Church Doctrine, Volume 3: Creation

CHURCH DOCTRINE

The Faith and Practice of the Christian Community

VOLUME III: CREATION

Paul C. McGlasson

CHURCH DOCTRINE

Volume Three: Creation

Copyright © 2015 Paul C. McGlasson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite

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isbn 13: 978–1–62032–696–1

eisbn 13: 978-1-4982-8003-7

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

McGlasson, Paul C.

Church doctrine : volume three : creation / Paul C. McGlasson.

xvi + 178 p. ; 23 cm. — Includes bibliographical references.

isbn 13: 978–1–62032–696–1

1. Theology, Doctrinal.

I. Title.

BT75 M153 2015

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part III: Creation

Chapter 1: God the Creator

a. Creation and Confession

b. The Narrative of Creation

c. The Theatre of Glory

d. Wonder

Chapter 2: Covenant of Grace

a. Covenant and Creation

b. One Covenant of Grace

c. The Content of the Covenant

d. Covenant Life

Chapter 3: Humanity

a. Authentic Humanity

b. Co-humanity

c. The Fall of Humanity

d. The Human Condition

Chapter 4: The Way of God in the World

a. God Who Provides

b. The Pattern of Grace

c. Transformation of the World

d. The Threat of Chaos

Chapter 5: Love for Neighbor

a. Honor your father and mother . . .

b. You shall not kill.

c. You shall not commit adultery.

d. You shall not steal.

e. Do not bear false witness . . .

f. Do not covet . . .

Bibliography

To Chasefu Model Farm, Zambia

Preface

Orthodoxy is a living thing. We serve the risen Lord of the church and the world. He comes to us as he has always come, in Word and Sacrament, by his Spirit lifting our hearts and minds to hear his voice, to feed on his body and blood. Yet he comes today, not yesterday; he comes to us, not to others; and he lays upon us the joyful responsibility to confess his name in word and deed before the whole earth.

The whole earth: these words now mean something they have never before meant in church doctrine. First of all, we who confess, the church universal, are now a global fellowship in a way never before experienced in the life of the church. On all continents, in all nations. The church of Jesus Christ now unites in him to speak and act in a new way in the world. The gospel is now reaching to the ends of creation; as we here turn to the doctrine of creation, it is the voice of the gospel that shows us the way.

The whole earth: the church has for countless generations shared concerns, fought its battles, won its victories, in various parts of the earth. Now, for the first time ever in the life of the church, the earth itself, the whole earth, is a question mark. Because of human greed and sheer ignorance, human activity is actually threatening the viable health of the planet God created to be our home. As we turn afresh to the doctrine of creation, we do so on an earth that we have violated.

Turning afresh to the doctrine of creation has in one sense therefore come at the best of times. A piecemeal solution will not do. A North American solution, or an Asian solution; a Roman Catholic, Protestant, or Eastern Orthodox solution will do no good at all when the issues raised by the doctrine of creation concern the whole church living on the whole earth. The global ecumenical fellowship of the church alone can take up this issue with the serious and high purpose it requires.

On the other hand, the need for a fresh doctrine of creation could not come at a worse time. Theology is still mired in the stale and outmoded cleavage between liberal and conservative along ideological lines, while the rich resources of Scripture and tradition are held captive to the one ideology or the other. The earth we call home is in crisis, and conservatives are still debunking Darwin; the planet we inhabit is under mortal threat and liberals are buried in symbols of our self-centered finitude.

No, it will not only take a fresh approach to the doctrine of creation to confront the crisis of our time; it will take nothing less than a fresh way of conceiving church doctrine itself. To understand the crisis of our planet is to pass through the crisis of doctrine, and to come through on the other side humbled, chastened, renewed.

This volume is dedicated to Chasefu Model Farm, a sustainable agriculture project currently being undertaken by students and faculty at the Chasefu Theological College in Zambia, on behalf of the Zambian Presbyterian Church (CCAP/Synod of Zambia). My deepest respect goes to the students, faculty, and families involved in this project.

Abbreviations

BTONT Brevard Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments.

CD Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics.

CCFCT Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, eds., Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition.

COTC John Calvin, Calvin’s Old Testament Commentaries.

DP Otto Ritschl, Dogmengeschichte des Protestantismus 1–4.

GNET Emanuel Hirsch, Geschichte der Neuern Evangelischen Theologie I–V.

HDThG Handbuch der Dogmen-und Theologiegeschichte 1–3, 2nd edition.

LCC Library of Christian Classics.

LW Luther’s Works (American Edition)

ST The Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas I–V (Christian Classics—the Benzinger Bros. edition)

Summa Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, edited by Timothy McDermott

TCT Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition 1–5

TDNT Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (abridged in one volume)

TLOT Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament

Introduction

And so we come to the doctrine of creation. We come, as the confessing church of Jesus Christ gathered around Holy Scripture, to learn God’s creative will for the church and the world. We come as those who know the canon of truth, which is the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, the bread of life for the church and the world; we come as those who have been sought and found by the God of the Scriptures, the triune God of love into whose name we are baptized, and whom we love above all things. We come as those who cherish the perfections of God’s love and freedom, and who know deep in our hearts that we come only because he bids us come, who first loved us.

We do not turn to the doctrine of creation in a time of ease and comfort, but in a time of crisis; and we share that crisis with our fellow humanity. The global ecological crisis brought on by human folly concerns us no less and no differently than those who cannot and do not share our faith; whether they have no faith at all, or whether they belong to a different religious community. We all breathe the same air (at times and places when it is breathable); we all look up into the same night sky (when light pollution from human enterprise does not entirely obliterate the vision of divine artistry); we all enjoy the same beloved plants and animals that surround us (those whose species have not disappeared due to the destruction of human habitat). We turn to the doctrine of creation in solidarity with humanity in a time of peril.

And we seek to learn what we can, and to offer what we find in the face of that peril. What helpful word does the confessing church of Jesus Christ have to say to the world in the current situation? We could, of course, simply say what we already know. Conservative evangelicals can tell the world about the great hoax that is being perpetrated by the science of global warming, and offer bromides from a passage or two from Scripture, taken out of their canonical theological framework. Liberal theologians can speak of our consciousness of dependency as creatures, and argue for human responsibility in the face of the crisis of creation, thus willy-nilly placing humanity, rather than the natural world, at the center of the debate. These voices we know; these voices we have heard; I wonder though whether church doctrine has yet made the contribution it can and should make to the global debate.

The purpose of this volume is not to offer an answer to the global ecological crisis, but to reflection rigorously and theologically upon the Christian doctrine of creation. However, in doing so, it is my hope that such sustained and rigorous reflection will in fact manifest the unique witness of the gospel in the midst of the current crisis.

We will follow in this presentation of the church doctrine of creation a fairly traditional outline: on God the Creator, humanity, covenant, the way of God in the world (providence), and love for God. There is much in the tradition of theology that needs to be remembered and preserved; much in fact that speaks directly to the crisis of our time. However, we do not read the Bible in the light of tradition; we read tradition, as it were, in the light of the Bible. The Scriptures alone illumine the voice of church doctrine in the past and the present; the Bible alone speaks directly and immediately the right word at the right time in our world today.

By way of introduction therefore, before turning directly to the content of the doctrine of creation, it seems helpful to mention briefly three changes—indeed three specific Hebrew words—whose contemporary interpretation not only shifts to a degree our understanding of Christian tradition, but in fact provides the best possible standpoint for the intersection of the Bible and the world today. We will meet these words again throughout the present theological study; we here introduce them by way of special focus.

God created the world by the power of his word; the Hebrew word for create used in this context is bara (New Testament Greek: ktizein).¹ Only God is the subject of this verb in the Bible; only God creates in this sense. There is no analogy to the divine act of creation; it is measurable only in terms of itself; it is known only as it given to be known by God himself. The creative agency of God is both ontically (as an act of God) and noetically (in terms of the human knowledge of that act) known only in reference to God himself, and to him alone. Knowledge of God the Creator comes only from God; knowledge of God the Creator refers only to God. What does that mean then for the human willingness to concede to God the exclusive rights over his own natural world?

God created human beings as flesh, basar (New Testament Greek: sarx).² To be created as flesh means humanity in its weakness, in the natural limitations of embodied existence. Humankind shares, according to the Bible, the same characteristic of flesh (basar) with the animal world; human beings do not merely have flesh, they are flesh. The term is never applied to God, only to humankind; once again the sheer incomparability of God the Creator over against the weakness and vulnerability of humanity the creature is in full view. It is through flesh that human beings are family and social creatures, with voices to speak, eyes to see, hands to touch. If we are flesh, along with the animals of the earth, and God alone is God, then how are we to understand the limits of our role in the natural environment?

God created human beings as nephesh, as living creatures (New Testament Greek: psyche).³ The term was traditionally translated soul, and it once connoted (in translation) the idea of an immaterial soul locked inside of a mortal body. We now know that is not the meaning of nephesh in the Old Testament, nor its counterpart in the New. Nephesh speaks not of an interior soul or consciousness inside a material body, but of the whole person as a living reality: one who desires, feels, chooses, hungers, hopes, lives, breathes, and dies. Humanity is life, not soul. In short, the human person does not have a soul; the whole human person lives the unitary existence of a holistic creature. If we are not immortal creatures locked inside mortal bodies, if we, human persons, are whole creatures living in God’s sight in the marvels of his universe, what does that mean for our humility in the face of the grandeur of his world?

We come to the Bible, not to confirm what we know, but to learn what we do not know. Among the things we learn, as if for the first time, is who we are, and what our place in the universe is. And we are astounded.

1. TLOT 1, 253–56; TDNT, 481–86.

2. TLOT 1, 283–85; TDNT, 1000–1007.

3. TLOT 2, 743–59; TDNT, 1342–53.

Part III: Creation

1

God the Creator

In the opening theological summary (argumentum) to his profound commentary on Genesis, John Calvin sets forth the outline of his theological-dialectical doctrine of God the Creator.

On the one hand, true understanding of the doctrine of creation can only begin in wonder: "Since the infinite wisdom of God (immensa Dei sapientia, where immensity means not size but sheer immeasurability by human standards) is displayed in the admirable structure of heaven and earth, it is absolutely impossible to unfold the history of the creation of the world [conditi mundi historia] in terms equal to its dignity."¹ To rightly understand the active work of God the Creator therefore requires a disposition of humility and reverence in meditating on the works of the Creator. Study of the doctrine of creation is no abstract nor abstruse science, but the most practical application of daily experience: "We see, indeed, the world with our eyes, we tread the earth with our feet, we touch innumerable kinds of God’s works with our hands, we inhale a sweet and pleasant fragrance from herbs and flowers, we enjoy boundless benefits; but in those very things . . . there dwells such an immensity of divine power, goodness, and wisdom, as absorbs all our senses [quae sensus omnes nostros absorbeat]."² For Calvin, it is a stunning paradox: the unspeakably sublime and awesome might of God, the Creator of the cosmos, is known most directly, not in discursive philosophical proofs, but as he is experienced in the stunning marvels of everyday interaction with the natural world on the most basic level of sensory experience. Few indeed, according to Calvin, ever pay attention to the sheer beauty found everywhere in the natural world all around them; those who know the Creator best are those who absorb his work in the sights, sounds, smells, and even tastes of the universe. So to make God visible, palpable in his works, is the entire theological point of the book of Genesis, the scopus of the whole work. As soon as the name God sounds in our ears,³ our first thought, according to Calvin, should be of the sheer marvel of the natural world, which comes directly from his almighty hand. (At the very least, it is difficult to understand the usual portrait of Calvin as a this-worldly ascetic familiar since the work of Max Weber. This-worldly yes; but I would think aesthetic more nearly describes his attitude to the natural world.)

Yet for Calvin on the other hand, the doctrine of God the Creator is completed only by emphatically asserting the absolute necessity of confessing faith. To be sure, God is present everywhere in the natural world, for it is his handiwork; it is so much his beloved creation that it can be described as a mirror of God himself.⁴ The problem though is overwhelming and irreparable: we have lost the ability to see, to feel, to know, to taste, even to find God the Creator in his works. He is there, and the invitation is ever-present to search him out; but the invitation has no more effect on us than to show the absolute inability of all humanity to find the Creator in his creation. Is there no solution? "And whereas the Lord invites us to himself by the means of created things, with no other effect than that of thereby rendering us inexcusable, he has added (as was necessary) a new remedy [novum remedium] . . . For by the Scripture as our guide and teacher, he not only makes those things plain which would otherwise escape our notice, but almost compels us to notice them; as if he had assisted our dull sight with spectacles . . ."⁵ God the Creator has made his beautiful world to be relished by everyday human interaction; but it is only through the instruction of the Scriptures that we know God for who he is, and rightly understand the world as his creation. He is there; he is everywhere; but without the Scriptures as glasses, as an aid to vision, our dulled and indeed distorted and distorting vision cannot find him. Scripture alone shows us how this is possible; only faith in Jesus Christ rightly follows the way laid down in the Scriptures: "I answer: it is in vain [frustra] for any to reason as philosophers on the workmanship of the world, except those who, having been first humbled by the preaching of the Gospel, have learned to submit the whole of their intellectual wisdom . . . to the foolishness of the cross."⁶ Only the cross of Jesus Christ raises us up to know God the Creator in the Scriptures, and in so doing guides us to the joys of creation. Calvin is clear: faith in Christ does not mean a withdrawal from the beauty of the natural world; far from it: Yet this [the invisible kingdom of Christ] does not prevent us from applying our senses to the consideration of heaven and earth, that we may thence seek confirmation in the true knowledge of God.⁷ Nor does he want us simply to acknowledge his works of creation: God wants us not indeed to observe them as mere witnesses, but to enjoy all the riches which are here exhibited . . .⁸ The doctrine of God the Creator is not about reaching an abstract rational conclusion; it is about enjoying the sheer beauty of God’s wondrous world in the most sensory—even sensuous—way possible. Faith in Christ does not lead away from the glory of creation, but on the contrary leads the community of faith ever more deeply into genuine enjoyment of its true bounty. Thus, Calvin.

Central to the church’s witness of faith is our confession of faith in God the Creator. The inner logic of the doctrine of creation is crucial to observe, as Calvin himself already makes abundantly clear. We do not, in the confessing church of Jesus Christ, move from reflection upon the natural world to the knowledge of God. We do not, that is, start with a particular conception concerning the created cosmos, and then move from that conception to an understanding of God as divine cause. We do not do so because we cannot do so, for we are sinners, dependent on the Scriptures alone for the true understanding of God. We start, rather, from the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ that comes only through the biblical witness to God the Creator, and only then move to the surrounding creation. Only the knowledge of God illumines the true meaning of the created universe, a relation that can never be reversed. Indeed, the focus of the Christian doctrine of creation is not first of all on the creation itself, but on God the Creator. The whole point of the Christian doctrine of creation is celebration of the living reality of God, who made the entire universe by the Word of his power, and who sustains all things by the renewing presence of his Spirit. To know God the Creator is to know ourselves as his creatures, which is to receive from him the joyous gift of life. Creation and wonder belong intimately together, because God himself created the universe to be enjoyed by his creatures, who thus find in him their one true fulfillment.

a. Creation and Confession

The Christian doctrine of creation—in the same manner as our doctrines of canon, God, reconciliation, and redemption—is an article of faith. We confess our faith in God the Creator; we confess our faith in the reality of creation. Our confession of creation, like all our confession in the living church of Jesus Christ, is based upon the authority of Scripture, which is grounded in the supreme authority of the exalted Christ. There can therefore be no apologetics in the Christian doctrine of creation; no attempt, that is, to start from a general philosophical conception of the universe, even for the well-intended purpose of arriving at the Christian doctrine of God the Creator. Every attempt to prove the Christian doctrine of creation, for example, by arguing for it on the basis of logical, scientific, or metaphysical grounds shared with some general philosophical system, will in fact seriously distort the doctrine of creation itself, and bring dishonor to the One whom we worship, the Maker of the heavens and the earth. For we are led by Scripture itself to the simple and basic declaration that creation is an article of faith, which cannot be moved onto any other foundational grounds: By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible (Heb 11:3). By faith; our faith in God the Creator is not a leap in the dark: we are instructed by the word of God, and so we believe. Our faith is upheld by a given content; and that content points to a divine reality.

Even here in the doctrine of creation—especially here, one might say—it is crucial to exercise the disciplined dialectical method of faith seeking understanding. On the one hand, we reject every approach to the doctrine of creation that does not come through faith in the word of God. Scripture has laid down this rule, and church doctrine follows the rule of faith laid down once and for all. Trying to ground the Christian witness to God the Creator upon a scientific or philosophical basis—even for the purpose of arriving at the Christian doctrine of creation—contradicts the heart of our confession. We are called by the gospel to explore the meaning of our confession of God the Creator. Inevitably, the very meaning of what we believe about God the Creator is twisted and distorted through such an approach. On the other hand, we are not simply given the task of repeating the verses of the Bible, without further reflection. Church doctrine is not simply exegesis, though it must rest firmly upon it. We are not only permitted but summoned by the gospel to explore the church doctrine of creation as attested by Scripture; and to use in our exploration whatever cultural tools may be adequate to the task. Such an approach is not apologetic, but fully theological in its expansive and imaginative exploration of the goodness of creation. However, we always move from faith to faith, never laying a second foundation for our confession, but rather always adhering strictly to the one foundation which is already laid for us in the gospel.

The great teachers of the church have long insisted that the Christian doctrine of creation must necessarily be pursued within the rigorous limits of the church’s confession of faith, based on the witness of Scripture. Augustine, for example, in stating the Christian witness that the triune God is the author of all things, though not of evil, struggles to attain exactly the right vantage point from which to proceed: "When, therefore, you ask what we should believe in matters of religion, the answer is to be found not by exploring the nature of things [rerum natura], as was done by those whom the Greeks call physicists . . . And as to their vaunted discoveries,