” “will,” and “reasons” must correspond to elements of the world that we have named, and so do terms like “force,” “particle,” and “cause.” My proposition P3 asserts that if these terms really are picking out ontological features of reality, then we ought to be able to give an account that integrates them. That is to say, if intentions are real parts of the world, and if the physical bits described by neuroscience are too, then we should be able to describe how the former are related to the latter. Or, in the case of divine action, if our language is a literal description of reality, then God’s intentions and the natural processes described by science are real 6. I’ll cite the proposition numbers from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. David Pears and Brian McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1974).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 216

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Explaining the Created Order  217

features of reality, and there ought to be some way of combining both into one coherent description. However, I’m not optimistic any such integrated description is forthcoming because P4. The most promising integration approach—­quantum mechanics—­ does not solve the problem of personal action. Robert J. Russell is the most prominent developer of a view of divine action that appeals to quantum mechanics.7 It is developed specifically as an explanation for divine action (and it is not clear how it would work for human personal action apart from positing a Cartesian dualism of some sort, which is a liability of this approach in addition to those addressed below). Essentially, Russell’s theory posits that God can intentionally influence nature without disrupting (our scientific understanding of) natural processes by acting in undetermined quantum events. This of course depends on an interpretation of quantum theory according to which there is an ontological indeterminacy in nature and not just an epistemological limitation we have in knowing nature. There are other interpretations of quantum theory that do not hold to this, but the mathematics works the same either way, and many physicists do in fact favor the so-­called Copenhagen interpretation according to which there are quantum events that have no antecedent sufficient causes.8 There are some interesting possibilities here. If this approach is successful, it shows that a scientific understanding of the world does not preclude divine action. It creates space for God to influence and guide the course of nature while operating within the parameters of the probabilistic laws we have to describe physical reality. It seems to me worthwhile for some scholars to continue working on this as an explanation for divine action, but I think there are some serious problems to the approach as it is currently conceived. Some common questions arise when we consider theories of divine action that integrate concepts from the personal image (e.g., God’s intentions and desires) with those of the scientific image (e.g., causal explanations). First, 7. A good introduction to Russell’s view is his “Quantum Physics and the Theology of NonInterventionist Objective Divine Action,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 8. Claudia Vanney gives a helpful presentation of the various ways quantum mechanics might be interpreted in “Is Quantum Indeterminism Real? Theological Implications,” Zygon 50, no. 3 (2015): 736–56.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 217

3/13/18 1:14 PM

218  J. B. Stump

we can legitimately ask why God did not design the created order from the beginning so as not to need such regular intervention. Then, even more puzzling in many people’s minds, if God can/does intervene in this way on some occasions, why doesn’t God do so more often to prevent some of the pain and suffering that results from the natural world? There is another set of problems particular to this quantum theory of divine action. First, it seems to be a risky strategy to wed one’s theology so closely to a particular scientific picture. Especially given the speculative nature of the interpretations of quantum theory (though not its formalism) and its lack of consistency with general relativity, it ought to make us nervous that there could be some dramatic change in the future of how we understand this science. Next, in order for this account to work, there have to be real effects of these quantum events at the macrolevel. One particularly interesting possibility for such amplification is that God could guide genetic mutations by causing the appropriate outcomes of quantum events. In this way, Christians might have an answer to critics who wonder how God could intentionally create human beings (or other species) through the evolutionary process which seems random (at the level of variation) to our empirical investigations. But this comes at a price. One of the goals of these integration approaches is that God’s activity does not become apparent to science. But if God is actively causing the particular forms to develop in the evolutionary process, it seems entirely plausible that empirical investigation into the history of life could show it to be incredibly unlikely that natural processes alone could account for the forms that developed. Of course this plays directly into the hands of Intelligent Design proponents, and it seems to run counter to the desired outcomes of supporters of the quantum approach to divine action. Some people have criticized the quantum action view by claiming that it is a violation of the natural laws for God to collapse the wave function of quantum events and so determine the outcomes—­essentially making this miraculous action.9 One response to this criticism would be that miraculous action like this is tolerable on a theistic worldview so long as it is sporadic (perhaps from time to time God directly causes a mutation to some species’ 9. E.g., Lydia Jaeger, “Against Physicalism-plus-God,” Faith and Philosophy 29, no. 3 (2012): 295–312.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 218

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Explaining the Created Order  219

DNA to keep evolution on track). But if this kind of intervention occurs more regularly, God’s action collapses into a kind of occasionalism in which God is the direct cause of everything that happens. A better rebuttal on behalf of the quantum action proponent is to reject the view of natural laws being assumed by the criticism. Thomas Tracy shows persuasively that this criticism is valid only if one assumes a rather strange “strong ontological” view of quantum laws according to which the outcomes of quantum events are precisely specified by a probabilistic law.10 Finally, in my list of concerns about the quantum solution to divine action, it only pushes the real problem back another level. It may help to explain whether there is room in nature for God to act without overruling the laws of nature, and so answer the question of where God acts. But it doesn’t help to explain how God acts. We want to know how God causes a genetic mutation. If the answer is, “by collapsing the wave function of a quantum event and determining one of the possible outcomes,” then we must ask, “well, how does God do that?!” We still have the utter perplexity of how the intentions and will of a person (whether divine or human) are causally efficacious in the material realm. Quantum theories bring us no closer to that kind of explanation than Descartes’s pineal gland helped to explain mind-­body interaction. There is no integrated account that shows how the elements of these two different images work together. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that C1. The images can’t both be literal descriptions of reality.11 But, so far, I’ve not ruled out the possibility that one of these images is the true description of the way reality is and the other merely invokes terms and concepts about which we’re mistaken. To address this possibility, I offer my next proposition: 10. Thomas Tracy, “Special Divine Action and the Laws of Nature” in Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action: Twenty Years of Challenge and Progress, ed. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and William R. Stoeger (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publications, 2008), 273–74. 11. Of course C1 does not follow from P3 and P4 with logical necessity. That could be remedied with an additional premise (if the most promising approach does not provide an integrated account, then there is no integrated account) and an additional conclusion (therefore there is no integrated account). That conclusion along with P3 forms a valid modus tollens argument. But of course the uncertainty in my original formulation is merely transferred in this addendum to the uncertainty of the truth of the additional premise, so there is nothing to be gained. I’m not claiming that the truth of my propositions forces one to accept my conclusion but that the truth of my propositions makes it reasonable to accept my conclusion.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 219

3/13/18 1:14 PM

220  J. B. Stump

P5. If one of the images is a literal and comprehensive description of reality, we should be able to reduce the other to it. There have been entities invoked for explanations in the past that turned out not to be real. Think of the pantheon of gods to which ancient people appealed to explain things like the weather or like phlogiston, which was thought by the best scientists of the day to be an element of materials that could burn in air. We now believe these terms to be without referents in the real world. There is no element of phlogiston that gives off fire, but instead scientists determined that the process of “dephlogistication” should be understood as a chemical reaction in which the oxidation state of atoms is changed (usually when there is sufficient heat and oxygen present). And there are lots of scientific explanations that have replaced what was once attributable to the gods. Perhaps the terms and concepts of the personal image or the scientific image can be shown to be superfluous in the same way. That is to say, if the scientific image is a literal and comprehensive description of reality, then we should be able to translate terms from the personal image like “intention” or “reasons” or even “person” into strictly scientific terms. The personal terms might persist in our language as a sort of shorthand or folk understanding, like when we talk about the sunrise. But the scientifically enlightened would know what they really refer to. Or, on the other hand, perhaps it is the personal image which describes reality correctly, and the terms of the scientific image are useful fictions and refer only to models rather than reality. Either way, that would solve the problem of personal action (and thus our understanding of the relationship between theological and scientific explanations) because our different images would describe things with very different ontological statuses. But it doesn’t seem to me that there is much promise in either reduction. Of course, these reductions have been much discussed, and I cannot treat them comprehensively here, but I’ll merely point toward the considerations I find persuasive. P6. We cannot reduce the scientific to the personal. One way of understanding the reduction of the scientific to the personal is as idealism. That would mean minds and their abilities are literal descriptions of reality, and the kinds of entities science appeals to are in fact only illusions.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 220

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Explaining the Created Order  221

This pertains not just to theoretical entities like quarks and dark energy, but to the more mundane kinds of objects from which scientific reflection begins: material objects like stones and trees and even human bodies. The reason we believe there to be quarks and trees and bodies, according to the classic version of idealism developed by Berkeley, is that God puts ideas into our minds directly and coordinates everyone’s experience so things are consistent. I’ll not spend much more time addressing this view than did Samuel Johnson.12 The argument sounds to me like those offered for God having created the world recently but with the appearance of great age. It seems strange that God would go to such elaborate lengths to coordinate everything precisely to make it seem to us as though something were real when it isn’t. Besides this kind of idealism, there is another way to claim that the terms we use for the scientific discourse (e.g., electron, gene) are not literal descriptions of reality. The deeper we probe into the nature of matter, the less it seems like the world of “medium-­sized dry goods” in which our lives are conducted. The solidity of my desk is not due to material that is packed tightly together and resists the material of my computer sitting on it by direct contact; in fact, both are almost entirely empty space. And what particles they do have are not miniature solar systems where electrons orbit a nucleus of protons and neutrons, but only clouds of probabilities. This picture of the material world and the scientific terms that describe it are very difficult to take literally. So perhaps, these terms can be reduced to terms from the personal image. But how would this work? Are forces really some exertion of will? Is matter somehow a manifestation of moral responsibility? Such reductions seem to deny our common sense. Yes, common sense has been proved wrong in the past, but until there is some plausible explanation for replacing it, we should hold to common sense. The opposite direction of reduction seems no more plausible to me: P7. We cannot reduce the personal to the scientific.

12. “After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’” James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Ware, UK: Wordsworth, 1999), 238.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 221

3/13/18 1:14 PM

222  J. B. Stump

It is true, however, that in the current intellectual climate there is more support for eliminating the personal image by showing it can be explained by the scientific. Science has previously shown that our ordinary experience is not always a reliable guide to reality (e.g., heliocentrism, neurological causes of epilepsy instead of demon possession). And there are serious defenses of the claim that elements of the personal image—­like free will, ethical responsibility, and even the self—­are similarly just appearances. Popular scientist Jerry Coyne, who dabbles in philosophy, has pronounced that free will is an illusion because it is contrary to the laws of nature.13 Philosopher Michael Ruse and biologist E. O. Wilson claim, “In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate.”14 Philosopher Jan Westerhoff wrote Reality: A Very Short Introduction and evidently has concluded that we are not part of it. He says, Many of our core beliefs about ourselves do not withstand scrutiny. This presents a tremendous challenge for our everyday view of ourselves, as it suggests that in a very fundamental way we are not real. Instead, our self is comparable to an illusion—­but without anybody there that experiences the illusion.15

This sort of reduction of the personal to the scientific has become commonplace in scientific writing (both by scientists and by philosophers who aspire to be scientific). If they are correct, there is no problem of personal action because there isn’t really such a thing as intentional action. There is only the interaction of particles, which has no effect other than to give rise to a subjective feeling that we have such capabilities. Choices are just appearances, just like the rising sun is an appearance and not the reality. It is tempting for me to respond to the elimination of the personal image with the same dismissiveness as I did the elimination of the scientific.16 But 13. Jerry Coyne, “Free Will,” in This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories that Are Blocking Progress, ed. John Brockman (New York: Harper Perennial, 2015). 14. Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” New Scientist, no. 1478 (17 October 1985): 50–52, quote from 52. 15. Jan Westerhoff, “What are You?” New Scientist 217 (23 February 2013): 34–37, quote from 37. 16. Mary Midgley might be interpreted as adopting this attitude: “This idea of our own non-existence is a myth, not a solid scientific discovery. It is a recently proposed imaginative vision, one optional way among others of conceiving the world. And it really does not make sense.” Midgley, Are You an Illusion? (London: Routledge, 2014), 7.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 222

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Explaining the Created Order  223

these are serious proposals, and the flaws in their thinking need to be exposed, not merely asserted. Hilary Putnam and John McDowell are two contemporary philosophers who have done that with rigor and philosophical sophistication. In the space here, I can only point toward their arguments. John McDowell, in his classic Mind and World, was addressing a slightly different problem, namely, how experience can justify our beliefs. But his diagnosis of the problem was similar to what I’ve done here. Instead of “images,” he used another concept derived from Wilfred Sellars called “logical space.” In those terms, there is a contrast between the logical space of nature and the logical space of reasons, which roughly correspond to my scientific and personal images. Experience is taken to be part of the space of nature, as it is the impinging of the world upon our sensory equipment. But justification belongs to the space of reasons since it involves normativity: what we ought to believe. So, as too many people fear, it seems that experience cannot play a justifying role for our beliefs. Such people are what McDowell calls the “bald naturalists.” They eliminate the space of reasons by reducing it to the space of nature (thus disputing my P7). On this account, there is no justification, or reasons, or meaning, or the self. There is just the world described by natural science. McDowell thinks people settle for this radical and mind-­numbing solution only because they don’t see how it could be otherwise. His solution is that our experience is not purely a matter of the space of nature. Experience may begin with mechanical processes, like electromagnetic waves bouncing off a tree and hitting our retina, but we conceptualize the information we receive. And we have been “initiated into conceptual capacities” that infect the space of nature with the space of reasons. These capacities give rise to a “second nature” in us, which means, “Experiences are impressions made by the world on our senses, products of receptivity; but those impressions themselves already have conceptual content.”17 That is to say, there is no “seeing that”; our most basic experience is already “seeing as.” Very interesting empirical work seems to confirm this point. According to neuroscientists Purves and Lotto, Despite our overwhelming impression that we perceive the world as it is, what we in fact see on this basis is not a facsimile of the physical world that is occasionally misleading (causing visual “illusions”), but a 17. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 46.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 223

3/13/18 1:14 PM

224  J. B. Stump

subjective world fully determined by associations made between images and successful behavior over the course of species and individual history.18

Hilary Putnam argues similarly in the book that came out of his Gifford Lectures, Renewing Philosophy. Here, he argues against philosophers like Jerry Fodor who claim that the natural sciences tell us the way the world really is, and that therefore the components of the personal image can safely be ignored when talking about reality. But, says Putnam, “From the fact that a statement is not explicitly about anything mental it does not follow that none of its presuppositions make any reference to our cognitive interests, our way of regarding different contexts, or our intentional powers.”19 He goes on to show how concepts like “causality” and “law” are infused with a cognitive dimension even when they are used with regard to inanimate objects. There is a whole world of background assumptions that intrude into our language and thinking, and we cannot rid ourselves of these. This is not to say that there is no mind-­independent reality but that there is no “view from nowhere” as science aspires to. We are subjects and can think about the world only by thinking about it as human persons. So there is deep entanglement between the concepts of the scientific image and those of the personal image. This line of reasoning may apply to my P6 just as much to P7, so I conclude about the scientific and personal images: C2. Neither is a literal and comprehensive description of reality; both are representations or images. Since both the scientific and the personal images are representations, it should not concern us that we cannot fit them into one coherent description. They carve up the world differently. They are parts of different traditions of discourse. So when I affirm that God intentionally created human beings, I am situating that claim within the personal image, which appeals to subjects and their distinctively personal abilities. When I affirm that evolution is the best scientific description for how human beings came to exist, I situate that claim within the scientific image, which appeals to objects and the kinds of causes appropriate for describing their effects. 18. Dale Purves and R. Beau Lotto, Why We See What We Do Redux: A Wholly Empirical Theory of Vision (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer, 2011), ix. 19. Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 57.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 224

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Explaining the Created Order  225

One way to think about these two images is by comparing them to two different styles of painting. Picasso’s Old Guitar Player, in his blue period of expressionism, and his The Guitar Player, in the style of cubism, are representations of the same thing—­a person playing a guitar. But they look very different and could not be fused into one coherent image without a significant breech of artistic integrity. They abstract different features from reality, and neither of them tells the whole story. Or perhaps it helps to think of the scientific and personal images as different kinds of maps.20 A political map of an area gives one kind of information and is useful for certain purposes; a topographical map of the same area gives very different information and is useful for different purposes. Again, neither tells the whole story. So too with the scientific and personal images. These are not literal descriptions of reality but representations of reality. They are two different ways of thinking about reality—­what Roger Scruton has called “cognitive dualism.”21 When applied to the created order (for which my claims about the origin of human beings were specific instances of the more general case), the scientific image treats it “as” the product of impersonal forces. We look for efficient or material causes to explain why things are the way we find them now. My argument has been that this is just one way of thinking about things—­a very successful way of thinking about things to be sure but not the whole story. The personal image has also been a successful way of thinking about things. It treats the created order “as” the intentional creation of a personal being. As such, we look for final causes or personal reasons to explain why things are the way we find them now. Both explanations are legitimate, and neither can be taken as an exhaustive account of the created order. What this suggests is that reality is more supple and complex than the language we have to describe it. Thus it takes multiple perspectives to draw out important facets of reality. Scruton says, If you look on the world with the eyes of science, it is impossible to find the place, the time, or the particular sequence of events that can be 20. I’ve drawn this metaphor from Bethany Sollereder’s blog post, “Lost in a World of Maps: Relations between Science and Theology,” BioLogos, 7 October 2015, http://biologos.org/blogs/jim-stump-faith​ -and-science-seeking-understanding/lost-in-a-world-of-maps​-relations-between-science-and-theology. 21. Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 225

3/13/18 1:14 PM

226  J. B. Stump

interpreted as showing God’s presence. God disappears from the world, as soon as we address it with the “why?” of [scientific] explanation, just as human persons disappear from the world, when we look for the neurological explanation of their acts.22

To return to the starting point—­the person of Jesus Christ—­this kind of cognitive dualism should not surprise us. The orthodox formulations of the nature of Christ also require coming to an understanding of who he is from two different perspectives. We can affirm his full humanity on the one hand and all that it entails. And as we direct our attention to the very human sorts of things about Jesus (e.g., born of a woman, he thirsted, he wept), his divinity recedes from focus. On the other hand, as we affirm Christ’s fully divinity (e.g., uncreatedness), we do not see how this relates to his humanity. Or consider an episode from the narrative about Jesus Christ: his crucifixion. From one perspective, we can legitimately describe this event as tragic and regrettable. People chose to turn over the revolutionary Jesus to civil authorities, who killed him in the most degrading and excruciating way. Yet through the eyes of faith, we see this event as a glorious victory over the powers of evil. These two perspectives are paradoxical and even seem contradictory. Yet we cannot coherently affirm that reality itself is contradictory. Instead, in the reality of Jesus Christ, we recognize our own epistemic limitations and the need for multiple perspectives to make sense of things. And so science and theology are human ways of knowing, embedded in traditions that have developed over time, and they overlap and intersect with each other in complex ways. We do not always tease out the origins of our beliefs and assign them to one of these images. But thinking carefully about them shows that each can deliver only incomplete and perspectival representations of the created order. What seem to be incompatible claims, then, turn out to be complementary. Our Christian orthodoxy—­as opposed to a bare theism—­seems to suggest we could expect things to be this way.

22. Scruton, The Soul of the World, 70.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 226

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter THIRTEEN

Christ and the Cosmos Christian Perspectives on Astronomical Discoveries DE B OR A H H A A R SM A A N D L OR E N H A A R SM A

I

n modern Western culture, many people feel daunted by the discoveries of modern astronomy. Without Jesus Christ, the universe can feel overwhelming, impersonal, and purposeless, evoking responses of insecurity, fear, or at best noble resignation. The universe is vastly bigger than us: light moves so fast that it can travel the distance around Earth seven times in one second, yet it takes billions of years for light to travel to Earth from the most distant galaxies our telescopes can see. The universe is vastly older than us: recorded human history goes back a few thousand years, while the universe is 13.8 billion years old. The universe is full of immensely powerful and dangerous things: black holes with the mass of millions of stars sit at the hearts of many galaxies, and supernovae erupt with the power to outshine a galaxy and destroy life. The future of the universe looks bleak. If the laws of physics continue to operate in the same way, life will eventually come to an end in this universe as the accelerating expansion of dark energy and the relentless increases in entropy mean that eventually there will be no physical processes that could sustain life. Steven Weinberg poignantly summarized a common reaction to what modern astronomy and physics seem to be telling us, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”1 What difference does a Christian worldview make to this picture? Some Christians respond by seeking scientific evidence that will establish the existence of God or the truth of Scripture. Unfortunately, this approach almost 1. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Vintage, 1993), 255.

227

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 227

3/13/18 1:14 PM

228  Deborah Haarsma and Loren Haarsma

always reduces to looking for God only in the gaps in our current scientific understanding, implying that scientific explanations for things in the natural world eliminate the need for God. Perhaps worse, this approach tacitly adopts one of the values of atheist materialists, that science is the one sure way to get reliable answers about anything, including questions of God, religion, and purpose. Science is a great way to learn truths about the history and operation of the natural world, but there are many questions it cannot answer. Astronomical evidence can’t prove that Jesus Christ is the Creator; the facts of astronomy by themselves allow multiple religious interpretations.2 Instead of starting from the natural world and trying to scientifically discover God, this chapter starts from God’s special revelation. Through Scripture and the Holy Spirit, and especially in the person of Jesus Christ, God gives us an interpretive framework for the natural world. These lenses help us see things in the natural world that are consistent with science but guide us to insights that go far beyond science. The Christian worldview is not something that we add onto, or “fit into,” the facts of science. Rather, it is a framework which helps make sense of science and everything else. C. S. Lewis, when asked to prove Christianity, famously responded, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”3 As Alister McGrath writes, our Christian worldview gives us the kind of mental framework that we bring towards the natural sciences, and especially towards reflecting on the natural world that we see around us. The Christian faith allows us to stand back and see a big picture of reality. It is, in effect, offering us a vision, in the rich, full sense of that word. . . . Christian faith gives us a lens; a framework, that helps us to make sense of the whole of our life—­our own experience, the physical world around us, and human culture.4 2. Scientists are used to situations where data is consistent with multiple theories, even within science. Famously, quantum mechanics—one of the most comprehensive and rigorously tested theories in all of physics—allows for multiple interpretations all consistent with every experiment performed to date. 3. C. S. Lewis, “They Asked for a Paper,” in Is Theology Poetry? (London: Geoffrey Bless, 1962), 164–65. 4. Alister McGrath, “Big Picture or Big Gaps? Why Natural Theology Is Better than Intelligent Design,” BioLogos, 15 September 2014, http://biologos.org/blogs/archive/big-picture-or-big-gaps​-why​ -natural-theology-is-better-than-intelligent-design.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 228

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ and the Cosmos  229

The astronomical discoveries that feel daunting when viewed apart from faith become just one part of the bigger picture of reality when viewed in the context of Christ as the cosmic creator.

Christ: A Personal Creator Think of a time when you were outside on a clear, dark night. Maybe you were standing on a city street and saw a beautiful full moon, or maybe you were in a remote campground and saw a sky filled with sparkling stars. Nearly all people feel a sense of wonder and awe in such moments, regardless of culture or creed. Recent studies of people watching nature documentaries—­those BBC shows with sweeping scenery and beautiful animals—­found that the viewers became more likely to perceive something beyond a materialist explanation.5 For those who know Jesus Christ, our response to the universe goes beyond a mere sense of wonder or even a generic spirituality. We believe there is a person who created and upholds the universe, a living God. “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3).6 The universe did not arise spontaneously, nor from an impersonal force, but from a person who created it all with purpose and delight. By studying his handiwork, we learn something about him (Ps 19:1). When seen through the lens of faith, the natural world illustrates and expands on our understanding of God and his attributes, impacting our senses in ways that bring the truth home to our hearts. And since these are God’s attributes, they are Christ’s attributes. Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), and “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). The person behind the universe is Jesus Christ, who knows us and desires to be known. When gazing at the night sky, Christians encounter the same person we know as Savior and Lord. In the New Testament, we see hints of Jesus’s authority as the Creator, such as his power to calm a raging storm (Matt 8:26). We also see glimpses of his divine glory on display in the transfiguration (Luke 9:29) and in John’s vision of Jesus in heaven (Rev 1:12–16). This shining glory is seen abundantly 5. Jeff Hardin, “Is Science ‘Awe’some for Christians?” BioLogos, 25 September 2016, http://biologos​ .org/blogs/deborah-haarsma-the-presidents-notebook/is-science-awesome-for-christians 6. Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations in this chapter come from the NIV.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 229

3/13/18 1:14 PM

230  Deborah Haarsma and Loren Haarsma

in the natural world. John Calvin described the world as “a theater of God’s glory”7 and wrote, It is evident that all creatures, from those in the heavens to those under the earth, are able to act as witnesses and messengers of God’s glory. . . . For the little birds that sing, sing of God; the beasts clamor for him; the elements dread him, the mountains echo him, the fountains and flowing waters cast their glances at him and the grass and flowers laugh before him.8

In astronomy, the full moon and sparkling stars shine for him. Comets, meteor showers, and eclipses entice us to pause, wonder, and worship. Have you ever seen the band of the Milky Way across the night sky? Even to the unaided eye, it is beautiful. If you zoom in to the Milky Way with a telescope, the views can become even more breathtaking. A quick Google image search on “nebula” shows you a large variety of astonishingly beautiful pictures. Most of these nebulae, when viewed by the unaided eye, are mere smudges or invisible. As we build ever more sensitive telescopes, we will find more and more of these astonishing vistas. They are out there, created by God for God’s pleasure, and waiting for us to discover their existence. When God created this universe, God created extravagant beauty beyond human scale. This fits with what we know from Scripture of God’s love, which is also extravagant beyond human scale. The love of Christ prompts the apostle Paul to break out in doxology: “I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—­that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:17–19).

Christ: The Word and Faithful Ruler of All Creation John’s Gospel calls Jesus the Word (John 1:1), a symbol rich with meaning. As a scientist, one aspect of that meaning stands out: that Christ can be “read” or 7. John Calvin, e.g., in Comm. Psalms 135:13, Comm. 1 Cor. 1:21. 8. John Calvin in preface to the French Bible translation of Robert Olivetan, as quoted in Belden Lane, “The World as a Theatre of God’s Glory,” Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought 16, no. 9 (November 2001): 7–12.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 230

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ and the Cosmos  231

understood; that he is intelligible on some level. That is reflected in Christ’s creation. When we look at the natural world, we are able to investigate and understand what we see! There is a sense of order in the natural world, and it is a joy to discover the way the universe works. This hit home for me (Deborah) in freshman physics class when I saw how the equations from the textbook actually matched the real-­world materials of the laboratory—­math precisely describes the real world and makes accurate predictions about what would happen next. Physicist Eugene Wigner called this the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.”9 When seen through a Christian lens, it is awe-­inspiring but not unreasonable—­Christ the Word has made a universe that can be understood. In Colossians 1:16–17, the apostle Paul teaches us that Christ reigns supreme over all things material and immaterial: “In him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” And in Hebrews 13:8 we learn that Christ reigns for all time: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” The comprehensiveness of Christ’s rule over all things, even time, is striking to us as physicists. It reminds us of the connections Einstein discovered between space, time, matter, and energy. In centuries past, time and space were thought to be entirely regular and unalterable, but modern physics shows that time itself is intimately tied to space, matter, and energy. Space can be curved, time can be stretched, and the two are tied together in these distortions in what is called “the fabric of space-­time.” Matter and energy can transform from one to another following the equation E = mc2, and both can distort that space-­time fabric. In our current scientific understanding, it would be nigh impossible for God to create matter and energy without also creating the time and space of this universe. This scientific picture gives us an intriguing view of the theological truth that all things hold together in Christ. Contrary to a pagan and polytheistic view in which nature is ruled by many gods and spirits who must be manipulated or appeased through rituals, the Bible from Genesis 1 onward clearly teaches that one faithful God rules nature. It is unsurprising, then, that we find that physical laws are consistent; 9. Eugene P. Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences: Richard Courant Lecture in Mathematical Sciences Delivered at New York University, May 11, 1959,” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no. 1 (1960): 1–14.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 231

3/13/18 1:14 PM

232  Deborah Haarsma and Loren Haarsma

recent astronomical discoveries demonstrate this consistency across wider swaths of space and time than ever before. To appreciate this, first consider placing a prism so that sunlight shines through it. The prism would spread the light into a complete rainbow. Now consider shining a neon tube through a prism. Here you would not see the whole rainbow, but a few isolated red lines. These are called spectral lines and give neon its characteristic color. In fact, each atom—­not just neon—­has a unique “fingerprint” of spectral lines, determined by the laws of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. When astronomers analyze light from stars and interstellar gas clouds in a similar way, they find the same spectral lines we see on Earth for the same atoms. This is surely one of the most profound discoveries in the history of science: every near and distant place in the universe is made of the same atoms and obeys the same laws of nature as Earth. These laws have remained consistent throughout the history of the universe. Scripture invites us to look at this regularity and see, not the absence of God, but God’s consistency in ruling the natural world. Scripture points to this as confirmation of the certainty of God’s promises to us. In Jeremiah 33:24–26, God specifically points to the regularity of day and night and the “established laws of heaven and earth” as evidence of his faithfulness in keeping his covenant to Israel.

Christ and the Wildness of Creation The images of glory and abundance described above are beautiful, but do not be misled by this to think that the universe is merely pretty. The universe is not sanitized or tame. Just like wilderness locations on Earth such as volcanos and deserts, the universe can be powerful, violent, and dangerous. The universe reminds us that we are but a small piece of it. The danger can be downright destructive. Some comets and meteors can fall to Earth with enough force to destroy life for miles in every direction. During the history of Earth, a few have fallen with enough energy to trigger planetwide mass extinctions. Dangerous supernova explosions happen about once every fifty years in our Milky Way galaxy.10 These energetic events not only destroy their own stellar systems but also expel enough radiation that they could destroy life in star systems dozens of light years away. Yet these events also have a creative element: 10. Roland Diehl et al., “Radioactive 26Al from Massive Stars in the Galaxy,” Nature 439, no. 7072 (2006): 45–47.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 232

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ and the Cosmos  233

falling comets may have brought water to the early Earth, and supernova explosions spread rich elements through space that can be formed into the next generation of stars. We see this same package deal of creative and destructive natural processes on Earth. The motion of continental plates, which brings nutrients necessary for life up to the planet’s surface and creates a wide variety of ecological niches, causes dangerous earthquakes and tsunamis. The mechanisms of evolution, which produce beautiful symbiosis in some contexts, produce predators, parasites, and disease organisms. In Scripture, God doesn’t shy away from taking ownership of the wild things in the natural world. God feeds the lions as well as the cattle in Psalm 104, and he governs the violent storms in Job 38:22–30. God doesn’t ask us to ignore these wild things either. In fact, one of God’s earliest instructions to humanity is to subdue the earth, a Hebrew word (kabash) used elsewhere to denote real struggle against real opposition.11 Jesus Christ gives us the ultimate example of how we should respond to the wild, destructive aspects of creation when they cause suffering: Jesus calmed the storms and healed the sick. He worked to ease the suffering of others, whatever the cause of their suffering. We are called to do the same.

Christ: A Creator Who Is Knowable but Never Fully Known After the Big Bang more than nine billion years passed before Earth was formed and habitable for life. These years saw a long history of star and galaxy formation and the slow accumulation of heavier elements through nuclear fusion, which formed the ingredients for the Earth. Life on Earth existed for nearly four billion years before our ancestors were called to be God’s image-­ bearers. This long history is daunting! If the entire history of the universe was packed into a twenty-­four-­hour day, humans would arrive in the last second or two. Yet if we view this long history through the lens of God’s revelation in Scripture and in Christ, we see a God who is patient. God is willing to work slowly, through the capacities of his creatures, to accomplish his purposes. Christ continues to deal with us patiently today. Christ chose to advance his 11. An analysis of this can be found in D. C. Spanner, Biblical Creation and the Theory of Evolution (Exeter, UK: Paternoster, 1987); http://www.creationandevolution.co.uk/the_primal.htm.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 233

3/13/18 1:14 PM

234  Deborah Haarsma and Loren Haarsma

kingdom on earth through his church, a very human instrument that makes progress slow and sometimes uncertain. One of the most remarkable things about the success of science over the past several centuries is that new discoveries keep raising new questions. The natural world works on principles which are understandable, yet we are nowhere near running out of discoveries to make! In astronomy, the recent discoveries of dark matter and dark energy powerfully illustrate this. We know a lot about ordinary matter (carbon, oxygen, iron—­everything in the periodic table of elements), but that stuff makes up only 5 percent of the universe. Dark matter makes up about 26 percent of the universe. We know a little bit about dark matter: it has mass and is attracted to ordinary matter and dark matter by gravity, but otherwise it doesn’t interact much with ordinary matter or light. We know the role dark matter plays in the formation of galaxies under gravity, and we know roughly where it is clustered in the universe today. And that’s about it. We know even less about dark energy. It fills space nearly uniformly, it is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe, and it composes about 69 percent of the total mass-­energy of the universe. And that’s about it. That means that 95 percent of the universe is stuff we barely understand! In astronomy and in every field of science, there is so much more yet to learn about the natural world. The fact that God chose to create a cosmos like that—­k nowable but never fully known—­has interesting parallels to the way God has revealed himself to us. God is vastly more than we can ever know or understand. Yet God is gracious and accommodates his self-­revelation to our limited human understanding. God’s accommodation is seen supremely in the person of Jesus. Jesus gives us a way to understand that God is personal, approachable, and above all merciful. The apostle Paul wrote of God’s mercy made available to Jews and gentiles alike through Christ. Yet he describes this in terms that remind us how unknowable God ultimately is: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Rom 11:33).

Christ Living among and Working through His Creatures The Gospel of John begins with naming Christ as the Word and then builds to an incredible declaration: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 234

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ and the Cosmos  235

among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). John speaks about Jesus’s glory immediately after speaking about him becoming flesh. Christ’s glory was revealed not just in shining moments like the transfiguration but in the fleshiness of the incarnation. Jesus was a helpless baby utterly dependent on his parents. He learned to walk and talk as a child. He lived in the dust and the mud and the smells of typical human existence. In becoming human, Christ not only connected himself in a new way to humanity but to all life on Earth. Most of our human DNA was inherited from our evolutionary ancestors. Catholic philosopher Ernan McMullin writes, When Christ took on human nature, the DNA that made him the son of Mary may have linked him to a more ancient heritage, stretching far beyond Adam to the shallows of unimaginably ancient seas. And so, in the Incarnation, it would not have been just human nature that was joined to the Divine, but in a less direct but no less real sense, all those myriad organisms that had unknowingly over the eons shaped the way for the coming of the human.12

And there is more. Every atom in Jesus’s human body—­like our bodies—­traces its history through interstellar dust and stars and novae, back to the quarks and electrons and exotic particles at the Big Bang. In another of Paul’s doxologies, he upholds Christ as our role model of humility. Christ, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (Phil 2:6–7). Christ has full authority and power but doesn’t grasp it tightly. As just one example, consider how he works in each of our lives; the Spirit of Christ sanctifies us not by overwriting our personalities in an instantaneous act but through a slow process which requires our cooperation. God’s relationship with the natural world seems to reflect this. His governance of nature is sometimes pictured as the work of a tyrant, supremely powerful over each atom and action. But that is inaccurate. Although God has the power to act that way, he often chooses to create through cooperation with 12. Ernan McMullin, “Plantinga’s Defense of Special Creation,” Christian Scholar’s Review 21, no. 1 (1991): 55–79.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 235

3/13/18 1:14 PM

236  Deborah Haarsma and Loren Haarsma

his creatures, a type of divine action called mediated creation. He calls nature itself to partner in his creative and providential work. For example, in astronomy, we know that every star was formed through gravitational collapse of interstellar clouds. Thus God creates new stars by drawing on materials he created previously and in partnership with natural processes. Similarly, God formed the carbon and oxygen in your body through natural processes of fusion in the cores of stars. God made Earth’s ocean, atmosphere, and dry land through processes of gravity and chemistry acting on the raw materials of the early solar system. God sustains life on Earth today using the light of our sun. God uses gravity to keep the atmosphere and ocean in place, and he uses the rotation of Earth’s core to create a magnetic field which shields life on Earth from deadly energetic particles in space. In these and so many more ways, God creates new things and sustains his creation through cooperation with what he already created. As God works in partnership with his creation, we see him using processes that look random to us. In everyday speech, “random” is often used to be mean “without meaning” or “purposeless,” but scientists use “random” to simply mean “unpredictable.” Random processes can actually be used in purposeful ways; consider an unpredictable coin toss before a football game, or a videogame designer adding random elements to make a more interesting game. In the natural world, randomness is key for developing greater complexity and variety. Consider the formation of snowflakes: in a winter storm, the motion of dust and water molecules in the atmosphere causes vast numbers of snowflakes to assemble, each one a beautiful crystal. And yet each one is unique because of the randomness of those atmospheric motions. Or consider the formation of species: the unpredictable aspects of DNA replication led to increased genetic variation within a species, and such genetic variations led to the incredible variety of lifeforms on Earth today through the process of evolution. Randomness is not something in opposition to God. God uses it to invite partnership from his creation, letting his creatures explore a range of possibilities. Philosopher and physicist Robert Bishop describes God’s mediated action in creation as God calling one part of creation to minister to another: Some parts of creation are called and empowered to serve as mediators or ministers to other parts of creation, so that creation participates in becoming what God calls it to be. For example, in Genesis 1, “God said, ‘Let the earth grow grass, plants . . .’ ” (Gen. 1:11) and “God said, ‘Let

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 236

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Christ and the Cosmos  237

the earth bring forth living creatures . . .’ ” (Gen. 1:24). . . . The great creation psalm, Psalm 104, is filled with examples of creation ministering to creation under divine call, guidance and enabling: trees and mountain crags providing shelter for animals, grass and water providing sustenance and refreshment for plants and animals, cycles of day and night and the seasons for sustaining the livelihoods of plants and animals, lions looking for their food from God by hunting for it, etc. Or think of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount during which He says, “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Matt. 6:26). The diets of birds are quite varied, as various species eat seeds, plants, insects, worms and more. Different species deploy different strategies for finding food, but all of these feeding behaviors are described by Jesus as the Father feeding them by being active in creation so that creation provides the foods needed by birds (compare with Job 38:39–41).13

Scripture teaches us to interpret God’s mediated action in the cosmos not as a sign of God’s distance, but as a sign of God’s gracious partnering which his creatures to accomplish his goals.

Christ’s Unending Forgiveness and the New Creation At the start of this chapter, we noted that the universe is vastly bigger than we are. If we were to consider that fact without Christ, we could easily conclude that humans are insignificant. But that’s not what God wants us to think when we contemplate the vastness of the universe. Instead, we read, [God] does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. (Ps 103:10–12) 13. Robert Bishop, “Recovering the Doctrine of Creation: A Theological View of Science,” BioLogos, n.d., https://biologos.org/uploads/static-content/bishop_white_paper.pdf.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 237

3/13/18 1:14 PM

238  Deborah Haarsma and Loren Haarsma

When that Psalm was written, “as high as the heavens are above the earth” and “as far as the east is from the west” literally meant “from one end of creation to the other.” You could not get farther apart. With today’s telescopes, we can see objects billions of lightyears apart on opposite sides of the visible universe. Yet when we ponder the great expanse of the universe, we need not despair that our smallness makes us insignificant. Rather, God invites us to think of the universe as a metaphor for the vastness of God’s love. We can picture God removing our sins to the ends of the universe. What does the future hold? If this universe continues into the infinite future under the laws of physics as we understand them, all life will inevitably end. Even if human beings develop enough medical technology to postpone indefinitely the death of our biological bodies, even if we learn to download our brains into computers, and even if we learn how to escape our solar system before our sun dies, this universe can only sustain life for so long. Eventually, the second law of thermodynamics will cause all matter and energy to reach a uniform-­temperature, high-­entropy state in which physical processes cannot sustain life or thought. Eventually, dark energy will cause space to expand so rapidly that all matter will be torn into individual particles. When looking at these facts in a worldview without Christ, hope for an eternal future for ourselves or our offspring can seem grim. Yet in Christ we are part of a bigger story, filled with hope. In Jesus’s incarnation, he participated not only in our human life, not only in our suffering, but also in our death. But it did not end with death. It does not end with death. With the resurrection of Jesus, eternity breaks into this universe. Jesus spoke of the resurrection to come and a new creation. We don’t know many details about this new creation; Scripture offers us poetic images of a new heaven and a new earth where tears are wiped away and there is no longer any death. Perhaps the laws of physics will be completely different in this new creation, or maybe “laws” will no longer make sense. But a recurring theme through all of the poetic imagery is the near presence of God. “I did not see a temple in the city [the New Jerusalem], because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp” (Rev 21:22–23). We have hope that we can dwell in that presence, for eternity, because of the self-­sacrificial love of Christ.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 238

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter FOURTEEN

Cognitive Science, Sensus Divinitatis, and Christ T Y L E R S . GR E E N WAY A N D J US T I N L . BA R R E T T

I

n the Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin claimed “that there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity.”1 Calvin believed that God endowed humanity with a sensus divinitatis—­a sense of the divine—­that gives every person some inchoate idea of God. More recently, research in the cognitive sciences has begun to support a similar claim—­that religious beliefs are cognitively natural. Many cognitive scientists argue that developmentally natural cognition enables and encourages religious beliefs such as belief in supernatural beings. Calvin’s writings and the findings of cognitive science provide an interesting connection point for integrating theology and cognitive science. Such integration may in turn generate questions for both fields. This chapter will first detail evidence from theology and cognitive science that may suggest correspondence between the two fields on this topic of study. This paper will also consider how this sense of the divine requires the work of Christ to repair and focus it rightly on the true God. Though a certain sense of the divine may be part of humanity’s created order, this capacity is limited and requires restoration. This chapter will then turn to questions raised by the integration of theology and cognitive science that require further inquiry. If these two fields do indeed correspond and inform one another, subsequent dialogue and integration may generate questions and testable hypotheses for both fields. 1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), 1.3.1.

239

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 239

3/13/18 1:14 PM

240  Tyler S. Greenway and Justin L. Barrett

Theology and the Sensus Divinitatis Calvin’s writings on the sensus divinitatis have spurred much thought and informed disciplines ranging from theological anthropology to analytic philosophy. The following sections will first consider evidence provided by theologians for a sensus divinitatis and then address why Christ’s work is needed to restore this aspect of creation.

Theological Evidence for a Sensus Divinitatis Though Calvin coined the term, theologians before Calvin also discussed senses similar to the sensus divinitatis. Augustine of Hippo, for example, wrote about a sense of justice, noting, “We have another and far superior sense, belonging to the inner man, by which we perceive what things are just, and what unjust—­just by means of an intelligible idea, unjust by the want of it.”2 Augustine’s discussion of a sense of what is just and unjust seems to parallel the apostle Paul’s writings in Romans 2:15 where he describes the requirements of the law as “written on their [gentiles’] hearts.”3 Similar to the sensus divinitatis, this sense of justice gives every person some idea of what is right or wrong. These writings provide a foundation for a theological understanding of some sort of ability linked to religious life that is, at least to some degree, implicit and characteristic of the human species. Thomas Aquinas regarded humans as having some implicit understanding that underwrote their thinking about God, though it may be inchoate. He wrote, “To know in a general and confused way that God exists is implanted in us by nature,” and “There is a certain general and confused knowledge of God, which is in almost all men.”4 Here Aquinas highlights both the existence of some intuitive knowledge of God, but also the imperfection and nonspecific nature of this knowledge. Akin to Paul’s writings concerning the law being written on the heart and Aquinas’s notion of a divinely implanted knowledge of God, Calvin writes that a “sense of Deity is inscribed on every heart.”5 Calvin goes on to argue that 2. Augustine, City of God and Christian Doctrine, trans. M. Dods, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1886), 11.27. 3. Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations in this chapter come from the NIV. 4. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. T. Gilby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1.2.1, ad. 1; Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, trans. V. J. Bourke (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1975), 3.38. 5. Calvin, Institutes, 1.3.1.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 240

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Cognitive Science, Sensus Divinitatis, and Christ  241

although many manipulate religion to coerce others, it cannot be the invention of humanity, for such an invention would have no place in the human mind were it not for a preexisting sense of the divine. Even those who deny the existence of God find themselves wondering about his existence from time to time despite their resistance.6 Indeed, Calvin writes, “This is not a doctrine which is first learned at school.” Such belief is “one which nature herself allows no individual to forget, though many, with all their might, strive to do so.”7 More recently, the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga has also written about the importance of the sensus divinitatis, particularly as it relates to arguments for warranted belief in God. Plantinga builds on the work of Calvin and Aquinas in defining the sensus divinitatis as “a disposition or set of dispositions to form theistic beliefs in various circumstances, in response to the sorts of conditions or stimuli that trigger the working of this sense of divinity.”8 Plantinga adds helpful nuance to Calvin’s writings, noting that though Calvin seems to think that belief in or knowledge of God is present at birth, it might be better to say that the capacity for this belief is present at birth and requires maturity to develop, much like our capacity for language. Plantinga argues that theistic belief generated by the sensus divinitatis ought to be considered basic “in the sense that it is not accepted on the evidential basis of other propositions.”9 Such beliefs are not produced through conscious deliberation when we are presented with relevant stimuli; instead, belief “spontaneously arises in those circumstances.”10 Plantinga goes on to argue that Christian belief is warranted and relies on the sensus divinitatis for his argument.11

Christ’s Restorative Work Although the sensus divinitatis produces some sense of the divine, this sense and the beliefs produced by it are limited. Aquinas, Calvin, and Plantinga all regarded the deliverances of this faculty as inadequate to take humans all 6. Calvin, Institutes, 1.3.2. 7. Calvin, Institutes, 1.3.3. 8. Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 173. 9. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 175. 10. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 176. 11. R. Nichols and R. Callergård have argued against Plantinga’s argument citing Thomas Reid’s epistemology and the disunity of the faculties that may produce belief in supernatural beings. Nichols and Callergård, “Thomas Reid on Reidian religious belief forming faculties,” Modern Schoolman, 88, no. 3 (2011): 317–35. K. J. Clark and J. L. Barrett argue that by updating Reidian epistemology such beliefs may still be considered basic. Clark and Barrett, “Reidian Religious Epistemology and the Cognitive Science of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79, no. 3 (2011): 639–75.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 241

3/13/18 1:14 PM

242  Tyler S. Greenway and Justin L. Barrett

the way to a full, mature understanding of God, let alone a relationship with God. Instead, they believed this sense naturally provides a way “to know in some general and confused way that God exists” (Aquinas), a sense of “Deity” (Calvin), or a “disposition to form theistic beliefs” (Plantinga). These beliefs conceptually or relationally fall short of proper knowledge of God, and some work is necessary to remedy this problem. Here, humans need God to intervene, and things are made right through the work of Christ. Calvin writes, “But though experience testifies that a seed of religion is divinely sown in all, scarcely one in a hundred is found who cherishes it in his heart, and not one in whom it grows to maturity so far is it from yielding fruit in its season.”12 Although Calvin is confident that humans can sense some aspects of God’s presence, he remains concerned about the continuing effects of sin that stifle this sense of God. Plantinga notes similarly that beliefs produced by the sensus divinitatis are imperfect. He writes, “This natural knowledge of God has been compromised, weakened, reduced, smothered, overlaid, or impeded by sin and its consequences,” and “the knowledge of God provided by the sensus divinitatis, prior to faith and regeneration, is both narrowed and partially suppressed.”13 Therefore, the believer needs an intervention—­“a process whereby she is regenerated, transformed, made into a new and better person.”14 This regeneration renews both affect and cognition, as both are deeply affected by sin. Human affect is damaged resulting in “a madness of the will whereby we fail to love God above all; instead we love ourselves above all.”15 Similarly, cognition is impaired, resulting in “blindness, dullness, stupidity, imperceptiveness, whereby we are blinded to God, cannot hear his voice, do not recognize his beauty and glory, may even go so far as to deny that he exists.”16 Needless to say, the damage to affect and cognition requires reparation. The believer, made “a new creature in Christ,” experiences this renewing and repairing of the will and mind.17 Concerning the repair of the sensus divinitatis, Plantinga writes, “Once again we can see God and be put in mind of him in the sorts of situations in which that belief-­producing process is designed to work.”18 As the Holy Spirit 12. Calvin, Institutes, 1.4.1. 13. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 184. 14. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 281. 15. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 280. 16. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 280. 17. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 280. 18. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 280.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 242

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Cognitive Science, Sensus Divinitatis, and Christ  243

works in the believer, he or she is given “a much clearer view of the beauty, splendor, loveliness, attractiveness, glory of God” and can “see something of the spectacular depth of love revealed in the incarnation and atonement.”19 It is through Christ that knowledge of God is made right and focused properly on him. Because of Christ, the believer has more than a vague sense of a deity; instead, when the believer is born again, he or she comes to know God. Both relational and conceptual failures are addressed via Christ.

Cognitive Science and the Naturalness of Belief in Supernatural Beings Many scholars practicing in disciplines outside of theology have argued that religious beliefs, including belief in supernatural beings, are cognitively natural.20 This type of naturalness has been termed maturational naturalness because the cognition enabling and encouraging religious beliefs is typical of normal human development.21 Capacity for religious beliefs is akin to language. Although language is not necessarily present at birth, given certain common environmental regularities (such as living in a human social group) and biological commonalities of our species, it is acquired with fluency early in life. Similarly, given certain environmental regularities and biological commonalities, religious beliefs such as belief in supernatural beings typically develop as a normal part of becoming a mature human. Cognitive science of religion (CSR) often examines types of religious beliefs (e.g., afterlife, gods, souls) rather than “religion” as a whole because the cognition enabling and encouraging one religious belief (e.g., belief in God or gods) may or may not support another belief (e.g., belief in the afterlife). Three cognitive processes that are thought to support belief in supernatural beings are discussed in what follows: agency detection, theory of mind, and teleological reasoning. The types of beliefs produced by such cognition are then noted. 19. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 281. 20. E.g., S. Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); J. L. Barrett, Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief (New York: Free, 2012); J. M. Bering, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Norton, 2011); P. Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic, 2001); S. Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); R. N. McCauley, Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 21. McCauley, Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 243

3/13/18 1:14 PM

244  Tyler S. Greenway and Justin L. Barrett

Cognitive Evidence for the Naturalness of Belief in Supernatural Beings One cognitive process that is important for day-­to-­day thinking is agency detection. Agency detection refers to the ability to distinguish agents, which move according to their own will (e.g., people, animals), from objects, which require an agent to be moved (e.g., furniture, toys). The ability is believed to be present within the first year of life. It is theorized that agency detection is important for enabling and encouraging belief in supernatural beings. Agency detection by itself may not necessarily lead to belief in supernatural beings, but the human ability to detect agency is thought to be sensitive to ambiguous stimuli, signaling agency when no agent is visible. Theoretically, such sensitivity supports belief in supernatural beings because such beliefs may be formed when no other agent is found 22 or reinforced when one has an experience of detecting agency that could be consistent with unseen superhuman beings.23 Another cognitive process termed theory of mind, which refers to the ability to consider the mental states of other agents, is also theorized to support belief in supernatural beings. Using theory of mind, humans can consider the goals, desires, and beliefs held by other beings around them. Theory of mind is thought to be important for belief in supernatural beings because it enables individuals to consider the mental states of beings that are not visible. Furthermore, some evidence suggests that theory of mind may err toward attributing supernatural ability to agents until limitations are learned,24 which may in turn dispose humans toward belief in super-​­able beings. Teleological reasoning—­t he tendency to see purpose and design in the world—­is also theorized to support belief in God or gods. Studies have found that children prefer teleological explanations for objects and animals in the natural world, 25 and, interestingly, a similar bias is found among 22. See Barrett, Born Believers; and Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds. 23. Justin L. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004). 24. Emily R. Burdett, Cognitive Developmental Foundations of Cultural Acquisition: Children’s Understanding of Other Minds (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2013); G. S. Foley, T. S. Greenway, and J. L. Barrett, “Children’s Understanding of Intentional Agents: Revisiting the Preparedness Hypothesis,” presentation at the annual Society for the Scientific Study of Religion meeting, Newport Beach, CA, October, 2015; J. B. Wigger, K. Paxson, and L. Ryan, “What Do Invisible Friends Know? Imaginary Companions, God, and Theory of Mind,” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 23 (2013): 2–14. 25. D. Keleman and C. DiYanni, “Intuitions about Origins: Purpose and Intelligent Design in Children’s Reasoning about Nature,” Journal of Cognition and Development 6, no. 1 (2005): 3–31.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 244

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Cognitive Science, Sensus Divinitatis, and Christ  245

adults when asked to respond to origin questions quickly.26 Similar research conducted using nonreligious adult samples has also identified a tendency to view nature as intentionally made by some being.27 Though such tendencies may be overridden through conscious reasoning, natural cognition seems to lead individuals to infer purpose in objects. Such tendencies may in turn support belief in supernatural beings who could account for the perceived purpose: a creator is inferred from natural objects and animals, not through reasoned argumentation. A creator would in turn need special abilities to make such creations, so humans are insufficient, but the right gods would be. Other scholars in CSR have pointed to how human minds try to explain great fortune and misfortune in terms of divine punishment or reward as a natural source of encouragement for beliefs in deity.28 It has also been suggested that meaning-­making finds a good target in the notion of deity due to the work of an “existential Theory of Mind.”29 The idea of superhuman beings may be attractive to humans because such concepts help explain, predict, and synthesize a broad range of experiences. They have great inferential potential and are, hence, worth thinking and talking about.30 In sum, it seems that many different aspects of ordinary human psychology collaborate to encourage belief in a god or gods.31 As anthropologist Scott Atran writes, “Supernatural agency is the most culturally recurrent, cognitively relevant, and evolutionarily compelling concept in religion. The concept of the supernatural is culturally derived from an innate cognitive schema.”32 Such a perspective did not emerge from theological inquiry but from the application of the relatively new fields of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology to the study of religious beliefs and practices.

26. D. Keleman and E. Rosset, “The Human Function Compunction: Teleological Explanation in Adults,” Cognition 111 (2009): 138–43. 27. E. Järnefelt, C. F. Canfield, and D. Keleman, “The Divided Mind of a Disbeliever: Intuitive Beliefs about Nature as Purposefully Created Among Different Groups of Non-Religious Adults,” Cognition 140 (2015): 72–88. 28. Bering, The Belief Instinct; A. Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 29. Bering, The Belief Instinct. 30. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God; Boyer, Religion Explained. 31. J. L. Barrett, Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology: From Human Minds to Divine Minds (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton, 2011). 32. Atran, In Gods We Trust, 57.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 245

3/13/18 1:14 PM

246  Tyler S. Greenway and Justin L. Barrett

Religious Beliefs Produced by Natural Cognition Although the evidence presented from theology and cognitive science thus far seems to indicate strong convergence between the two fields, it is important to consider what types of beliefs are generally produced by natural cognition. Clark and Barrett describe the beliefs formed by cognitive processes like those listed above as thin beliefs. For thin beliefs, “Formation and assent requires rudimentary conceptual consent.” In contrast, thick beliefs “require significant conceptual content for their formation and assent.”33 Below are four thin beliefs that may be produced by the natural cognition described above: • “Elements of the natural world such as rocks, trees, mountains, and animals are purposefully and intentionally designed by agents that are not humans.” • “Things happen in the world that unseen agents cause. These agents are not human or animal.” • “Gods exist with thoughts, wants, perspectives, and free will to act.” • “Gods generally know things that humans do not, especially things important for human relations.”34 Such beliefs may be important for the generation of beliefs in supernatural agents in a population. Furthermore, such beliefs may provide the groundwork for a “thicker” belief in the God of the Abrahamic faiths, though these beliefs may not be sufficient to believe in the God of these faith traditions. Stated differently, most orthodox Christians would not consider the above thin beliefs as a comprehensive description of God. Rather, they represent descriptions of a deity or of some supernatural being. The thin beliefs noted by Clark and Barrett may serve as an important foundation for thicker beliefs in the deities described by various religious traditions, but by themselves they do not fully support robust belief in any one deity. Such thick beliefs require inference and instruction. Religious institutions may spend several years carefully instilling orthodox knowledge. It may be the case that these beliefs can become natural through practice,35 but they are not typically developed without explicit cultural influences. 33. Clark and Barrett, “Reidian Religious Epistemology,” 25. 34. Clark and Barrett, “Reidian Religious Epistemology,” 26. 35. In Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not, McCauley describes practices naturalness as a second form of naturalness that requires cultural inputs and instruction.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 246

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Cognitive Science, Sensus Divinitatis, and Christ  247

Implications of Integration Between Theology and Cognitive Science Evidence from both theology and cognitive science suggest a correspondence between the two fields concerning at least one aspect of how people come to knowledge about God. Theologians have argued that God has instilled in humanity some sense of the divine that produces religious belief in certain circumstances. Cognitive science has detailed various cognitive processes that seem to dispose most humans in developmentally typical settings toward belief in supernatural beings. If such correspondence does in fact exist, what implications might there be for both fields? The following sections will consider how theology and cognitive science may inform one another.

Implications for Theology If evidence from theology and cognitive science do indeed converge in their investigation of humanity’s tendency to develop belief in supernatural beings, and both disciplines are addressing the same phenomena, the implications for theological study should now be considered. Evidence from cognitive science may add helpful nuance to theology’s articulation of the sensus divinitatis. For instance, theological study may consider what the existence of a sensus divinitatis, particularly one that is multifaceted (i.e., employing agency detection, theory of mind, and teleological reasoning), tells us about God and his creation. On one hand, the multifaceted nature of the sensus divinitatis seems to be yet another gracious act of God’s creative work in that humans are endowed with a flexible and diverse system to sense God. If humanity relied on a single psychological process to sense supernatural beings, such a sense could be impaired resulting in a diminished capacity to consider God or gods, but having multiple cognitive pathways to some general belief in the divine may guard against this possibility. For instance, if a person has an impaired theory of mind system, speculation about God’s beliefs and desires may be more challenging, but he or she would not be left without other conceptual gadgets upon which a belief in and relationship with God could be built. The emerging perspective from CSR is not that humans have a single additional device that is comparable to a sensus divinitatis. Instead, humanity seems to be created with a multitude of senses that may detect and reflect upon God.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 247

3/13/18 1:14 PM

248  Tyler S. Greenway and Justin L. Barrett

In this way, one facet of this complex sense may be impaired, but other facets may still enable the individual to sense God. Furthermore, theological study may consider whether the ubiquity of this sense qualifies it as an act of common grace provided for all of humanity. Many in cognitive science argue that belief in the supernatural has been important for human evolution because it has promoted cooperative behavior and group unity.36 Even if used for imperfect views of God or misdirected toward false gods, a sense of the divine may restrain some of the evil and harm that could have affected humanity. On the other hand, this multifaceted nature of the sensus divinitatis may raise more problematic questions for theologians. Some of the cognitive processes detailed above are at times argued to be error prone. Agency detection, for instance, is believed to err toward detecting agents when none are present (i.e., a false positive) because such a tendency benefited human ancestors (e.g., it is better to believe a predator is present and be wrong than to believe a predator is not present and be wrong). Likewise, the tendency to see design and purpose in the natural world has been regarded as “promiscuous teleology,”37 and recent research shows that this teleological reasoning is reduced when adults have more time to make judgments, as if reasoning reduces the error of this system.38 The alleged “error” produced by cognitive systems is not entirely due to researchers’ assumptions that gods do not exist. These cognitive systems support religious beliefs that even many theists would reject: they seem to give rise to belief in false gods. The error in question may not be a consequence of the cognitive systems themselves but arise through individual or cultural factors working on the output of these faculties. Nevertheless, error appears to arise at least in part from the cognitive systems ordinarily. If the sensus divinitatis is composed of several individual senses, some or many of which tend to be error prone, theologians may need to consider the theological implications of these errors. For instance, should theologians 36. E.g., A. Norenzayan, Big Gods. 37. D. Keleman, “Why Are Rocks Pointy? Children’s Preference for Teleological Explanations of the Natural World,” Developmental Psychology 35 (1999): 1440–53; see also D. Keleman, J. Rottman, and R. Seston, “Professional Physical Scientists Display Tenacious Teleological Tendencies: Purpose-Based Reasoning as a Cognitive Default,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 142, no. 4 (2013): 1074–83. 38. Kelemen, Rottman, and Seston, “Professional Physical Scientists Display Tenacious Teleological Tendencies.”

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 248

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Cognitive Science, Sensus Divinitatis, and Christ  249

consider the error prone nature of these senses the result of sin, the result of God’s creative action, or some combination of both? If God created the senses connected to the sensus divinitatis in such a way that they consistently exhibit a high degree of error, these errors may raise questions about God’s nature. Why would God implant in humans such an imprecise system that tolerates false beliefs about God? Would a natural, fully formed knowledge of God be somehow coercive and at-­odds with a freely loving relationship between God and his creatures? If these errors are the result of the effects of sin, such effects raise further questions concerning the need for Christ’s atoning work. A multitude of senses that point to divinity may also have interesting implications for arguments that have built upon Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. Plantinga, in particular, bases much of his argument for warranted Christian belief on the sensus divinitatis. If the sensus divinitatis should be considered to be multiple, distinct senses instead of one unitary faculty, what might the implications be for his argument? Theologians and philosophers may need to consider whether Plantinga’s argument requires amendment. Finally, theological study may consider how salvation may repair the sensus divinitatis and correct the effects of sin. If cognitive science has added nuance to the nature of the sensus divinitatis and the specific limitations of the beliefs produced by the sensus divinitatis (see thin beliefs above), theological study must consider how Christ’s work restores the sensus divinitatis. Are the errors made by agency detection diminished when a believer is saved, or does salvation as it relates to the sensus divinitatis take a different form? How is it that Christ’s work addresses the limitations of the sensus divinitatis? The incarnate Christ seems to remedy the limitations of the sensus divinitatis in at least two ways. First, the incarnation provides more precise semantic knowledge of God. CSR currently gives no evidence that the sensus divinitatis includes the sense that God is good or that he is the supreme deity and not just one of many potentially equal gods. Christ displays knowledge of God to humanity, revealing his goodness and sovereignty. Without Christ, humanity may only have a limited sense of some divine being with some creative power, but because of Christ, humanity is granted a fuller understanding of God and his attributes. Such correction by Christ corresponds to the cognitive effects of salvation noted by Plantinga in Warranted Christian Belief. Through Christ’s work humanity is regenerated, and through this regeneration and the work of

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 249

3/13/18 1:14 PM

250  Tyler S. Greenway and Justin L. Barrett

the Holy Spirit, Christians have “a much clearer view of the beauty, splendor, loveliness, attractiveness, glory of God.”39 Second, Christ provides motivation to engage in a personal relationship with God. CSR does give reason to think that belief in God or gods is largely natural, but it does not give reason to think that a personal relationship or devotional response to the supernatural is natural. Indeed, many religious faith traditions have quite different understandings of how they should act toward the divine beings they worship. Christ reveals the response required for the abundant life that Christ promises. Belief in some divine being is not enough—­even the demons believe, and shudder (Jas 2:19)—­a life devoted to Christ is necessary, and through Christ humanity is instructed accordingly. Such correction by Christ corresponds to the affective effects of sin also noted by Plantinga. Without Christ, human reaction to God may be fear or hate, but the Christian may respond with love because of Christ’s love. Plantinga writes, The person with faith . . . not only believes the central claims of the Christian faith; she also (paradigmatically) finds the whole scheme of salvation enormously attractive, delightful, moving, a source of amazed wonderment. She is deeply grateful to the Lord for his great goodness and responds to his sacrificial love with love of her own. The difference between believer and devil, therefore, lies in the area of affections: of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, desire and detestation.40

Christ’s incarnation and atonement restore the sensus divinitatis in such a way that the believer comes to know God more fully and love him more wholly.

Implications for Cognitive Science Dialogue between theology and cognitive science concerning the sensus divinitatis may also bear implications for cognitive science. If theology argues that humanity’s ability to sense and know God is impaired by sin both cognitively and affectively, cognitive science might consider whether these effects are measurable and scientifically explicable. Furthermore, might there be noticeable and measurable changes in a person’s sensus divinitatis (or the cognitive faculties that compose it) upon conversion and throughout the 39. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 291. 40. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 292.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 250

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Cognitive Science, Sensus Divinitatis, and Christ  251

process of sanctification? Such assessment might be beneficial for churches and clergy as they seek to disciple believers and promote further growth. Cognitive science might also more carefully consider what beliefs are produced by the sensus divinitatis. The thin beliefs noted by Clark and Barrett provide some details about the results of natural cognition, but perhaps further nuance may be added. Paul wrote in Romans 1:20, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—­his eternal power and divine nature—­have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” Theology may determine what beliefs produced by the sensus divinitatis are necessary for an individual to be left without excuse, but cognitive science may help verify that these beliefs are indeed produced by natural cognition. Cognitive science may also consider whether there are other important “senses” of religious belief that theologians should consider more frequently and incorporate into their studies. Augustine noted a sense of justice that parallels the study of moral intuitions.41 These moral intuitions are believed to generate intuitive responses in situations requiring moral decisions. For instance, if an authority figure is disrespected, most individuals may intuitively believe that such action is wrong. These rapid, unconscious responses to these types of situations are thought to be the result of intuitive senses of right and wrong. Further scientific research concerning these moral intuitions and how they may relate to religious commitments may bear valuable theological implications. Other “senses” may also be considered. Some cognitive scientists argue that humans are inclined to believe in the afterlife42 and in a duality between body and soul or mind43 because of natural cognition as well. Cognitive science may produce additional evidence about whether these cognitive processes might influence theology like the cognitive processes that enable and encourage belief in supernatural beings. Lastly, if the development of belief in supernatural beings may be compared to language, cognitive science may continue to investigate the nature of 41. E.g., J. Haidt and J. Graham, “When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals May Not Recognize,” Social Justice Research 20 (2007): 98–116. 42. J. M. Bering, “Intuitive Conceptions of Dead Agents’ Minds: The Natural Foundations of Afterlife Beliefs as Phenomenological Boundary,” Journal of Cognition & Culture 2 (2002): 263–308; J. M. Bering and D. F. Bjorklund, “The Natural Emergence of Reasoning about the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity,” Developmental Psychology 40 (2004): 217–33. 43. P. Bloom, Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (New York: Basic, 2005).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 251

3/13/18 1:14 PM

252  Tyler S. Greenway and Justin L. Barrett

this capacity’s development. Scientists may consider key points in childhood development and how the ability matures late in life as well.

Conclusion Theology and cognitive science both argue that belief in the divine is, at least to a certain degree, natural. Calvin and Plantinga have claimed that humanity is endowed with a sensus divinitatis by which all may sense God. Various cognitive scientists agree that belief in supernatural beings is natural to the human species and the result of developmentally natural cognitive processes. This cognition enables and encourages several religious beliefs and provides the foundation for religious traditions across the globe. If these two fields are accepted as studying the same topic, both fields may raise interesting questions for the other in a mutually beneficial way. To date, both the scientist and the theologian agree that a sensus divinitatis only supports vague, inchoate theistic beliefs (at best) and that some additional special revelation through Christ is required to motivate a personal and loving relationship with the one true God. This intersection of the cognitive science of religion, theological anthropology, and Christology may be a promising new frontier for Christian faith-­science integration.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 252

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter FIFTEEN

Science as the Foolishness of God Twenty-­Eight Theses and Scholia on “Science and Religion” W I L S ON C . K . P O ON

Preamble In 1518, the vicar general of German Augustinians invited a fellow monk to draw up twenty-­eight theses for a disputation at the Heidelberg assembly of their order. The author, Martin Luther, presided over the disputation itself on the 26th of April.1 In these twenty-­eight theses, Luther diagnosed the ecclesiastical malaise of his day: the church had ceased to live as a people of the cross.2 His proposed cure was a full-­blooded theologia crucis (theology of the cross) and its application to the doctrine of justification. A pithy summary appeared in a subsequent lecture on Psalm 5: CRUX sola est nostra theologia (“the cross alone is our theology”).3 Academic disputations date back to the origins of European universities. Initially, topics came from authoritative texts such as the Bible, Peter Lombard’s Sentences, or various works of Aristotle, but disputations less tightly bound to 1. This was barely six months after Luther supposedly nailed ninety-five theses to the Wittenberg castle church door against the sale of indulgences. Scholarly consensus now suggests that real events were less dramatic. 2. For an introduction, see Alister E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). 3. Martin Luther, Operationes in Psalmos, D. M. Luthers Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar, 1883), 5.176.32–33, original capitalizations. See comments under v. 12 (11 in modern Bibles).

253

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 253

3/13/18 1:14 PM

254  Wilson C. K. Poon

such texts soon arose, and these disputations could become public occasions. Such disputations are no more, but the sound instinct that new understanding could be reached by disciplined debate can still be seen in the stylised doctoral thesis defence ceremonies of many continental universities. Here, I revive this medieval practice and offer twenty-­eight theses on “science and religion” for public debate. In doing so, I was partly inspired by the fortuitous coincidence that 2018 is the 500th anniversary of Luther’s Heidelberg theses. More important, the editors of this volume have enjoined the authors to “reflect on the significance of Jesus Christ for understanding the created world, particularly as that world is observed by the natural sciences.” To my mind, to “reflect on the significance of Jesus Christ” for any matter means to examine the matter first and foremost in the light of his cruciform life.4 A good example of cruciform reflection on creation is John Polkinghorne’s edited volume, The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, which explores the doctrine of creation in the light of God’s self-­emptying (or kenotic) love displayed on the cross.5 However, I know of no cruciform reflection on the scientific enterprise as such.6 What follows is a prolegomenon to a cruciform theology of science, to “god talk” science starting from the cross. For this purpose, emulating Luther’s Heidelberg theses seems appropriate. Like Luther’s, my theses are deliberately terse, perhaps even provocative; they are stated baldly with little attempt at academic nuancing and “back covering” by footnotes.7 Luther followed his theses by “proofs.” I follow mine by more discursive scholia (notes and commentaries).8 Readers are encouraged to read and reflect on the theses first before turning to the scholia and resist the temptation of reading the latter as running footnotes to the former. If this experiment in medieval mimicry takes the church9 further in understand4. See Timothy Gorringe, Discerning Spirit (London: SCM, 1990). Gorringe suggests that God (rather than human ego) can be discerned in the public arena wherever there is a story that has a “christic structure” (47); citing 1 Cor 1:18f, Gorringe says “it is ‘Christ crucified’ who provides the standard to measure all human culture” (30). The Corinthian correspondence is central to what follows. 5. John Polkinghorne, ed., The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). 6. Gorringe’s Discerning Spirit deals with politics, community, sexuality, and art. Strikingly, science is absent. 7. References to quotations in the theses are given in the footnotes to the corresponding scholia. 8. Scholia originated as interlinear or marginal scribal glosses in medieval manuscripts. My scholia are more like those in, e.g., Spinoza’s Ethics, where scholia are used to clarify and amplify various “propositions.” 9. Throughout, “the church” means churches in general and not any particular denomination. Little difference is discernible between Western denominations vis-à-vis “science and religion” (although aspects of the Eastern approach are notably different). My experience is mainly within English-speaking

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 254

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Science as the Foolishness of God  255

ing the scientific enterprise in a specifically Christian perspective and helps Christian scientists10 in constructing their own laboratory spirituality, my exoticism will be amply justified.

Theses 1. The church feels threatened by science because the New Atheists shout noisily that science makes the “god hypothesis” redundant. In this situation, the church feels wrong-­footed from the start because she is still haunted by the Galileo and Huxley-­Wilberforce affairs. 2. The church therefore participates in a “science-­religion dialogue” to show that, on the contrary, there is no necessary incompatibility between science and belief in “god,” and that religion is not irrational. 3. In this dialogue, one of the church’s favourite moves is to argue from design: the sciences, especially their “latest results,” reveal a universe with so much grandeur, so majestic, so intricately ordered that it must have been the product of an even grander, more majestic and wiser “god”: “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19:1 NIV). 4. But the “latest results of science” are faux amis. Science changes very fast. “Latest ideas” are often consigned to the dustbin tomorrow, together with the “god” to whom they are supposed to point. 5. The “god” typically discussed by the church in the science-­religion dialogue is a “lowest common denominator (LCD) god” who is supposedly shared by multiple religions. The church therefore hopes to join forces with them to defend the rationality of religious belief. 6. Discussing the existence or otherwise of such a “god,” who has little to do with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, represents a loss of nerve, whereby the church wrong-­foots herself and denies her own essence as the body of Christ. 7. Instead, the church should articulate a theology of science that embraces the daily experience of Christian scientists in their vocation, in which they Anglicanism in Hong Kong and the UK, although twenty-eight years in Scotland has given me some insight into Presbyterian worship and polity. My faith journey as a scientist can be found in Wilson C. K. Poon, “The Laboratory of the Cross,” in Real Scientists, Real Faith, ed. R. J. Berry (Oxford: Monarch, 2009), 127–42. 10. Throughout, “Christian scientists” refer to scientists who are Christians, not followers of Mary Baker Eddy.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 255

3/13/18 1:14 PM

256  Wilson C. K. Poon

seek explanations for natural phenomena without the “god hypothesis.” Such a theology of science, which starts from the experience of putative divine absence, most naturally starts at Golgotha, the paradigmatic Christian locus of divine presence-­in-­absence. 8. Saint Paul rediscovered the centrality of the cross after arriving in Corinth on his first missionary journey “in weakness and in fear and in much trembling” (1 Cor 2:3), questioning his own apostolic calling. At Corinth, he resolved “to know nothing . . . except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). 9. Paul’s Corinthian experience led him to articulate a cruciform epistemology: the old way of “knowing kata sarka” (according to the flesh) is gone; the new way of “knowing kata stauro” (according to the cross) has come. 10. In the Twenty-­Eight Theses for the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, Martin Luther also rediscovered that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor 1:25). He exchanged a theologia gloriae (theology of glory) for a theologia crucis (theology of the cross). 11. Luther declares, “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened (Rom 1:20). He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who perceives the visible rearward parts of God seen through suffering and the cross.” 12. The theologian of glory looks at the universe disclosed by science and concludes that it is grand, majestic, and wisely ordered and reasons from this to an LCD god who is infinitely grander, more majestic, and wiser. 13. This stratagem is at best a praeparatio evangelica (preparation for the gospel). At worst, it schools the world in a theologia gloriae in which scientific discoveries evidence a “monarchical god” whose grandeur, majesty, and wisdom are as conceived by the world and not as displayed by Christ on the cross. 14. The most entrenched datum presented by science for theological reflection is the “Laplace Principle”: that it is possible to give intellectually satisfying, causally tight explanations of the workings of the universe without the “god hypothesis.” 15. The world commonly takes this entrenched datum as evidence for the absence of “god.”

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 256

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Science as the Foolishness of God  257

16. For the theologian of the cross, this entrenched datum is deeply consonant with a universe created by a God of whom Isaiah said, “Truly, you are a God who hides [your]self!” (45:15), and of whom the Roman centurion watching Jesus die said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” (Mark 15:39). 17. The Laplace Principle works because the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ gives autonomous creaturely existence to everything in the universe independent of Godself. Such self-­emptying (kenotic) love, which Julian of Norwich saw concretely in her hazelnut vision, is what Paul calls the “foolishness of God.” 18. The granting of creaturely autonomy reaches a symbolic climax in the Genesis creational narrative when God invited Adam to name the animals, that is, to declare prophetically their true character. 19. Science is the foolishness of God for our generation. At this modern Golgotha, where the New Atheists believe is the place where humanity is least likely to find “god,” the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has erected a sign saying, “Meet me here!” 20. God uses modern science to school the church in how to (in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer) “live in the world etsi deus non daretur [as if God doesn’t exist]. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually.” 21. The universe studied by science does indeed declare the doxa (glory) of God (Ps 19:1), but glory as refracted through the lens of Saint John, who spoke of Jesus’s crucifixion as “the hour of his doxa” (John 12 et passim). 22. A cruciform “laboratory spirituality” is needed to enable practising Christian scientists to “wrestle until day break” with the paradox of being believers in God who are committed to working without making recourse to the “god hypothesis” and learning to receive the wound of blessing (Gen 32:22–32). 23. The taunt, “If you are a scientist, you can’t believe in god!” is unanswerable by any on-­the-­spot quod erat demonstrandum. The taunted Christian scientist, like Isaiah’s Servant, suffers the wound in silence (Isa 53:7), “filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col 1:24 ESV). 24. Such a taunt can only be adequately answered in the form of Philip’s invitation to Nathanael: “Come and see!” (John 1:46). It is only in the

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 257

3/13/18 1:14 PM

258  Wilson C. K. Poon

context of the church, the sacramental body of Christ on earth, that a God-­ ordained scientific enterprise flourishing without the “god hypothesis” can possibly make sense. 25. The Christian scientist learns and witnesses to God’s kenotic (self-­ emptying) strength-­in-­weakness (Phil 2:6–11) by participating in the church’s eucharistic worship, which declares that on this side of heaven the full weight of divinity is borne neither by spectacular galaxies nor by intricate human brains but by humble bread and wine offered and consumed in memorial of One crucified in fellowship with the community of his brothers and sisters, “not many of [whom] were wise by worldly standard” (1 Cor 1:26 ESV). 26. The church agrees with the New Atheists that science indeed does not need the “god hypothesis.” The disagreement is over the implication. They deduce atheism. We say that it is an expected consequence of the universe having been created by the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 27. A theologia crucis of science offers a starting point for discussing the violence and suffering in nature disclosed by scientific enquiry. 28. Christian scientists answer Christ’s call to “take up their cross” (Mark 8:34) by their prayerful participation in working daily without recourse to the “god hypothesis” and learning to discern the companionship of the crucified and risen Christ with them in this “presence in absence.” As we do so, we hear Christ say, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9 NIV).

Scholia 1. In a 2013 survey, a majority of pastors agreed that “younger adults today are more concerned than ever about whether faith and science are compatible.”11 The subtitle of Victor Stenger’s book gives the New Atheist’s “war cry,” The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason.12 The disagreement between Galileo (1564–1642) and the Roman Church about heliocentrism ended with his house arrest and the censoring of his books. 11. BioLogos editorial team, “A Survey of Clergy and Their Views on Origins,” BioLogos, 8 May 2013, http://biologos.org/blogs/guest/a-survey-of-clergy-and-their-views-on-origins. 12. Victor Stenger, The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (Amhurst: Promethus, 2009).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 258

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Science as the Foolishness of God  259

At a debate seven months after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), Bishop Samuel Wilberforce supposedly asked the scientist Thomas Huxley whether he was descended from monkeys on his grandmother or grandfather’s side, with Huxley retorting that he had no problem with having primate ancestors but would be ashamed to be associated with a man who used oratory to obscure truth. The simplistic reading of either episode as a straightforward “science vs. religion” contest has long been discredited by historians. However, both still loom large in the public imagination as icons of the “conflict thesis.”13 The “god hypothesis” is a reference to the reply that Pierre-­Simone de Laplace (1749–1827) supposedly gave to Napoleon when the latter enquired where God featured amongst the equations in Laplace’s five-­volume Traité de mécanique céleste: “Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.” Even if this is apocryphal, the intellectual context is instructive. Isaac Newton (1643–1727) solved his own equations of motion and predicted unstable planetary orbits in the long run. He opined that God had to poke the planets occasionally to keep the solar system from falling apart. Laplace redid the calculations and concluded that planetary orbits were stable without the need to appeal to a deus ex machina, illustrating the danger of appealing to “the latest results of science”—­Laplace certainly buried Newton’s planet-­poking “god.” See further thesis 4.14 2. There is little evidence that the church as a whole is actually interested in science: the subject is typically relegated to “special events” for “those interested in such things.” Instead, the church engages in the science-­religion dialogue to “regain credibility.” This contrasts with the way that the church celebrates music and the arts (and, in some cases, political action for justice) by integrating these areas of human endeavour into her regular acts of worship. The challenge is to similarly integrate science into the fabric of congregational life. 13. For an account of the Galileo affair and its contemporary relevance, see John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 106–40. A nuanced account of the Huxley-Wilberforce debate has been given by Sheridan Gilley and Anne Loades, “Thomas Henry Huxley: The War between Science and Religion,” Journal of Religion 61 (1981): 285–308. For the long shadow cast by the Darwinian controversy, see Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control America’s Schools (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 14. The tale has a final sting. Chaos theory says that the long-term stability of the solar system is intrinsically unpredictable.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 259

3/13/18 1:14 PM

260  Wilson C. K. Poon

3. Multiple examples of this genre can be given. Take, for example, Sir John Houghton’s pamphlet for the John Ray Initiative.15 Sir John starts by surveying the universe from the Big Bang onwards, and then talks of “the wonder that many, probably most, scientists feel as they encounter the greatness of creation with its fantastic scale, energy and precision.” Towards the end, Sir John quotes Charles Spurgeon’s comment on Psalm 19:1: “The creation shouts, gossips and exclaims the glory of God in wordless revelation.” This presumably references back to “the greatness of creation with its fantastic scale, energy and precision.” Sir John does point out that this evidence does not get to the personal God of the Bible, whom he also describes. However, the “god” whose “glory” we are supposed to see from the impressively energetic Big Bang is simply assumed to be the God of Jesus Christ, and their relationship is never made clear. Or take The God Question—­a recent series of DVDs on science and religion.16 In part 2 of the first DVD, the presenter quotes Psalm 19:1 to say that our impressively large universe demonstrates God’s omnipotence for all with eyes to see it. Quite apart from the theological objections I raise below, the necessary “fiduciary framework” to make such an argument plausible has long been shattered by the Copernican revolution.17 Such a framework existed in the Middle Ages, when looking at the sky was literally an exercise in gazing at the (albeit invisible) dwelling place of God beyond the crystalline spheres.18 4. James Clerk Maxwell concluded in 1865 that “light is an electromagnetic disturbance” but noted that contemporary science could say little about the medium through which such waves propagated the “luminiferous ether.”19 In 1875, Bishop C. J. Ellicott asked Maxwell whether he, “as a scientific man” was “able to accept . . . that the creation of the sun posterior to light involves no serious difficulty,” because “the creation of light being the establishment 15. John Houghton, “Big Science, Big God,” John Ray Initiative Briefing Paper 15, January 2007, http://www.jri.org.uk/brief/Briefing15-print.pdf. 16. See The God Question, http://www.thegodquestion.tv. 17. Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels (New York: Doubleday, 1969). Berger talks about the “fiduciary frameworks”—intellectual and psychological superstructures—that make belief more or less plausible in various societies. 18. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), ch. 5. Medievals gazing up at the sky saw, quite literally, “the love makes the sun and other stars go round” (Dante, Paradiso, last line)—with some imagination, they could “see” God imparting motion to the outmost sphere, the primum mobile, which then turned all of the other Ptolemaic crystalline spheres. 19. James Clerk Maxwell, “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London 155 (1865): 459–512, quote from 499.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 260

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Science as the Foolishness of God  261

of the primal vibrations.” Maxwell replied, “. . . there is a statement printed in most commentaries that the fact of light being created before the sun is in striking agreement with the last results of science . . . it would be very tempting to say that the light of the first day means the all-­embracing aether.” Maxwell described this “all-­embracing aether” as “the largest, most uniform and apparently most permanent object we know,” so that we might suppose that the ether “existed before the formation of . . . gross matter.” However, even as he sought to harmonise theology with “the last results of science,” Maxwell counselled caution. The opening ellipsis in the above quotation reads: “If it were necessary to provide an interpretation of the text in accordance with the science of 1876 (which may not agree with that of 1896) . . .” Maxwell goes on to say, But I should be very sorry if an interpretation founded on a most conjectural scientific hypothesis were to get fastened to the text in Genesis. . . . The rate of change of scientific hypothesis is naturally much more rapid than that of Biblical interpretations, so that if an interpretation is founded on such an hypothesis, it may help to keep the hypothesis above ground long after it ought to be buried and forgotten.

In his reply, the bishop said, “I cordially agree with you. . . . Theologians are a great deal too fond of using up to the last scientific hypothesis they can get hold of.”20 Neither theologians nor scientists have been very good at heeding Maxwell and Ellicott’s caution. 5. Marilyn McCord Adams suggests that the desire to be ecumenical with each other and with other religions has led theologians to downplay Christology, which is necessarily particularistic (God has revealed Godself singularly in one first-­century Jew), and deal instead with an “LCD god,” or the god of “restricted standard theism.” Against this trend, Adams shows how to do theology starting with Christ—­in her case to construct a christological theodicy—­without foreclosing ecumenical dialogue.21 20. Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell with a Selection from His Correspondence and Occasional Writings and a Sketch of His Contributions to Science (London: Macmillan, 1882), 392–96 (190–91 in the digital edition at http://www.sonnetsoftware.com/bio/maxbio.pdf). 21. Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ix, 1, 5–6. Other quotations in this scholium are from 10–12.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 261

3/13/18 1:14 PM

262  Wilson C. K. Poon

To make particularist claims, Adams has to be a realist—­she holds “that there is some fact of the matter, prior to and independent of what we think, believe, or conceive of in our theories.” But she is keen to avoid constructing an exclusivist theory. She is therefore a “sceptical realist” who tries to “eat [the] realist cake while gulping down [the] epistemological ‘humble pie.’ ” Adams realises that in the face of complex data that “pull in many different directions,” the best one could do is to seek maximal coherence, so that any position one puts forward will “involve premises [that] are fundamentally controversial and so unable to command the ascent of all reasonable persons.” Thus, “It is rational . . . to endorse one of the plurality of well-­developed positions.” Notably, then, “A theory is not made discreditable . . . by the mere observation that there is some . . . alternative.” Indeed, seeking coherence amongst an ever-­widening field of complex data may lead to paradigm shifts so that the sceptical realist must be ecumenical and seek to “enter into the other theories, . . . to learn what, why and how they handle issues well or badly.” The “LCD god” dominates the mainstream science and religion discourse (see, e.g., thesis 3 scholium references). There are important exceptions,22 but few have started with Christology per se. Polkinghorne’s edited volume on creation as kenosis23 comes closest to my goal of “god talking” science christologically within a broadly sceptical realist framework. 6. By wrong-­footing herself, the church also jettisons her most distinctive resource for explaining the success of a scientific enterprise that eschews the “god hypothesis,” the cruciform story of Christ. For the church as the body of Christ, see further theses 24, 25, and their associated scholia. 7. To speak of “science and religion” suggests that “science” and “religion” are like two jars sitting on a shelf that can be scrutinised individually and compared as two instances of the same kind of thing. For me, religion is the shelf that holds up all other jars because it offers a Weltanschauung from which to view all other human endeavour. For a Christian, articulating this perspective for science means constructing a “theology of science.” 22. John Polkinghorne examines the Nicene Creed in Science and Christian Belief (London: SPCK, 1994). Arthur Peacocke discusses Jesus extensively in Theology for a Scientific Age (London: SCM, 1993). Celia Deane Drummond reflects on Christ as our wisdom in her Creation through Wisdom (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2003). 23. Polkinghorne, The Work of Love.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 262

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Science as the Foolishness of God  263

To do so, one is faced with rich and complex data, which the sceptical realist must decide on their relative “degrees of entrenchment,” because “it will usually not be straightforward how all of the pieces fit together.” Inevitably, “Some [data] get marginalized. . . . Some data are virtually unbudgeable. . . . Still others fall somewhere in between.”24 In theologising about science, I take as my “unbudgeable data” the Bible and the experience of Christian scientists. The data of Scripture are “entrenched” because they are “primary tools of spiritual formation,” so I “put [myself] to school to them on a daily basis.”25 The experience of the Christian scientist is crucial because he or she seeks a theology of science to inform a “laboratory spirituality” mediating work and worship. The twin desiderata of being schooled by Scripture and experience lead us directly to the cross (see theses 14 and 16). 8. It is tempting but probably incorrect to ascribe Paul’s “fear and trembling” on arrival in Corinth to his immediately previous experience in Athens (Acts 17:16–34).26 9. “Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer” (2 Cor 5:16 NASB). A key issue is whether kata sarka (according to the flesh) modifies “Christ” adjectivally or “to know” adverbially. J. Louis Martyn made a strong case for the latter.27 For Martyn, Paul is here articulating an epistemology appropriate for “the turn of the ages” inaugurated by Christ’s death and resurrection. Importantly, Martyn notes that the implied alternative to “knowing kata sarka” is not “knowing according to the Spirit”—­that will only be possible after the parousia (second coming of Christ). For the present “in-­between time,” Paul proposes a form of knowing that can only be characterised as kata stauron (according to the cross), even though the word stauros (cross) is absent from 2 Corinthians (but cf. 1 Cor 1:18 and 2:2).28 24. McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors, 19. 25. The two quotations are from McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors, 19, 20. 26. L. Legrand, “The Unknown God of Athens,” Vidyajyoti 65 (1981): 158–67. 27. J. Louis Martyn, “Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages,” in Christian History and Interpretation, ed. W. R. Farmer, C. F. D. Moule, and R. R. Niebuhr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), ch. 13. 28. For the “in-between-timeness” of the scientific enterprise, see Wilson C. K. Poon and Tom McLeish, “Real Presences: Two Scientists’ Response to George Steiner,” Theology 102 (1999): 169–77.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 263

3/13/18 1:14 PM

264  Wilson C. K. Poon

10. Note, from the next thesis, that Luther used personal language and talked about the theologian of glory and theologian of the cross. My contention is that worshipping Christian scientists must necessarily be theologians of the cross if they are to remain true to their vocation and their faith. 11. These are Luther’s nineteenth and twentieth Heidelberg Theses.29 The “visible rearward parts of God” refers to the occasion when Moses said to God, “Show me your glory,” and received the reply, “You shall see my back” (Exod 33:18, 23). In other words, God’s glory cannot be “frontally perceived.” The “QED” of these assertions is found in the cross. What is “clearly perceptible” as “[having] actually happened” was the Roman execution of a malefactor; however, those able to “perceive the . . . rearward parts of God” will conclude with the centurion, “Truly this man was God’s Son” (Mark 15:39). See further theses 16, 28, and their scholia. 12. It is often baldly asserted (see the examples in the scholium to thesis 3) that divine glory and wisdom can be “read” from the natural world, whether it be from the unimaginably powerful nuclear reactions in stellar evolution or from the equally unimaginably intricate web of biochemical reactions in a living cell. Such assertions are prima facie examples of “[looking] upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened.” Thus the direct appeal to Psalm 19 in “science and religion” discourse typically constitutes a theology of glory unless one travels the indirect road from the heavens via the cross before arriving back at Psalm 19 “and know [it] for the first time”30 (cf. thesis 21 and its scholium). 13. The New Testament repeatedly warns us against theologies of glory. It was their humanly conceived idea of “glory” that misled James and John to ask McLeish has developed some of this material further in his Faith and Wisdom in Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Interestingly, both our joint article and McLeish’s later book drew heavily on the book of Job. However, the cruciform resources offered by Job were drawn upon only in passing in either work. 29. A detailed exposition is given by MacGrath in Luther’s Theology of the Cross. The translation is from Luther’s Works, vol. 31, Career of the Reformer I, ed. Harold J. Grimm and Helmut T. Lehmann (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1957), 39–58, except for the “perceives the visible rearward parts” of God, which is McGrath’s; the Fortress edition has “comprehends the visible and manifest things.” 30. T. S. Elliot, “Little Gidding” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), 222: “We shall not cease from exploration // And the end of all our exploring // Will be to arrive where we started // And know the place for the first time.”

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 264

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Science as the Foolishness of God  265

of Jesus, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” They received the rebuke: “It shall not be so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:35–45 RSV). It was his humanly conceived “wisdom” that misled Saul to persecute the first Christians, who foolishly worshipped a crucified and therefore accursed man. He learnt on the road to Damascus, and relearnt at Corinth, that such divine foolishness was wiser than any human wisdom (1 Cor 1:25). Similarly, the ideas of divine grandeur, majesty, and wisdom that are simply “read off” the universe give rise to what Sallie McFague has called a “monarchical model” of god, which she argues is inappropriate for our age.31 McFague’s blanket dismissal of the monarchical model is surely an overclaim,32 but a one-­sidedly monarchical model of god is certainly inappropriate in a religion that claims to worship a crucified criminal as its (risen) Lord. 14. The Laplace Principle is the major legacy of the scientific enterprise as a whole because giving naturalistic explanations is one of the most unnatural things Homo sapiens have learnt to do. To most of our ancestors, eschewing supernatural explanations would have appeared both foolhardy (because it wouldn’t work!) and dangerous (because the gods would surely be angry). How unnatural this was can be seen in the first book of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (ca. 55 BCE)—­a Latin epic poem arguing for a completely naturalistic, atomistic worldview. Lucretius explained that he used verse to sweeten the message just as doctors tricked children to drink bitter medicine by smearing “sweet yellow honey on the goblet’s rim.”33 Note, however, that Lucretius argues for an “ontological naturalism”—­there is nothing else other than natural entities, while Laplace’s reply to Napoleon needs only be construed as a declaration of “methodological naturalism”—­that we eschew all but naturalistic causes in our scientific work.34 31. Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 63ff. 32. George Herbert’s “Teach me my God and King // In all things Thee to see” surely constitutes an authentic component of any adequate response to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (although the gender-specific language does need updating!). 33. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), lines 935–44. 34. Owen Flanagan, “Varieties of Naturalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 430–52.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 265

3/13/18 1:14 PM

266  Wilson C. K. Poon

15. The standard move starts with the exposition of some “latest scientific advance” that provides an explanation for something hitherto inexplicable. Thus, for example, newly discovered fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background explain how clumps of matter (galaxies) could have formed from an ultra-­homogeneous initial Big Bang. Then the conclusion follows: “so we don’t need god any more, quod erat demonstrandum.” 16. A universe in which a scientific enterprise committed to wholly naturalistic explanations thrives is not obviously compatible with all kinds of religions; but a religion that attributes divinity to a crucified criminal may conceivably have the resources to explain why it is that a naturalistic science should not only be tolerated by the God so revealed, but that it may actually flourish. 17. On what she thought was her death bed in May 1373, Julian of Norwich saw a series of visions as she contemplated the bleeding head of Christ on a crucifix. In her first vision, Julian was shown “a little thing the quantity of a hazelnut,” which was a symbol of “all that is made.” The “little thing . . . lasts and ever shall, for God loves it.”35 Grace Jantzen explains the connection between Christ crucified and a hazelnut. Her starting point is the realization that for a God who is the very ground of being to “bring creatures into existence, so that they are genuinely differentiated beings in their own right, [God] must impose restraints upon [Godself], so as to allow them to have being of their own.” Crucially, according to Jantzen, there is continuity between such divine humility demonstrated in the creation of “genuinely differentiated beings”—­even a tiny hazelnut—­and the self-­emptying love displayed in the bleeding head of Christ that Julian was contemplating.36 If indeed the kenotic impulse demonstrated in the cross was already there in the act of creation,37 then the Laplace Principle is not only explicable, but expected. 35. Julian of Norwich, Showing of Love, trans. Julia Bolton Holloway (Collegeville: Liturgical, 2003), 8–9. 36. Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich (London: SPCK, 2000), 133–35. 37. Such an account of kenotic creation is consonant with the “double agency” account of divine action, which was classically delineated by Thomas Aquinas and revived in modern time (though with important differences) by Austin Farrar. For a concise introduction, see Nicanor Austriaco, “In Defense of Double Agency in Evolution: A Response to Five Modern Critics,” Angelicum 80 (2003): 947–66. I am indebted to Mark Harris for prompting me to think about double agency in this context.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 266

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Science as the Foolishness of God  267

18. As Alan Richardson says in his theological commentary on Genesis, “Names are very important in Hebrew thought; a name represented a person’s character, his real self. . . . Man names the animals; that is, he assigns to them their status and character—­he defines and determines their being.”38 Note that this “model of God,” in which the Creator grants a high degree of creaturely autonomy, is not a universal feature in all theistic religions, even within the three Abrahamic religions. Compare, for example, the story of Adam naming animals. Here is the Judeo-­Christian narrative: So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. (Gen 2:19)

The corresponding qur’anic narrative pictures Allah teaching Adam: He taught Adam the names of all things and then set them before the angels, saying: “Tell Me the names of these, if what you say be true.” “Glory be to You,” they replied, “we have no knowledge except that which You have given us. You alone are all-­k nowing and wise.” Then said He: “Adam, tell them their names.” And when Adam had named them, He said: “Did I not tell you that I know the secrets of the heavens and the earth, and know all that you reveal and all that you conceal?”39

The respective “models of God” emerging from these two traditions relate to the Laplace Principle rather differently. The doxa of the Judeo-­Christian God consists in withdrawing Godself to let Adam take centre stage; it was this Godhead whose Second Person would later “empty” Godself and “become obedient to the point of death” (Phil 2:6–8). On the other hand, submission (Islam) seems to be an appropriate response to the glory of Allah revealed in the qur’anic narrative. A discourse that simply hides such differences under a generic “LCD god” lacks intellectual rigour and will prove pastorally unsatisfying to either religion’s practitioners who work in science. 38. Alan Richardson, Genesis 1–11 (London: SCM, 1953), 67. 39. Sūrah al-Baqarah (“The Cow”) in The Koran, trans. N. J. Dawood (London: Penguin, 2003), 13 (vv. 31–33).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 267

3/13/18 1:14 PM

268  Wilson C. K. Poon

19. A cruciform epistemology alerts us to the fact that all human conceptions of “god” must die for the true God to be revealed. This is true of every human conception of what “god” is like—­however “orthodox” it is—­and every human conception of what “god” is not like. All such conceptions tempt us into believing that there are places where we do not have to look for “god” because “god” will surely not be found in these places. Every generation has its favourite list of such “most god forsaken places.” The church is called to inhabit these places prayerfully in order to discern and bear witness to Christ as his body in (not in spite of) these places, each of which is an instance of the “foolishness of God.” 20. To learn to see God in an apparently god-­free scientific enterprise is to be schooled by “God’s foolishness,” which “is wiser than human wisdom” (1 Cor 1:25a). There is a sense in which everything I want to say is already present in highly condensed form in Bonhoeffer’s musings from his Tegel prison cell on the form of the postwar church. Bonhoeffer’s crucial insight is that humanity’s increasing ability to “live in the world without the working hypothesis of God” is not to be lamented by the church, who, instead, should learn to recognise in this development the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.40 Science, being the first area in which such development became sustained and rapid (the first volume of Laplace’s Celestial Mechanics came out in 1799), is therefore one of the main pedagogical instruments God uses in schooling the church in this matter. Note carefully that Bonhoeffer no more believed in or championed the “death of God” than the One who cried on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Bonhoeffer was a faithful disciple of both Christ and Luther: he was well-­schooled in the theologia crucis. 21. Christ on the Emmaus road taught his disciples that all the writings were “about himself” (Luke 24:27). Christian exegetes and theologians from the subapostolic period through to the Reformation and beyond universally expounded the Old Testament in this light. It is still possible, indeed imperative, for Christians to read these Scriptures humbly in this way in our 40. These musings were recorded in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison: An Unabridged Edition (London: SCM, 2013). The quotations in this thesis are taken from the letter dated 16/7/1944. How Bonhoeffer might have developed these musings had his life not ended tragically in the hands of the Nazis just before the War ended has been discussed by various authors. See, e.g., Edwin H. Robertson, Bonhoeffer’s Legacy: The Christian Way in a World Without Religion (London: Macmillan, 1991).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 268

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Science as the Foolishness of God  269

postmodern world.41 However, few, if any, have attempted to read the doxa of Psalm 19:1 in the light of the Johannine “hour of Christ’s glory,” namely, his crucifixion (John 12:23, etc.). 22. Jacob wrestled with an enigmatic opponent through the night at Piniel (Gen 32:24–32). He only let go of his opponent when the latter agreed to give him a blessing just as “the day is breaking,” at the price of a dislocated hip. The spiritual vocation of Christian scientists is to wrestle with the enigma of having to work daily under the Laplace Principle and emerge with the “wound of knowledge” that they have been wrestling with God.42 23. Jesus was similarly taunted at Golgotha: “If you are the son of God, come down from the cross!” (Matt 27:40). He offered no soundbite. The desire for immediate response is, however, very keen because silence appears unbearably weak. Yet a theologian of the cross learns that “God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor 1:25b). 24. When Nathanael made an a priori objection to Philip’s claim that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah (“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”), Philip had no soundbite or ready-­to-­hand “apologetics.” Indeed, no soundbite would have convinced Nathanael. Instead, Philip said, “Come and see!” Upon encountering Jesus, Nathanael exclaimed, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (John 1:45–49). The New Atheist’s objection to belief in God is of the same a priori kind. They need to meet Christ in his body, the church, not hear soundbites or apologetics. 25. When the church gathers to perform the eucharistic memorial, it is most singularly constituted as the body of Christ. Only those schooled in perceiving the real presence of God in the fellowship of believers sharing bread and wine are in a position to “read” God from the Laplace Principle. 41. Here are three examples. Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms: Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spirit, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2007); Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007); Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress, 2010). 42. The “wound of knowledge” alludes to a poignant poem by R. S. Thomas entitled “Roger Bacon” exploring “science and religion” that resonates strongly with my approach. See R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems 1945–1990 (London: Phoenix, 1993), 354. Another pertinent allusion is to Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to Saint John of the Cross, 2nd ed. (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2014).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 269

3/13/18 1:14 PM

270  Wilson C. K. Poon

26. The New Atheists look on the “clearly perceptible” (cf. thesis 11) success of the Laplace Principle, and conclude that there is no “god.”43 They are therefore “antitheologians of glory”—­if they had made the world, they would have taken care to leave much more obvious marks of their creatorship. The Christian claims that by the Laplace Principle’s success we see “a visible rearward part” of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The temptation to jettison a cruciform theology for a theology of glory is great. There is constant pressure to smuggle the “god hypothesis” back in. One recent manifestation is known as Intelligent Design.44 27. In a theologia gloriae featuring a monarchically conceived “LCD god,” violence and suffering necessarily appear surprising and extraneous. Under a theologia crucis, there is at least the possibility that such features are inherent. Working out whether this undoubtedly surprising claim is coherent must be left for another project, but Adams’s christological theodicy at least shows that it is not necessarily incoherent. 28. The Letter to the Hebrews puts this call more graphically: “Jesus . . . suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (13:12–14). My theologia crusis of science is an “outside the camp” theology that is bound to appear weak and foolish by worldly standards. There is a long Judeo-­Christian tradition of the deus absconditus (hidden god). Second Isaiah famously exclaimed, “Surely, you are a God who hides himself” (45:15 CEB). Note, again, that absence is not nonexistence: Isaiah continues, “. . . O God of Israel, the Saviour.” (See also thesis 20 and its scholium.) It is the Jesus whom the disciples saw disappear into heaven (Acts 1:9) who promised the same disciples, “I am with you always” (Matt 28:20). Many mystics emphasize divine hiddenness. A foremost explorer of divine hiddenness in relation to science is the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas (writing in English).45 Note, finally, that the disciple’s risen life at present is also “hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3, emphasis added). 43. Philosophically, they infer ontological naturalism from the success of methodological naturalism. 44. For my own spiritual journey in matters evolutionary, see Wilson C. K. Poon, “Evolutionary metanoia,” in Christians and Evolution, ed. R. J. Berry (Oxford: Monarch, 2014), 197–214. 45. See Collected Poems cited in n42, especially “Via Negativa” (220), “Emerging” (“Not as in the old days I pray,” 263), “Roger Bacon” (354), and “The Absence” (361).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 270

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Science as the Foolishness of God  271

Postscript The editors of this volume have invited the authors to “reflect on the significance of Jesus Christ for understanding the created world, particularly as that world is observed by the natural sciences.” I have chosen to reflect mainly on the significance of Jesus Christ for understanding the natural sciences themselves. Through articulating and commenting on twenty-­eight theses on “science and religion,” I have sought to adumbrate a Christocentric, cruciform theology of science in which scientific methodological naturalism—­what I have termed the Laplace Principle—­is seen to witness to the self-­emptying (or kenotic) nature of the second person of the Godhead. In such a theology of science, one necessarily and unapologetically starts from a position of faith and articulates what that faith makes of the scientific enterprise, in this case that scientific methodological naturalism resonates deeply with the God that Christians worship.46 Although I have focussed on the scientific enterprise that studies the natural world, I have also made brief comments on the “world . . . observed by the natural sciences.” In thesis 3, I pointed out the popularity of quoting Psalm 19 as a starting point for Christian scientists discussing the natural world: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” In thesis 21, I suggested that the “glory” mentioned by the psalmist should be read through the lens provided by Saint John, for whom the hour of Christ’s glory was his being “lifted up” on the cross. Otherwise, the ideas of grandeur, majesty, and wisdom supposedly revealed by the universe would remain merely human ones that do not correspond to the God revealed by the crucified and risen Christ. While my main aim has been to address the church, a subsidiary aim is to persuade mainstream theologians that “science and religion” is too important a topic to be left to a “special interest group.” If I am right, then reflecting on the nature of the scientific enterprise has central implications for core areas of Christian theology: the nature of God, creation, Christology, and indeed (following Gorringe) pneumatology.47 46. For a comparative study of the role of faith in Christian belief and in science, see Wilson C. K. Poon, “Thomas: The Apostle of Scientists,” Theology and Science 15 (2017): 203–13. 47. I thank Brian Brock (Aberdeen), Tim Gorringe (Exeter), David Fergusson, Michael Fuller, and Mark Harris (Edinburgh), and the two editors of this volume for their helpful comments on various drafts of this chapter.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 271

3/13/18 1:14 PM

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 272

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Chapter SIXTEEN

The Scientist-­B eliever Following Christ as We Uncover the Wonders of the Living World RU T H M . BA NC E W IC Z

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . Through him all things were made. JOHN 1:1, 3A1

T

he scale and complexity of the living world can be every bit as awe-­ inspiring as the vast distances in the universe. For example, if the total amount of DNA in a person’s body was taken out and joined together end-­ to-­end, how far would it reach? Someone told me it could stretch as far as the moon, but such a figure needs careful checking. The most difficult part of the calculation is finding the total number of cells in the average human body.2 Estimates in the scientific literature have typically ranged from around 1–100 trillion, but the latest figure is about 30 trillion. If you limit that number to cells that contain DNA after they mature (and therefore exclude red blood cells which break down their DNA to make room for haemoglobin), that number is reduced to around 3 trillion.3 With 2 metres of DNA in every cell, 1. Unless noted otherwise, Scripture quotations come from the NIV. 2. Red blood cells and the cells in the lens of the eye used to contain DNA but digested it to make way for haemoglobin or crystallins, respectively. 3. A trillion is 1 x 1012, or 1,000,000,000,000. Estimates for the number of cells in the human body are 30 trillion—10 percent of which contain DNA—in Ron Sender et al., “Are We Really Vastly Outnumbered? Revisiting the Ratio of Bacterial to Host Cells in Humans,” Cell 164 (January 2016): 337–40; and 37 trillion in Eva Bianconi et al., “An Estimation of the Number of Cells in the Human Body,” Annals of Human Biology 40 (2013): 463–71.

273

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 273

3/13/18 1:14 PM

274  Ruth M. Bancewicz

3 trillion times 2 metres gives 6 trillion metres, or 6 billion4 kilometres of DNA. The moon is only 380,000 kilometres away, which means the story I was told was very short of the mark. The distance to the sun is 150 million kilometres, so the average person’s DNA could go there and back about 20 times. If that thread were stretched out from the sun in a single straight line, it would reach past the planet Neptune and all the way to Pluto. This comparison between the world of the very large and the world of the very small is just one way of highlighting how we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps 139:14). For the Christian who is a scientist, their work often leads to a similar sense of wonder and worship, which feeds directly back into their faith. The question of where Christ is in this process is a very important one and is the focus of this chapter. What follows is an insider’s look at the world of science from the perspective of a scientist who is also a follower of Jesus. Having left the laboratory environment several years ago, I will be drawing on the experience of a number of collaborators who are still actively involved in research. I will explore their work, looking at the implications of their research for faith in Christ and vice versa. Each section begins with a relevant and awe-­inspiring scientific example. To begin with, it is important to lay out a theology of science.

Theology of Science Every living organism on Earth contains DNA, but that is only one piece of the genetic code. The other part of the story is told by the proteins: an extremely diverse family of molecules that does most of the work inside our bodies. For example, we have haemoglobin in red blood cells, keratin in hair and nails, and insulin to help regulate blood sugar levels. Proteins are long molecules made from a set of smaller subunits called amino acids. The instructions for adding amino acids together in the right order are held in the DNA molecule, so one could say that the language of DNA is translated into the language of proteins. The genetic code is these two languages, plus the molecules that translate one into the other. There are hundreds of potential amino acids with their own particular sizes, shapes, and chemical properties, but only twenty are used to build the 4. British billions are bigger than American ones (twelve zeroes compared to nine), but the US billion is becoming standard, so I am using that here.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 274

3/13/18 1:14 PM

The Scientist-­Believer  275

proteins in living organisms. This raises two important scientific questions: Why only twenty amino acids? And why these particular ones? The computational biochemist Stephen Freeland has studied thousands of alternative sets of amino acids and found that the set used in the living world is like a very carefully chosen group of building blocks, providing an excellent range of shapes, sizes, and chemical properties. There are in fact signs that this particular group of amino acids might be almost perfectly optimised for building proteins.5 Freeland is a professor at the University of Maryland and studied at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. For him as a Christian, this work prompts questions that are philosophical and theological as well as scientific. Is the genetic code—­which is found in all living things on Earth—­unique? If this code is a product of the cosmos as we know it, does this mean that the universe is pregnant with life? What is the purpose of it all? These are fascinating questions for anyone, regardless of their faith or profession, and Freeland’s work will no doubt provide further data that helps this conversation develop in new directions. For any Christian working in science, there is no part of the world that is outside God’s domain. One of the central messages of the Bible is that everything we see is created and sustained by him. In Genesis 1, God’s creation is described as “good,” and he commands the people he made to rule over the Earth, working and caring for it. Connecting these themes together, one could say that an important part of our calling is to explore creation so we can serve it in a more informed way. This theology brings freedom in research (within responsible ethical boundaries) and affirms the joy of discovery as a way of delighting in God’s creation. This way of thinking is foundational to the role of any Christian in the sciences and can teach all of us about the relationship between science and faith. One way of describing the interaction between science and Christianity 5. Amanda Doyle, “Mapping Amino Acids to Understand Life’s Origins,” Astrobiology Magazine, 13 January 2014, http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/mapping-amino-acids-to-understand-lifes-origins/; Stephen Freeland, “The Genetic Code,” lecture at Biology & Belief, Faraday short course no. 34, February 2016, http://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/Multimedia.php?Mode=Add&ItemID=Item_ Multimedia_665&width=720&height=460; Melissa Ilardo et al., “Extraordinarily Adaptive Properties of the Genetically Encoded Amino Acids,” Scientific Reports 15 (2015): 1–6; Gayle Philip and Stephen Freeland, “Did Evolution Select a Nonrandom ‘Alphabet’ of Amino Acids?” Astrobiology 11 (2011): 235–40; Yi Lu and Stephen Freeland, “A quantitative investigation of the chemical space surrounding amino acid alphabet formation,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 250 (2008): 349–61.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 275

3/13/18 1:14 PM

276  Ruth M. Bancewicz

uses Venn diagrams. For any Christian who believes God created and rules over the universe, the biggest circle represents their whole life which stands in relation to him. Within that large circle are smaller overlapping circles representing the different activities or experiences in which they are involved. In other words, science is something a Christian can do alongside all the other pursuits that are part of an active life of worshipping God.6

Figure 1: One way of representing the life of a scientist-­believer

What makes this life in science a specifically Christian commitment? These scientists do not believe in a generic, faceless, God or one who created the universe and no longer interacts with it. They worship the God who enters into the universe and reveals himself in the person of Jesus Christ. With this background or framework for their life, the Christian’s scientific work takes on an extra level of significance because their research is an integral part of their commitment to following Jesus. This interaction can also go both ways, as science can feed into and inspire faith. To illustrate how this process works, I will use an example from developmental biology. 6. The following diagram is not intended to be an accurate or scale model. Attempting to draw one for your own life, however, may be a very instructive process if you are feeling a little overstretched.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 276

3/13/18 1:14 PM

The Scientist-­Believer  277

Christ and the Created Order Every single person used to be an embryo. He or she went through that precarious stage when a sperm met an egg, then divided into two, four, and so on, until they became a tiny round collection of cells and implanted into the side of their mother’s womb. After a couple of weeks that ball elongated into a peanut shape, and two weeks later it began to grow arms and legs. During the first nine weeks of gestation all the main patterns and features in that person’s body were laid out, after which came the task of growth and making connections between nerve cells.7 Eventually they emerged from the womb as a newborn baby. Jeff Hardin is a professor of zoology at the University of Wisconsin-­ Madison, and he uses the tiny nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans to study some of the processes involved in embryonic development. For him, the tightly choreographed dances of cell division and cell movement that form and fold a ball of cells into a living organism are incredibly beautiful as well as deeply meaningful. One of the most wonderful processes in development is the patterning of the body from head to rump. Each section must take on its appropriate character, which in turn determines which organs or appendages grow where. This stage is tightly controlled by a family of genes called “Hox,” which are organised in a doubly ordered and efficient way. The Hox genes can be found on the chromosomes in the order they are needed for development. This tidy filing system also reflects the order that the proteins they make are needed along the body: first the ones in the head, then those for the neck, and so on. A wave of gene activation passes down the body, making the correct proteins in the places where they are needed.8 For people who enjoy order, this is a very beautiful process indeed. Hardin’s work on embryonic development has helped him appreciate God’s creative power, which leads to a sense of worship. It also reminds him that we have very fragile beginnings, giving him a sense of humility and reliance on God. Most importantly, knowing these processes in such detail communicates 7. Lewis Wolpert, Developmental Biology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Lennart Nilsson and Lars Hamberger, A Child is Born, rev. ed. (London: Doubleday, 2003). 8. Lewis Wolpert, Developmental Biology; Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (London: Phoenix, 2007).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 277

3/13/18 1:14 PM

278  Ruth M. Bancewicz

the wonder of the incarnation to him in a very real way. The conversation about biology and belief is deeply christological because the Word, who is the creator and sustainer of the universe, became a living organism.9 Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. (Phil 2:6–7)

God the Son became an embryo, and submitted to the same processes of development that we all went through. As Mary became a mother for the first time, God assumed humanity in all its organic fragility and gave dignity to biological material like nothing else could. When Jesus walked the earth, he became part of the ecological network of creation, using the same genetic code as every other living organism, the same cellular machinery, and the same vital organs as so many other animals. In coming to Earth, Christ was truly one of us and submitted to the same laws of physics that affect every particle of the universe, but he was not bound by them. Jesus is Lord over all creation, and he has been since the very beginning of time. He demonstrated his power by overriding the ordinary mechanisms of life to achieve extraordinary things. He turned water into wine, healed the sick, walked on water, and—­most important—­rose from the dead. These two concepts of incarnation and power over creation are especially relevant to the Christian scientist. She or he can work hard to understand the mechanisms behind the processes of the world, secure in the knowledge that God created and sustains the laws of physics that give order and coherence to everything we see. Whether experiments fail or succeed, God understands what is going on more intimately than we ever will. Recognising God’s deep understanding of creation can inspire us to be humble, patient, and diligent as we work to increase our own understanding. As a follower of Christ, the 9. Jeff Hardin, “How We Are Made: Embryos, Biology and Belief,” CiS-Faraday Public Lecture, February 2016, http://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/Multimedia. php?Mode=Add&ItemID=Item_Multimedia_664&width=720&height=460.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 278

3/13/18 1:14 PM

The Scientist-­Believer  279

researcher can commit their days to God knowing that he can relate to our struggles and anxieties. Jesus will slowly and steadily help us become more like him in character, learn to work in a more diligent and creative way, and be a better colleague and teacher. The Bible also makes it clear that Jesus came to redeem the whole of creation. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Col 1:19–20). We have a specific and very important role to play in serving and preserving the Earth, but the primary purpose of creation is to worship and glorify God. In that task, we are equal with the fish and birds, rocks and water, wind and trees (e.g., Ps 148). This makes the study of God’s creation even more important. The whole Earth is part of his ongoing work and will be renewed according to his plans.10 For the follower of Jesus who is also a scientist, this knowledge of Jesus’s relationship to creation—­his power, his incarnation, and his care for it—­can renew their sense of wonder at the world and move them to worship when they make new discoveries. This is the world that Jesus is involved in creating and sustaining, but of which he is also a very real material part. He made DNA, but his own human body contains the same molecule. So Christians, of all people, should be taking the study of creation as a very serious responsibility. We should be asking difficult scientific questions and not accepting easy answers. When we make discoveries, we should be thinking about what to do with them. Along with the general increase in our knowledge about creation, scientific knowledge has enormous practical value in terms of improvements in agriculture, medical treatments, travel, communications, and countless other technologies. Even if the technical outworkings of a piece of research are a hundred years in the future, we should still continue that work for the benefit of future generations. Christians can play their role as members of the body of Christ by being part of God’s kingdom in which “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”11 There are benefits to doing science in addition to the academic and the practical. Jesus told parables using the things of nature. We can do something 10. Hilary Marlow, The Earth Is the Lord’s: A Biblical Response to Environmental Issues, Grove Biblical Series B50 (Cambridge: Grove, 2008). 11. Marlow, The Earth Is the Lord’s.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 279

3/13/18 1:14 PM

280  Ruth M. Bancewicz

similar, as demonstrated by the “DNA to the moon” story at the beginning of this chapter. Overly detailed analogies can be unhelpful, but a relatively simple scientific story can be a very effective way of communicating the wonder of creation or something about the character of God. This method of moving from creation back to God raises the question of what we might learn of Christ from the things he has made. This is a subject that biologists, in particular, tend to be wary about. Many have been hurt by well-­meaning but unhelpful arguments from science to God, but natural theology can work very well within certain boundaries.

Natural Theology Anyone who has studied biology for a long time will know that certain shapes and structures tend to crop up again and again among different types of organisms. Birds and bats have similar-­shaped wings; octopuses and humans both have eyes that operate like pinhole cameras; and dolphins and fish have streamlined bodies with powerful tails.12 Underlying these matching forms are some hints that they arose from different evolutionary pathways. The stiffness in a bird’s wing comes from strong but light feathers, but a bat has “fingers” that extend through large flaps of skin.13 The nerves in a human eye lie on the outside of the retina, causing a blind spot where they channel into the optic nerve, whereas an octopus has its nerves beneath the retina. Even at a molecular level, the crystallin proteins that make up the lens of an octopus are similar but not identical to the crystallin proteins in a human eye. The octopus’s crystallins are similar to proteins in other places in its body, suggesting that they have been “co-­opted” for use in the eye. The same happens in humans, but our crystallins are co-­opted from different places.14 To most biologists, these similarities and differences demonstrate that evolution tends to follow well-­worn paths, producing similar but not identical solutions to the familiar problems of thriving on planet Earth. Cambridge professor of palaeobiology Simon Conway Morris has spent much of his career studying these evolutionary pathways, trying to discern why they lead 12. For more examples, see http://www.mapoflife.org. 13. Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 150–53; Morris, The Runes of Evolution: How the Universe Became Self-Aware (Philadelphia: Templeton, 2015), 193. 14. Morris, The Runes of Evolution, 93–107.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 280

3/13/18 1:14 PM

The Scientist-­Believer  281

in certain directions and not others.15 Some similarities can be explained by the constraints of the physical world. For example, light travels through air or water in set ways, so there are only so many ways to build an efficient eye.16 Others, such as the body plan of animals or the shape of a protein are less straightforward to explain. What pressures, interactions, or attractions might underlie these patterns? Can they be explained using a series of biological rules similar to the laws of physics? In the same way that physics has a general theory of relativity, might these rules be combined to produce a general theory of biology—­or a map of life? As Conway Morris writes, “Evolutionary convergence is, at the least, a straw in the wind, pointing to a deeper pattern of biological organisation.”17 Another reason why Conway Morris is interested in convergence is the question of predictability. Is evolution a directionless process that can be thrown off in different directions by random events, or is it heading in a limited number of directions? How compatible is this with the idea of a God who has a purpose for the world? For example, was it inevitable that conscious beings would emerge: persons who would be capable of encountering God and fulfilling a responsible role in creation? These are far-­reaching questions, and in looking for answers to them we need to move beyond science to theology, philosophy, and other areas of human knowledge and experience. Natural theology is the activity of learning about God from creation, which has been tried in various ways over the past few hundred years.18 There is much to be discussed, but one thing is clear: you cannot find Christ from looking at creation alone. Observing the created order might give us a sense of God’s greatness or creativity, and perhaps some other general ideas, but none of this can take the place of God’s revelation of himself through the person of Jesus Christ or his other interactions with humankind that are recorded in the Bible. With this caveat in mind, some forms of natural theology can be complementary to the gospel. Alister E. McGrath proposes a way of thinking that views the physical 15. See also Simon Conway Morris, The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 16. There are lots of other kinds of eyes, but the camera eye seems to be the most efficient. 17. Simon Conway Morris, ed., The Deep Structure of Biology: Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal? (Philadelphia: Templeton, 2008), ix. 18. John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 281

3/13/18 1:14 PM

282  Ruth M. Bancewicz

world through the lens of Christian theology.19 In other words, does theology make sense of our observations of the world? For example, we learn from the doctrine of creation that creation itself is not divine, that it is ordered and regular, and that it is a source of wisdom for living a good life.20 For McGrath, this account of creation makes sense of much of what we know about the world through science, including the physical laws, the regular patterns and processes, the fact that it appears to have had a beginning, and the fruitfulness and interdependence of living things and their nonliving environments. Other scholars believe that creation can speak of God more specifically, or to people who do not have access to the lens of Christian theology.21 They might prefer to call McGrath’s way of thinking—­summarised here very briefly—­as a theology of nature. Rather than covering all the responses and different ways of thinking, the purpose of this chapter is simply to show that even a very cautious form of natural theology, such as that used by McGrath, can be very helpful to the church. McGrath’s way of formulating natural theology helps us avoid some of the potential pitfalls of looking for evidence of God in nature. For example, some would like to use science as proof for a creator, but is that an appropriate thing to do? The scientific method looks for evidence, but only mathematicians can prove things. There is also a theological or pastoral issue at stake here. For example, if one believed that the Big Bang was evidence for a God who “lit the fuse,” then what happens if a cosmologist explains the very origin of the Big Bang in a materialistic way? Their research will only undermine faith if the Big Bang was used as hard evidence for God. Another potential pitfall for natural theology is that, if it presents creation as a foundation for theology, it risks elevating creation above the creator. Some might even end up worshipping creation itself rather than God. There is also a very real risk that we might misinterpret created things, mistakenly thinking they communicate something about God’s character. The reality for a Christian is that if the Bible or science seem to be in conflict, then somewhere 19. For example, see Alister E. McGrath, Inventing the Universe: Why We Can’t Stop Talking about Science, Faith and God (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015); and McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). 20. Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 5th ed. (Chichester, UK: WileyBlackwell, 2011), 215–17. 21. For example, Rodney Holder, The Heavens Declare: Natural Theology and the Legacy of Karl Barth (Philadelphia: Templeton, 2012); and Holder, “Natural Theology,” Faraday Papers 19 (2016), http://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/Papers.php.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 282

3/13/18 1:14 PM

The Scientist-­Believer  283

along the line is a human error. Coming at things from the other direction, starting with revealed theology before moving to science, is likely to be a far more reliable way of understanding God in the context of the things he has made. Finally, while creation is fit for purpose, it is not perfect. We need to think about what the Bible means when it says that “the whole creation has been groaning” (Rom 8:22) and will one day be liberated from that painful state. If we forget that the state of the world at present is not God’s ultimate plan for the world, then the presence of suffering and death might make one think he is an uncaring tyrant. Looking at creation within the context of what Christians know about the God who reveals himself through Jesus, a scientist-­believer is free to see their work as an opportunity to explore and enjoy creation. They can revel in curiosity and wonder, letting the sense of awe they sometimes feel lead them to worship. Like the examples given so far, some may find their work provokes questions about meaning and purpose, taking them beyond science into the realms of philosophy or theology. They will hopefully share those experiences with others, both in and outside of the church, by raising questions about how science and faith relate to each other. They are in the perfect position to explain how a Christian can be encouraged in their faith by what they learn through science or how Christian faith can make sense of what science tells us about the world. Simon Conway Morris’s work is a good example of this way of doing natural theology. His research has no direct bearing on the person of Christ but is complementary to his knowledge of Christ’s involvement in creation. His work is, in a sense, a way of worshipping Christ. Morris is not looking for evidence of God’s intervention in nature but is instead trying to understand the regular mechanisms of the world that God created and sustains. He is fascinated by the ordered workings of things and wants to understand how they function. His evidence is consistent with belief in a loving, purposeful, personal creator God. Ultimately, scientific knowledge may be useful but it does not take the place of God’s revelation of himself in Christ. “Science, when it treats creation as a true Creation and thereby faces up to its responsibilities, may well be important. . . . It seems ultimately, however, that it is the knowledge and experience of the incarnation, the wisdom and warnings given by Jesus in the Gospels, and not least the resurrection that in the final analysis are all

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 283

3/13/18 1:14 PM

284  Ruth M. Bancewicz

that matters.”22 Conway Morris’s words remind us that both biblically and scientifically our activities are not the most important thing in the world. Instead, our ultimate purpose is to worship and glorify God.

Worship Coral reefs cover around 0.2 percent of the ocean floor, but harbour about a third of all known marine species.23 Like a city, a reef provides niches for a huge diversity of creatures: fish, crabs, anemones, sea urchins, turtles, snails, octopuses, snakes, worms, sponges, and many more. There are fish and eels that hunt together, goby fish and shrimp living in the same burrow, and small fish that eat the parasites off larger fish. Some fish even farm algae or eat coral, while turtles feast on sponges. This system is shaped by interactions of all sorts, both cooperative and competitive. These interactions, including the most incredible examples of camouflage or mimicry, turf wars between different types of coral, and a certain amount of damage from storms or predators, are essential for creating new opportunities for a diversity of species to thrive.24 As in many ecosystems, the richest diversity in a reef is found among the microbes. Each coral colony has its own type of resident algae: single-­celled photosynthesising organisms that live right inside the cells of each coral polyp. In exchange for the safe dwelling, the algae use up the coral’s waste products and give back energy in the form of carbohydrates. Other microbes also live on the coral, so like our own bodies, each polyp is a tiny ecosystem of its own. Not all the microbes on a reef are well understood, or even known to science; most seem harmless, or may even be helpful, but in certain circumstances they can cause disease.25 22. Simon Conway Morris, The Boyle Lecture 2005, quoted in Tim Stafford, The Adam Quest: Eleven Scientists Who Held on to a Strong Faith While Wrestling with the Mystery of Human Origins (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2013), 181. 23. Russell E. Brainard et al., “Status Review Report of 82 Candidate Coral Species, Petitioned Under the U.S. Endangered Species Act,” NOAA Technical Memorandum, NMFS-PIFSC-27 (September 2011), 52. 24. Forest Rohwer with Merry Youle, Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas (USA: Plaid, 2010); Charles Sheppard, Coral Reefs: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Redouan Bshary et al., “Interspecific Communicative and Coordinated Hunting between Groupers and Giant Moray Eels in the Red Sea,” PLOS Biology 4 (2006): 2393–98; Margaret Miller, “Coral Disturbance and Recovery in a Changing World,” in Coral Reefs in the Anthropocene (Springer: Netherlands, 2015), 217–30. 25. Charles Sheppard, Coral Reefs: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 29–31, 63, 90–93; Tracy Ainsworth et al., “The Future of Coral Reefs: A Microbial Perspective,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 25 (2009): 233–40.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 284

3/13/18 1:14 PM

The Scientist-­Believer  285

Margaret Miller is a marine ecologist who works for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at the Southeast Fisheries Science Center in Miami. She studies coral breeding, looking at ways to help endangered species recover their breeding effectiveness and genetic diversity.26 Although her work is funded for commercial reasons, Miller and many of her colleagues also recognise the intrinsic value of corals. Reefs may be vital for edible marine life, protecting coastlines, and a host of other “ecosystem services,” but the beauty, complexity, and wonder of these living cities are also worth preserving simply for their own sake. This way of ascribing intrinsic value to an ecosystem resonates strongly with Miller’s Christian faith. She believes that God made the world and saw that it was good; he has a loving relationship with all of creation, and a purpose for the whole Earth. To her, the beauty of God is reflected in his creation, and the interaction of creatures on a reef is an illustration of his provision for every living thing.27 The Bible speaks of the fact that the world was not primarily created for our benefit. The closing chapters of Job and many of the Psalms tell that God provides, and has purposes, for the whole of the created order. Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? (Job 38:25–27)

And How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all; 26. Margaret Miller et al., “Genet-Specific Spawning Patterns in Acropora palmata,” Journal for the International Study of Coral Reefs (2016): 1–6; Miller et al., “Disease Dynamics and Potential Mitigation among Restored and Wild Staghorn Coral, Acropora cervicornis,” PeerJ 2 (2014): 1–30; M. E. Johnson et al., Caribbean Acropora Restoration Guide: Best Practices for Propagation and Population Enhancement, The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA (2011). 27. Margaret Miller, “Ecology: Living Communities,” lecture in Biology and Belief, Faraday short course no. 34, February 2016.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 285

3/13/18 1:14 PM

286  Ruth M. Bancewicz

the earth is full of your creatures . . . All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time. (Ps 104:24, 27)28

This principle of the intrinsic value of every part of creation informs many conservationists around the world. Ultimately, the purpose of creation is to worship and bring glory to God. Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let the sea resound, and all that is in it. Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them; let all the trees of the forest sing for joy. (Ps 96:11–12)29

Most church leaders will teach that Christians should worship God in everything we do, but it is easy to forget that we are just one part of the chorus: we worship alongside all of creation. “Praise the Lord from the earth . . . mountains and all hills . . . wild animals and all cattle . . . young men and women” (Ps 148:7–12). Creation, writes Richard Bauckham, worships God by simply being itself. The Old Testament, and particularly Psalms, is clear that creation has its own relationship to God and does not need human help to praise him (e.g., Ps 96:11–12; Isa 42:10; Job 38–39). Jesus himself says that even if people fail to praise God, the seemingly inanimate parts of creation will do so (Luke 19:40). The biblical language for creation’s praise is metaphorical but strongly suggests that trees, mountains, rivers, and animals praise God simply by doing what they were created to do. Let them praise the name of the Lord, for he commanded and they were created. (Ps 148:5)

In this way creation reflects back to God the glory that he gave them in the first place (Gen 1:31a).30 28. Marlow, The Earth Is the Lord’s. 29. Bancewicz, Wonders of the Living World (working title, Oxford: Lion, 2018); Richard Bauckham, “Joining Creation’s Praise of God,” Ecotheology 7 (2002): 45–59. 30. Bauckham, “Joining Creation’s Praise of God,” 45–59.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 286

3/13/18 1:14 PM

The Scientist-­Believer  287

We are called to join in with creation’s praise, inspired by the things that point so clearly to God. We are called away from our preoccupations with ourselves to realise the intrinsic value of creation and take our place in the choir.31 One way to inspire our worship, therefore, is to revel in the parts of creation we can see and experience, and science can be part of this. The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. (Ps 19:1–4)

Without any knowledge of the gospel, staring at the stars can give us a profound intuition that some sort of great being might be responsible for the universe. When we encounter the person of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, that vague feeling finds its proper ground and inspires genuine and heartfelt worship. If God is as the Bible describes, he deserves all this praise and more. Christ’s work on Earth enables worship to continue in a renewed and restored way. As we participate in the life of the body of Christ, his church, scientists can use their gifts to “serve and preserve” the Earth.32

Conclusions: Biology and Belief So for scientists who are faithful Christians, their work in the lab, the classroom, or the field is a vocation: a way to serve and follow Christ and use their talents fully. We want to explore the world Jesus came to save, making our own contribution to serving and preserving it, and helping humankind to benefit from it in responsible ways. In this way, faith can inspire scientists to work to the best of our ability. Science, in turn, can also provide inspiration for faith in Christ. As we see 31. Bauckham, “Joining Creation’s Praise of God,” 45–59. 32. “The Hebrew words abad and shamar often translated ‘to till and to keep’ could just as well be rendered ‘to serve and preserve.’” See Hilary Marlow, The Earth Is the Lord’s, 16.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 287

3/13/18 1:14 PM

288  Ruth M. Bancewicz

how wonderful the world is and how it reflects something of God’s character, that knowledge can help us to praise him even more. As science helps us see more of the world, it can remind us how small we are and how little we know. This reinforces the biblical message that we are not the centre of the universe. As Jeff Hardin said when considering the timescales of life on Earth, “Knowing that I am a part of something absolutely huge . . . is a cause of excitement, and enhances my own sense of worship as a Christian.”33 Christ relates to the whole cosmos and has redeemed every bit of it. Science provides a lens through which we see the world that reinforces that message. We are part of his kingdom, worshipping alongside every other creature, plant, bacterium, or rock on the planet. This two-­way interaction between science and faith is the reality for many scientists today, including the four people whose work has been described here. For these scientists, studying the living world is not just a huge privilege, but it also opens a two-­way conversation between science and faith that can last a lifetime. As Stephen Freeland has said in his writing about the genetic code, “For my part, I find excitement and challenge in the search to unravel this marvellous mystery. I choose to associate that inspiration with a loving creator God whose universe I am exploring.”34

33. Personal interview. Set to appear in Bancewicz, Wonders of the Living World (Oxford: Lion, forthcoming). 34. Stephen Freeland, “The Evolutionary Origins of Genetic Information,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 63 (2011): 240–54.

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 288

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Subject Index Aaron, 73 Abram/Abraham, 31, 153, 155, 162, 201 action, divine, 16, 66, 71, 131, 139, 177, 196, 206, 210, 213, 215–19, 242, 266, 283 Adam, 71–74, 155, 162, 168, 171, 174, 191, 235, 257, 267 adoption, 20, 129–49, 162 aesthetics, 58 agency, 39, 48, 60, 78, 86, 197, 200–2, 205, 243–49, 266 Allah, 267 Alzheimer’s, 174 angels, 57, 73, 78, 81, 86, 95, 108, 168–71, 173, 267 animal, 40, 44, 46, 52, 55–70, 94, 170, 175, 229, 237, 244–46, 257, 26, 278, 281, 286 animism, 48 anthropology, 20, 25, 46–47, 60, 93, 129–30, 134, 140, 142–44, 148–49, 240, 252 anthropomorphism, 213 apocalypse, 93, 101 apocalyptic theology, 101, 154, 164–66 apologetics, 210, 269 art, 34, 64, 225, 259 ascension, 142 astronomy, 22, 227–36 atonement, 243, 250 baptism, 83, 159 beauty, 27, 32–34, 38, 49, 197 229–33, 242–43, 250, 277, 285 being/ontology, 38–39, 49–50, 67, 77, 107, 138, 216, 266

Big Bang, The, 233, 235, 260, 266, 282 biochemistry, 198, 275 biology, 25, 59, 64, 69, 105, 136, 175, 276, 278, 280–81, 287 bondage, 39, 44, 82–83, 86–87, 91, 93, brain, 27, 59, 115–16, 173–75, 215, 238, 258 canon, 67, 131, 154 Chalcedon, 15, 21, 182–83, 193 chaos, 24, 102–3 chaos theory, 259 chemistry, 25, 198, 236 Christology, 15–21, 129, 140, 142, 160, 184, 190–93, 252, 261–62, 271 church, 15, 17–18, 22, 23, 36–37, 52–53, 61, 73, 78, 85–88, 94, 181–84, 190–93, 221, 234, 251, 253–55, 257–59, 262, 268–69, 271, 282–83, 286–87 cognitive psychology, 20, 111, 114, 119–22, 127 cognitive science, 22, 239, 243–52 comets, 230, 232–33 consciousness, 72, 113, 123, 208, 241, 245, 281 convergence, 281 Copernican revolution, 260 cosmos, 24, 29, 35, 47, 61, 63, 81, 91–92, 97–99, 106, 109, 143, 167, 169, 172, 134, 237, 275, 288 coral, 284–85 cosmology, 46, 52, 78, 81, 88, 90, 93, 167, 282 cosmos, 24, 29, 35, 47, 61, 63, 81, 91–92, 97–109, 143, 167, 169, 172, 227–38, 275, 288

289

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 289

3/13/18 1:14 PM

290  Christ and the Created Order creation ex nihilo, 38, 65–66 creativity, 49, 126 cross/crucifixion, 22, 33, 44, 78, 83–85, 88, 92, 95, 101, 109, 141, 144–49, 154, 158–59, 162, 176, 181, 183, 190–91, 226, 253–58, 262–66, 268–71 culture, 29, 35, 43, 46–47, 51–53, 87, 126, 176, 181, 185, 187, 189, 227–29 Darwinism, 69, 74, death, 33, 58, 78, 84–85, 89–90, 92, 102, 125, 135, 137, 141, 144, 146, 158–59, 162, 166, 174–76, 238, 263, 266–68, 283 deism, 16, 20, 35, 90, 98, 103, 105, 181–83, 190, 200 demonic, 39, 78–79, 83 desire, 57, 74, 142, 206, 215, 244, 247, 250 devil, 250 DNA, 235–36, 273–74, 279–80 dualism, 35, 46–47, 53, 89, 91–92 Cartesian, 217 cognitive, 225–26 ecclesiology, 183, 191 Eden, 56, 69–75, 147, 154 eisegesis, 151, 156 election, 132, 141, 144 embodiment, 18, 39–40, 42, 44, 72, 95, 114, 127, 130, 143, 146–49 emotion, 28, 59, 113, 118–19, 125 empiricism, 188 energy, 221, 231–32, 234, 238, 260, 284 entropy, 178, 227, 238, Enlightenment, 62, 182, 187, 189 environmentalism, 35 Epicureanism, 103–5, 188 epistemology, 106–7, 191, 198, 203, 206, 241, 256, 263, 268 eschatology, 37, 40, 67, 72–74, 88, 159, 167, 178 eternity, 56, 142, 161, 238 ethics, 59, 69, 87, 175, 196 Eucharist, 83, 258, 269 evangelicalism, 181–82 Eve, 71–74, 168

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 290

evil, 20, 24, 44, 67, 79, 88–92, 152, 175–76, 210, 226, 248 evolution, 20–21, 59, 60, 62–64, 68–71, 98, 100–5, 175, 179–81, 212, 215, 218–19, 222, 224, 233, 235–36, 248, 280–81 evolutionary biology, 64, 69–70 evolutionary psychology, 245 exegesis, 64, 93, 107, 151, 153, 163 exousiology, 78, 87, 89 eyewitnesses, 20, 111, 115, 118, 120–25 fallenness/the fall, 43–44, 67–74, 82, 86–90, 93, 168 fideism, 64 fine-­tuning, 208 flourishing, 34, 35, 41, 46, 49, 51, 53, 66, 69, 90, 208 forgiveness, 32, 84, 237 freedom, 30–31, 72, 85, 89–90, 130, 144 galaxy, 25, 227, 232–34, 258, 266 Galileo, 181, 193, 255, 258–59 genetics, 67, 69, 181, 218–19, 236, 274–75, 278, 285, 288 grace, 41, 67, 71, 74, 81, 91, 129, 131, 136, 139–40, 143–44, 191, 235, 248, 258 gravity, 234, 236 heaven, 17, 23, 29, 31, 33, 36, 46, 77, 92, 95, 98–100, 108, 136, 142, 168, 211, 229–32, 237–38, 255, 258, 264, 267, 270–71, 279, 286–87 hermeneutics, 64, 151, 155–57, 162–64, 186 hierarchy, 148 holiness, 202 Holy Spirit, 17, 23–24, 29–33, 41, 49, 53, 71, 105, 107, 129, 131, 134–44, 157, 166, 192, 204, 206, 209–10, 228, 235, 242, 250, 263, 287 homousios, 15 horrors, 173–78 humanism, 187–189 Huxley-­Wilberforce, 255 hypostatic union, 140, 168–72, 183 identity divine, 27, 36, 45–49, 51, 56, 141 human, 31, 43, 130, 133, 146–49

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Subject Index  291 image of God/imago Dei, 67, 142, 177 imagination, 61, 65, 162, 175, 179–83, 190, 193, 206, 259, 260 immanence, 60, 95 Immanuel, 16, 177 incarnation, 17–18, 21, 35, 137, 139–41, 146–47, 167–73, 176–77, 190–91, 235, 238, 243, 249–250, 278–79, 283 individualism, 80 Intelligent Design, 270 instinct, 58–60, 69–71, 175, 239, 254 Israel, 24–25, 31, 62, 67, 72–73, 101, 108, 131–33, 135, 153–54, 160–61, 163, 232 Jesus, historical, 15, 105, 109, 120, 136 Job, 264, 285 justification, 162, 253 kenosis, 254, 257–58, 262, 266, 271 kingdom animal, 59–60 God’s, 32, 56, 70, 73, 83, 88, 91–92, 100–3, 109, 234, 279, 288 lament, 24, 28 LCD God, 255–56, 261–62 Logos, 36, 40, 42, 44, 52–53, 56, 98 love, 21, 28, 31, 33–34, 38–44, 53, 58, 61, 68, 78, 80, 82, 85, 91–92, 102–9, 130, 135–39, 141, 144, 149, 162, 170–76, 201–7, 230, 237–38, 242–43, 249–52, 254, 257, 260, 266, 283, 285, 288 Mary, 74, 166, 278, martyrdom, 163, 182 materialism, 86, 91, 94, 188, 228–29, 282, matter, 17–18, 32, 35, 60, 173, 214, 221, 231, 234, 238, 261, 266 meaning, 30, 35–37, 40, 48, 87, 90, 196, 108, 163, 173–78, 186–89, 223, 230, 236, 245, 277, 283 medicine, 92–93, 238, 279, memory, 50, 101, 111–27 metaphor, 20, 45–46, 52, 62, 98, 104, 129–49 metaphysics, 17, 57, 68, 93, 95, 166, 181

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 291

meteor, 230, 232 Milky Way 230, 232 miracles, 16, 39, 94, 100, 178, 183, 218 moon, 108, 229–30, 238, 273–74, 280 morality, 19, 37, 56, 58–62, 69–75, 84, 92, 106, 189, 192, 195–96, 199–210, 212, 214, 221, 251 mortality, 58 Moses, 64, 101, 162, 264 music, 26–29, 34, 49, 259 mutation, 69, 218–19 mystery, 42, 44, 129, 162, 197, 288 mysticism, 270 myth, 61–65 of Conflict, 179–80 nanotechnology, 93, narrative, 21, 51, 62, 66–67, 71, 101, 106–9, 112, 115–21, 127, 143–45, 151–66, 174, 187, 226, 257, 267 natural laws, 56, 63, 66, 94, 218–19, 222, 232 natural selection, 69, 104, 117 natural theology, 98, 105–6, 208–9, 280–83, 16, 18–19 naturalism methodological, 265, 271 ontological, 265, 270 nature, 17, 35–36, 46, 53, 82, 97, 104, 185, 190, 208, 215, 217, 219, 223, 229, 231, 235–36, 241, 245, 258, 279, 282–83 Book of, 181, New Atheism, 255, 257–58, 269–70 new creation, 70, 99–102, 105, 107–9, 146, 152, 237–38 oppression, 28, 44, 85, origins, 29, 37–38, 62–63, 75, 103, 181, 212, 225–26, 282 parable, 100, 103, 279 paradox, 21, 42, 57, 101, 226, 257 particles, 214, 221–22, 235–38, 278 patristic thought, 35, 37–38, 46, 56, 169 Paul (the apostle), 17, 19–20, 23–24, 33, 39, 52, 78, 80–81, 83, 86–87, 91–92, 98–102, 108–9, 129–49,

3/13/18 1:14 PM

292  Christ and the Created Order 151–66, 189, 200, 202, 206, 209, 230–31, 234–35, 240, 251, 256–57, 263 personalism, 79 personhood, 130, 137, 141, 147–48, 213 Pharisees, 84, phenomena, 16, 26, 63, 71, 92, 119, 123–24, 184, 187, 198, 203, 212, 247, 256 physical law, 214, 231, 282 physicalism, 198 physical sciences, 74, 167, 171–72, 175, 177–78 physiology, 28, 198 Pietism, 79, 84 planets, 25, 55, 94, 233, 259, 274, 280, 288 Platonism, 40, 56, 100, 168 pneumatology, 206, 271 positivism, 65–66, 126 postmodernism, 126–27, 187, 269 powers, 17, 19–20, 23, 28, 43–44, 51, 58, 77–95, 152, 167, 178, 211, 224, 226, 231 prayer, 27–28, 99, 136, 192, 258, 268 predators, 69–70, 233, 248, 284 predestination, 135–36, 170, priestly tradition, 25 progress, 16, 41, 144, 182 providence, 19, 41, 78, 83, 87, 89, 91, 168, 170, 236 psychoanalysis, 187 psychotherapy, 122–23 purpose, 19, 21, 23–25, 29–34, 36, 38, 40–41, 44–45, 62–64, 67, 82, 90, 93–94, 104, 116, 136, 142, 152, 167–74, 177, 188, 195–98, 207, 225, 227–29, 233, 236, 244–46, 248, 254, 275, 279, 281–86. See also teleology quantum mechanics, 217, 228, 232 theory, 218–19 rationality, 17, 29, 41, 55–59, 106, 108, 167–68, 170–71, 180, 207, 212, 255, 262

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 292

reconciliation, 23, 30–33, 53, 99, 181, 193, 200–1, 203–4, 206 reconstruction, 115–16, 174 redemption, 16–18, 22, 33, 35, 40, 65–67, 83, 87–88, 91, 130–31, 135, 138, 140–41, 143, 147–48, 162, 192, 195, 200–1, 204, 206–7, 279, 288 reductionism, 26, 37, 60, 94–95, 149, 190 religions, 35, 67, 255, 261, 266–67 resurrection, 33, 44, 65–66, 78, 83–85, 88, 92, 95, 137, 141, 146–47, 158–59, 162, 166, 238, 263, 283 revelation, 18, 20, 22, 98, 106–7, 160, 162–65, 182, 190, 203, 228, 233–34, 252, 260, 281, 283 Sabbath, 38 sacrament, 191–92, 258 salvation, 37, 40, 64–69, 129, 140, 143–44, 158, 162, 167, 171, 249–50 sanctification, 130, 148, 173, 235, 251 Samson, 28 scientific method, 93, 271, 282 scientism, 187, 189–90, 197 Scripture, 17, 19–20, 24, 29, 36, 40, 43, 52–53, 64–70, 75, 78, 89–91, 104, 144, 151, 154, 163, 169, 181–82, 227–30, 232–33, 237–38, 263, 268 Second Temple Judaism, 176 secularism, 61, 63, 86, 95, 180, 187, 189 self-­realization, 47, 62 sensus divinitatis, 22, 239–252 sin, 22, 31–33, 44, 60, 66, 70–74, 80, 84, 87–90, 120–22, 144, 153, 155–56, 158, 162, 165, 168–71, 204, 237–38, 242, 249–50 solidarity, 74, 149 soul, 28, 41, 46–48, 53, 58, 61, 68, 92, 169–71, 251 sovereignty, divine, 167, 172, 176–77 spirit/spirituality, 23, 35–36, 39, 48, 68, 90–91, 100, 160, 172, 192–93, 200, 205, 229, 231, 257, 263, 269, 270. See also Holy Spirit stars, 25, 108, 227, 229–30, 232–33, 235–36, 260, 287

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Subject Index  293 storytelling, 149 suffering, 18, 24, 26, 33, 88, 90, 93, 141, 144, 148, 162, 218, 233, 238, 256, 258, 270, 283 supernature, 38, 100, 169, 177, 188, 239, 241, 243–52, 265 sympathy, 49–52, 207–8 tabernacle, 73, 98–99 teleology/telos, 31, 93, 143–45, 186, 188, 243–48 temple, 24, 56, 72, 84, 98–99, 209, 238 theodicy, 79, 88–90, 92, 261, 270 theosis, 145–49 Thomism, 57 time, 17–18, 20–21, 38, 40, 72, 85, 91, 112, 114, 136, 138–40, 142, 151–66, 202–3, 226, 231 transcendence, 22, 35, 39, 95, 140, 161, 183, 187–89 Trinity, 16, 18, 41, 49, 129, 136–42, 173, 192, 211 tropos, 42–43, 49, 51, 53

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 293

union (between God and creation), 15, 57, 66, 139, 173. See also hypostatic union universe, 18–19, 22, 23, 25, 29, 32, 34, 37, 41, 45, 63, 74, 91, 89, 169–70, 183, 188–89, 221, 227–34, 237–38, 255–58, 260, 265–66, 271, 273, 275–76, 278, 287–88 vocation, 18, 56, 75, 105, 109, 145, 153, 176, 181–82, 255, 264, 269, 287 wisdom, 84, 97–99, 105, 160, 193, 234, 256, 262, 264–65, 268, 271, 282–83 wonder, 16, 22, 26, 229–30, 250, 260, 274, 278–80, 283, 285 Word of God, 17, 30, 42, 60, 65, 67, 69–74, 97–99, 129, 141, 165–66, 167, 170, 176, 193, 230–31, 234, 273, 278 worship, 22, 84, 89, 183, 192–93, 196, 201–3, 206, 208–9, 230, 250, 255, 258–59, 263–65, 271, 274, 276–77, 279, 282–88

3/13/18 1:14 PM

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 294

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Scripture Index Genesis

Isaiah

1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26, 98, 108, 231 1:1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37, 99 1:1–2:4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24–25 1:11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 1:20–25. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 1:22. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 1:24. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 1:31. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286 2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 2:8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 2:19. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 3:16–18. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 3:17. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 8:21. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 12:3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 22 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 22:16. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 32:24–32. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269

11:6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 24:7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 42:10. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286 43:6–7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 45:15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257, 270 45:18 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 45:23. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 53:7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 65:1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 65:25. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Exodus 3:14. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 4:22. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 15:1–21 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 33:18, 23. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264

Numbers 21. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160

Deuteronomy 8:5. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 21:23. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

2 Samuel 7:14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

Jeremiah 31:9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 33:24–26. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232

Job 38–39 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286 38:22–30. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 38:25–27. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 38:39–41. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

Psalms 2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 2:7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 5. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 19. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264, 271 19:1 . . . . . . . . . . . . 229, 255, 257, 260, 269 19:1–4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 33:6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 56:11. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 77 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 96:11–12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286 98:2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

295

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 295

3/13/18 1:14 PM

296  Christ and the Created Order 103:10–12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 104. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233, 237 104:24, 27. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286 110. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 135:13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 139:14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274 148:5. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286 148:7–12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286

15:39. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257, 264

Proverbs

1:1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38, 230 1:1–5. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 1:3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36, 229 1:14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 1:45–49. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 1:46. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 3:16. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 3:20. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 6:11–12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 7:17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 10:30. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 12:23. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 12:31. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 13:1–20. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 13:35. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 14:6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 14:9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 14:30. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 15. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 16:8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 16:11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 18–19. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

3:11–12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 8:22. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38, 99

Ezekiel 36:8–12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Daniel 7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Hosea 2:1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

Joel 2:21–29. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Malachi 3:17. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

Matthew 5:16. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 6:25–39. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 6:26. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 8:26. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 14:20. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 27:40. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 28:20. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270

Mark 6:42. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 8:34. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258 10:35–45. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 14:32–39. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 15:34. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 296

Luke 9:17. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 9:29. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 19:40. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286 24:27. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168

John

Acts 1:9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 17:16–34 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 17:22–28. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

Romans 1–4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 1:2–3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 1:19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 1:20. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251, 256 2:15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240 2:16. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Scripture Index  297 3:2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 3:20. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 3:21, 26. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 3:21–26. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 3:25. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 4:1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 4:10–11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 4:13. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 4:15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 5:5. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 5:9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 5:14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 5:16. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 5:20. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 6:4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 6:10–11. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 6:22. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 7:4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 7:6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 7:9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 8. . . . . . . . . . 78, 134–35, 139–41, 143–44 8:1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 8:3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141, 144 8:6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 8:9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 8:11, 23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 8:14. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 8:15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 8:15–23. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130, 135, 142 8:17. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 8:18. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 8:18–21. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 8:18–25. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 8:21. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 8:22. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33, 283 8:22–23. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135, 144 8:23. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130, 141, 148 8:24–25. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 8:29. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134, 146, 148–49 8:38. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 8:38–39. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 9:4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130–31, 135

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 297

9:9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 9:29. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 10:20. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 11:4–8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 11:5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 11:17–24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 11:25 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 11:26. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 11:33 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 12:11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 13:1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 13:11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 14:10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 15:12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 16:7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 16:25. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 16:26. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161, 162 16:26–27. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 16:27. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

1 Corinthians 1:7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 1:18 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254, 263 1:25. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256, 265, 268–69 1:26. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258 2:2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256, 263 2:3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 2:7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 2:8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84, 162 3:16. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 4:5. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 7:32–35. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 8:6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19, 24, 99, 160 10:1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 10:4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 10:9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 12:2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 12:26. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 13:10. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 15. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 15:17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 15:26. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 15:28. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 15:58 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

3/13/18 1:14 PM

298  Christ and the Created Order

2 Corinthians 3:1–6:2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 3:2–3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 4:4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 4:14. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 5:14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 5:16. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 5:17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 5:19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33, 200 7:1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 8:9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 10:4–5. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 11:2–3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 12:9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102, 258

Galatians 2:19–20. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 3–4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 3:13. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 3:28–29. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135, 143–45 4:1–2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 4:3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 4:4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143, 147, 159 4:4–5. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135, 137, 140–41 4:5. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130–31, 135 4:6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 4:8, 9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 4:19. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 5:16. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 6:8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 6:14. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

Ephesians 1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136, 138, 141–43, 145 1:3–4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 1:4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138, 141–43, 160 1:4–5. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131, 136, 138 1:5. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129–30, 137–38, 142 1:5–6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 1:5, 9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 1:5, 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 1:6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 1:6–7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 1:7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 298

1:10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138, 143 1:12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 1:13–14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 2:1–3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 2:2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 2:6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 2:12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 3:17–19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 4:6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41, 43 6:12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Philippians 1:20. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 1:21. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 1:23. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 2:1–4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 2:6–7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235, 278 2:6–8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 2:6–11. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258 3:5–6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 3:7–8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 3:12–14. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202

Colossians 1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 1–2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 1:10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 1:15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100, 191 1:15–17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23, 24, 211 1:15–20 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 1:16 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77, 81, 190 1:16–17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17, 36, 231 1:16–17, 18. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 1:17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21, 181, 191 1:18 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 1:19–20. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 1:20. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31, 33 1:24. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 2:9. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 2:12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 2:13–15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 2:15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 2:20. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 3:1, 3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 3:3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Scripture Index  299

1 Thessalonians

James

4:17–18 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 5:10–11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

2:19. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250

Hebrews

1:8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 4:12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 5:19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78, 99 1:2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 1:2–3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 1: 10–12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 1:3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 6:13. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 10:22. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 13:8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 13:12–14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 299

1 John

Revelation 1:12–16 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 3:19. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 21. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 21:22–33. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 22:13. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

3/13/18 1:14 PM

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 300

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Author Index Adams, Marilyn McCord, 21, 167–78, 261–63, 270 Adams, Robert Merrihew, 175 Adams, Samuel, 164–65 Ainsworth, Tracy, 284 Albert, Bruce, 184 Allison, Dale C., 117, 120–21 Anselm, 167–71, 177 Aristotle, 50, 56, 58, 196, 253 Aquinas, Thomas, 56–57, 169–70, 172, 240–42, 266 Arendt, Hannah, 60, 69 Atran, S., 243, 245 Augustine, 56, 64, 75, 172, 191, 240, 251 Austriaco, Nicanor, 266 Auzépy, Marie-­France, 134 Bancewicz, Ruth, 22, 273–88 Bandstra, A., 160 Barrett, Justin, 22, 239–52 Barth, Karl, 30, 61, 66–67, 161–62, 164–66 Barth, Markus, 80 Bauckham, Richard, 20, 36, 52, 98, 111–127, 286–87 Beale, G. K., 73 Berger, Peter L., 260 Bering, J. M., 243, 245, 251 Berkhof, Hendrikus, 80–82, 84–85, 92 Bianconi, Eva, 273 Bishop, Robert, 237 Bjorklund, D.F., 251 Blackwell, Ben C., 154, 159 Blocher, Henri, 64, 67–68 Bloom, 251 Blowers, Paul, 36–38, 40, 192 Boethius, 56

Bonaventure, 168–70 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 38–39, 74, 257, 268 Boswell, James, 221 Boyer, Pascal, 243 Brainard, Russell, 284 Brewer, William F., 118, 122 Brock, Brian, 19, 55–75, 269, 271 Brooke, John Hedley, 259, 281 Brown, William P., 40 Brueggemann, Walter, 24, 269 Brunner, Emil, 165 Bshary, Redouan, 284 Buber, Martin, 199, 214–15 Burdett, Emily, 244 Byrne, Brendan, 133 Caird, G. B., 80 Callergård R., 241 Calvin, John, 22, 230, 239–42, 249, 252, Campbell, Douglas, 151, 155, 163–64 Campbell, Lewis, 261 Candlish, R. S., 137 Canfield, C. F., 245 Cantory, Geoffrey, 259 Casey, Edward S., 45 Cassidy, James J., 161 Childs, Brevard, 269 Chopin, Friedrich, 26–29 Clark, David L., 75 Clark, K. J., 241, 246, 251 Clayton, Philip, 69 Clerk Maxwell, James, 260 Clough, David, 70 Coakley, Sarah, 70, 142 Cohen, Gillian, 112, 118, 122 Congdon, David W., 166

301

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 301

3/13/18 1:14 PM

302  Christ and the Created Order Copeland, M. Shawn, 149 Coyne, Jerry, 222 Crawford, Thomas, 137 Crease, Robert, 184 Curry, Brian, 20, 43–44, 77–95 Cutshall, Judith L., 125 Darwin, Charles, 19, 57–58, 60–62, 64–65, 68–70, 75, 103, 175, 259 Darwin, Erasmus, 103 Das, A. Andrew, 135 Davies, Jamie, 165 Davis, Ellen F., 52 Dawes, Gregory, 132 Dawkins, Richard, 60, 70, 200 Deane-­Drummond, Celia, 262 DeBord, Guy, 192 Derrida, Jacques, 74, 186 Descartes, René, 107, 215, 217, 219 Diehl, Ronald, 232 Dixon, William, 55 DiYanni C., 244 Doerfler, Walter, 69 Doyle, Amanda, 275 Dunn, James, 140, 144, 160 Eddy, Mary Baker, 255 Ehrman, Bart D., 120 Einstein, Albert, 95, 231 Eliade, Mircea, 55 Eliot, T. S., 264 Ellicott, C. J., 260 Flanagan, Owen, 265 Fodor, Jerry, 69, 197 Foley, G. S., 244 Forrest, David W., 200–1, 207 Fletcher-­L ouis, Crispin, 73 Franzen, Jonathan, 189 Freeland, Stephen, 275, 288 Fretheim, Terence E., 47 Gaius, 133 Garland, David E., 160 Garnett, William, 261 Gathercole, Simon, 155 Gaventa, Beverly, 131 Geertz, Clifford, 46 Goodrich, John K., 154, 155

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 302

Gopnik, Adam, 94–95 Gorman, Michael, 144–46, 149 Gorringe, Timothy, 254, 271 Graham, J., 251 Greenway, Tyler, 22, 239–52 Greimas, A. J., 156 Griswold, Daniel M., 161 Gross, Aaron, 55 Grosseteste, Robert, 168, 169 Grzybek, Erhard, 133 Guthrie, S., 243 Gunton, Colin, 60, 69 Haarsma, Deborah, 22, 227–38 Haarsma, Loren, 22, 227–38 Haidt, J., 251 Hardin, Jeff, 229, 277–78 Harrison, Peter, 93, 179–81, 190 Harrisville, Roy A., 164 Hart, David Bentley, 90, 93, 95 Harvey, Lincoln, 161, 166 Hauerwas, Stanley, 93, 183 Hays, Richard, 143 Hedley, A., 27 Heim, Erin, 129–49 Herbett, George, 265 Herrmann, Peter, 134 Herrmann, Wilhelm, 203–4 Hill, Wesley, 136 Hodge, Caroline Johnson, 135 Hoffman, Alice M., 122 Hoffman, Howard S., 122 Holder, Rodney, 282 Houghton, John, 260 Howgego, Christopher, 134 Huneker, James, 28 Hunt, Andrew N., 32 Ilardo, Melissa, 275 Ingold, Tim, 19, 46–50 Irenaeus of Lyons, 37 Jaeger, Lydia, 218 Jantzen, Grace, 266 Järnefelt, E., 245 Jenson, Robert, 161–62, 166 Jervis, Ann, 158 Jewett, Robert, 160

3/13/18 1:14 PM

Author Index  303 Johnson, Mark, 285, 132 Johnson, Samuel, 221 Julian of Norwich, 266 Käsemann, Ernst, 205 Keleman, D., 244, 245, 245, 248 Keselopoulos, Anestis G., 53 Kierkegaard, Søren, 32 Lactantius, 56 Lakoff, George, 132 Lang, T. J., 160 Laplace, Pierre-­Simon, 36, 256–57, 259, 265–71 Latour, Bruno, 63 Leithart, Peter, 82 Lessing, G. E., 104, 130 Levinas, Emmanuel, 75 Lewis, Robert Brian, 133 Lewis, C. S, 228, 260 Lincoln, Andrew, 143 Longenecker, Richard N., 140 Lotto, R. Beau, 223–24 Lu, Yi, 275 Lucretius, 265 Luther, Martin, 22, 64, 71, 79, 253–54, 256, 264, 268 MacGregor, G. H. C, 80 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 55, 94 Marion, Jean-­Luc, 72 Marlow, Hilary, 279, 286, 287 Martyn, J. Louis, 147, 263 Maston, Jason, 154, 155 Maximus the Confessor, 40–42, 44 McCauley, R. N., 243 McDonough, Sean, 36, 77, 83 McDowell, John, 223 McFague, Sallie, 265 McGrath, Alister, 228, 253, 264, 281–82 McIver, Robert, 121 McLeish, Tom, 263–64 McMullin, Ernan, 235 Messer, Neil, 60, 70 Midgley, Mary, 62–63, 222 Milbank, John, 104 Miller, Margaret, 284, 285 Molnar, Paul, 141

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 303

Morris, Simon Conway, 280–81, 283–84 Moser, Paul, 195–210 Moses, Robert, 80, 81, 83, 86 Newton, Isaac, 259 Nichols, R., 241 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 87 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 61, 189 Noll, Mark, 182 Norenzayan, A, 248 Origen of Alexandria, 38, 172 Pasoli, Elio, 134 Paxson, K., 244 Payne, Ian W., 30 Peppard, Michael, 133, 134 Peterson, Dale, 59 Philip, Gayle, 275 Piattelli-­Palmarini, Massimo, 69 Picasso, Pablo, 224 Pick, Anat, 61 Pillemer, David, 116–17, 119, 122 Plantinga, Alvin, 187, 241–43, 250, 252 Polanyi, Michael, 197 Polkinghorne, John, 178, 254, 262 Poon, Wilson C. K., 22, 253–71 Porter, Stanley, 165 Post, Stephen G., 69 Propp, Vladimir, 156 Pseudo-­Dionysius, 168 Purves, Dale, 223–24 Putnam, Hilary, 223–24 Quine, W. V., 198 Rae, Murray, 19, 23–34, 130 Rahner, Karl, 35 Redman, Judith, 121 Rehfeld, Emmanuel L. 159 Reimarus, H. S., 103, 104 Reynolds, B. E., 101 Rheinberger, Hans-­Jörg, 185–86 Richardson, Alan, 199, 267 Rink, John, 28 Robertson, Edwin H., 268 Rohwer, Forest, 284 Rosset, E., 245 Rottman, J., 248 Rouse, Joseph, 185, 186

3/13/18 1:14 PM

304  Christ and the Created Order Rowlands, Mark, 58–60 Ruse, Michael, 60, 222 Russell, Robert J., 217 Ryan, L., 244 Sampson, J., 28 Saracino, Michael, 149 Schacter, Daniel B., 117, 120, 122 Schnabel, Eckhard J., 158, 160 Schmidt, Stephen R., 119 Scruton, Roger, 225–26 Schweitzer, Albert, 59–60, 69 Scotus, John Duns, 170–71 Sellars, Wilfred, 214–15, 223 Sender, Ron, 273 Seneca the Elder, 133 Seston, R., 248 Shaw, Julia, 113 Sheppard, Charles, 284 Shuman, Joel, 92–93 Singer, Peter, 69 Smith, James K. A., 21, 179–93 Socrates, 169 Sollereder, Bethany, 225 Soskice, Janet Martin, 132 Spanner, D. C., 233 Spinoza, Baruch de, 254 Stafford, Tim, 284 Stenger, Victor, 258 Stuckenbruck, L. T., 101 Stump, James B., 21, 211–26 Supiot, Alain, 55 Tanner, Kathryn, 39 Taylor, Charles, 86, 95, 106, 181, 186–90 Taylor, John, 135 Taylor, Kathleen, 175 Taylor, Lily Ross, 134

9780310536086_ChristCreatedOrder_int_SC.indd 304

Thiessen, Matthew, 135 Theophilus of Antioch, 38 Thielicke, Helmut, 142, 145 Thiselton, Anthony C., 158, 160 Thomas, R. S., 269 Tilling, Chris, 20, 136, 151–66 Torrance, Thomas F., 46, 95, 129, 137–42 Tracy, Thomas, 219 Ulrich, Hans, 69 Vanney, Claudia, 217 Volck, Brian, 92–93 Waal, Frans de, 60 Walhout, Matthew, 184 Waller, James, 175 Walton, John H., 63 Webb, Stephen H., 70 Webster, John, 139 Weinberg, Steven, 32, 227 Wessels, G. F., 159 Westerhoff, Jan, 222 Wigger, J. B., 244 Wigner, Eugene, 231 Wilckens, Ulrich, 158 Williams, Rowan, 42–43, 269 Wilson, David, 55 Wilson, Edward O., 222 Wirzba, Norman, 19, 35–53, 191–92 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 216 Wolpert, Lewis, 278 Wolter, Michael, 158–59 Wright, N. T., 20, 97–109, 152–57, 164–65 Yoder, John Howard, 20, 79–88, 91–92 Youle, Merry, 284 Yuille, John C., 125 Zizioulas, John D., 72

3/13/18 1:14 PM