T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation (T&T Clark Handbooks) 0567686477, 9780567686473

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T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION

Forthcoming titles in this series include T&T Clark Handbook of Christology, edited by Darren O. Sumner and Chris Tilling T&T Clark Handbook of Modern Theology, edited by Philip G. Ziegler and R. David Nelson T&T Clark Handbook of Theology and the Arts, edited by Imogen Adkins and Stephen M. Garrett T&T Clark Handbook of Intercultural Theology and Mission Studies, edited by John G. Flett and Dorottya Nagy T&T Clark Handbook of Biblical Thomism, edited by Matthew Levering, Piotr Roszak and Jörgen Vijgen Titles already published include T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change, edited by Ernst M. Conradie and Hilda P. Koster T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology, edited by Rubén Rosario Rodríguez T&T Clark Handbook of Pneumatology, edited by Daniel Castelo and Kenneth M. Loyer T&T Clark Handbook of Ecclesiology, edited by Kimlyn J. Bender and D. Stephen Long T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and the Modern Sciences, edited by John P. Slattery T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics, edited by Tobias Winright T&T Clark Handbook of John Owen, edited by Crawford Gribben and John W. Tweeddale T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology, edited by Mary Ann Hinsdale and Stephen Okey T&T Clark Handbook of Election, edited by Edwin Chr. Van Driel T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism, edited by Cory Brock and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION Edited by Jason Goroncy

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Copyright © Jason Goroncy and contributors, 2024 Jason Goroncy has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xxx constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Black slate, Lerderderg Gorge, Wurundjeri country Photo © Jason Goroncy All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-8647-3 ePDF: 978-0-5676-8648-0 eBook: 978-0-5676-8649-7 Series: T&T Clark Handbooks Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

The prawn is there, at the place of the Dugong, digging out mud with its claws . . . The hard-shelled prawn living there in the water, making soft little noises. It burrows into the mud and casts it aside, among the lilies . . . Throwing aside the mud, with soft little noises . . . – ‘Wↄnguri-’Mandʒikai People

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. – John of Patmos

vi

CONTENTS

List of Figures xi List of Abbreviations xii Note on Contributors xiii Preface xxiv Foreword  Catherine Keller xxvi Acknowledgements xxx Introduction: The Doctrine of Creation in Historical and Contemporary Perspective  David Fergusson

1

I

Texts and Traditions

19

1

Sabbath and Land  Daniel R. Driver

21

2

Tabernacle and Temple  David L. Stubbs

32

3

Pentateuch and Blessing  Stephen B. Chapman

44

4

Creation and the Prophets  Abigail Pelham

56

5

From Wonder to Wisdom  William P. Brown

67

6

Creation in the Synoptic Gospels  Stephen C. Barton

79

7

Creation in John’s Gospel  Vicky Balabanski

92

8

Paul, Slavery, and Creation  Batanayi I. Manyika

103

9

Ecology and Eschatology in the Second Testament  Keith Dyer

120

10 Patristic Reflections  Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

135

11 Gnosticism: Creation Myths and Lesser Gods among Early Christianities  Michael A. Williams

149

12 Creation in Syriac Christianity  Nebojsa Tumara

164

13 On the Six Days of Creation: The Hexæmeral Tradition  Giles Gasper

176

Contents

14 Avicenna, Maimonides, and Aquinas on Creation  William E. Carroll

191

15 Creation in Reformation Theology  Randall C. Zachman

204

II Dogmatic Partners

217

16 Eschatology and Resurrection  David W. Congdon

219

17 God, Maker of Heaven and Earth  Gregor Etzelmüller

233

18 Creation and Monotheism  Janet Soskice

244

19 Christ and Creation  Ian A. McFarland

250

20 Beauty as Person: Christ’s Presence to the World  Stephen John Wright

260

21 Holy Spirit: A Cosmic Creational Pneumatology  Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen

273

22 Nature and Grace: The Spirituality of Existence  Nicholas Ansell

284

23 Providence and Promise  Michael Weinrich

297

24 Transcendence and Immanence  Andreas Nordlander

310

25 The Land, Creation, Sovereignty, and Property  Tink Tinker

322

26 Election and Covenant  Margit Ernst-Habib

335

27 Liberation, Reconciliation, and Creation  Ernst M. Conradie

347

28 Time and Eternity  Ephraim Radner

358

29 Providence and Process  Thomas Jay Oord

373

30 Pantheism and Panentheism  Mariusz Tabaczek

386

31 Love and Law  Ulrik Nissen

398

32 Love and Justice: The Primacy of the Creator, the Goodness of the Creation  Timothy P. Jackson

407

33 Justice and Joy  Andrew Shepherd

422

34 Metaphysics and Moral Responsibility  Jordan Wessling

435

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Contents

35 Principalities and Powers  Joerg Rieger

447

36 Values and Disvalues in Creation  Christopher Southgate

459

37 Evil Giles Waller

472

38 Human Personhood  Marc Cortez

486

39 Death Chris E. W. Green

498

40 ‘The heavens declare . . .’ (Ps. 14.1, 19.1): Creation, Mission, and the Embodied Knowing of God  John G. Flett

516

41 Church and World  Simon Chan

534

42 Unveiling Scripture: Creation in an Apocalyptic Key  John Behr

545

III Upbuilding Discourses

559

43 Astrophysics David Wilkinson and Jennifer Wiseman

561

44 Cosmology Rodney Holder

583

45 Physics: The Recreation of Creation  Tom McLeish

595

46 Theologies of Creation and the Anthropocene  Forrest Clingerman

608

47 Ecology and Ethics  Whitney A. Bauman

623

48 (Non-human) Animals  Ryan McLaughlin

635

49 Children David Jensen

647

50 Disability and Creation  John Swinton

659

51 Human Sexuality  Eugene F. Rogers Jr.

670

52 Race Willie James Jennings

683

53 Creation and Dao: A Theodaoian Perspective  Heup Young Kim (Kim Hŭb-yŏng)

694

54 Creation and Tian  Xiaoli Yang

707

55 Decolonization: A Postcolonial Critique to a Theology of Creation  Nicolás Panotto 723

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Contents

56 Religions and Responsibility  Jan-Olav Henriksen

737

57 Cities Genevieve James

748

58 Politics Tim Gorringe

761

59 Economics Daniel M. Bell Jr.

775

60 Food David Grumett

787

61 Pandemics: Conceptualizing the Doctrine of Creation during the Era of HIV/ AIDS and Covid-19  Sophia Chirongoma

799

62 This Present Darkness: War and the Doctrine of Creation  Scott Paeth

811

63 Work: Triune and Humane  Gordon Preece

825

64 Medicine Andrew Sloane

842

65 Technology: Cybernetics and Creation  Scott Midson

853

66 Sport Lincoln Harvey

869

67 Making Places: Architecture  Murray Rae

881

68 Creation, Creativity, and Artistry  Trevor Hart

892

69 Sounds Jeremy Begbie

907

70 Contemplating Creation  Kevin Hart

917

71 Liturgy and Creation  Christopher Irvine

932

Afterword  Jürgen Moltmann

945

Scripture Index Name and Subject Index

947 964

x

FIGURES

42.1 Scripture read in a linear manner 42.2 Scripture as a mosaic 42.3 The axes and movements described in scripture 42.4 Reading scripture at the foot of the cross in the present 42.5 The dimensions of creation 43.1 The Very Large Array (VLA) Radio Telescope Observatory 43.2 The Ultra-Deep field of galaxies, as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope 43.3 The Orion Nebula 43.4 Interacting galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163 43.5 The Abell 370 Galaxy Cluster 43.6 An artist’s impression of what the view might be on the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b

547 548 549 550 555 562 563 564 566 567 569

ABBREVIATIONS

CD Church Dogmatics CNTC Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries CTS The Commentaries of John Calvin on the Old Testament Inst. Institutes of the Christian Religion KD Die Kirchliche Dogmatik LW Luther’s Works PG Patrologia Graeca [= Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca]. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne. 162 vols. Paris, 1857–86 PL Patrologia Latina [= Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina]. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne. 217 vols. Paris, 1844–64 ST Summa Theologica WA M. Luther, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (= ‘Weimar’ edition) Abbreviations for classical and Patristic texts follow The SBL Handbook of Style, 2nd edn. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014.

CONTRIBUTORS

Nicholas Ansell is Associate Professor of Theology at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, Canada. His research probes issues in biblical, systematic, and philosophical theology. He is the author of The Annihilation of Hell: Universal Salvation and the Redemption of Time in the Eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann (2013) and of the forthcoming The Call of Wisdom/ The Voice of the Serpent: Rethinking the Tree of Knowledge, ‘Holy War’ Hermeneutics, and the Enigma of the Satan. Vicky Balabanski is Professor of New Testament at the University of Divinity and Principal of Uniting College for Leadership and Theology, Australia. She is an editor and writer in the internationally acclaimed Earth Bible series, which develops a nuanced approach to interpreting scripture in solidarity with Earth (the interconnected web of life). Her Earth Bible commentary Colossians: An Eco-Stoic Reading (2020) draws on Stoic philosophy as a framework for deepening ecological ways of reading. Stephen C. Barton is a theologian with a specialism in New Testament studies. He was Reader in New Testament in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, UK, and is currently an honorary research fellow of Durham and Manchester Universities, UK. His most recent publication, co-edited with Todd Brewer, is The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels, 2nd edn (2021). Whitney A. Bauman is Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University in Miami, USA. He is also co-founder and co-director of Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge, a non-profit based in Berlin, Germany, that holds public discussions about social and ecological issues related to globalization and climate change. His areas of research interest fall under the themes of religion, science, and globalization. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Humboldt Fellowship. His publications include Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (2014) and, with Kevin O’Brien, Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty: Wrestling with Wicked Problems (2019). Jeremy Begbie is the Thomas A. Langford Distinguished Research Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School, USA. He teaches systematic theology and works at the interface between theology and the arts. He is Senior Member at Wolfson College, UK, and an affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge, UK. His books include Theology, Music and Time (2008), Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (2008), and Music, Modernity, and God: Essays in Listening (2015). John Behr is the Regius Professor of Humanity at the University of Aberdeen, UK, previously having been at St Vladimir’s Seminary, USA, where he also served as Dean. His recent

Contributors

publications include an edition and translation of Origen’s On First Principles (2018) and John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (2019). Daniel M. Bell Jr. is Professor of Theology and Ethics and the author or several books, including The Economy of Desire: Christianity and Capitalism in a Postmodern World (2012). He teaches at Lenoir-Rhyne University, USA, and Utah Valley University, USA. William P. Brown is the William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, USA, and is ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA). His writings explore the intersecting issues of ecology, justice, faith, and science from various biblical perspectives. Much of his work is driven by the desire to promote dialogue among diverse participants to foster mutual understanding and equity. William E. Carroll is Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Philosophy of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, China, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the Hongyi Honor College of Wuhan University, China. His principal research concerns the reception of Greek philosophy in the Middle Ages and the development of the doctrine of creation. He is the co-author, with Steven E. Baldner, of Aquinas on Creation: Writings on the ‘Sentences’ of Peter Lombard 2.1.1 (1997). Simon Chan is former Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Theological College, Singapore, and current editor of Asia Journal of Theology. Stephen B. Chapman is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Duke University, USA. He is the author of 1 Samuel as Christian Scripture: A Theological Commentary (2016) and The Law and the Prophets: A Study in Old Testament Canon Formation (2020), as well as co-editor, with Marvin A. Sweeney, of The Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (2016). Sophia Chirongoma is Senior Lecturer in the Religious Studies and Ethics Department at Midlands State University, Zimbabwe. She is also an academic associate/research fellow at the Research Institute for Theology and Religion in the College of Human Sciences, University of South Africa, South Africa. Her research interests focus on the interface between culture, ecology, religion, health, and gender justice. Forrest Clingerman is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Ohio Northern University, USA. His research connects theology, ethics, and philosophical hermeneutics to investigate environmental topics, such as climate change. David W. Congdon is Senior Editor at the University Press of Kansas, USA, and adjunct instructor at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, USA. He is the author of The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (2015), The God Who Saves: A Dogmatic Sketch (2016), and Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture (2024). Ernst M. Conradie is Senior Professor in the Department of Religion and Theology, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He is the author of Redeeming Sin? Social Diagnostics amid Ecological Destruction (2017) and Secular Discourse on Sin in the Anthropocene: What’s Wrong xiv

Contributors

with the World? (2020). He is the co-editor, with Hilda Koster, of T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change (2019). Marc Cortez is Professor of Theology at Wheaton College, USA. His teaching and writing focus primarily on the nature of the human person and how Jesus informs our understanding of humanity. He is the author of several books in theological anthropology, including Theological Anthropology: A Guide for the Perplexed (2010), Christological Anthropology in Historical Perspective: Ancient and Contemporary Approaches to Theological Anthropology (2016), and ReSourcing Theological Anthropology: A Constructive Account of Humanity in the Light of Christ (2017). Daniel R. Driver is Professor of Old Testament at Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the author of Brevard Childs, Biblical Theologian: For the Church’s One Bible (2010), and the editor of Childs’ collected essays, Canon as Rule and Guide (2023). His other work has focused on canonical and reception-historical approaches to Christian scripture. Currently, with Sean McDonough, he is co-writing a biblical theology of creation. Keith Dyer is Associate Professor of New Testament at Whitley College, University of Divinity, Australia, where he has taught over the past three decades. He is the author of The Prophecy on the Mount: Mark 13 and the Gathering of the New Community (1998) and the co-editor of Resurrection and Responsibility: Essays on Theology, Scripture, and Ethics in Honor of Thorwald Lorenzen (2009), Ecological Aspects of War: Engagements with Biblical Texts (2017), and From Ancient Manuscripts to Modern Dictionaries: Select Studies in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek (2017). He has also published various articles, mainly on Mark, Paul, and the book of Revelation, subjects that he continues to pursue in his retirement. Margit Ernst-Habib is Interim Professor of Systematic Theology at the Universität Duisburg Essen, Germany, and has previously taught at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, the Universität des Saarlandes, both in Germany, and at Columbia Theological Seminary, USA. She has researched and published widely on Reformed theology, feminist and postcolonial theologies, and theological critiques of religion. Her forthcoming book develops a theology of joy, understanding Christian joy for the twenty-first century as both hopeful and subversive. She is an ordained minister of the Evangelisch-reformierte Kirche. Gregor Etzelmüller is Professor of Systematic Theology at Osnabrück University, Germany. He received his PhD from Heidelberg University, Germany, and is an ordained priest of the Protestant Church of Baden (Germany). He is the author of ‘. . . zu richten die Lebendigen und die Toten’: Zur Rede vom Jüngsten Gericht im Anschluß an Karl Barth (2001), Was geschieht beim Gottesdienst? Die eine Bibel und die Vielfalt der Konfessionen (2014), and Gottes verkörpertes Ebenbild: Eine theologische Anthropologie (2021). David Fergusson is Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Creation (2014) and The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (2018). John G. Flett is Professor of Missiology and Intercultural Theology at Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity, Australia, and Außerplanmäßiger Professor at the Kirchliche Hochschule, Wuppertal, Germany. He specializes in constructive theologies of mission set xv

Contributors

in conversation with intercultural and ecumenical theologies, and this work has taken him around the world, having lectured in the United States, Germany, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Romania, Scotland, France, India, and the Netherlands. Giles Gasper was educated at the University of Oxford, UK, and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Canada. He is Professor of High Medieval History at Durham University, UK. His areas of interest are the religious, intellectual, and cultural histories of the European Middle Ages and its inheritances from late antiquity and the early Church. Creation and the natural world, the economy of salvation, and concepts of order form his main themes of interest. These are explored through monastic and scholastic theology and science, historical writing, literary texts, and craft and culinary manuals. His recent publications include coediting a six-volume series on The Scientific Works of Robert Grosseteste (2020–), featuring new editions, English translations, and interdisciplinary commentary. Jason Goroncy is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Divinity, Australia. He has authored and edited Descending on Humanity and Intervening in History: Notes from the Pulpit Ministry of P. T. Forsyth (2013), Hallowed Be Thy Name: The Sanctification of All in the Soteriology of P. T. Forsyth (2013), Tikkun Olam – To Mend the World: A Confluence of Theology and the Arts (2014), and, with Rod Pattenden, Imagination in an Age of Crisis: Soundings from the Arts and Theology (2022). Tim Gorringe taught theology at the Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary in Madurai, South India, and then at the universities of Oxford, St Andrews, and Exeter, UK, where he is now Emeritus Professor. He is the author of many books, including most recently The Common Good and the Global Emergency: God and the Built Environment (2011), Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art (2011), and Word, Silence, and the Climate Emergency: God, Ekklesia, and Christian Doctrine (2020). Chris E. W. Green is Professor of Public Theology at Southeastern University, USA, and Director for the St Anthony Institute for Theology, Philosophy, and Liturgics, USA. He is the author of Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper (2012), The End Is Music: A Companion to Robert W. Jenson’s Theology (2018), Sanctifying Interpretation: Vocation, Holiness, and Scripture (2020), and All Things Beautiful: An Aesthetic Christology (2021). David Grumett is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Ethics in the University of Edinburgh, UK. His books include Henri de Lubac and the Shaping of Modern Theology: A Reader (2020), Material Eucharist (2016) and, with Rachel Muers, Theology on the Menu: Asceticism, Meat and Christian Diet (2010). Kevin Hart is Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Theology at the University of Virginia, USA, where he also holds professorships in the Departments of English and French. He is the author of L’image vulnérable: Sur l’image de Dieu chez saint Augustin (2021), Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology Christian Theology and the Status of Animals of Religious Poetry (2017), and Maurice Blanchot on Poetry and Narrative: Ethics of the Image (2023). His Gifford Lectures, ‘Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation’, have recently been completed. His most recent collections of poetry are Wild Track: New and Selected Poems (2015) and Barefoot (2018). xvi

Contributors

Trevor Hart, formerly Professor of Divinity and Director of the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts in the University of St Andrews, Scotland, is currently Rector of Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in St Andrews and Canon Theologian of St Ninian’s Cathedral, Perth, UK. Among his publications are Making Good: Creation, Creativity, and Artistry (2014), In Him Was Life: The Person and Work of Christ (2019), and Confessing and Believing: The Apostles’ Creed as Script for the Christian Life (2022). Lincoln Harvey is Vicar of The Annunciation, Marble Arch, in the Diocese of London, UK. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including A Brief Theology of Sport (2014) and Jesus in the Trinity: A Beginner’s Guide to the Theology of Robert Jenson (2020). Jan-Olav Henriksen is Professor of Systematic Theology/Philosophy of Religion at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society, Norway. He has written extensively on theological anthropology and topics related to contemporary theology, and on criticism of religion. He has been a visiting scholar at the universities of Durham and Oxford, UK, and is also a senior fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, USA. Rodney Holder was Course Director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge, UK, before retiring in 2013, and is a Fellow Commoner of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, UK. His books include God, the Multiverse, and Everything: Modern Cosmology and the Argument from Design (2004), The Heavens Declare: Natural Theology and the Legacy of Karl Barth (2012), Big Bang, Big God: A Universe Designed for Life? (2013), and Ramified Natural Theology in Science and Religion: Moving Forward from Natural Theology (2021). Christopher Irvine is a teaching fellow of St Augustine’s College of Theology, UK, and teaches for the Mirfield Liturgical Institute, College of the Resurrection, UK. He is the author of The Art of God: The Making of Christians and the Meaning of Worship (2005) and The Cross and Creation in Christian Liturgy and Art (2013), and has contributed to A Time for Creation: Liturgical Resources for Creation and the Environment (2020), Oneness: The Dynamics of Monasticism (2017), and Lively Oracles of God: Perspectives on the Bible and Liturgy (2022). Timothy P. Jackson is the Bishop Mack B. and Rose Stokes Professor of Theological Ethics at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, USA. He received his BA in Philosophy from Princeton University, USA, and his PhD in Philosophy and Religious Studies from Yale University, USA. He is the author of Love Disconsoled: Meditations on Christian Charity (1999), The Priority of Love: Christian Charity and Social Justice (2002), Political Agape: Prophetic Christianity and Liberal Democracy (2015), and Mordecai Would Not Bow Down: AntiSemitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism (2021). Genevieve James is Deputy Director of Community Engagement and Outreach at the University of South Africa, South Africa, where she provides strategic direction and oversight to over one hundred engaged scholarship projects aimed at enhancing development outcomes across government, business, and civil society, and where she created the education for justice initiative, the Chance 2 Advance.

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Contributors

Willie James Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale University, USA. He is the author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2011) and After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (2020). He taught for many years at Duke University, USA, where he received his PhD. His Master of Divinity degree is from Fuller Theological Seminary, USA, and his BA is from Calvin College, USA (now Calvin University). He is also a published poet. David Jensen is Professor in the Clarence N. and Betty B. Frierson Distinguished Chair of Reformed Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, USA. His research and teaching interests focus on the intersection of Christian doctrine and everyday life (work, family, and play). His most recent book is Christian Understandings of Christ: The Historical Trajectory (2019). Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen is Professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, USA, and Docent of Ecumenics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of the five-volume A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World (2013–17). Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in The Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University, USA. Her books include Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (2003), Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (2015), Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (2018), and Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances (2021). Heup Young Kim (Kim Hŭb-yŏng) is the founding director of the Korea Forum for Science and Life, South Korea, and a fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion, UK. He was Professor of Systematic Theology at Kangnam University, South Korea, President of the Korea Society of Systematic Theology, and a co-moderator for the Congress of Asian Theologians. His research focuses on East Asian theology, interreligious dialogue, ecological theology, and religion and science. He is the author of Wang Yang-ming and Karl Barth: A Confucian-Christian Dialogue (1996) and A Theology of Dao (2017), and he has contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity (2011), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology (2017), and The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Korea (2022). Batanayi I. Manyika is Academic Dean at the South African Theological Seminary, South Africa. He holds theological degrees from the University of Wales, UK, and Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and a PhD in New Testament from the South African Theological Seminary, South Africa. His research interests are in Pauline literature, early Christianity, the social world of the New Testament, Christianity in Africa, and public theology. Ian A. McFarland is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Theology at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, USA, and Quondam Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of several books, including From Nothing: A Theology of Creation (2014) and The Word Made Flesh: A Theology of the Incarnation (2019).

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Contributors

Ryan McLaughlin is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Elizabeth University, USA. He is the author of Christian Theology and the Status of Animals: The Dominant Tradition and Its Alternatives (2014) and Preservation and Protest: Theological Foundations for an Eco-Eschatological Ethics (2014). Tom McLeish, FRS, was Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics and Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, UK, following posts at Cambridge, Sheffield, Leeds, and Durham universities, where he was also Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research. His research in soft matter and biological physics informed science–humanities work on medieval science and theology of science. He authored Faith and Wisdom in Science (2014), The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (2019), and Soft Matter: A Very Short Introduction (2020). Scott Midson is Lecturer in Liberal Arts at the University of Manchester, UK, with a background in religions and theology. His interdisciplinary work brings together theological anthropology and posthumanist thought and has been published in a range of interdisciplinary journals and edited volumes. He is also the author of Cyborg Theology: Humans, Technology and God (2017) and the editor of Love, Technology and Theology (2020). Jürgen Moltmann studied Protestant theology in a POW camp in Göttingen, Germany, served as a pastor in Bremen, received his habilitation in Göttingen (in 1967), served as full professor at the Kirchliche Hochschule in Wuppertal, Germany (1958–63), at the University of Bonn, Germany (1963–7), and, since 1967, at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where, from 1994, he has been Emeritus Professor. He has lectured all over the world, received nineteen honorary degrees, and is the author of many books, including Theologie der Hoffnung (1964), Der gekreuzigte Gott (1972), Gott in der Schöpfung: Ökologische Schöpfungslehre (1985), and Das Kommen Gottes: Christliche Eschatologie (1995). Ulrik Nissen is Associate Professor in Ethics and Philosophy of Religion in the Department of Theology, Aarhus University, Denmark, and Professor II in Theological Ethics, at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, Norway. He is the author of Luther Between Present and Past: Studies in Luther and Lutheranism (2004), The Polity of Christ: Studies on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Chalcedonian Christology and Ethics (2020), and Kærlighedens Ansvar: Grundlag og Områder for Kristen Etik (2022). Andreas Nordlander is Associate Professor of Religion and Theology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has been a visiting scholar at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Germany, and at Duke Divinity School, USA, and is currently writing a book on the concept of purpose in theology, philosophy, and science. He holds degrees in philosophy, religious studies, and theology from the universities of Lund and Cambridge, and he wrote his doctoral dissertation in the philosophy of religion on the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His current research is focused on the Christian doctrine of creation, including ecological ethics. Thomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and scholar of multidisciplinary studies. He directs the Center for Open and Relational Theology and supervises doctoral students at Northwind Theological Seminary, USA. He has written and edited more than twenty-five books. xix

Contributors

Scott Paeth is Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University, USA. His work focuses on Christian ethics, public theology, and applied religious ethics. Nicolás Panotto is a theologian with a PhD in Social Sciences, and Associate Researcher at the Universidad Arturo Prat, Chile. He is the author of Fe Que se Hace Pública: Reflexiones sobre Religión, Cultura, Sociedad e Incidencia (2019) and Descolonizar o Saber Teológico na América Latina: Religião, Educação e Teologia em Chaves Pós-Coloniais (2019), and is the editor of Indecent Theologians: Marcella Althaus-Reid and the Next Generation of Postcolonial Activists (2016) and Pope Francis in Postcolonial Reality: Complexities, Ambiguities, and Paradoxes (2015). Abigail Pelham is an independent researcher who writes about Bible and literature with a particular focus on creation themes. She is the author of Contested Creations in the Book of Job: The World-As-It-Ought-And-Ought-Not-To-Be (2012). Gordon Preece is Director of Ethos: EA Centre for Christianity and Society, Honorary Research Fellow at Whitley College, and former Director of the University of Divinity’s Centre for Religion and Social Policy, all in Australia. He is the author of Changing Work Values: A Christian Response (1995), The Viability of the Vocation Tradition in Trinitarian, Credal and Reformed Perspective: The Threefold Call (1998), and the author/editor of ten books on theological and workplace ethics. Ephraim Radner is Professor of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, Canada, and an Anglican priest. He has worked pastorally and taught in the United States and in several countries around the Anglican Communion. He has published in the areas of pneumatology, ecclesiology, and hermeneutics. Murray Rae is Professor of Theology at the University of Otago, New Zealand. After completing a Bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, he began his working career as an architect in private practice before studying theology and philosophy in New Zealand, Germany, and the UK. His research interests include theology and the arts, especially architecture, Māori engagements with Christianity, Christian ethics, and the work of Søren Kierkegaard. Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, FRHistS, has been Professor of Roman History, Senior Visiting Professor (at the universities of Harvard, Boston, Columbia, and Erfurt), Professor of Theology and Endowed Chair at Angelicum, Italy, Professor of Theology at Durham University, UK, and at KU Leuven, Belgium, Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University, USA, Senior Fellow (at the universities of Durham, Princeton, Sacred Heart, Bonn, and Oxford), and Senior Member, at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her recent publications include The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (2013), Evagrius’ Kephalaia Gnostika: A New Translation of the Unreformed Text from the Syriac (2015), and Social Justice and the Legitimacy of Slavery: The Role of Philosophical Asceticism from Ancient Judaism to Late Antiquity (2016), and she is the co-editor of Early Christian and Jewish Narrative: The Role of Religion in Shaping Narrative Forms (2015), T&T Clark Handbook of the Early Church (2021), and Patterns of Women’s Leadership in Ancient Christianity (2021).

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Contributors

Joerg Rieger is Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies and Director of the Wendland–Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University, USA. He is the author of Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God (2018), No Religion but Social Religion: Liberating Wesleyan Theology (2018), and Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity (2022), and the co-author, with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger, of Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (2016). His works have been translated into Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Croatian, German, Malayalam, Korean, and Chinese. Eugene F. Rogers Jr. is Professor of Religious Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina, USA. His most recent books are Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk (2021) and Elements of Christian Thought: A Basic Course in Christianese (2021). Andrew Shepherd is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Public Issues in the Theology Programme, University of Otago / Mātai Whakapono Karaitiana, Te Whare Wānanga o Otāgo, in Aotearoa New Zealand. His working life has straddled the fields of environmental education, theological education, and leadership roles within non-profit organizations, including a long involvement in the Christian conservation organization, A Rocha. He is the author of The Gift of the Other: Levinas, Derrida, and a Theology of Hospitality (2014) and the co-editor, with Nicola Hoggard Creegan, of Taking Rational Trouble Over the Mysteries: Reactions to Atheism (2013) and Creation and Hope: Reflections on Ecological Anticipation and Action from Aotearoa New Zealand (2018). Andrew Sloane is Lecturer in Old Testament and Christian Thought at Morling College, Australia. He teaches in the areas of integration of faith and work, Old Testament, philosophy of religion, and bioethics. Andrew qualified in medicine and practiced briefly as a doctor before training as a Baptist pastor. He is the author of Vulnerability and Care: Christian Reflections on the Philosophy of Medicine (2016). Janet Soskice is the William K. Warren Distinguished Research Professor of Catholic Theology at Duke University Divinity School, USA, and Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is the author of Metaphor and Religious Language (1984), The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (2007), The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels (2009), and Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy Theology and Scripture (2023). Christopher Southgate is Professor of Christian Theodicy at the University of Exeter, UK, with specialisms in the science–religion debate and ecotheology. His books include The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (2008) and Theology in a Suffering World: Glory and Longing (2018). He is also a published poet; one of his recent collections is Rain Falling by the River: New and Selected Poems of the Spirit (2017). David L. Stubbs is Professor of Ethics and Theology at Western Theological Seminary, USA. He received BS and MS degrees from Stanford University, USA, an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary, USA, and a PhD in theological ethics from Duke University, USA. He

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is an ordained Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA), acted for many years as co-chair of the Christian Systematic Theology Section of the American Academy of Religion, is currently co-directing the Hope–Western Prison Education Program, and is the author of Table and Temple: The Christian Eucharist and Its Jewish Roots (2020). John Swinton is Professor in Practical Theology and Pastoral Care at the University of Aberdeen, UK. He is the author of Dementia: Living in the Memories of God (2012), Becoming Friends of Time: Disability, Timefullness, and Gentle Discipleship (2016), and Finding Jesus in the Storm: The Spiritual Lives of Christians with Mental Health Challenges (2020). Mariusz Tabaczek, OP, is a Polish Dominican and theologian. He holds a PhD in philosophical theology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, USA, a Church Licentiate from the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland, and Dr. habil. in philosophy from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, Poland. He is a professor of theology and member of the Thomistic Institute at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Italy. Tink Tinker, a citizen of the Osage Nation (wazhazhe), is Emeritus Professor of American Indian Studies at Iliff School of Theology, USA. As an American Indian academic teaching at a eurochristian school for training ministers, Tinker is committed to a scholarly endeavour that takes seriously both the liberation of Indian peoples from their historic oppression as colonized communities and the liberation of eurochristian americans, the historic colonizers and oppressors of Indian peoples, whose own history of violence has been largely suppressed. A scholar/activist, Tinker has worked closely with both Four Winds American Indian Council in Denver and the American Indian Movement of Colorado. He has published several books and nearly a hundred book chapters and journal articles. Nebojsa Tumara is Senior Lecturer in Biblical Languages, Religious Studies, and Old Testament at Saint Athanasius College, University of Divinity, Australia. He is active in research contributions and course development, and lectures in Old Testament studies, comparative religion, theology and film, iconography, and Hebrew and Syriac languages. An ordained priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church, he also serves at the parish of St Basil of Ostrog in Langwarrin, Melbourne, Australia. Giles Waller is a research associate and affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, UK. He is the co-editor, with Kevin Taylor, of Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature, and Tragic Theory (2011). Michael Weinrich is Emeritus Professor of Dogmatics and Ecumenics, and Director of the Ecumenical Institute of the Faculty of Protestant Theology, at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. His recent monographs include Religion und Religionskritik: Ein Arbeitsbuch (2012), Die bescheidene Kompromisslosigkeit der Theologie Karl Barths: Bleibende Impulse zur Erneuerung der Theologie (2013), and Karl Barth: Leben – Werk – Wirkung (2019). Jordan Wessling is Assistant Professor of Religion and Program Coordinator of Christian Ministries at Lindsey Wilson College, USA. He has published over twenty-five essays on a range xxii

Contributors

of topics in systematic and philosophical theology, and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of Love Divine: A Systematic Account of God’s Love for Humanity (2020), the co-author, with Oliver Crisp and James Arcadi, of The Nature and Promise of Analytic Theology (2019), and the co-editor of Love, Divine and Human: Contemporary Essays in Systematic and Philosophical Theology (2019) and Analyzing Prayer: Theological and Philosophical Essays (2022). David Wilkinson is Professor of Theology and Religion at Durham University, UK, and Director of Equipping Christian Leadership in an Age of Science (ECLAS). He has doctorates in both theoretical astrophysics and systematic theology and is the author of Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe (2010), and, with David Hutchings, God, Stephen Hawking and the Multiverse: What Hawking Said and Why It Matters (2020). Michael A. Williams is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion in the Jackson School of International Studies, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, at the University of Washington, USA. His is the author of The Immovable Race: A Gnostic Designation and the Theme of Stability in Late Antiquity (1985) and Rethinking ‘Gnosticism’: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (1996), the editor of Charisma and Sacred Biography (1982), and the co-editor of Innovation in Religious Traditions: Essays in the Interpretation of Religious Change (1992). Jennifer Wiseman is an astrophysicist who studies the formation of stars and planets using radio, optical, and infrared telescopes. She received her BS in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, and her PhD in Astronomy from Harvard University, USA. She is a senior astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She is also interested in science policy and public science engagement, and is Director Emeritus of the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, USA. Stephen John Wright is Senior Lecturer in Christian Theology and Wesley Studies, Nazarene Theological College, UK. He is the author of Dogmatic Aesthetics: A Theology of Beauty in Dialogue with Robert W. Jenson (2014) and the editor, with Chris E. W. Green, of The Promise of Robert W. Jenson’s Theology: Constructive Engagements (2017). Xiaoli Yang is a research scholar and adjunct faculty at the University of Divinity, Australia, and Charles Sturt University, Australia with specialties in World Christianity, intercultural theology, ethno-hermeneutics, mission studies, and spirituality. She has had visiting appointments at Fuller Theological Seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Boston University. She is the author of A Dialogue between Haizi’s Poetry and the Gospel of Luke: Chinese Homecoming and the Relationship with Jesus Christ (2018, and 2022 in Chinese.). Randall C. Zachman is Professor Emeritus of Reformation Studies at the University of Notre Dame, USA. He is the author of The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (2005) and Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (2009), and has published chapters on the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Søren Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth, as well as on Jewish–Christian relations. xxiii

PREFACE

What is the way to the place where the light is distributed or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth?1 The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.2 Even within the limits of Christian theology, the idea of ‘creation’ prompts divergent opinions. Most Christian theology exhibits a confidence that ‘creation’ is the doctrine that ties all things together. This assumption, largely untested in the academy, has served well the interests of ecclesial expansion, colonialism, and capitalism.3 Other theological voices, those uncommitted to Babel’s cause, have resisted so employing the idea of ‘creation’ as a unifying idea and have instead recognized that diverse interpretations of creation are necessary if the ecological, cultural, and other differences that truly characterize created life are to contribute in fundamental ways to constructive theological work on the doctrine itself. This, of course, prompts questions of power, which is precisely why such moves have, by and large, been repressed. This Handbook both illustrates and interrogates such claims. It does so by providing a wideranging and introductory treatment of the doctrine of creation as understood in Christian traditions. In three major parts, it offers an examination of: (i) how the Bible and a range of Christian traditions have thought about creation, (ii) how the doctrine of creation informs and is informed by various dogmatic commitments, and (iii) how the doctrine of creation relates to and engages with a range of human concerns and activities. While not exhaustive, such an approach recognizes a diversity of sources and exchanges that properly characterize efforts to speak theologically about the subject. Put otherwise, efforts to attend to the doctrine in ways unmarked by due consideration of a broad range of concerns typically result in an unpropitious narrowing and isolating of what responsible theological speech demands. It is hoped that this collection might contribute towards the undoing of this kind of methodological aridity typical of this field of enquiry. It is indeed dismaying how narrow most theological treatments of the doctrine of creation typically are. There is both loss and promise to be named here. As I worked with authors on the contributions herein, many, even many of those whose research is marked by a proven commitment to interdisciplinarity as an approach, noted both how challenging, even alien, and invigorating they found the task of relating the subject of their discipline to a doctrine of creation, and vice versa. Sometimes, assumptions were laid aside after deeper examination, prompting new questions. At other times, basic assumptions were left uninterrogated in the quest to pursue

Job 38.24. Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 8. 3 The claim that creation is one thing is a tool of empire, sustained by a failure to recognize that the language of ‘creation’ itself is a construct often serving as a legitimizing weapon. Of course, such efforts too are part of creation. 1 2

Preface

different questions. The result is an unresolved tension in the material that follows, a tension that, it is hoped, invites the reader to question their own assumptions about the doctrine of creation itself. Of course, no matter how deliberate human attention to creation is, and no matter how determined one is to comprehend any of creation’s multifarious parts and mutually dependent relations, creation remains a mystery marked by something of gift, bewilderment, and magic; it is where fairies and malignancies and black holes live and die together. Creation’s disenchantment remains one of modernity’s cardinal evils, one that any doctrine of creation purporting to be ‘Christian’ must exorcise. Certainly, creation remains as familiar to us as it is strange, graced with all the fragility, risk, resistance, freedom, and possibility that marks any process born of love. Attention to any Christian doctrine of creation is inescapably bound up with talk of ‘God’. In the purview of Christian belief, creation participates in the drama, dialogue, history, resistance, love, and time that is the divine life. This life, it is widely believed, is not only creation’s antecedent; it is also creation’s future. Thus, creation looks for and labours towards the promised renewal of all living things. Such hopeful activity, Christian faith claims, is born of God’s ‘unintuitive power to create new life in precisely that place where evil ostensibly wins the ultimate victory – that is, death’.4 Thus, Christian theology is marked by efforts to narrate creation in light of the lifework of Jesus of Nazareth, recognizing that Christianity’s unreasonable insistence on hope is grounded and hidden in the inearthing of the ruined Christ into the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, the full meaning of which remains painfully unresolved, even perhaps for God. Meanwhile, because something new has been promised in that inhumation, ‘the created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next’ (Rom. 8.19, The Message). A sincere thank you to each contributor to this volume, not a few of whom undertook research amid arduous personal circumstances and during what one contributor described as ‘a very cruel couple of years’. I am grateful to Catherine Keller and Jürgen Moltmann for enthusiastically agreeing to bookend the project. Many thanks also to Jill Pope for her editorial assistance. Jason Goroncy

Hermann Spieckermann, ‘Creation: God and World’, in The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Companion, ed. John Barton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 290. 4

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FOREWORD

Catherine Keller

One can argue for the relevance of each and every Christian doctrine to our life – and to any creaturely moment of it – in the creation. But no such argument is needed for the doctrine of creation itself. The doctrine of creation instantly signifies world and all that is meant by it. It embraces all the space that there is, bounded or boundless. And at the same time, the creation makes a claim about time. It signifies, at least in the western force field, an event: a moment or series of moments making up the becoming – the genesis – of the world. Genesis is always already a spatiotemporality; or, rather, spatiotemporality itself. Is it a single moment of origin? Or is the event a series of moments of becoming? When does that series end? Did it? Does it? Will it? Thus, the symbol of the creation breaks into a multiverse of meanings and of arguments about its meaning and, therefore, about the meaning of the world, of its matter, of its mattering life. Fortunately, this volume swells grandly to meet the occasion. Its bountiful chapters sparkle like the facets of creation itself. They take the reader through manifold traditions and texts of the doctrine, through multiple accounts of its ineffaceable linkage to the other doctrines of its traditions. And then we journey through a stunning myriad of developments of creation’s pertinence to astrophysics and to the Anthropocene, to race, sexuality, war, decolonization, sounds . . . and, finally, liturgy. Thus, this Handbook does not reduce ‘the creation’ to any one register of spatiotemporality, let alone to a single dogmatic definition. Yet even – or precisely – in its multireligious ecumenism, it hews close to the Wirkungsgeschichte (reception history) of the biblical creation story. That very text is not one: it surges through the first creation story of Genesis 1, through the older Genesis 2 and 3, and ripples on through every reference by psalmist and prophet to the earth and sky, to the succinct recap of John 1’s Logos, to the closing prophecy of the endangerment of the earth and of its renewal. Of course, one might read the Genesis account as something of a Foreword to the whole Bible. Then it, the Genesis account, is readily mirrored and closed by the disclosure at the end of the Second Testament of the new creation. Such a framework developed its theology in Irenaeus’ articulation of a creation from nothing, moving along with consequential linearity through the Incarnation and on to the End, followed by a supernatural new creation. Then ‘the creation’ comes to name at once a singular point of origin and a line that shoots from that point straight towards its single eschatological goal. And already, therefore, in the hermeneutics of the beginning, begin all manner of theological arguments about the precise character of the creation’s spatiotemporality and of the creator’s divine agency. What frank perplexity flashes through these interpretive developments. Augustine, for example, turns in chapter 12 of his Confessions to his uncertainty about how to interpret the mere first two verses of Genesis. He recognizes a big problem: that there is no nothing in evidence ‘before’ God begins to ‘let be’. That second verse – with its pre-terrestrial earth tohu vabohu, its darkness over the face of the tehomic (primal oceanic chaotic) waters – runs abysmally deep. It seems to take the place of a clean ‘nothing’ and challenge the creator’s

Foreword

unilateral power to do the job on their own. So then God must have created the chaos first, as a primal materiality. But such a priori formlessness appals Augustine’s own classical sensibility. So he beautifully calls it a nihil aliquid, a ‘nothingsomething’.1 Yet it would somehow be from God, though not as a true creature nor as a direct expression or emanation of divine being. Later, however, he leaves that ambiguity behind. He delivers the forever normative either/or – non de deo sed ex nihilo, not out of God but out of nothing. The line of history is firmed and moved forward, no doubt reinforced by the spatiotemporal order of the dynamic Christian empire. It continues to wall off the watery abyss ever threatening to leak into world and church, the deep with its sea monsters threatening every order. Yet disputes persisted, and not only within Christendom. Rashi, the great eleventh-century Talmudic commentator, finds Gen. 1.1 ‘crying aloud for interpretation’. For ‘the text does not intend to point out the order of the acts of Creation – to state that these (heaven and earth) were created first’. He rather startlingly claims that if one thinks the text is about a chronology of creation, ‘you should be ashamed of yourself ’.2 Rashi got to me, along with the sea that ‘burst out from the womb’ in Job 38 and the joyful splash of the Leviathan in Psalm 104. So far from any demon of disorder, that sea monster (a great whale?) appears as God’s playmate. There appear in the Bible opposing affects in relation to that deep. I’ve called them ‘tehomophilic’, as in the celebratory interplay suggested in the psalm; and ‘tehomophobic’ – a dread of the abyss that finds resolution in the creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing).3 Indeed, I found myself so preoccupied with the theological meaning of the tehom (the primal oceanic chaos), with that not-nothingness at and in some nonlinear sense before the beginning, that I wrote a book, Face of the Deep, which is pretty much on Gen. 1.2. Fortified by near-complete consensus among biblical scholars that there is no teaching of ex nihilo as such in the Bible – though, of course, one may infer or interpellate it hermeneutically – I felt called to articulate a doctrinal alternative to the clean precreation nothing – a creatio ex profundis (creation out of the watery depths). To recognize the formless depths, the dark waters of becoming with their womby potentiality, is to circumvent the enduring narrative of a masculinist omnipotence with its top-down control and one-way creation. The alternative cosmos, neither pure order nor mere chaos, hints at what James Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, dubbed the chaosmos, and resonates with the process theological model of a cosmic creativity without absolute beginning or ending. At the same time, it need not question the ‘in the beginning’ of this universe, this galaxy, this world. A chaosmic reading of creation opens the way to a more fruitful deployment of chaos and complexity theory in theological cosmology and, simultaneously, to a recognition of the disordering and anarchic elements crucial to social transformation. In all registers of life, it encourages a creativity that unfolds not unilaterally, not predictably, but at the edge of chaos. Not over the edge. Not in mere disorder, but with uncertainty, indeterminacy, novelty. Once the tehom leaks back into the picture, so does the relational dynamism even of Genesis 1, where the waters and the earth are invited to ‘bring forth’, to engage in a primal co-creativity.

Augustine, Confessions, 12.6. Pentateuch with Targum, Onkelos, Haptaroth and Rashi’s Commentary. Volume 1: Genesis, trans. M. Rosenbaum and Abraham M. Silbermann (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1965), 2–3. 3 See the discussion in Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), 25–40. 1 2

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Foreword

Perhaps the ‘dominion’ of the dominant species can then be reread not as supreme exception to the creation but rather as one creative inception within it: in the capacity for responseable collaboration, creatio cooperatio in the image of the one who finds only ‘everything’, all together, very good. Yet in that cooperative spirit, we might offer our divergent interpretations as themselves uncertain, multiple, ever beginning. So, for example, the ex profundis need not rule out the ex nihilo but only asks that the latter recognize itself also as one possible explanation, one carried but not verified by its post-biblical authority. Perhaps there is something very like an absolute origin and final end to what we know as ‘the world’, or perhaps an alternative that streams through from Genesis to Revelation. That latter book no more offers an absolute end than does Genesis an absolute origin – as in the cloudy vision of the messianic ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’ (Rev. 1.8). That ‘I am’ hints at a spatiotemporality in which beginning and ending are not separated by a timeline but take place interactively, in response to this, and this, moment of the creation. Each moment might be pulsing with new beginnings, mustard seeds of possibility on offer – and of partial realizations, imminent endings. Each creaturely occasion might be calling for creative cooperation in, between, and with the vastly divergent publics of our world: such as, to tap more examples of this volume’s amplitude, those of children, of the disabled, of cities and politics, of non-human animals, indeed of the Anthropocene itself. Such multiple registers of a collective life – also work, food, medicine, technology, architecture, sports, economics, the Dao, and the imagination – vastly exceed standard doctrinal purview. And so the doctrine of creation surfaces in these pages refreshed, surprising, expressing and then provoking the cooperative creativity it narrates. Whatever is true of the ‘spacetimemattering’4 of the creation, its doctrinal continuity will materialize differently in every living context. But what matters now across all human, animal, vegetal, and elemental contexts, and with strange new urgency, is our awakening to our species’ abuse of its ‘dominion’ and so of our sphere of the creation itself. As the extinctions unfold at their incomprehensible speed, as the temperature rises – hardly heavenward – in its under-recognized increments, Genesis 1 seems to be rolling back, presenting in the inverse of a great decreation. If our dominion does not quickly translate itself into responsibility – and that not as a lame version of stewardship or as an aggressive claim of dominance – the discreation will continue along its apocalyptic trajectory; not to the end of the creation, but perhaps to the end of what we have called home – this spatiotemporality that is our habitat. The possibility of a beautiful, shared dwelling with each other, with all the terrestrial others, was tragically mistaken by some dominant minority of us for possession and control. So what more important task for the doctrine of creation can there be than to tune theological practice to our current and becoming atmosphere and earth? Yet such mounting urgency brooks no zero-sum game: the ecology of our planet remains irreducible to any single issue. In sickness and in health, it remains oikos, what Pope Francis calls our ‘common home’.5 And it might remain so for a good long time – if we can in creatio cooperationis join in some unprecedented but not ex nihilo unfolding; if we can link issues across

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 179, 182, 234, 315. 5 See Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015). 4

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the glowing and shadowed reaches of our little bit of universe. If creation continues at every moment, genesis unfolds before and beyond any doctrine. And in fidelity to that unfolding, the essays that follow crystallize a translucent multiplicity of issues, themes, contexts, implications, and applications. In this creation-scaled Handbook, the doctrine of creation sparkles into fresh readability.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the 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 worldwide. Sections of Wing-Tsit Chan’s A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 1963, are used with permission of Princeton University Press. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. Sections of Richard Brautigan’s poem ‘All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace’ are reprinted by the permission of Salky Literary Management as agent for the author. Copyright © 1959, 1969 by Richard Brautigan. Copyright renewed © 2006 by Ianthe Brautigan. Geoffrey Hill’s poem ‘Genesis’ is reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press and the Licensor through PLSclear. Sections of Benedicta Ward’s The Spirituality of Saint Cuthbert, 1992, are used with permission of SLG Press. 

INTRODUCTION THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION IN HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE David Fergusson

Introduction The doctrine of creation is a constitutive element of Christian theology, reflecting both a commitment to divine oneness and an understanding of the world’s dependence upon God. There is one God, and everything else is dependent upon God for its existence. Traditionally, this has been expressed by the idea of creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo). The world is not out of something that pre-exists the act of creation; this would jeopardize divine uniqueness by positing a reality that exists over and against God. Nor is the world an emanation or outpouring of the divine being, since this would confuse the essential distinction between creator and creation. While at first glance these seem speculative ideas, they undergird practices of prayer and praise, together with a series of practical dispositions towards creatures and the environment. Other doctrines also repose upon this one, their expression, in turn, enriching one’s understanding of creation. In describing Jesus Christ as the Word of God, the New Testament provides an important linkage of creation with salvation in the Christian imagination. Here the beginning of creation is connected with its end by reference to a single divine purpose that is disclosed in Jesus. What follows explores each of these points by reference to scripture, tradition, and contemporary debates.

Why start at the beginning? The idea of creation has often been taken as a way of anchoring the name of God. In describing God to a young child, one frequently begins with an account of God as the maker of everything. This is likely to be combined with some (admittedly hazy) description of God as residing preeminently in heaven yet present all around. Already two key elements of creation theology are captured here – the world as originating in God, and God as being other than the world but present to it and actively involved in it. As a practice of initiation into God-talk, this has some impressive support from the tradition. In placing the book of Genesis with its two creation stories at the front of the Bible, the canonical editors believed that it made sense to begin with God as the maker of the world. Both divine names – Elohim and Yahweh – are first designated by the act of creation, though other themes in Israelite religion are already woven into these stories. The classical creeds also begin with God the Creator, even if these statements seem now too terse and underdeveloped: I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. (The Apostles’ Creed, c. sixth century)

T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, seen and unseen. (The Nicene Creed, 381) The creeds advance quickly to the second article about God the Son, in part because this was a greater source of dogmatic controversy in the early centuries of Christian history than was the first article. Nevertheless, the name of God is first explicated by reference to the act of creation and to the differentiation of God and the world. Similarly, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) introduces the doctrine of creation in the first part of his Summa Theologiae. Marked by clarity and brevity, his account captures how God is conceived in terms of creating everything that is other than God, of the essential unlikeness of God and creatures, and of how the world is endowed with a wisdom, beauty, and purpose that derive from God. Though such an approach has attracted criticism for its undue attention to speculative philosophical arguments and a remoteness from practical considerations, it has some impressive historical antecedents. The strongest consideration in its favour is that failure to anchor the idea of God initially with respect to creation generates confusion at a later stage of theological exposition.

How should the Genesis stories be interpreted? With its magisterial expression of the hexaemeron, the six days, the first creation story is the better known (see Gen. 1.1–2.4a). The world comes about through a series of events performed effortlessly by a sequence of divine speech acts. This generates light, the sky and the earth; the waters and vegetation; the sun, the moon and the stars; a diversity of fish, birds and other animals; and, lastly, human beings made in the divine image. On the seventh day, having completed the work of creation, God rests. In relation to scientific approaches to creation, theologians have adopted an interesting range of attitudes. In the early centuries, it was incumbent upon Christian apologists to show that the story was consistent with the best science available, perhaps even surpassing it. Hence Origen of Alexandria (c. 184–253) and Basil of Caesarea (330–79) were at pains to show how the account of the six days of creation was at one with the natural philosophy of their time. This was argued not simply in terms of consistency but also by attempting to show how the Bible itself was a valuable resource that added to the stock of scientific knowledge.1 In the early modern period, Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) sought to date the creation of the world at 4004 bce through his reading of the creation stories and the later genealogies in scripture. Given the resources available to him, this was a plausible hypothesis for his time. Yet, with the development of modern science, it became apparent that the world was much older than the biblical stories had suggested. Evidence from geology and palaeontology, which had started to accumulate from the late eighteenth century, revealed an earth that was millions, not thousands, of years old. In response to these developments, strategies of ‘concordism’ emerged to reconcile Genesis 1 with science. Typically, this involved viewing the ‘days’ of creation not

For an overview of early church readings of Genesis 1, see Andrew Louth, ‘The Six Days of Creation According to the Greek Fathers’, in Reading Genesis after Darwin, ed. Stephen C. Barton and David Wilkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 39–56. 1

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as 24-hour intervals but as symbolic of long periods of geological time. While the Bible might no longer function as a source of scientific knowledge, it was at least consistent with the best science available.2 More recently, however, ‘complementary’ approaches have been favoured that release the theologian from demonstrating how the details of Genesis 1 can be harmonized with the latest scientific findings. Following the lead of Hebrew literary scholarship, the creation stories are interpreted as ‘parables’, ‘sagas’, or ‘myths’ that express religious and existential themes. One can recognize the enduring value of these without committing to the view that these are also scientific accounts of cosmic or human origins. Whether previous generations or the biblical writers themselves were able to make this distinction is irrelevant; from the present vantage point, this is the most plausible and charitable reading of these texts. This complementary approach views the theology of creation as answering a different set of questions to those addressed by natural scientists. As a rough generalization, one can see modern science as answering questions about how the universe emerged from an initial Big Bang and evolved over 13.6 billion years, whereas religion is concerned with why questions about the existence of the universe and the purpose of life. These questions are of a different order, requiring stratified layers of description. Nevertheless, one should not be excluded in favour of the other since they do not belong to the same plane of investigation. Whether one talks of ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ or of ‘partially overlapping magisteria’, it seems clear that these are different forms of discourse that can generally work in tandem.3 Points of tension and questions for fruitful conversation may arise, for example, with respect to the traditional fall doctrine. Still, these are to be negotiated rather than viewed as a competition in which the winner takes all. The Genesis 1 narrative raises further questions that have continued to dominate discussions of creation. Whether the opening two verses teach creation out of nothing is doubtful, though later tradition found that the idea made good sense of much of what is implicit. Divine sovereignty is expressed by the effortless act of creation. God speaks, and it is done. Although these images feature elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Isa. 27.1; 51.9), there are almost no hints of a struggle with recalcitrant forces, as in other Ancient Near Eastern creation stories. For the writer(s) of Genesis 1, the Word of God is sufficient to bring the world into being. Despite the residual threat of the waters (Gen. 1.2) that seem to pre-exist God’s creative work, the story unfolds serenely and majestically, its rhythmic structure and refrain – ‘and God saw that it was good’ – suggesting an earlier liturgical setting in the transmission of the text.4 The relative absence of struggle tends to underscore the uniqueness of God and establishes a clear distinction between God and the world.5 The world exists because God has called it into being. Its order and diversity reflect divine intentionality; this reaches its culmination on the seventh day ‘of rest’ when creation is at peace with itself and its maker. Readers should be alert here to how this is a story not merely of beginnings but also of ends. Creation is not only about

See John Hedley Brooke, ‘Genesis and the Scientists: Dissonance Among the Harmonizers’, in Reading Genesis after Darwin, ed. Stephen C. Barton and David Wilkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 93–110. 3 This is argued in, for example, Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2007). 4 See Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11: A Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion (London: SPCK, 1984), 91–3. 5 The Qur’an follows a similar pattern in linking divine uniqueness with the work of creation. As the sole creator of a well-ordered world, God has no rival or partners. See, for example, Sura 35. 2

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how the world was generated; with its array of themes, Genesis 1 reveals convictions about the being and purposes of God, the nature of God’s creatures, and the end point envisaged for the world. Commentators have sometimes pointed to how this story also reflects future hopes of a new creation in which species live together in peace and harmony (see Isa. 11.6).6 The extended character of creation – it involves much more than reference to a single point of origination – is confirmed by the second story at Genesis 2.4b with its anthropological focus. The account of a subsequent fall that leads into the history of God’s dealings with human beings places creation as the first in a succession of God’s works. The act of creation does not then exhaust divine agency but is instead the commencement of a temporally extended sequence in which the divine–human drama is enacted. A further important feature of Genesis 1 is the making of human beings in the image and likeness of God (see Gen. 1.26-27). These verses have loomed large in theological anthropology, though the definition of the imago Dei has proved elusive. The text itself is not explicit about what constitutes the image and likeness of God. Much of the tradition has identified this with the ‘soul’ or ‘mind’ on the assumption that possessing this component sets human beings apart from other animals. Yet this reading of the text appears to impose philosophical presuppositions on the text which the Hebrew does not readily admit. No single term exactly translates ‘soul’ where this intends an immaterial substance. The anthropology of the Hebrew Bible is psychosomatic and holistic by contrast with dualist separations of body and soul. A functional reading of the text seems more promising when consideration is given to the words that follow: ‘Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and over the cattle and over the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth’ (Gen. 1.26). As bearers of the image of God, human beings are God’s counterparts in the world. Their appointed task is to hear and respond to God by exercising wise stewardship within the created order. This notion is not without its dangers, especially given the language of ‘dominion’, which can all too readily suggest the delegation of control over creation resulting in practices of exploitation and despoliation. But its inflection in ways that accentuate cooperation, humility, and responsibility must be the way to go.7 One enduring result of the theology of the imago Dei has been the support it has long provided for belief in the sanctity of human life. This is evident in both Jewish and Christian theology. As imaging God, each human life has a divinely bestowed worth that ought to prevent our regarding anyone as disposable or irrelevant.8 One should beware of theological manoeuvres that suggest the image of God was lost at the fall. This has sometimes been attractive to accounts of redemption that accentuate the misery and depravity of the postlapsarian human condition. These can claim some support from New Testament texts that speak of Christ as the true image of God that will be restored to the redeemed (see 1 Cor. 15.40). Yet there is no suggestion in the Hebrew scriptures that the image

See, for example, Richard Bauckham, Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2010), 26. 7 This is helpfully developed in William P. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 44–6. 8 Abraham Joshua Heschel writes of the need for human beings to recover a sense of reverence to understand their true image. See Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: The Noonday Press, 1996), 275. 6

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of God is forfeited at the fall in Genesis 3. On the contrary, human beings continue to reflect God’s wisdom and hold a status a little lower than the angels (see Ps. 8.3-8). John Calvin’s theology, produced in the sixteenth century, reflects this ambivalence over whether the image of God is lost or only defaced by human sin.9 But the lack of textual support and the ethical gains of viewing the imago as an alienable human gift should prevent one from adopting the view that somehow the imago is lost and missing.

Creation out of nothing The classical doctrine of creation out of nothing was accepted with a rapidly achieved consensus during the late second century. While some scriptural passages appear to gesture in this direction (see, for example, 1 Macc. 7.28; Rom. 4.17; Heb. 11.3), the idea was only explicitly adopted when Christian writers contested the leading alternatives, namely, creation from pre-existent matter and creation by emanation from the divine being. The eternity of matter was a default assumption in ancient philosophy. In the Timaeus, a highly influential dialogue for later Christian cosmology, Plato (c. 429–c. 347 bce) describes an Artificer who imposes order upon a disorderly material substrate. In exercising a form of intentional agency, this Artificer bears some resemblance to the God of the Bible. The order and beauty of the world derive from God’s sharing of the divine goodness.10 Not surprisingly, early Christian writers discerned a harmony between the teaching of Genesis and the cosmology of Plato. Writing around 150 ce, Justin Martyr assumes that Plato must have had access to the Hebrew Bible while writing Timaeus.11 In Metaphysics, Aristotle’s God does not create from out of nothing so much as cause motion in the heavenly realms by the power of attraction. The motion of the heavens is circular, the most perfect and eternal form of movement with neither beginning nor end. The heavenly bodies, in turn, cause movement in the sublunary realm; hence, the seasons of the year follow a rhythm and return upon themselves. Aristotle (384–322 bce), in Lambda 7 of Metaphysics, speaks of an unmoved mover, a cause of change that does not change itself.12 This external mover initiates change by acting as an object of love. If the stars are moving divinities, they are moved by the love of the Prime Mover who is beyond all movement and change. This image famously recurs at the end of Dante’s Divine Comedy, an early fourteenth-century epic poem: ‘[B]ut now my desire and will were revolved, like a wheel which is moved evenly, by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.’13 The Prime Mover must itself be unmoved since it is not susceptible to change or to being acted upon; it cannot have any potentiality since this

See Randall C. Zachman, Reconsidering John Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 35–61. ‘T h e framer of the universe . . . was good, and what is good has no particle of envy in it; being therefore without envy he wished all things to be as like himself as possible.’ Plato, Timaeus, trans. Henry D. P. Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 30. 11 Justin Martyr, First Apology, 59. The standard work on the emergence of the doctrine remains Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994). 12 See Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1996), 373. 13 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: III. Paradise, trans. Charles E. Norton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 257. 9

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would require an unactualized state that would either improve or worsen its condition. As unmoved, Aristotle’s God is unchanging pure actuality, without any potential. And since the highest activity is thought, God must be characterized as contemplative. Yet, as Prime Mover, God does not contemplate the changes in the world below, for this would make its knowledge fluctuate. Here Aristotle is driven to the strange notion that the unmoved mover contemplates its own thought as the highest state possible. It thinks about itself. This mode of existence is its unique status and attraction for other beings. This thinking of thinking is unending and eternal. Later Christian writers would transpose this notion into the idea of the beatific vision – a sharing in God’s knowledge of God’s own self. On one reading, this resembles a version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God. Motion, change, and contingency must be explained by a first cause beyond all these categories. A first cause that participated in this changing world would itself require a similar explanation. To avoid an infinite regress of explanations, one must think of a first unmoved mover. Aristotle rehearses this argument in Book VIII of Physics. The whole universe exhibits an eternal process of motion that can only be fully explained by a first mover itself unmoved and eternal. In the present context, it is important to reiterate that the Prime Mover is not a creator. There is no suggestion that the stars and planets emerge ex nihilo by the will of God. The assumption, rather, is that the Prime Mover coexists eternally with the cosmos; they are coeval. Within this single coordinated system, the primacy of God is understood as the source of motion. This prevailing assumption about the world’s eternity appeared intuitively correct to many thinkers. Since nothing can come from nothing, it made little sense to postulate a sudden emergence of the world ex nihilo. Yet this was the position that Christian theology adopted under the pressure of two types of consideration, one positive and the other negative. First, the power and sovereignty of God, as expressed in scripture, were most fittingly described by an act of creation that did not repose upon pre-existent matter. God did not require preexistent material – the Word of God is sufficient to bring the world into being from nothing. Second, the postulation of eternal matter risks threatening the uniqueness of God by positing a second deity. If the world was eternal, would it then belong on the same ontological level as God? Driven by the need to distinguish the necessity of God from the contingency of the world, theologians judged that a doctrine of creation out of nothing more fittingly captured a distinction vital to scripture. Writing around 175 ce, Theophilus of Antioch advances these arguments from a doctrine that is already becoming the settled opinion of the churches.14 Around the same time, the ex nihilo tradition was also to prove vital in combating Gnostic myths. These understood the world to have emerged from an outpouring of the divine being in a series of gradations explaining matter’s imperfections. Although most of what one knows about these Gnostic speculations derives from the writings of their opponents, they appear to undermine two critical elements of creation theology. First, the ontological distinction between God and the world had become blurred by emanationist accounts. Instead of a theory of making by intentional agency, there is an involuntary overflowing of divine being that cascades into descending orders of being. And, second, the goodness of the world is threatened

See Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus, 2.4.

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by mythological accounts that are closely connected with strategies for escaping the world of flesh. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Marcion of Sinope (c. 85–160) set the Old Testament against the New in a dualist framework in which the creator God was set against the God of Jesus. If the material world represents a move downwards from spiritual being, then the path to redemption must be a return to the spiritual through release from the material. Whether or not this critique represented Marcion fairly, it undoubtedly contributed to the framing of the Christian doctrine of creation.15 In contesting Gnosticism, Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 202) and Tertullian (c. 155–c. 220) appeal to the idea of creation out of nothing. This secures the necessary distinction between God and the world and their positive relationship. Writing around 200 ce, they consolidate a tradition that has already emerged. The nihilo, however, is not to be characterized as some shadowy substance or a void of non-being. Rather, to speak of creation out of nothing is essentially a way of saying that creation is not out of something, whether pre-existent matter or the divine being. Understood negatively, it makes sense as a rule of faith for ordering Christian thought and speech against trends that were found to be inimical to key concerns.16 Given the settled distinction between God and the world accentuated by the ex nihilo concept, there arises a further problem about the Word (logos) of God through whom the world is created (see Jn 1.1-2). This creative agency, already found in Jewish teaching where it is fused with the Hebrew notion of wisdom, is identified by Christian writers with Jesus, the incarnate Word. But if the world was created out of nothing through the Word of God, is this Word a creature made from nothing or is it simply a term to describe the creative agency of God? On which side of the ontological divide should the Word of God be located? Though the fourth century disputes about the status of the Word or Son of God were largely preoccupied with trinitarian and soteriological issues, their connection with the concept of creation out of nothing should not be ignored. If the Word cannot be a secondary God emanating from the one God, then its relation to God requires clarification. The outcome of this was the classical doctrine of the Trinity in which the Word and the Spirit were understood as eternal distinctions within the Godhead, whereas the world was held to be created from nothing by the triune God. In light of these dogmatic decisions, the eternal generation of the Son was regarded as necessary to the divine being, by contrast with the contingence of the created world. Hence, God could never have been other than triune, whereas the world might not have existed.17 A further consequence of creation out of nothing is that two possible accounts of evil are now excluded. These could attribute the imperfections in matter, for example, diseases and natural disasters, either to the surd element that pre-exists creation as primal matter, or to the defects of entities that are ontologically distant from God, as in Gnostic myths of emanation.

For a recent nuanced reading, see Judith M. Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 16 For a defence of the doctrine as consonant with scripture, see Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 14–18. 17 See Thomas F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 92. How these modal notions are to be explicated with reference to the eternal divine being is less clear, but the distinction again seems vital to the understanding of the God–world relationship. For a further affirmation of creation as a ‘free’ action of the triune God, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 2:94. 15

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But if creation proceeds from nothing through the Word of God, then there is nothing prior to that act by which evil can be explained. And the biblical affirmation of the goodness of creation and the sovereignty of God prevents any easy move to postulating ab initio either a flawed world or a lack of capacity in the creator. In the face of this problem, Christian theology tended to adopt two types of response. The first was to view evil as a privation or lack of goodness. Having no positive status, evil simply represents an absence of order. Just as disease represents the loss of health or wholeness in an organism, so evil should be viewed in terms of absence or negation. This characterization does not diminish the very real effects of such privation. For example, people living with dementia experience an impairment of their physical and mental capacities, sometimes in highly distressing ways. The disease can be characterized negatively in terms of a diminution of brain functions, yet this is not to suggest that it is unreal or illusory. A second response of theological descriptions of evil is the notion of a voluntary defection. The bestowal of free will upon rational creatures generates the possibility of a misuse of the power of choice. The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2–3 illustrates this. Though created in an ideal environment, the first human couple is given the power to eat or to refrain from the fruit of the forbidden tree. That they choose to do so is the result of a failure to exercise their Godgiven freedom properly. This might also have characterized the fall of Satan and other angels from heaven, with a resultant unleashing of satanic forces upon the earth. The key point here is that sin and its evil consequences originate not in the creator but in creatures with voluntary powers. Both these moves – evil as privation and as voluntary defection – are represented by Augustine (354–430) in his discussions of evil.18 Emerging in the late second century, creation out of nothing quickly became an established dogma of the Christian church. The other Abrahamic faiths have shared the idea in varying contexts.19 Within the church, it was accepted swiftly by all the leading theologians and traditions of subsequent centuries and was never the source of major doctrinal controversy. To this extent, it did not involve a prolonged debate between competing positions nor require conciliar definition. Throughout the Middle Ages, creation out of nothing was reinforced by an elaborate series of cosmological arguments that added philosophical weight to the idea of one God who was the source of everything that was not God. Deploying Aristotle’s fourfold distinction of causes – material, efficient, formal, and final – Thomas Aquinas argued that God was required to explain the presence of causal powers in the cosmos. With the assertion of God as the cause of all matter, it became necessary to conclude that creation must be from nothing and thus distinguished from all those acts of making that require pre-existent materials.20 The builder requires raw materials to construct a house, but this is quite different from the creation of matter itself which of necessity is from nothing. If it were from something, then the something would also be dependent upon God for its existence. In this way, there emerged strong philosophical support for a theological doctrine that has continued to this day.21 This

See Augustine, Confessions, 7; Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, 4; Gillian R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 19 For comparative study, see David B. Burrell, Carlo Cogliati, Janet M. Soskice, and William R. Stoeger, eds, Creation and the God of Abraham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 20 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), I, Q. 44, Art. 1. 21 See, for example, Richard Swinburne, Is There a God? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 18

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is one further reason why there need be no conflict between religion and science. The type of explanation offered for the world resides at a metaphysical level beyond the questions of natural science. It seeks to answer why there is a world at all and why it displays the kind of order that is intelligible to the scientist. These questions transcend science by placing science within a broader philosophical context. Although the answers offered by the theologian may be contested, such disputes are not resolved by scientific investigation. Big Bang cosmology and evolutionary theory reveal much about cosmic origins and processes, but meta-questions concerning why such an intelligible world (or multiverse) should exist at all belong to a different order of description. At this level, the position one adopts will tend to reflect a personal sense of fit; that is, what is in accordance with one’s most basic existential commitments about how one understands oneself and the surrounding world. This first-person perspective is necessarily self-involving in expressing a sense of who one is and why one is here. Partly for this reason, the so-called proofs of the existence of God are amenable neither to conclusive demonstration nor refutation. Yet, notwithstanding this historical consensus, creatio ex nihilo has recently attracted an array of criticisms. These are animated by concerns that it accentuates power over love, transcendence over immanence, detachment over relationality, and spirit over body. In postulating a world that is brought into being by the free decision of the sovereign God, the doctrine of creation out of nothing presents a world that might not have been. God could have been God without it; the world could have been quite different had God chosen to create an alternative cosmos. Moreover, if a strong ontological contrast is drawn between an eternal God and an ephemeral creation, then the latter appears temporary, transitory, and even disposable. For critics, this tradition is too closely aligned through its symbolic associations with patriarchal assumptions of power and environmental notions of domination. In imaging God, humans exercise similar sovereignty by virtue of their intellect and capacity to transcend the material world. Prioritizing a freedom characterized by autonomy and lack of constraint, the ex nihilo doctrine militates against notions of interdependence, partnership, and ecological harmony – so runs the critique. Alert to these considerations, process and feminist theologians have revisited the hints found in the Hebrew Bible of creation out of chaos. This views God and creatures as together bound within a single cosmic order in which they seek in partnership to realize values of justice, cooperation, harmony, and love. The hierarchical features of the older tradition are thus eliminated through a panentheism in which God no longer transcends the creation or stands over against it; instead, the divine being is always and only expressed in and with the world. In her sustained treatment of the subject, Catherine Keller tilts against the ex nihilo doctrine as irredeemably patriarchal and authoritarian. Replacing its logic of control with that of cooperation becomes an urgent ethical priority in her work. The result is an eschewing of speculative issues in favour of intense concentration on the best symbolic framework to capture the involvement of God in the world as a creative, reforming presence that works with creaturely agencies rather than seeking to superimpose itself.22 The querying of the ex nihilo tradition is also apparent in other ecologically sensitized theologies that seek to stress cosmic harmony and divine–human cooperation. In a subtle

See Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003).

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discussion, Douglas Ottati favours ‘a more rough-and-ready vocabulary’23 that captures elements of both trajectories; that is, creation out of nothing and creation out of chaos. This is valuable, he argues, for articulating the sense in which God should be understood as both source and ordering power.24 From a traditional perspective, two types of response to the critique of the ex nihilo tradition can be discerned. The first points to how the creation of the world is neither a random nor capricious act on the part of God. By viewing the world as a fitting, if not necessary, expression of the divine, creation is seen as expressive of God’s being. The world is created both ex nihilo and per verbum. Through the mediation of the Word, creation displays an order and a purpose that correspond to the eternal life of God. This was sometimes expressed through the concept of the divine ideas. Borrowed from Platonism, the forms that are instantiated in the world could be viewed not as quasi-independent metaphysical objects but as ideas or thoughts that image God in creaturely mode. This provides a means of expressing how the divine goodness and beauty are communicated to the world.25 The notion of God as an artist has some traction in this context. Painters and writers are deeply involved in their work with a mixture of freedom and constraint. Yet, once complete, the work can assume its own character that is patient of different interpretations over time. Similarly, creation can be seen as a handiwork in which God is deeply invested even though it possesses a life distinct from that of its maker. As Kathryn Tanner notes, the language of emanation never entirely disappeared from the doctrine of creation; it remained essential for describing how the world reflects God by bearing a divine imprint.26 This blending of self-expression and conferred freedom on creation is also supported by the traditional doctrine of preservation. The world is not abandoned or let loose from its constant relation to God; its temporal duration depends upon an act of conservation in which God sustains it in being. In this way, the world is viewed as perpetually dependent upon God. Creation is not simply an event of origination – in maintaining the world and willing that it continues to be, God acts to preserve its existence. This ensures a constant relationship of creator to creation, rather than a single action that brings into existence something that is then available for subsequent disposal. A related nuancing of the ex nihilo concept points to the ontological difference between God and creatures not as set in a hierarchical pattern of control but rather as facilitating a particular mode of divine interaction with creatures. An analogy with human relationships points to this possibility. For persons to interact in ways that express freedom, love, and friendship, each must occupy their own space without being subject to control. This generates an ontological distinction that makes possible a coming together in an ordered personal relationship. Without this measure of freedom, the recognition and practice of interdependence are problematized. This is the impossible position of G. W. F. Hegel’s master–servant relationship. In willing to love and to be at one with each other, persons must overcome a relationship in which one

Douglas F. Ottati, Theology for Liberal Protestants: God the Creator (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013), 340. See Douglas F. Ottati, A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2020), 301–17. 25 See, for example, Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 47, Art. 1. For a discussion of divine ideas, see Matthew Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of Creation: Cosmos, Creatures, and the Wise and Good Creator (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 73–208. 26 See Kathryn Tanner, ‘Creatio ex Nihilo as a Mixed Metaphor’, Modern Theology 29, no. 2 (2013): 138–55. 23 24

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controls and dominates the other. So it goes with God and human beings, though in a much less symmetric manner. A creaturely distance and distinction must be maintained, not so much to keep God and humanity apart, but so that human beings can live with God and God with human beings. In this context, creation out of nothing can be read as determining the possibility of an interaction that can only be captured by the analogical use of personal categories. If, by contrast, one thinks of the world as God’s body, then one has a model of the God–world nexus that binds the two closely together in a common life. Yet it is not clear that one can speak of having a relationship with one’s own body. Individuals are dependent upon their own body, concerned with it, and cannot speak of themselves as other than embodied. But they are not capable of befriending or loving their body as they would another person. Hence the necessary condition of a personal relationship with the other is that some clear distinction between oneself and the other can be maintained. Thus construed, the concept of a creation out of nothing can be viewed as a means of avoiding a deism in which God sits apart from the world following an initial act of origination, and a pantheism in which God and the world are equated as a single spiritual–somatic unity.27 In distinguishing God and the world, a theology of creation and preservation can avoid both separation and confusion by articulating a relationship in which (asymmetric) forms of interaction are enabled. Within this conceptual space, a range of activities become possible on both sides – for God, these include address, command, and disclosure; and for individuals, prayer, worship, and confession. In this respect, the ordering of the relationship between creator and creation, a central feature of the ex nihilo doctrine, is as much a practical as it is a speculative doctrine.

Creation and Fall Within the Christian imagination, the story of creation is closely associated with the episode of the fall. There is scriptural precedent for this in the juxtaposition of these in Genesis 2–3, where the history of Adam and Eve as the first human couple is dominated by their act of disobedience and subsequent expulsion from the garden. The trans-generational consequence of eating the forbidden fruit is a sentence in which life outside paradise will be marked by hardship, conflict, and death. This account has exercised an important role in Christian theology, particularly in the Latin-speaking west under the influence of Augustine. Yet while the story of the fall in Genesis 3 is prominent at the opening of scripture, there is seldom any reference to it elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures. Mortality appears to be a feature of the creature’s natural lot (e.g. Ps. 90) rather than a punitive departure from an original condition. In the New Testament, however, Paul refers to the fall story in Rom. 5.12-21 when establishing a parallel between Adam and Christ. As sin and death afflict humankind following Adam, so forgiveness and restoration come to all through Jesus Christ. In drawing this parallel, Paul uses a more developed interpretation of the fall story found in inter-testamental Judaism (e.g. 4 Ezra). Here the fall of Adam is cited as an explanation for the prevalence of sin, suffering, and

In characterizing deism and pantheism in this way, it should be stressed that these are diffuse terms denoting a range of positions rather than a single body of teaching. The temptation to use them pejoratively should be resisted. 27

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death in God’s good creation. How far Paul buys into this explanation is unclear. His allusion to the fall is not developed – the sentence begun at Rom. 5.12 is left incomplete. It seems that his primary purpose in this passage is to accentuate the universal significance of Christ’s work. The grace of God here enacted is directed towards all who have sinned, both Jews and Gentiles. The gospel annuls and overcomes the effects of Adam’s disobedience through the death and resurrection of Christ. The text is primarily soteriological, not protological; it concerns the salvation wrought by Christ, rather than a causal explanation of sin and death.28 Nevertheless, now referenced in the New Testament, this story assumes a particular significance for later Christian theology in articulating not only the work of Christ but also in explaining how the creation, originally declared good in Genesis 1, could be riven with disease, violence, sin, suffering, and death. For Augustine, the fall story is assigned a maximal significance in the drama of creation and redemption. The contrast between the initial felicity of the first human couple in Eden and the subsequent misery of their postlapsarian condition is accentuated. The sentence of death and hell now falls upon not only Adam and Eve, but also upon every human being descended from them. The curse of the fall is apparent both in the disorderly and unruly nature that humanity inherits and in the guilt that attaches to this condition. This places humanity under the punishment of the first death, when body and soul are sundered, and the second death, in which the eternal damnation of hell is suffered. Only divine grace working through Christ can provide liberation. The attractions of this account are manifold. As a pivotal event, the fall can explain how a good creation rapidly descended into a disorderly state. In stressing the depravity of the human condition, the fall story points to the only remedy – grace. And by incorporating the story of sin into the wider economy of salvation, the fall doctrine has shaped other elements of the Christian world view, including its account of the sacraments, sanctification, election, the subordination of women (following 1 Tim. 2.14), and the immaculate conception of Mary. With their different understandings of divine grace and mercy, neither Judaism nor Islam has perceived the fall story to be as significant. Notwithstanding its appeal, the account faces formidable difficulties. Most obvious is the tendency to read the story of Genesis 3 as historical rather than parabolic. Its literary features reflect mythological elements from the Ancient Near East – magical trees, angelic guards, and a talking serpent. These suggest symbolic rather than historical readings. The presence of the serpent – a traditional symbol of evil – in the garden already signifies a creation threatened by hostile forces. And much of the Hebrew scriptures, especially the Psalms and the wisdom literature, continue to celebrate the goodness of the created order in its present condition. In any case, the current understanding of cosmic origins and animal evolution indicates that the conditions that produced disease, conflict, and death were already inherent in the world long before the emergence of the human species. Postulation of an original human pair created in a state of moral and physical perfection is untenable as a historical hypothesis, given the long process of hominid evolution over millions of years. In his 1924 Bampton Lectures on the history of the fall doctrine, N. P. Williams noted that the underlying attraction of the fall doctrine was its capacity to offer an explanation for the

James Dunn speaks about Paul’s use of the ‘language of universal experience, not of cosmic speculation’. See James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1–8 (Dallas: Word Books, 1988), 272. 28

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emergence of forms of evil in a creation that originally lacked these features.29 By appealing to the voluntary defection of a good creation, the fall doctrine could exonerate God without recourse to a cosmic dualism such as Manichaeism. Sin, suffering, and death could be attributed to Adam, Eve, and their progeny, without detriment to the purity of the original creation and its architect. But the fall story is best interpreted parabolically as a transition from moral infancy to an awareness of corporate guilt and responsibility. It characterizes the condition of each human being as ‘fallen’ from what is intended by God. Sin entails both a condition into which human beings are born and a sequence of actions for which they bear responsibility. In underscoring the solidarity of the human condition, the story should caution individuals against thinking of their neighbours as worse than themselves.30 In prefacing the subsequent history of Genesis, the fall brings the whole human race under the providence of God and is situated within the history of salvation. The reality of sin is disclosed amid a story of grace, even if Genesis 3 does not supply information about humanity’s primeval origins. And, by locating human beings amid a creation that shares a creaturely vulnerability to disease, suffering, and death, the story sets human creatures in close proximity to other creatures.31

Creation and hope In affirming the goodness of the world and a providentially ordered history, creation is a hopeful doctrine. Yet contemporary thought often appears to find the idea of creation more plausible than that of resurrection. The need to explain the origin of the world inclines one towards the notion of God as creator. As source rather than end, God is more intuitively grasped – this might explain the ongoing attraction of an attenuated deism. Belief in the raising of the dead seems harder to sustain in the face of speculative questions about where or how God’s creatures can live again, and many of the traditional images can be speculative, naïve, or sentimental. Three types of consideration are relevant here. The first concerns divine power. If God can create ex nihilo, then God also has the means to restore life to the dead – this seems a reasonable assumption to make. To this extent, resurrection becomes no more implausible than is creation as a modality of divine action. This consequence of divine power is implicit in Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones (Ezek. 37.114) and is also stressed in the Qur’an (75.40): ‘Does He who can do this not have the power to bring the dead back to life.’ Both Augustine and Martin Luther (1483–1546) comment on how resurrection is neither more nor less mysterious than is creation:

See Norman P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin: A Historical and Critical Study, Being Eight Lectures Delivered before the University of Oxford, in the Year 1924, on the Foundation of the Rev. John Bampton, Canon of Salisbury (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1927). 30 ‘T h is doctrine teaches us to think no worse of others, than of ourselves: it teaches us, that we are all, as we are by nature, companions in a miserable helpless condition: which, under a revelation of the divine mercy, tends to promote mutual compassion.’ Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 3: Original Sin, ed. Clyde A. Holbrook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 424. 31 For a reconstruction of the doctrine of original sin along these lines, see Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 2:231–76. 29

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Since God is able to bring forth from the water the heaven and the stars, the size of which either equals or surpasses that of the earth; likewise, since He is able out of a droplet of water to create sun and moon, could He not also defend my body against enemies . . . or, after it has been placed in the grave, revive it for a new life.32 A related argument invokes divine love. If creation is the outflowing of the essential love of God, then why would it end? Human lives are all too often extinguished early and without fulfilment. Does the love of God cease? Or must there not be ways, however mysterious, in which human beings are not only sustained in being but brought to redemption? In his study of everlasting life, John Baillie posits a ‘syllogism of hope’ that develops this thought: Major premis: God is Omnipotent Love. Minor premis: Something of intrinsic value resides in human personality. Conclusion: Therefore, God will preserve the persons whom God loves and values.33 Baillie points out that belief in both premises requires a significant commitment on the part of the believer, particularly with respect to the love of God. He goes on to say this is not acquired through abstract speculation or deduction, but in the multifaceted task of loving God and one’s neighbour. The practice of the Christian life thus enables one to be hopeful of the future. Moreover, if one extends the second premis to include not merely human individuality but all creaturely forms, then the argument can also work for the preservation and renewal of creation itself. In this way, Baillie’s argument can be enlarged beyond its Kantian anthropocentrism to a more holistic vision for all creation. A third element of Christian hope proceeds from faith in the resurrection of Christ. In several New Testament passages, this is already integrated with reflection on the first and second creation. The raising of Jesus from the dead is not an isolated event but the harbinger of a new age that encompasses the entire cosmos (1 Cor. 15.20). In Jesus, creation has both its source and end (Col. 1.18). He is the first and the last, the one who is alive for ever (Rev. 1.18). With its embodied character, the resurrection determines the material dimensions of creaturely existence. Disrupting expectations, the resurrection has the character of surprise, yet it also provides reassurance of the goodness of creation. The garden of the empty tomb in which Jesus meets Mary (Jn 20) recalls the first garden of Adam and Eve (Gen. 2). Creation is now seen in the light of resurrection and, therefore, also as a doctrine of hope that looks both backwards and forwards.

The natural environment Thomas Aquinas discusses why God did not create only one species. He answers that a variety of creatures is a more fitting expression of God’s wisdom and splendour than a more monotonous

Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Volume 1: Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 1–5, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, trans. George V. Schick (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1958), 49. 33 See John Baillie, And the Life Everlasting (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 157–97. 32

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world.34 This seems right, though whether Christian theology has paid sufficient attention to the implications of this insight is doubtful. Too much of the tradition has been punctuated with proprietorial attitudes towards non-human animals, reflecting an assumption that the world has been given to human beings for their welfare. In part, this is already a danger inherent in the text of Gen. 1.26 with its granting of human dominion over other creatures. The Hebrew verb radah has militarist connotations that can suggest that non-human animals are disposable in whatever ways are humanly useful. Practices of subordination without due attention to the ethical status of non-human animals have also been reinforced by an overdetermination of the aforementioned imago Dei. If possessing an immortal soul sets human creatures apart from all other creatures of the earth, then a moral divide is generated that can quickly lead to the diminution of non-human animal significance.35 The term ‘anthropocentrism’ has recently been introduced to name and identify a besetting problem of the tradition. In its most potent form, it describes the view that the world has been made for human beings, with other animals existing only in a supportive or instrumental capacity. Weaker forms of anthropocentrism may be more defensible; for example, those that argue against biotic egalitarianism or maintain that it was necessary for the Word of God to be incarnate as a human being. Yet the introduction of this term – is it the most recent heresy to be named in Christian theology? – has generated a hermeneutic of suspicion around historical and contemporary attitudes towards other creatures. A recent focus of study, the theology of animals has become a major theme in the work of several scholars. Of course, to suggest that earlier generations lacked a proper affinity with their fellow creatures would be an egregious mistake. The study of human evolution points to how symbiotic relationships were formed with other creatures. These often resulted in bonds of affection as well as ties of convenience. The husbanding of non-human animals generated an understanding and empathy that did not exclude their usefulness in contributing to human welfare. A recognition of ethical responsibility can be discerned even amid historical examples of wanton cruelty. When set in context, the Genesis story does not license the kind of exploitation that a narrow interpretation of dominion might otherwise imply. The original community of creation is depicted in terms of harmony and peace.36 Only later in Genesis do we read of animal predation and conflict among species. The story is crowned not by the creation of human beings on the sixth day but with the sabbath on the seventh, when God rests, having completed the work of creating ‘the heavens and the earth and all their multitude’ (Gen. 2.1). Elsewhere, the Hebrew scriptures celebrate the diversity of creatures and God’s provision of them (see Ps. 104). Jesus employs positive images of non-human animals throughout his teaching, for example, in the parable of the lost sheep (Lk. 15.3-7), the providential themes of the sermon on the mount (Mt. 6.26), and in defence of healing on the sabbath (Mt. 12.11).

See Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 47, Art. 1: ‘And because one single creature was not enough, he produced many and diverse, so that what was wanting in one expression of the divine goodness might be supplied by another, for goodness, which in God is single and all together, in creatures is multiple and scattered. Hence the whole universe less incompletely than one alone shares and represents his goodness.’ 35 See David L. Clough, On Animals. Volume 1: Systematic Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 3–25. 36 See Norbert Lohfink, Theology of the Pentateuch: Themes of the Priestly Narrative and Deuteronomy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 168–9. 34

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Reinforced by later legends surrounding his birth, the company of non-human animals is also a recurrent if unobtrusive feature of his ministry (Mk 1.12), whether in the wilderness or in entering the holy city (Mk 11.1-11). Against this backdrop, the notion of dominion should be expounded in terms of stewardship and responsible care. The role assigned to the human being as God’s representative is more akin to the pastoral function of the shepherd than that of military conquest. Admittedly, the notion of stewardship can itself function in anthropocentric ways. Critics have argued that one would do better to let creation be than to intervene as its steward. In some respects, this objection has force. There are areas of the natural world that should be left alone; considered wilderness areas, these ought to remain in their natural condition with minimum interference.37 Yet even this may require a good deal of protective legislation and active enforcement on the part of human beings. Now allied to environmental concerns, a growing body of opinion has sought to advocate vegetarianism or ethical meat-eating as the most appropriate ways to recognize the moral status of non-human animals. Popular attitudes seem quite disordered. Public attention is regularly devoted to domestic pets and other non-human animals that elicit sentimental reactions. In contrast, much less coverage is dedicated to practices of industrial farming in which nonhuman animals are bred, fed, and slaughtered to provide food at the most competitive prices. In 2008, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver attracted public opprobrium when he suggested that people consider paying more for better-housed and reared chickens. A theology alert to the co-creaturely status of non-human animals can promote a reforming of attitudes and practices. This will both draw upon and challenge its own traditions, for example, in articulating a better account of the imago Dei; Douglas John Hall’s description of the three dimensions in which God is to be imaged by humans points in this direction. The counterparts of human person’s being are other people, the wider world with its rich diversity of species, and God, who is humanity’s maker. Hall argues that only by living well in all three dimensions can one live well in any of these.38 Personalist philosophy and theology have long argued that human beings only become themselves in relation to other people and to God. There is no ‘I’ without a ‘You’ in which one realizes one’s identity as fundamentally relational.39 This insight should be extended beyond the human to include all creaturely reality. Human persons exist also in relation to the natural world of which they are a part – this has its own value within a network of relationships. Human connections with land and with other animals are constitutive of human lives and, when properly ordered, are conducive to human well-being. Ecological justice is imperative both for the rest of creation and for humankind’s imaging God as intended. Yet, apart from human creatures, the world has its own value and dignity before God. By being itself, ‘nature’ offers its testimony and praise to its maker.40 Construed in this way, adopting a reverential attitude towards nature can elicit a proper sense of humans’ identity as dwellers in the natural world rather than as marauders.41

See Bauckham, Bible and Ecology. See Douglas John Hall, Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1987), 123–8. 39 See, for example, John Macmurray, Persons in Relation (London: Faber & Faber, 1961). 40 See Bauckham, Bible and Ecology, 80. 41 See Erazim V. Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 89–109. 37 38

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Much of what has already been argued with respect to other creatures applies mutatis mutandis to the physical environment. The welfare of human and other creatures cannot be divided from the ecology of the natural world. As taught in the Hebrew scriptures, resources can be marshalled for a more holistic understanding of the earth, its myriad life forms, and human responsibility for its care. Later, Christian understanding of the Word become flesh and the resurrection of the body affirm the physical order and its place in the divine drama of creation and redemption. Yet the ecological deficit in much Christian thinking may be the result of some structural issues that require investigation. The tendency to move too swiftly from the story of creation to that of redemption has resulted in the occluding of the former by the latter. The natural world is here reduced to a stage on which a drama is enacted. The stage then becomes largely incidental to the dynamics of the story – this danger may lurk in Karl Barth’s description of creation as ‘the external basis’ of the covenant.42 This tendency is already present in the creeds and the liturgy, which often shift rapidly from a declaration of God as creator to the story of salvation. Too little has been said about the world to which human beings belong with other creatures. As a missionary religion that spread throughout the Gentile world, Christianity was never identified with a single ethnic grouping or portion of land. While this enabled its translation into different languages and cultures, some dislocation from the natural world may have resulted. This was accentuated by a tendency to think of Christians as having here no abiding city but instead seeking a heavenly destination (see Heb. 13.14). Although a powerful metaphor during times of persecution and uprooting, it could also generate the unintended impression that the natural world was merely a temporary staging post destined to pass away in the state of glory. A further factor in this partial neglect of the theology of the natural world was the anxiety around immanentist or pantheist patterns of thought that threatened to invest created realities with sacral powers. If the world itself were viewed as spiritually enchanted, then a regression to earlier forms of paganism might be likely. But, for obvious reasons, this was resisted or at least viewed with suspicion by official church teaching. This critique, of course, has its limitations. There are many counterexamples from across the history of theology of attention devoted to the created world – for example, the abundance of early church commentaries on the six days, the influence of Franciscan spirituality, Julian of Norwich’s reflection on the mystery of the hazelnut, Calvin’s fascination with the cosmos as the ‘theatre of God’s glory’, and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins with its stress on ‘inscape’. These need to be retrieved and inflected to promote a spiritual practice of discerning the presence of God throughout nature. If Christ is the Word of God by whom all things were created, humans should not be fearful of such practice leading them astray from the central focus of faith. Yet a broader scope is required to understand Jesus’ teaching and link it to wisdom traditions found in Israel and other cultures. Creationtide merits stronger emphasis in the liturgical calendar, while the church’s relationship to the arts needs strengthening. Much recent impetus to a more holistic theology and spirituality has been given by Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’:

See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), §41.2. 42

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Everything is related, and we human beings are united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love God has for each of his creatures and which also unites us in fond affection with brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth.43 Theology, set within the life of the church, might best contribute to ethical responsibility for the environment by paying closer attention to the spiritual significance of the material, and not merely as it impinges upon human welfare. Given the urgent need to protect the ecosystems of planet earth, the doctrine of creation is set to remain at the forefront of theological reflection throughout the twenty-first century.

Further reading Anderson, Gray A. and Markus Bockmuehl, eds. Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Barton, Stephen C. and David Wilkinson, eds. Reading Genesis after Darwin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Bauckham, Richard. Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2010. Burrell, David B., Carlo Cogliati, Janet M. Soskice and William R. Stoeger, eds. Creation and the God of Abraham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Clough, David L. On Animals. Volume 1: Systematic Theology. London: T&T Clark, 2012. Fergusson, David. Creation. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014. Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, 2003. Pope Francis. Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015.

Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015), 45 (§92). 43

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I TEXTS AND TRADITIONS

CHAPTER 1 SABBATH AND LAND

Daniel R. Driver

Introduction Considered individually, sabbath and land are major topics in their own right. Simply in terms of biblical texts, an investigation of sabbath would need to account for creation and the Flood (Gen. 1.1–2.3; 6–9); Israel’s hunger in the wilderness and God’s gift of bread from heaven (Exod. 16); the sabbath commandment in the Decalogue, including parallel rationales that make it a memorial of creation (20.8-11) or an observance tied to redemption from slavery in Egypt (Deut. 5.12-15); other legal traditions in Exodus (Exod. 31.12-17; 34.21); the sabbath’s link to various festivals (Lev. 16.31; 23), sabbatical years (Lev. 25.1-7), and the year of Jubilee (Lev. 25.8-24); consequences for sabbath breaking, up to and including capital punishment (Exod. 35.2; Num. 15.32-36) and national exile (Lev. 26; 2 Chron. 36.21); Isaiah’s complex message across sixty-six chapters about the sabbath as empty and unendurable by God (Isa. 1.13), yet also, for all who keep it rightly, an institution of lasting beatitude (Isa. 56.1-8), delight in God (Isa. 58.13-14), and right worship in the whole created order (Isa. 66.23); Jeremiah’s sermon about commerce in the gates of Jerusalem on the sabbath (Jer. 17.19-27); Ezekiel’s stress on the sabbath as a sign (Ezek. 20.12-24), hallmark of profanation (Ezek. 22.8-26; 23.38), and instrument of renewal (Ezek. 44.24; 45.17; 46.1-4, 12); other prophetic critiques (Hos. 2.13; Amos 8.5); a song for the sabbath (Ps. 92); a lamentation for the same (Lam. 2.6); and the recontextualization of sabbath in Nehemiah (Neh. 9.14), with the public oath (Neh. 10.32-34) and struggle (Neh. 13.15-22) to restore its observance. In the New Testament, one finds, in addition, controversies that arise from the action and teaching of Jesus, who declares himself ‘lord of the sabbath’ (Mt. 12.8; Mk 2.28; Lk. 6.5); a consistent record of Paul, Barnabas, and other Christians who habitually gather, teach, and argue on the sabbath (Acts 13.14, 27, 42, 44; 15.21; 16.13; 17.2; 18.4), just as Jesus had done; a somewhat ambiguous remark about gathering ‘on the first day of the week’ (Acts 20.7); and an affirmation that ‘sabbath rest’ (Heb. 4.9), instituted by God in creation and withheld from Israel in judgement, lies not in the past but rather in the future. Biblical traditions about land are still more complex. They include the first emergence of dry land from primordial waters at God’s call (Gen. 1.9), the return of water in a cosmic flood of judgement (Gen. 6.13, 17), and the reappearance of land under the sign of a rainbow, which betokens ‘the covenant between [God] and the earth [hāʾāreṣ]’ (Gen. 9.13). They also include the emergence of the first man, Adam, ‘from the dust of the ground [hāʾaḏāmâ ]’ (Gen. 2.7), that human from humus, whose wayward offspring God indicts in the Flood, resolving poetically to ‘wipe out the human [ʾemḥê ʾeṯ-hāʾāḏam]’ that he especially created by removing ‘from the face of the ground the groundling [mēꜥal penê hāʾaḏāmâ mēʾāḏam]’,

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along with the earth’s other creatures (Gen. 6.7).1 Adam himself hears God speak a curse that falls not on him but on the ground, out of which he is fashioned, to which he is bound as dust (Gen. 3.17-18), and from which his firstborn son, Cain, is further alienated as a ‘rootless rover on the earth’ (Gen. 4.12) because God hears Abel’s blood cry out ‘from the ground’ (Gen. 4.10). Striking in the early chapters of Genesis is the extent to which land is bound up with other major biblical themes such as creation, blessing, commandment, work, food, obedience, curse, exile, sin, death, bloodshed, judgement, mercy, sacrifice, and covenant. In contrast to sabbath, it would be impossible to outline the biblical profile that land has after Genesis 1–9 in just a few compound sentences. Land is one of the most prominent themes in the Hebrew Bible, making an impact almost everywhere through its presence or absence. Shlomo Dov Goitein (1900–85) exaggerates only slightly by saying that ‘the entire Bible is one long story with one theme: how the people of Israel merited the land of Israel, how they lost it, and how they regained it’.2 Considered together, sabbath and land converge in various ways. A few biblical texts rise to prominence. Other possible points of contact are more elusive. Land is central to God’s promises to the patriarchs, for example, but their own presence in it is tenuous. How is God’s covenant with the earth connected to God’s covenant with Abraham and his seed? Abraham is called to leave his native land in favour of ‘the land that [God] will show’ him, where he and his descendants will be established with abundant blessing (Gen. 12.1-3). Sabbath observance is not in view for Abraham (though see Gen. 26.3-5). How much beatitude does he enjoy in Canaan? He builds altars when the land is pledged to his heirs (Gen. 12.7; 13.14-18), and God makes a covenant with him about it (Gen. 15.18-20; cf. Gen. 17.8); however, he only lives there as a resident alien. He passes through on the way to Egypt, where he stays for a time before returning to traverse Canaan, where again he sojourns. The only promised land he acquires is the burial plot that he purchases from Ephron the Hittite for 400 shekels (Gen. 23.1-20), which, not incidentally, amounts to one piece of silver for every year that his ‘offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs’ (Gen. 15.13). Genesis 15 makes several important statements about Abraham, his ‘recompense’ (Gen. 15.1), and his offspring. The sequence in verses 13-16 is especially suggestive of rest in the land on which he stands. God forecasts judgement on the nation that will enslave Abraham’s offspring abroad, who, much as Abraham had left Egypt (Gen. 12.16-20), will leave the unspecified land with ‘great wealth’ (Gen. 15.14). God also tells Abraham that he will have a peaceful death and a good burial (Gen. 15.15), and that the offspring will return to the present land after ‘the iniquity of the Amorites is . . . complete’ (Gen. 15.16). How is the final peace (šālôm) of Abraham linked to the full measure (šālēm) of sin by the land’s current occupants? The land is not said to observe a sabbath, but Gen. 15.13-16 is redolent of the land–sabbath

‘Wordplay pervades the Book of Genesis’ (Samuel L. Bray and John F. Hobbins, Genesis 1–11: A New Old Translation for Readers, Scholars, and Translators [Wilmore: GlossaHouse, 2017], 14), but it is rarely possible to translate. Robert Alter uses ‘human’ and ‘humus’ to capture some of the play with Adam’s name, if only in Gen. 2.7. See Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 8. Translations in this chapter are the author’s own unless otherwise indicated. They sometimes include transliterations of key words like ʾereṣ (land, earth, territory, country) and ʾaḏāmâ (land, ground, soil, territory). 2 Cited in David Frankel, The Land of Canaan and the Destiny of Israel: Theologies of Territory in the Hebrew Bible (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 1. 1

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theology of Leviticus. What is required for Israel to ‘live on the land securely’ (Lev. 25.18) or for God to ‘give peace in the land’ (Lev. 26.6)? These questions can almost be glimpsed on the horizon. Abraham, meanwhile, humbles himself ‘before the people of the land’ (Gen. 23.12) and insists on paying ‘full price’ (Gen. 23.9) for a field in the land that has already been vouchsafed to him. The burial of Sarah in the cave of Machpelah (Gen. 23.19), followed by Abraham and others down to Jacob (Gen. 25.9; 35.29; 49.31; 50.13), may show how the ancestors of Israel were rewarded. As Gerhard von Rad has it: ‘In death they were heirs and no longer “strangers”.’3 The family tomb also highlights the extent to which land promises remain unfulfilled in Genesis. Before his death in Egypt, where he is embalmed, Joseph makes his brothers swear to take his bones along when God ‘bring[s] you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ (Gen. 50.24). Moses fulfils half of the oath by carrying Joseph’s bones out of Egypt in the Exodus (Exod. 13.19), but Moses himself dies just outside the land, in Moab, where he is buried in a place known only to God (Deut. 34.5-6). Israel’s status in the land is simply too provisional for it to offer a final resting place for most. Indeed, Genesis is the only book in the Pentateuch in which the nation spends any time there. The Law of Moses comprehends Israel’s life in the land, including the institution of a monarchy (Deut. 17.14-20). In canonical presentation, however, all such laws are framed as anticipating conditions that do not yet obtain. Deuteronomy 12.9 describes entry into the land as an entry ‘into the rest [menûḥâ] and possession [naḥalâ]’ that remains outside the narrative present. Deuteronomy’s idiom for the suspension of land-specific laws while outside the land is by far the most developed in the Pentateuch, with its studied emphasis on ‘the place that the Lord your God will choose out of all your tribes, to put his name there, as his dwelling’ (Deut. 12.5). Variations on that circumlocution recur more than twenty times, with about half concentrated in chapters 12 and 16. Reduction of the formula to a crass policy for cultic centralization obscures the extent to which the Torah is purposefully constructed to comprehend life outside the land as well as in it. If one includes Joseph’s charge to his brothers about his bones, then all five books of Moses contain at least traces of qualified expatriate stipulation (in addition to Gen. 50.24-26 and most of Deuteronomy, see Exod. 12.25; Lev. 19.23; 23.10; 25.2; Num. 15.18; 34.2). At one level, the framing is necessary because the generation that experiences the Exodus is prohibited from entering the land (Num. 14.23, 30; 20.12, 24). At another level, the framing makes the Torah relevant to all generations of Israel, regardless of location. For as much as the land of Canaan belongs to the identity of Israel, it is astonishing how much the Bible contemplates land at a distance. The Former Prophets begin and end outside the land, for example, creating a picture of land tenure almost the inverse of what Goitein describes for the Bible as a whole. On reflection, it does not seem an extraordinary leap for Abraham Heschel to conclude that the essence of sabbath is the sanctification of time first, and space last.4 He goes further by

Gerhard von Rad, Genesis, rev. edn, trans. John H. Marks (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1972), 250. Here von Rad makes the memorable comment that Genesis 23 ‘contains a preview of our relationship to the saving benefit promised to us, the new life in Christ into which we also bear’ (250). Less impressive are his remarks about the attachment to land, among other ‘this-worldly saving benefits’, which shows ‘[h]ow little ancient Israel’s faith was satisfied with the blessings of a spiritual relationship to God’ (249). 4 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951), 10. 3

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suggesting that sabbath makes Judaism a religion of time rather than space, but it is true that, in the Bible, sabbath and land do not have an equal relationship.

The creation of sabbath and land Although the syntax of the Bible’s first sentence has been a matter of debate since the time of Rashi (1040–1105), it is frequently and rightly noted that Gen. 1.1 has exactly seven words. The verse seems to go out of its way to establish a premonitory word count by using a pair of definite direct object markers, both superfluous, both without any other obvious purpose. Curiously, the common Hebrew particle ʾēṯ is mirrored in the Peshitta, which uses the archaic particle yāṯ twice in Gen. 1.1 and nowhere else in its translation of the Pentateuch.5 It may reflect an obscure memory preserved in Syriac, a dialect of Eastern Aramaic, that the Hebrew wording of Gen. 1.1 is just so for a reason – although that reason, whatever it was, seems to have been lost on Ephrem the Syrian.6 But if word count is among the key features of Gen. 1.1, one might replicate it in English translation as follows: ‘At first God created heaven and earth.’7 In addition, Gen. 1.2 has fourteen words, and Gen. 2.1-3, the account’s seventh marked paragraph (parashah petuḥah) according to the Masoretic presentation, has thirty-five words – all multiples of seven. That paragraph frames three heptads between two verses of uneven length so that the full narrative culminates in a regimented coda of five-, seven-, seven-, seven-, and nine-word verses. This aspect of the passage is not translatable, but overt stress on ‘the seventh day’ is emphatic enough to make the theme obvious: Thus were finished heaven and earth, and their full array – So God finished, on the seventh day, the work that he made; So he rested, on the seventh day, from all the work that he made; So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it – For on it he rested from all the work that God created, in order to make it. (Gen. 2.1-3)

Michael Weitzman argues that the particle yāṯ is archaic rather than borrowed, and he reports that it is used a total of nineteen times in the Peshitta: in Qohelet (eleven times), Song of Songs (five times), 1 Chron. 4.41 (one time), and Gen. 1.1 (two times). He notes how, in Genesis and 1 Chronicles, the translator appears to have ‘abandoned [the form] as archaic almost immediately, and switched to contemporary usage’. Michael P. Weitzman, The Syriac Version of the Old Testament: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 123. He also observes that the Peshitta comes closest of all ancient translations to the Hebrew of Gen. 1.1. See Weitzman, The Syriac Version of the Old Testament, 89. 6 Ephrem the Syrian construes the word as ‘substance’. Ephrem the Syrian, Selected Prose Works, ed. Kathleen McVey, trans. Edward G. Mathews, Jr. and Joseph P. Amar (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 74n20. Gideon Goldenberg sees that Ephrem misunderstands the verse because the translation ‘offers a non-Syriac version which as it is makes little sense’. Gideon Goldenberg, ‘Bible Translations and Syriac Idiom’, in The Peshitta as a Translation: Papers Read at the II Peshitta Symposium, Held at Leiden, 19–21 August 1993, ed. Piet B. Dirksen and A. van der Kooij (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 29. Cf. Weitzman, The Syriac Version of the Old Testament, 253. 7 Michaela Bauks argues that the verse is a motto that ends in an anacoluthon. Michaela Bauks, Die Welt am Anfang: Zum Verhältnis von Vorwelt und Weltentstehung in Gen 1 und in der altorientalischen Literatur (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1997), 83–92. 5

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The italicized words show how the subject and object of Gen. 1.1 are repeated in reverse order in Gen. 2.1a and 2.3b. The work announced ‘at first’ is now ‘finished’. The absence of direct object markers in Gen. 2.1a, where the phrase ‘heaven and earth’ is otherwise aligned with Gen. 1.1b, is offset by the balance of the final paragraph.8 In short, the primordial waters of the deep in Gen. 1.2 are presided over by more than divine breath. They, together with the created order that unfolds in the six-day workweek of Gen. 1.3-31, are set within an expansive vision of primordial sabbath. Writing in the early twentieth century, Umberto Cassuto (1883–1951) lays out a ‘system of numerical harmony’ in the creation story: ‘Not only is the number seven fundamental to its main theme, but it also serves to determine many of its details.’9 Cassuto multiplies examples, citing more than a dozen instances of words, phrases, and patterns that occur seven times, or a factor of seven times, including the terms ‘God’, ‘heaven’, ‘earth’, ‘light’, ‘day’, ‘water’, and ‘living beasts’. While not all of his totals can be sustained without special pleading, enough of them can be to justify his conclusion: ‘To suppose that all this is a mere coincidence is not possible.’10 His analysis of heptads stands independent of his broader rejection of source criticism, too. It ought to have crushed the notion, still rehearsed in introductory textbooks, that Genesis 1 shoehorns eight creative acts into six days to make room for an awkwardly imposed sabbath framework. The sabbatical pattern is no incidental feature of creation in Genesis. Rather, its presence is elemental and all-pervasive. More recently, Ellen Davis has drawn attention to the centrality of land in Genesis 1.11 She observes how the rhythm of the creation poem, which is initially quick and regular, slows and becomes more awkward after land appears, is named ‘earth’, and is seen as good (Gen. 1.9-10). Action from here to the end of chapter 1, including the formation and blessing of humans, is surrounded with vegetation: sprouts sprout, seeds seed, fruit trees fruit (Gen. 1.11-12), and these good things are given as food to all creatures upon the earth (Gen. 1.29-30). ‘The whole description of the dry land is marked off by lengthy notices about plants.’12 Davis connects details about seeds in chapter 1 to the land of Israel, the subsequent narrative in chapters 2–3, and the present ecological crisis. The earth, listed first with a few other primordial elements in Gen. 1.2, acquires a quasi-divine status because of its prodigious flourishing: ‘Genesis 1 represents the earth as the primary acting subject, second only to God.’13 Some of Davis’ best insights turn on her recognition that the earth is a macrocosm of the land of Canaan, a point suggested by God’s command to humans to ‘fill the earth and conquer [weḵiḇšuhā] it’ (Gen. 1.28). The word for ‘conquer’ can be a goad as well as a source of encouragement to those without firm footing on the land, she argues: ‘From first to last, the Priestly tradition

Definite articles, which appear in Gen. 2.1 just as in 1.1, are omitted for the sake of parallelism. Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part One: From Adam to Noah, trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1961), 12. Cassuto finds support in Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 66–8. 10 Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, 15. 11 See Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 42–65. 12 Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, 48. 13 Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, 57. 8 9

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reckons with the harsh realities of exile and land loss.’14 On the one hand, the text of Gen. 1.28 states that humans have a role in advancing the created order. On the other hand, the subtext of the verse ‘is that land, the habitable earth, can be lost in penalty for disobedience’.15 On this reading, God’s instruction to ‘conquer it’ reveals something crucial about human responsibility in ancient Israel for the status of its life in the land of Canaan and also today for life on planet Earth. Cassuto and Davis read Genesis with different ends in view, yet their insights can be integrated. The canonical shape of Gen. 1.1–2.3 puts sabbath and land in a hierarchical relationship in which sabbath presides. Cassuto suggests, first, that creation is most deeply ordered by God’s own sabbath, which frames heaven and earth and God’s work in them. Sabbath scaffolding puts the special position of human beings in a certain literary, cultural, and religious context. Davis suggests, in addition, that the context for land in Gen. 1.9-30 is agrarian and ecological. Humans and all other animals on dry land are surrounded by every kind of plant; these bear the seeds and greens that God gives for food to each kind, as appropriate. The human situation under divine command in Gen. 1.28 is at once privileged and precarious, and rather closer to the exile adumbrated still more fully in chapter 3 than casual readers suppose. How, though, does God’s sabbath bear on human responsibility for life in and away from the land? Jon Levenson speculates that the creation week of Genesis became detached from annual re-enactments of creation in the cult, formerly observed, perhaps, as enthronement festivals in the autumn or spring.16 Similarly, Matitiahu Tsevat sees ‘that the sabbath stands somewhat apart from the other phenomena of Israelite religion. . . . Having no bond with nature other than the change of day and night, the sabbatical cycle is indifferent to the harmony of the universe’.17 Its deep logic is found not in the Bible’s various rationales for sabbath observance but in ‘the idea of the absolute sovereignty of God’.18 Tsevat’s conclusion is sound. Yet about Gen. 1.1–2.3, it might be truer to say that the Priestly author presents a sevenfold litany as the hidden pattern by which the sovereign God of Israel establishes the harmony in the universe. Creation’s seven-day cycle is the seedbed of all seeds. If, as Davis has it, ‘the earth [is] the primary acting subject, second only to God’, then rest on the seventh day is the thing that shows God’s transcendence over all acting subjects. Land may be close to God, but sabbath is closer still. Again, God may own the land (so Lev. 25.23), but God hallows the seventh day (Gen. 2.3; Exod. 20.11), and while the creatures made in God’s image fill the earth, God abides in sabbath rest. Do sabbath and land ever meet in the Bible’s most prominent text about both, or are they related merely as container and contents? The implication of their conjunction, together with the divine charge to humans on the land, might well be that people are meant to rule the earth by maintaining God’s sabbath on it. To say as much is to go beyond what Genesis 1 makes explicit, though not the Hebrew Bible. As the Chronicler states, Israel was exiled to Babylon

Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, 61. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, 63. 16 See Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 72–7: ‘The annual renewal of the world has become a weekly event’ (77). 17 Matitiahu Tsevat, ‘The Basic Meaning of the Biblical Sabbath’, Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 84, no. 4 (1972): 456–7. 18 Tsevat, ‘The Basic Meaning of the Biblical Sabbath’, 458. 14 15

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‘until the land [hāʾāreṣ] enjoyed its sabbath’ in full measure (2 Chron. 36.21; cf. Lev. 26.34, 43). Also, Noah observes a global sabbatical year and weeks of re-creation during the Flood.

Flood waters over the earth ‘As far as Israel is concerned, sabbath rest and restfulness is not a biblical commandment.’19 Rather, biblical sabbath concerns God’s rest, and the land’s rest, and Israel’s surrender of work, and its memory of national slavery, and the rest that is accorded by extension to Israel’s slaves (Deut. 5.14). Physical rest for free Israelites is, at best, an afterthought. Hence Abraham Heschel invokes the Bible as his grounds for rejecting Philo’s apology for the sabbath as an institution to make the Jewish workforce of Alexandria more efficient. For Heschel, the sabbath ‘is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor’.20 This is not to say, however, that nobody in the Bible ever rests to maintain the sabbath. Noah’s name means ‘rest’, after all, and, in the Flood, he and the earth clearly observe some manner of sabbath rest. Officially, Noah’s name is connected to his toil as the world’s first viticulturist. He is ‘a man of the soil [ʾiš hāʾaḏāmâ]’ (Gen. 9.20) and the first person to get drunk (Gen. 9.21). His father, Lamech, calls him Noah because ‘he will console us [yenaḥamēnû] from our work and from our sore hands, from the soil that the Lord cursed’ (Gen. 5.29). The etymology, drawn from a word that shares just two of its three root letters with nōaḥ, indicates relief from manual labour on the land under curse, not rest or sabbath. But important biblical names are often invested with multiple meanings. When one reads that ‘Noah found favour [ḥēn] with God’ (Gen. 6.8), one is probably meant to appreciate that ‘favour’ is Noah’s name backwards. Noah’s link to sabbath rest becomes more transparent as the story reaches its climax. After the Flood, Noah makes a burnt offering with one of every clean animal and bird on the planet. The aroma is not just ‘pleasing’ to God but, with a wordplay on Noah, ‘restful [nı̂ ḥōaḥ]’ (Gen. 8.21). Moreover, the smell prompts God to say: ‘I will never ever curse the land [hāʾaḏāmâ] again because of the human [hāʾāḏām] . . . , nor will I ever again strike down every creature, as I did. Never again in all the earth’s days will seed and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night cease’ (Gen. 8.21-22; cf. Gen. 2.3). One could as well say ‘rest’ as ‘cease’, except for the association of rest with Noah in chapter 8.21 Smelling Noah’s sacrifice, God’s first act after the Flood is to suspend cosmic sabbath indefinitely. The world will not cease again for as long as it lasts. The strong implication is that seeds, seasons, and times did stop during the Flood. Noah is 500 years old when he begets Shem, Ham, and Japheth (Gen. 5.32). He is 600 years old when the Flood covers the earth (Gen. 7.6). The simplest solution to the problem of Shem’s age – he is ‘one hundred years old when he bore Arpachshad two years after the Flood’ (Gen. 11.10) – is to see that time does not pass as usual on the ark. Shem does not age while aboard.22 Also,

Tsevat, ‘The Basic Meaning of the Biblical Sabbath’, 451. Heschel, The Sabbath, 14. 21 Bray and Hobbins, Genesis 1–11, 170. 22 Or, perhaps, not while afloat, as argued in Philippe Guillaume, Land and Calendar: The Priestly Document from Genesis 1 to Joshua 18 (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 57, 73–4. However, Guillaume’s decision to cut the knot of biblical chronology in places, including by substituting LXX numbers to round out a count of seven months after the ark strikes ground, makes his reconstruction of Pg’s chronology difficult to accept. 19 20

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Noah’s round years suggest that the full measure of time had come for a cancellation of seed and harvest. He lives 600 years before, plus half of 700 years after the Flood (Gen. 9.28), the duration of which does not add to his total age, either. Yet time’s pause in the Flood does not mean that the land’s sabbatical passes unmarked. Three times Noah sends out a dove. He sends it ‘to see if the waters had ebbed from the face of the ground’ (Gen. 8.8), just after the narrator specifies when the ark ‘rested [root nûaḥ]’ (Gen. 8.3), to the very month and day, and, with the same calendrical precision, when ‘the heads [root rōʾš] of the mountains appeared’ (Gen. 8.4). The sight of peaks recalls the surfacing of dry land in the beginning (cf. Gen. 1.1, 9). The dove returns to Noah first because it cannot find ‘rest [mānôaḥ] for its foot’ (Gen. 8.9). After a week, it returns again with a torn olive leaf in its mouth (Gen. 8.11), bringing proof of the ebb tide, and indicating the simultaneous renewal of green food for its kind and edible seeds for humankind (cf. Gen. 1.29-30; 6.21). Finally, after another week, the bird flies away for good. Its flights encompass major elements of the third and fifth days of creation. Significantly, between each dispatch Noah marks seven days: ‘Again [ꜥôḏ] he waited seven days further [ʾaḥērı̂ m]’ (Gen. 8.10, 12). The wording is identical in both verses, which adds to the impression that Noah has been counting off weeks the whole time. There is ample reason to think he has been, since the formula has an antecedent in God’s instruction to board the ark one week in advance. God warns Noah that he will send rain to unmake everything the land supports after ‘another [ꜥôḏ] seven days’ (Gen. 7.4). Cycles of weeks evidently carry on from the creation week into the Flood narrative, along with some other noteworthy heptads. Among the most significant are the two that Noah counts as he waits with ‘all flesh’ (Gen. 8.17) to be restored to God’s green earth, as on creation’s sixth day. The earth’s re-creation is measured not in days, as it is in the beginning, but in the months and days added to Noah’s six centuries, and in the seven-day periodicity of the dove’s flights. Historically, the numbers of Genesis were the thin end of a wedge leading to the development of a source–critical paradigm.23 Apparently irregular dates for the Flood’s duration, and a question about whether the animals came in single pairs or sets of seven, are among the details still routinely presented as evidence for a foregone conclusion. Both problems may in fact cohere around an enacted theology of the land’s sabbath rest. First, as Philippe Guillaume notes: ‘The traditional source division between J and P is largely responsible for the failure to understand the different chronologies superposed in the Flood narrative.’24 Although the problems involved in understanding the origin and meaning of these diverse chronologies will likely remain too opaque ever to be settled in full, Guillaume demonstrates how much more consistent dates in the Flood narrative can be when they are not presumed to conflict. For example, he argues quite plausibly that the year-and-ten-day gap between the Flood’s beginning (Gen. 7.11) and end (Gen. 8.14) reflects the intercalation of a 354-day lunar calendar with a 364-day sabbatical calendar.25 His attempt to control the delimitation of a Priestly Document (Pg) by referencing calendrical matters known to be at issue in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Enoch, and Jubilees is instructive, even if his reconstruction does not persuade in every detail. Land

See Daniel R. Driver, ‘Genesis by the Numbers: A Reassessment of the Years of the Patriarchs, Beginning with the Joseph Story’, Journal of the Bible and Its Reception 6, no. 1 (2019): 67–95. 24 Guillaume, Land and Calendar, 69. 25 See Guillaume, Land and Calendar, 72. 23

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and calendar help show why, literarily, seven and sabbath are not incidental to the Flood. There is a good case to be made, too, that they carry thematic importance from the start of Genesis through the Torah and beyond, continuing at least as far as the subdivision of land in Joshua. Second, a review of Noah’s connection to time, rest, land, creation, and the number seven discloses a fresh possibility for understanding what it means that Noah was sufficiently ‘righteous in his generation’ to have ‘walked with God’ (Gen. 6.9), as Enoch did (Gen. 5.22, 24). Enoch had lived a year for each day in a solar year and then was translated. Noah, son of a man who died after 777 years, experiences a cosmic caesura at age 600. When ‘God saw the earth’ not good, as at first, but ‘ruined because all flesh had ruined its way on the earth’ (Gen. 6.12), Noah preserves life for all when the earth is covered with Flood waters ‘on the seventh day’ (Gen. 7.10). At God’s command, seven days before this, he takes onto the ark seven pairs of all clean animals, one pair of all unclean animals, and his family. At God’s command, he disembarks with his family, bringing forth (hôṣēʾ, Gen. 8.17) with him all the classes of creatures that the earth itself had brought forth (tôṣēʾ, Gen. 1.24) on day six. Without explicit instruction, he looks for land after the ark strikes ground on the seventeenth day of the seventh month, waiting seven days again and again. Without instruction, he builds an altar on which he sacrifices one of every clean animal and bird, rendering to God the seventh pair of each. The burnt offering smells like rest to God, who resolves never again to halt those cycles that make the land productive and hospitable. For a specific period of weeks, Noah floats above the land while time itself seems to wait. He walks with God in the sense that he keeps God’s time as the earth is unmade and remade through an enforced sabbath.

Implications No single figure in the Bible has more to do with sabbath and land than Noah. His name, lifespan, and time on the ark make him a man of the soil at rest. Taught by God to count seven days, he keeps time in weeks while waiting for the earth to emerge from under water. Like the land itself, he observes a sabbatical year while floating above it on the ark, and, at just the right time to recapitulate the sixth day of creation, he answers God’s command by bringing forth upon the earth all of its living creatures. When God makes a perpetual covenant with Noah and all flesh (Gen. 9.8-17), attentive readers should not be surprised to learn that the word berı̂ ṯ appears seven times. The Noahic covenant, too, underscores a Priestly theology of sabbath. Genesis 6–9 reinforces these themes of creation through re-creation; it also anticipates the priority of sabbath over land within Israel’s observance of the law. As David Frankel argues, land tends to be subordinated to law in the Hebrew Bible, though there are countertrends that pull Israelite religion in more territorial directions.26 The dominant picture is dramatized by the formal institution of sabbath law in the wilderness, where Israel must subsist between the lands of Egypt and Canaan (Exodus 16). God promises to ‘rain bread from heaven’ six days in seven, as a test of Israel’s obedience (Exod. 16.4; cf. Gen. 7.4). ‘Bread comes from heaven and is not dependent on the land, and Sabbath observance is also disconnected from life on the

See Frankel, The Land of Canaan and the Destiny of Israel, 1–76.

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land.’27 If one takes the Bible in its received form, the effect of placing Genesis 1–9 and Exodus 16 ahead of Sinai is to give sabbath observance relative priority within the law, and to give the theme of sabbath absolute priority over the theme of land. For example, the drunkenness of Noah (Gen. 9.18-27), because of distinctives and irregularities that distinguish the episode from the Flood narrative, has classically been assigned to J, or, more recently, excluded from Pg. Considered in isolation, it has no discernible theology of sabbath. To the extent that it has a theology of land, it looks more regional and nationalistic than global. Yet by being embedded within the framework of Noah’s years, which end in verses 28-29, it acquires a calendar. Occurring in sequence after creation and the Flood, it takes on associations with earlier and later parts of Genesis, too. In his person, precisely as a man of the soil, Noah evokes God’s original curse of the ground. As God plants a garden (Gen. 2.8), so Noah plants a vineyard (Gen. 9.20). As Eve and Adam eat the fruit of the tree, so Noah gets drunk on the fruit of the vine. Whereas Eve’s and Adam’s eyes were opened to their nakedness, for which they improvise loincloths (Gen. 3.7), Noah’s eyes are closed in stupor, and his body is ‘uncovered’ (Gen. 9.21) – a rare verb from the root gālāh, also associated with exposure through sexual debauchery and Israel’s removal from the land (see 2 Kgs 17.23; 25.21). His nakedness is exposed to his sons (Gen. 9.21-23). Within Genesis, their responses, notoriously difficult to parse, appear to disclose different futures on a land still touched by the curse of Adam. Perhaps like the earth after the Flood, Noah wakes from oblivion. In cursing Ham, he speaks as the land, or at least on behalf of the land, that has not ceased to suffer the sins of its human occupants. Something of the land’s old burden carries over into the postdiluvian era in the way Ham is identified with Canaan (Gen. 9.18, 22, 25-27), the people whose balance of years on the land will be disclosed to Abraham. The difference is that God has released land from its implication in human wrongdoing (Gen. 8.21). On Noah’s lips, liability for the land’s curse is transferred to its occupants. Noah blesses Shem and Japheth in different ways, but the basic point seems to be that a superlative blessing is bestowed on Shem as the one whose offspring will receive the land of Canaan in perpetuity once it is forfeit (Gen. 17.8). If so, Noah’s words to his sons mark the beginning of land as national territory subject to blessings and curses. This novel motif is tempered, though, by the overarching one that puts any discussion of land rights under sabbath obligations. The land’s sabbatical clock has been reset in the Flood, and although a second deluge has been ruled out, expulsion or exile of people from the land remains a distinct possibility. Methodologically, there is something to be gained from source-critical analysis. At the same time, its dominance in biblical studies continues to be an impediment to integrative theological study. An episode like the drunkenness of Noah does fit awkwardly in its present context, and that calls for explanation. One also wants to know what it contributes to a theology of sabbath and land. Genesis 9.18-27 seems to have something to say about land tenure in Canaan, but Guillaume excludes it from Pg, and so passes over the story in silence. Unfortunately, the situation is even more dire in the work of Norman Habel, whose commitment to a traditional source-critical division between ‘Erets and Adamah myth cycles’28 in the Flood story – P and

Frankel, The Land of Canaan and the Destiny of Israel, 53. Norman C. Habel, The Birth, the Curse and the Greening of Earth: An Ecological Reading of Genesis 1–11 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011), 90. 27 28

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J material, in other words – leaves the text dissected on the table. The tragic effect is to block access to the sabbath calendar that enhances Noah’s ties to the land’s rest during the Flood. Thankfully, a more sophisticated approach is modelled by Gary Anderson, whose study of metaphors for sin in the Bible does much to explain how the people and land of Israel can accumulate a burden of debts.29 Leviticus 25–26 presents the most developed doctrine of sabbath and land in the Bible. Although its compositional history is, by all appearances, complex, it clarifies some important points that begin to emerge in Genesis. First, the land belongs to God (Lev. 25.23). God’s ownership provides the ultimate rationale for the year of Jubilee. Second, when Israel enters the land, the land itself is bound to observe a sabbath to God (Lev. 25.2). If, in the end, Israel fails in its obligations to the land, the land will make up for its lost sabbaths in full (Lev. 26.34). Third, as Anderson argues, the escalating threats of punishment for faithlessness in the land, culminating in national exile, are reframed in Leviticus 25–26 with a purpose to renew Israel and the land: ‘Devastation of the land is no longer just a punishment but a means of securing enough years of nonuse so that the land can pay back what it owes for the Sabbath years it has not observed. And the suffering Israel must undergo is not simply a measure-for-measure punishment but rather a process of restoration.’30 Finally, it is worth remembering that all these instructions about land and sabbath are given at Mount Sinai (Lev. 25.1), far outside the land. Why does this matter? One answer is canonical, another historical. First, as Davis observes: ‘The shape of the canon means that exile is a felt reality even before Israel enters the land; the end is adumbrated at the beginning.’31 Second, as Anderson suggests, the importance of the sabbath commandment increases after Israel is removed from the land.32 Sabbath keeping is thus a way of bearing with the land in alienation from it. Like Noah’s year and weeks on the ark, it is a measure and means of purification in exile.

Further reading Anderson, Gary A. Sin: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Davis, Ellen F. Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Frankel, David. The Land of Canaan and the Destiny of Israel: Theologies of Territory in the Hebrew Bible. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2011. Guillaume, Philippe. Land and Calendar: The Priestly Document from Genesis 1 to Joshua 18. London: T&T Clark, 2009.

See Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 43–74. Anderson, Sin, 66. 31 Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, 62. 32 Anderson, Sin, 70. 29 30

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CHAPTER 2 TABERNACLE AND TEMPLE

David L. Stubbs

The tabernacle and temple were central sacred places and symbols of the people of Israel. At them, Israel gathered to meet with God, engaged in various regular worship practices, and transacted various aspects of their covenantal relationship with God. Israel did this for centuries. As recorded in scripture, Israel built these buildings and practised these practices in response to the command of God. On Mount Sinai, God specified the architectural and liturgical frameworks of the tabernacle. Through David and Solomon, God authorized and directed the building of the temple. Embedded in and expressed through these places and ritualized practices were the full expanse of Israel’s theological understanding of God, themselves, the arc of history, and the world in which they lived. As such, the biblical texts concerning them, as well as their actual spaces and practices – spaces and practices known to us through both biblical and extra-biblical materials – are some of the most important roots out of which grew a full Christian doctrine of creation. The primary goal of this chapter is to describe and reflect on features of the architecture and central worship practices of the tabernacle and temple and, in doing so, to point out important roots, resonances, and resources they provide for a Christian doctrine of creation. Before doing so, it is good to acknowledge that, despite their centrality within scripture and the imaginations of Israel and the early church, tabernacle and temple have not played a large positive role in Christian theological conversations in the modern world. Now, however, biblical and theological scholars are beginning to appreciate anew the centrality of tabernacle and temple for the lives and imaginations of the people of Israel, for New Testament christology and ecclesiology, and for the deep significance they have for the constellation of questions and concerns that form a doctrine of creation. Perhaps the most important factor in the neglect of tabernacle and temple has been Christian supersessionism, here meaning that interpreters have understood the work of Christ has superseded Old Testament worship traditions, making them obsolete, unimportant, and, in some cases, even antithetical to Christian truths. In addition, given that many leading Old Testament scholars of the last centuries have been Protestants, and many of the prejudices and stereotypes by which Protestants have understood their relationship to Roman Catholicism – dualities such as grace versus works righteousness, modern versus primitive, life-giving charismatic leadership versus death-dealing institutionalized authority, scientific versus magical, spontaneity versus ritualism – were translated into prejudices against Old Testament temple worship and into preferences for prophetic material. Also, modern academic methods, including both Julius Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis and history of religions approaches, were understood and used in ways which denigrated priestly materials and practices. Yet another factor is that modern understandings of causation have made the more ‘sacramental’ way that God and heavenly realities were understood to be present and active at the temple seem implausible. Finally, concerns about the use of rabbinic materials to understand temple

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practices – the concern that rabbinic descriptions composed after the destruction of the temple were simply retrojections of an imagined ideal back onto the past – have raised questions about how much the practices at the temple and tabernacle can be known with certainty. However, in the wake of the Shoah, there has been a reckoning with the long history of antiJudaism in the west and a reconsideration of Christianity’s relationship to its Jewish roots. All the factors listed above are being reconsidered or challenged today. Today is a time when the formative power that tabernacle and temple had on Christ and his followers, including their understanding of the creation, is being newly appreciated and reassessed.

The central meanings of the tabernacle and temple The tabernacle and temple were, in one sense, simply buildings or structures; or, better put, a series of buildings and structures. According to scripture, the tabernacle’s architecture and main worship services were commanded by God on Mount Sinai and constructed and used by Israel from that point until they were replaced by the temple in Jerusalem. The temple was modelled on the wilderness tabernacle. The temple was built in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah by Solomon in the tenth century bce, destroyed by the Babylonians in the sixth century bce, and rebuilt by Zerubbabel after the exile. It was later expanded in the pre-Herodian era and again by Herod the Great, starting about twenty years before Christ was born. The Romans finally destroyed it in 70 ce.1 This relationship between tabernacle and temple is the most common-sense way to read their relationship as presented in scripture. However, reflecting on the composition history of the Pentateuch, the relationship between temple and tabernacle, and even the garden in Eden, is more complicated.2 Assuming the final redaction of the Pentateuch in the fifth century bce, the temple was built centuries before the stories of the garden and laws concerning the tabernacle reached their final written form. The form and worship of the temple would have influenced the imaginations of those who redacted the creation stories in Genesis and the descriptions of the tabernacle in the Torah. Whatever the literary history, one finds deep typological resonances between tabernacle, temple, and the Garden of Eden. Their central meanings and symbols are interrelated. For the Israelites, however, the tabernacle and temple were more than literary images. They were actual places and involved practices at the centre of their lives. Israel’s imagination about creation and about their identity as God’s chosen people were formed by tabernacle and temple and the rites that took place in them. While there were a host of possible meanings, stories, and images that a member of Israel might have associated with them – and for the sake of convenience, given temple symbols were extensions of tabernacle symbols, this chapter will refer simply to ‘the temple’ – the temple possessed certain central meanings within Israelite

See Dan Bahat, ‘The Second Temple in Jerusalem’, in Jesus and Temple: Textual and Archaeological Explorations, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 59–74. 2 See S. Dean McBride Jr., ‘Divine Protocol: Genesis 1:1–2:3 as Prologue to the Pentateuch’, in God Who Creates: Essays in Honor of W. Sibley Towner, ed. William P. Brown and S. Dean McBride Jr. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 3–41. 1

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traditions. These meanings can be organized into four central ones. These central meanings have important implications for understanding the created order and God’s relationship to it. First, the temple was the dwelling place of God’s actual, yet elusive, presence. It was a place where God promised to be personally present. The most primary meaning of the temple was that it was the dwelling place of God. In Exod. 25.8, God tells Moses: ‘Have them make me a sanctuary (miqdash), so that I may dwell among them.’ When the tabernacle was replaced by the temple, one of the most typical ways that the temple was referred to was simply as ‘the house’ (habbayit), the house of God. God was understood to be present and to dwell in the holy of holies between the cherubim, as the psalmist says: ‘You who are enthroned upon the cherubim’ (Ps. 80.1). While God was present there, it was also understood that God did not dwell in the temple in a crassly physical way; God’s transcendence was always held in tension with claims about God’s presence. As Solomon says at the dedication of the temple: ‘But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house that I have built!’ (1 Kgs 8.27). Similarly, Isaiah’s and Ezekiel’s visions of God in the temple suggest, on the one hand, that God is present there; and, on the other, that God’s glory fills the whole earth. God’s free, elusive, and yet real and local presence is discussed in several ways.3 In biblical traditions, the kabod (‘glory’) or shem (‘name’) of God is said to dwell in the temple, while in rabbinic traditions, it is spoken of as the shekinah. God’s presence in the temple was not only actual, yet elusive; it was also personal. God shared his name with Israel at the temple, as he shared it earlier with Moses (Exod. 3.1315), suggesting God was accessible for the kinds of interactions and relationships appropriate to human persons. In the temple rites, covenantal relationships were formed, remembered, renewed, and strengthened; the breakdown of those relationships was lamented; forgiveness was asked for and received; the relationships that constituted the coming kingdom of God were being longed for and celebrated hopefully. Second, not only did God dwell at the temple, but it was a place where heaven and earth met. The layout of the temple suggests this. A significant feature of the temple was its division into three parts: the holy of holies, the holy place, and the outer courts. Inside these spaces were important symbols. In the holy of holies was the ark of the covenant. In the holy place, the veil, the altar of incense, the menorah, and the table of the bread of the Presence were placed. In the courts were the altar of sacrifice and the bronze sea. Moving throughout these areas were the high priest, other priests, Levites, and other worshippers. So what do all these symbols represent? In broad strokes, the holy of holies represents God’s presence and the heavenly realms where God dwells with the angelic hosts. Moving outward, the holy place represents, on one level, the entire cosmos and, on another level, the priestly people of Israel. In the ritual interactions between these places, proper relationships between God, creation, humanity, and God’s priestly people were symbolized and maintained.4 For example, the veil between the holy of holies and the holy place was understood to represent the created heavens – the transition space between God and the earth. Josephus writes that the veil ‘was like an image of the universe. . . . And the woven cloth was embroidered with the spectacle

See Samuel Terrien, The Elusive Presence: Toward a New Biblical Theology (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978). See C. T. R. Hayward, The Jewish Temple: A Non-Biblical Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1996), 6–13.

3 4

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of the whole heaven, except for the signs of the Zodiac’.5 According to Philo and Josephus, the high priest’s vestments also represented various parts of the creation, and the seven lamps of the menorah represented the seven known heavenly bodies (sun, moon, and five planets).6 Josephus writes that the twelve loaves of the bread of the Presence represented the twelve months of the year with their corresponding signs of the Zodiac.7 And, of great significance, the sacrifices of the high priest in many writings are linked with the sacrifice of Noah, who is himself a kind of second Adam. These same symbols also figured the people of Israel. For example, the menorah’s seven lights not only represented the planets and their light; it also symbolized Israel, the people of God, who burned with the presence of God but were not consumed, and who were a light to the nations. Similarly, the twelve loaves of the bread of the Presence also represented the twelve tribes of Israel, who were blessed and prosperous because of the presence of God. One can make sense of this dual signification by considering Israel’s fundamental vocation to be ‘a priestly kingdom and a holy nation’ (Exod. 19.5-6). Priestly Israel, on the one hand, represents and mediates God’s presence, words, and ways to the nations, for example, in their justice and care for one another (Exod. 20.12-17), for the stranger (Exod. 22.21), and for animals and the land (Exod. 23.12). On the other hand, Israel represents all humanity, even the entire cosmos, to God through their prayer, praise, and worship. The realms of heaven and earth not only met there but also overlapped. A central biblical image for this aspect of the temple is the ladder of Jacob, with ‘the angels of God . . . ascending and descending on it’ (Gen. 28.11-12, 17-22). Jewish tradition holds that the very stone Jacob’s head rested on during that dream became the foundation stone for the temple.8 Not only angels but specific patterns of activity that are pleasing to God are being extended into and mirrored on the earth. Earthly priests and worshippers ‘approach Him to serve in His sanctuary as the angels of the presence and as the holy ones’ (Jub. 31.14; cf. Ps. 103.19-22). The temple was like an incarnation of certain patterns of activity of a heavenly prototype – a meaning fulfilled in Christ. Third, as heaven and earth met and overlapped, the ways of humanity and creation were set right. The reign of God, which was perfectly accomplished in heaven, was dynamically extended into the earth. Wrong was dealt with, and typical righteous practices of humanity in relationship to God were seen, practised, and extended outwards. The temple was a conduit of the kingdom of God. The overall layout of the temple and its symbols suggested that God’s rule and kingdom emanated from the holy of holies outward. In the holies of holies, the ark of the covenant was placed – at least until it disappeared, probably during the Babylonian captivity. As described in Exod. 25.10-22 (cf. Exod. 37.1-9), it functioned first of all as a throne where YHWH gave commands. God’s rule was not arbitrary but instead had a specific shape. The ark was not only a throne but also a depository for the covenant. The covenant, with its laws and prescriptions, drew a picture of the torah, the way of life that God desired for Israel and commanded Israel

Josephus, Jewish War, 5.212–14. See Josephus, Jewish War, 5.217–18. Philo, Moses 2.102-3; Hayward, Jewish Temple, 8, 145–6. 7 See Josephus, Jewish War, 5.217–18. 8 Pirqe R. El. 35; Midr. Ps. 91.7. 5 6

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to follow. The goal of the covenant way was blessing and abundant life for God’s people. If Israel heeded God’s commands and followed God’s way, they would be like ‘trees planted by streams of water’ (Ps. 1.3). And like a stream in the desert, as the rule of God intersected with the earth, the life-giving creative energy of God would make earthly realities whole, holy, and fruitful – like a garden. The temple was likened to the garden in Eden, a place of creation as it was intended.9 In the Genesis accounts of the garden (Gen. 2.5–3.24), it was a place where God dwelt with humanity. Right before the sin of Adam and Eve was discovered, God was ‘walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze’ (Gen. 3.8). God is similarly described as ‘walking among Israel’ as he dwells in the tabernacle (Lev. 26.12; cf. Deut. 23.14 and 2 Sam. 7.6-7). Moreover, the garden was a beautiful and healthy place: ‘Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food’ (Gen. 2.9). Similarly, the furnishings and decorations of the temple – palm trees, fruit, and cherubim – and its purity – no blemished people or animals were present – further suggested that it was like a new garden. As Jon Levenson writes: ‘Words like “ideal”, “perfection”, and “unblemished”, suggest that the Temple was, in fact, a paradise.’10 The temple layout also has analogies to the geography of Eden and its garden. The source of life in Eden is in the west; the garden is just to the east of this source, and the rest of the world is east of the garden. Similarly, the holy of holies is in the west. Going east, one moves to the holy place and from there to the temple courts, Jerusalem, and the nations. In many traditions and biblical passages, Adam functions in the garden similarly to the priests in the Jerusalem temple. For example, the book of Jubilees recounts an unbroken line of Israel’s priestly leaders from Adam forward, all of whom play the role of priest–king, a priest–king who is to bear God’s image. Finally, one can spot this kingdom dynamism in the holiness and purity laws of the temple. These laws described and created a space at the centre of the temple, the holy of holies, in which the holiness and purity of God’s heavenly kingdom were preserved and then radiated outward. Fourth, and finally, given these connections to the kingdom of God, the temple also had deep connections to the past and to the future. It was a reminder of the past, the Garden of Eden. It also pointed to a future day when God’s reign would be fully realized on earth. First-century Jews knew the temple was part of an overarching narrative. That narrative started at creation – at the Garden of Eden – and it reached into the future – to the day when God’s purposes would be fully realized, and God’s reign would finally be realized on earth. In the visions of the prophets, prayers of the psalmists, and intertestamental literature, the temple plays a central role in visions of the age to come. Ezekiel’s vision of the temple to come (Ezek. 40–48) ends with these words: ‘And the name of the city from that time on shall be, The Lord is There’ (Ezek. 48.35). It is a vision of God dwelling amid his holy people in a renewed Jerusalem in the centre of the earth, similar to how God dwelt with Adam and Eve in the garden. God’s holy presence will again fully dwell in the earth, and God’s kingdom will be extended throughout the creation.

See G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 66–80. 10 Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), 128. 9

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Resources for a doctrine of creation: A present but elusive God and a God-attuned world Reflecting on these above meanings surrounding the tabernacle and temple, one can see how deeply formative they would have been for the Israelites’ understanding of creation and the rich seedbed they are for a Christian doctrine of creation. They imply certain things about God’s relationship to creation, humanity’s place in creation, and creation itself. The mode of God’s presence at the temple is an important root of fuller reflections on God’s relationship to creation in Jewish and Christian traditions. First, the immanence and transcendence of God are simultaneously affirmed. God is present but elusive. God has decided to be personally accessible in God’s ‘house’, yet God is not contained by it. Given tabernacle and temple are symbolically related to creation as a whole, God’s immanent presence throughout the world is symbolized and affirmed, while at the same time God is not contained by ‘the earth’. Moreover, God’s willingness to enter into a personal, covenantal relationship with humans further specifies the kind of space God has created for creatures and humanity in particular. Humans are sustained by God yet offered the freedom needed to relate to God and one another as responsible persons who flourish within the bounds of God’s covenantal designs. Regarding humanity: humanity is positioned within the creation primarily as a priest and covenant partner in temple imagery. More will be said about humanity’s priestly role below. The creation is also pictured in a particular way, as an ‘enchanted’ or ‘sacramental’ cosmos, using familiar terms in contemporary discussions. Just as heaven and earth overlapped at the temple, so the world is intended to be attuned to the ways of God’s heavenly realms. The world is not only created ‘good’ but is also capable of shining forth with the patterns of heaven and of God’s glory. The dynamics of the holiness and purity system make this clearer. At the centre of Israel’s vision of holiness and purity is God: ‘Holy, holy, holy’, cry the angels in Isaiah’s vision of God in the temple (Isa. 6.3). God’s holiness means that God is separate from all physical corruption and chaos, separate from all moral impurity and sin. Persons, places, times, and objects marked as ‘holy’ (qodesh) to God are separated from the ‘common’ (hol). So God tells Aaron and the priests of Israel: ‘You are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean’ (Lev. 10.10). This is done not to separate creatures from God, but rather to create and preserve a holy space in the world where physical corruption and sin are excluded so that God and creatures may draw near to one another, dwell with each other, and be filled with God’s glory. God’s holy being might be thought of as having a certain frequency, ordered pattern, or even harmony. This harmony or pattern is reflected throughout the creation to the extent that creatures are capable of such harmony, but it powerfully occupies the tabernacle and temple. Only creatures that resonate with such attunement in physical and moral ways can bear God’s holy presence. Attunement or dissonance can occur both at a physical/biological level and at the level of human actions and intentions.11 At the physical/biological level, creatures that are blemished, temporarily ‘unclean’, and thus do not reflect the orders or harmonies of God’s creation, are excluded from the temple or ‘the camp’. The distinction between ‘clean’ and

See Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3–20; Samuel E. Balentine, The Torah’s Vision of Worship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 148–76. 11

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‘unclean’ has at its core two related contrasts – creational order versus disorder, and life versus death. While there has been much scholarly debate on this topic, one can see the relationship between these contrasts in the three most significant causes of ritual uncleanness (Num. 5.13) – the breaking down of the body’s integrity in skin diseases and blemishes (cf. Lev. 13.159; 14.1-57); the leaking out from the body of fluids associated with life, namely, blood and semen (cf. Lev. 15.1-33); the lack of life and breaking down of the body in the case of corpses. A creational order and patterning lead to life; the breakdown of that order leads to death. To ‘dwell’ (Num. 5.3) with and worship the holy God, creatures must exhibit this ordering and integrity. In Jesus’ ministry, in his surprising yet fitting fulfilment of temple practice, he does not avoid people with these conditions, but instead touches them, heals them so that they are again ‘clean’, integrates them back into the regular life of the community, and dwells with them. At the moral level, humans who have sinned – acted out of harmony with God’s desires for human life and community – are also required to make amends in some way, typically by sacrifice to God and/or some form of restitution to those harmed, in order to approach God. The Israelites drew analogies between dysfunctions or ‘impurity’ at the physical/biological level and dysfunctions or impurity in the mind or soul. Israel, at every level of its being, was to emulate God’s holiness as reflected in the creational order. The ultimate goal is that all of creation – bodies, hearts, minds, spirits, and actions – will resonate with the holiness of God so that God might dwell closely with all his creation and God’s reign will ‘roll down like waters’ from the heavens, through the temple, and into all creation. Thus, the Israelite concepts of ‘heaven’ meeting ‘earth’, ‘glory’, ‘purity’, and ‘holiness’ are rich normative centres for thinking through ecological and moral creational patterns and systems. The world imagined by the temple is enchanted with and attuned to the energy and patterns of God in a quasi-sacramental fashion.

Daily, sabbath, and monthly celebrations: Responding to the creator The words and symbols of Israel’s communal liturgies also richly embody understandings of the creation, God’s relationship to it, and humanity’s calling within it. The principal corporate celebrations of Israel are laid out in the covenant given to Israel at Mount Sinai in ‘the book of the covenant’ (Exod. 20.22–23.33; 24.7). Instructions concerning sabbatical years and sabbath observance are given there, followed by instructions for the three annual festivals – Passover (Pesach), Weeks (Shavuot), and Booths (Sukkoth). Thus, sabbath rites and the three annual festivals – also called the three pilgrim feasts since all male Israelites were to pilgrimage to the temple three times a year (Deut. 16.16) – are at the heart of Israelite worship.12 Sabbath worship is supplemented later in Exod. 29.38-46 and in Numbers 28–29 by commands concerning daily and monthly worship, rites which bear similar meanings to the sabbath offerings (cf. Lev. 23; Deut. 16.1-17). While all the tabernacle and temple rites have repercussions for an understanding of the creation, in the daily, sabbath, and monthly rites, creation takes centre stage. Their central

See Balentine, The Torah’s Vision of Worship, 119–47.

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focus is thanksgiving for the creational order and a commitment to responding properly to God’s creating and sustaining work. There is no clear-cut biblical summary of their central meanings, but the rabbinic tractates Tamid and Menahot, and other intertestamental sources, aid in understanding the overall structure of rites at the temple at the time of Christ and possibly much earlier. Every morning and evening, services were celebrated at the temple, together called the tamid (‘continual’ or ‘perpetual’, for olah tamid, perpetual burnt offering). They were quite similar to one another. The basic liturgy of the morning service was as follows: the priests gathered well before dawn, cast lots for assignments and prepared the places and the sacrifices that would be used – a single lamb, flour, cakes of bread (called chavatim), and wine. Representatives from the people of Israel gathered at the gate of Nicanor. At dawn, the service began with great fanfare. The gate of Nicanor was opened; the magrefah, an organ-like instrument, was played; a priest announced the beginning of the service; the basin of water in the court was noisily filled; shofroth were sounded; and flutes and cymbals were played while the choir of Levites sang. Two priests tended the menorah and altar of incense in the holy place while others prepared sacrifices in the courts. They then regathered in the Chamber of Hewn Stones for prayers and to cast lots again for other sacrificial roles. When the priests re-emerged, the magrefah sounded again. Three priests entered the holy place. One priest tended the lamps of the menorah. A second placed coals in the altar of incense. When these tasks were finished, they left so that the third priest was alone in the holy place. This priest offered incense on the coals, bowed, and prayed before God. Meanwhile, the pieces of lamb, the fine flour, the chavatim, and the wine were offered at the altar of sacrifice. As they were offered, trumpets would sound, and the Levites sang the psalm appointed for the day. At each ‘chapter’ or division within the psalm, the trumpets would sound again, and all the people would bow. After this, and to conclude the liturgy, all five priests who had been in the holy place during the whole service gathered at the top steps leading into the holy place, lifted their hands in the priestly gesture of blessing, and blessed the nation using the familiar words: ‘The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you shalom’ (Num. 6.24-26).13 These actions of the daily rite can be seen as an exchange of gifts between Israel and God. God’s role as creator, sustainer, and restorer of the order of creation and the gifts that God gives in these roles are highlighted. Israel, who at this service was acting as a representative of all humanity, even the priest of all creation, would come into God’s presence and offer thanksgiving to God for those gifts through words, offerings, and sacrifices. The offerings and sacrifices were also symbols of tribute to God and commitment to God’s creational order. That creational order, pictured as whole, complete, and without sin or disorder, was called ‘shalom’. All the central symbols of the daily ceremonies point to those primary meanings. Consider first the sacrifices of the lamb and the flour, bread, and wine. The lamb was an olah or burnt offering, one of the four main corporate sacrifices, the most common and perhaps the most important of the offerings. While the meaning of the olah remains a subject of debate, a common understanding is that it symbolizes the willing servanthood and commitment of

m. Tamid 7.2.

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the human to God and to God’s ways.14 The daily offerings of flour and cakes were minhah offerings, which are variously called grain, cereal, tribute, or loyalty offerings. Both the name and the ingredients of these offerings are suggestive of the covenant relationship between God and Israel. The word minhah means ‘tribute’ – which indicates that the sacrifice is a gift symbolizing loyalty to and dependence on God. Leviticus instructs Israel to make cakes or wafers for the offering using flour mixed with oil, incense, and ‘the salt of the covenant’, while honey and leaven are expressly excluded from the mixture (Lev. 2.11-13). The symbolism of the elements suggests that the offerer is thanking God for the sustenance God gives Israel on its journey, acknowledging the fruits and blessings of covenant experienced thus far, and loyally recommitting themselves to that covenant. Looking more closely at this connection between Israel’s covenant with God and the creational order, the precepts of the covenant, ‘the law’, can be understood as describing and commanding a pattern of life in which God’s original intentions for an ordered creation are pictured and in part realized. The precepts of the law dealt with Israel’s worship of and relationship to God, their relationships between themselves, and their actions towards the rest of the creation. As Israel commits to and lives according to those covenant precepts, the creational order is being restored. The other symbolic elements of the service – its daily rhythm, the details of the incense used, the content of the prayers, and the final blessing – all resonate with and fill out these themes of creational and covenantal order that leads to blessing. The service held on the new month or new moon was similar to these daily rites but apparently grander (Num. 28.11-15). Not much is known with certainty about the monthly offerings during the first century, but it is known that it was of great importance during biblical times.15 This beautiful prayer from the third century ce attributed to Rabbi Judah suggests this service revolved around the same creation-centred meanings of the daily sacrifices: Blessed be He who created the Heavens with His word, and all their hosts with the breath of His mouth. He appointed unto them fixed laws and times, that they should not change their ordinance. They rejoice and are glad to do the will of their Creator. They work truthfully, for their action is truth. The moon he ordered that she should renew herself as a crown of beauty for those whom he sustains from the womb, and who will, like it, be renewed in the future, and magnify their Maker in the name of the glory of His kingdom. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who renewest the moons.16 The sabbath day service was similar to the daily and monthly rites. However, the sabbath burnt offerings were larger in number than the daily offerings, and the service included important ritual actions involving the twelve loaves of bread in the holy place called ‘the bread of the Presence’ or lechem happanim. These twelve loaves of bread were kept on the golden table in the holy place. Flagons of wine were placed on or next to the table. On the sabbath, these were replaced with new bread,

See Alfred Marx, Les systèmes sacrificiels de l’Ancien Testament: Formes et fonctions du culte sacrificiel à Yhwh (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 47. 15 1 Sam. 20.5-24; 2 Kgs 4.23; Isa. 1.13; 66.23; Ezek. 46.1-3. 16 b. Sanh. 42a. 14

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while the older loaves were taken out and then eaten by the priests, accompanied by wine. This rite bears a remarkable resemblance to the original covenant celebration on Mount Sinai in the presence of God, recorded in Exod. 24.4-11. The twelve pillars in that passage, which represent Israel, and the sacrifice at the base of the mountain and the feast at the top, strikingly parallel the twelve loaves, the sacrifices, and the feast at the temple. The meaning of these loaves of bread is suggested by their name and the symbol of bread – the presence of God brings forth blessing and fullness of life. Such meanings are also illuminated by their connection to the phrase berith olam, or eternal covenant. Leviticus 24.8 states: ‘Every sabbath day Aaron shall set them [the lechem happanim] in order before the Lord regularly as a commitment of the people of Israel, as a covenant forever [berith olam].’ Most other uses of the term berith olam (eternal covenant) point to a covenant that involves symbols of shalom, fruitfulness, and life.17 The rainbow that God set in the sky after Noah’s sacrifice is a symbol of God’s berith olam (eternal covenant) between God and every creature (Gen. 9.16), a sign of God’s ongoing providence, care, and commitment to bless. The observance of the sabbath, the completion and crown of creation, is also called a berith olam (Exod. 31.16). The bread rite shares elements of both the minhah and the shelamim. The shelamim or ‘sacrifice of well-being’ is a meal shared between God and humans (Deut. 12.7; 1 Sam. 1; 1 Kgs 8.62-66) and an occasion when the blessings of God and the longed-for shalom between God, humans, and all of creation are celebrated and partially experienced here and now. Bread, a symbol of life, combined with wine, a symbol of life abundant, together create a fitting sign of the shalom that results from God’s presence. In sum, in the sabbath celebrations – as in the daily and monthly rites – the Israelites gave thanks for, celebrated, and recommitted themselves to God’s creational order. Partaking of bread and wine, they feasted with God and remembered, celebrated, and looked forward to the life and well-being that come from living in the presence of God and in harmony with God’s ways.

Resources for a doctrine of creation: Responsible priestly humanity The temple’s daily, weekly, and monthly worship practices are filled with resources for a Christian doctrine of creation. Chief among them is simply that these services at the temple are centred upon God as creator, and those who perform them offer thanksgiving for God’s providential activity in sustaining the world and recommit to being God’s human creatures. God’s saving acts are the focus of the three annual pilgrim feasts, and they find their place as melodies over the continuous bass line of this recognition of God as creator. Given tendencies to reduce the meaning of temple worship to mere forgiveness for sin, the covenant to ‘spiritual’ matters, and creation spirituality to a side issue, this is a rich resource to mine. The temple and its worship pressure one to integrate themes of creation and salvation rather than to separate them or privilege one over the other.

Gen. 9.16; 17.6-7, 13, 19; Exod. 31.16; Lev. 24.8; Num. 18.19; 2 Sam. 23.5; 1 Chron. 16.15-17; Isa. 55.3; 61.8; Jer. 32.40; 50.5; Ezek. 37.26; Pss. 105.8; 111.5. 17

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Another is the image of humanity as a priest. The modern world has been quite suspicious of priests, as has Protestantism. David Hume voiced a common sentiment: ‘In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies to liberty.’18 In Hume’s critique, priests parasitically take life from people through heteronomous rule and the enforcement of arbitrary laws. While tragically true in certain instances, it completely flips the deeper meanings of the Israelite priesthood on its head. At the core of the Israelite’s priesthood is the idea of representation. As one traces the connections made in canonical scripture and other Israelite texts between priests, Levites, the firstborn, Noah, and Adam, one finds priests are to function like a synecdoche, a part that represents the whole. Adam, in his priestly vocation to till and keep the garden (Gen. 2.15; cf. Num. 3.7-8), and Noah, in his act of sacrifice (Gen. 8.20), were understood in Israel’s traditions as representative of all humanity. This representative character of the priesthood – rather than the priesthood being in the place of, separate from, or ruling over – is symbolized in the command for all Israelites to place fringes or ‘tsit-tsit’ with blue cords on their garments (Num. 15.37-41). Such fringes remind all Israelites of their ‘royal’ nature, while the blue cord – the same expensive coloured threads used in the high priest’s garments and the temple veil – reminds them of their priestly character. All Israel is to be a ‘priestly people’ who represent what all of humanity is intended to be and to do. As noted above, one of the primary tasks of this representative priesthood is to distinguish between the ‘clean and unclean’ and the ‘common and the holy’. Rather than a system of arbitrary rules, the purity laws of Israel are tied to a vision of a God-given ordering of creation, an ecological system that leads to life. The role of the priest – and implied in this, the part of all humanity – is to discern that life-giving order and to help those outside that order to cross the boundary from ‘unclean’ back to the ‘clean’ and ‘common’ functioning of the community, and then from ‘common’ towards the ‘holy’ ways of God. Another role of priestly humanity is linked to Adam's vocation to ‘till’ and ‘keep’ the garden (Gen. 2.15). The command to ‘till’ the garden suggests that humanity has a role in cultivating and developing the created order of which they are a part. Like the servants in Jesus’ parable of the talents, humanity is to make good and creative use of what has been given (Mt. 25.1430). This finds ritual expression in the Eucharist, in which bread and wine, God’s gifts which are also the fruit of human labour and culture, are presented to God. They are fitting symbols that humanity’s relationship to the created order is not simply conservation but is also creative cultivation. In the Dutch Reformed tradition, through the impact of Abraham Kuyper, Gen. 2.15 has been interpreted to mean that humans have been given a ‘cultural mandate’ by God to enter into God’s creational order and to develop a culture that fits within it.19 Researching ‘orders of creation’ in economics, sexuality, politics, and ecology is perilous. Yet, the call to ‘till’ – to develop the world – requires a conscious commitment to wisely discern and participate in God’s providential order.

David Hume, ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Thomas H. Green and Thomas H. Grose (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1875), 135. 19 See Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God’s Gifts for a Fallen World: Volume 1, ed. Jordan J. Ballor and Stephen J. Grabill, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman and Ed M. van der Maas (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2015). 18

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Finally, seeing humans as priests also ties their role within creation to worship. The image of humans as priests of all creation is common in Eastern Orthodox reflections on the Eucharist. In that tradition, there is a healthy disagreement about the extent to which the priestly worship of humans ‘mediate’ the worship of all creation to God. Do not the ‘angels’ and ‘sun and moon’ praise God without the help or mediation of humanity (Ps. 148.2-3)? Perhaps humans do not lead the creation in worship so much as they join a fuller choir composed of the three ‘estates’ of the creation – the angelic hosts, the remainder of visible creation, and humanity.20 The Eucharist becomes a living symbol of what all creation is doing and a place of intensity where such worship comes to verbal and visual expression. In sum, tabernacle and temple – meaning the complex symbolism and meanings of the architecture, practices, and texts associated with them – are immensely rich resources and key backgrounds to many themes and concepts taken up within a full Christian doctrine of creation, including God’s multifaceted relationship to the creation, understandings of creational order, and the priestly role of humanity within the community of creation. They are not only able to resource, but also to help ground and organize one’s thinking about God, creation, and humanity’s place within this beautiful and mysterious world.

Further reading Balentine, Samuel E. The Torah’s Vision of Worship. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999. Beale, G. K. The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004. Charlesworth, James H., ed. Jesus and Temple: Textual and Archaeological Explorations. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014. Chryssavgis, John and Bruce V. Foltz, eds. Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Hayward, C. T. R. The Jewish Temple: A Non-Biblical Sourcebook. London: Routledge, 1996. Levenson, Jon. Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 1987. McBride, S. Dean, Jr. ‘Divine Protocol: Genesis 1:1–2:3 as Prologue to the Pentateuch’. In God Who Creates: Essays in Honor of W. Sibley Towner, edited by William P. Brown and S. Dean McBride Jr., 3–41. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000. Stubbs, David L. Table and Temple: The Christian Eucharist and Its Jewish Roots. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2020.

See Elizabeth Theokritoff, ‘Liturgy, Cosmic Worship and Christian Cosmology’, in Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation, ed. John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 299. 20

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CHAPTER 3 PENTATEUCH AND BLESSING

Stephen B. Chapman

Blessing occupies a prominent place in the Bible’s presentation of creation. Animate life is not only created but also ‘blessed’ (Heb. brk). The first occurrence of blessing in Genesis follows the creation of sky animals and water animals on the fifth day. According to the pattern of the account in Genesis 1, God first affirms their created goodness (‘And God saw that it was good’, Gen. 1.21).1 Then God blesses these creatures, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and let birds multiply on the earth’ (Gen. 1.22). The divine act of blessing expresses itself in fruitfulness, multiplication, and filling. After the blessing of birds and fish, a similar blessing transpires on day six when God blesses again. However, God’s second blessing is not pronounced, as might be expected, after Gen. 1.25 (in response to the creation of land animals) but in Gen. 1.28, after the creation of human beings. This apparent delay underscores not only that the creation of human beings is an extension of God’s activity on the sixth day (and thus that human beings are a subset of land animals) but also that the blessing in Gen. 1.28 applies in some degree to non-human land animals. The difficulty with this interpretation is that the blessing of Gen. 1.28 proceeds to elevate human beings above other animals: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion (Heb. rdh) over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ Here again, blessing relates to fruitfulness, multiplication, and filling – but now also subduing and dominion. The dominion language of this blessing echoes the phrasing of Gen. 1.26 (‘and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth’), which begins the subunit focused on human creation within day six. Yet it would be strange for non-human land animals not to receive a blessing2 since the sky and water animals receive one.3 Also, Gen. 1.30 returns to and includes non-human animals in its permission to eat vegetation. So the blessing of day six (Gen. 1.28) should not be read as applying exclusively to human beings, although human beings are set apart within it. The chapter’s final verse (Gen. 1.31) provides a summary statement for the sixth day, further implying the receipt of God’s blessing by every creature created on day six. This initial account

Numbering of chapters and verses follows the English Bible. As in Mari Joerstad, The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics: Humans, Nonhumans, and the Living Landscape (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 57: only ‘birds, fish, and humans are tasked with being fruitful, multiplying, and filling’. 3 See Reinhard Feldmeier and Hermann Spieckermann, God of the Living: A Biblical Theology, trans. Mark E. Biddle (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011), 271n2: ‘The blessing of humankind surely includes blessing of the land animals, likewise created on the sixth day. No cogent reason can be imagined why the birds and aquatic animals would be blessed (Gen. 1.22) but the land animals would be denied a blessing.’ 1 2

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of creation in Genesis (Gen. 1.1–2.3)4 then culminates in a third blessing for the seventh day as a day of rest (Gen. 2.3).5 God blesses the seventh day and ‘hallows’ (Heb. qdš) it, thereby also associating blessing with holiness. The sun and the stars, the earth’s rocks, trees, and plants – such things are not recipients of God’s blessing in Genesis 1. Instead, blessing describes a particular and foundational dimension of God’s relation to animals and sabbath, which also suggests that animals and sabbath are associated. Such an association is further implied by the inclusion of livestock in the sabbath prohibition against work (Exod. 20.10; Deut. 5.14). Non-human and human animals have a responsibility to acknowledge God’s ordained day of rest and an opportunity to participate in God’s blessing by doing so. This focus on animate creatures should not be viewed as indicating that non-animate elements of creation lack sacredness or even sentience.6 In Genesis 1, they are treated as ‘creatures’ with a degree of agency (e.g. plants ‘yield’ seed, fruit trees ‘bear fruit’, the earth ‘brings forth’ vegetation and land animals, the lights in the sky ‘rule over’ [Heb. mšl + b] the day and the night). However, blessing as such appears in Genesis 1 only in relation to animals and sabbath observance. The nature of this blessing is largely assumed in the text and left unexplained. Yet the language of fruitfulness, multiplication, and filling suggests not only that blessing is expressed mainly through fertility7 but also that this fertility functions crucially in relation to land/earth. For if God is the one who blesses, and fertility is the fundamental character of such blessing, then it is in relation to the land/earth that animals are to be fruitful, multiply, and fill. But how exactly? In what ways? The underdetermined quality of the blessing motif at the beginning of Genesis sets out a readerly expectation for the remainder of the Pentateuch and the Bible. Will animals (including human animals) be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth? Will their lives exhibit God’s blessing? Will the sabbath be observed and kept holy? Blessing is, in this way, presented as a divine charge as well as a divine gift.8 Blessing and curse were paired cultural phenomena within the ancient world, as is evident from extra-biblical inscriptions and treaty texts.9 However, the rhetoric of curse is strikingly absent from Genesis 1. In the Bible, the creation of life begins in, with, and through blessing.

Many scholars include the toledot formula in Genesis 2.4a in this first creation account because of its priestly language, but elsewhere in Genesis this formula appears exclusively as an introduction rather than as a conclusion. See Terje Stordalen, ‘Genesis 2,4: Restudying a locus classicus’, Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 104, no. 2 (1992): 163–77. For this reason, it is better to treat Genesis 2.4a as an editorial addition bridging the first creation account with the second. See Walter Bührer, Am Anfang . . . : Untersuchungen zur Textgenese und zur relativ-chronologischen Einordnung von Gen 1–3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 152. 5 See Adrian Schenker, ‘Die Segnung des siebten Schöpfungstages. Zum besonderen Segen in Gen 2,3’, in Der Sonntag: Anspruch – Wirklichkeit – Gestalt; Festschrift für Jakob Baumgartner zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Alberich M. Altermatt and Thaddäus A. Schnitker (Würzburg: Echter, 1986), 19–29. 6 See Richard Bauckham, Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2010); Joerstad, The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics. 7 See Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11: A Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), 88. 8 See Thomas W. Mann, The Book of the Torah: The Narrative Integrity of the Pentateuch (Atlanta: Westminster John Knox Press, 1988), 16. 9 See James K. Aitken, The Semantics of Blessing and Cursing in Ancient Hebrew (Louvain: Peeters, 2007); Timothy G. Crawford, Blessing and Curse in Syro-Palestinian Inscriptions of the Iron Age (New York: Peter Lang, 1992); Martin Leuenberger, Segen und Segenstheologien im alten Israel: Untersuchungen zu ihren religions- und theologiegeschichtlichen Konstellationen und Transformationen (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2008). Feldmeier and Spieckermann agree with this assessment but sound a cautionary note. They stress that the relation between blessing and curse was subsequently transformed in the biblical tradition. See Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 272. 4

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At the end, as in the beginning Although the final chapter of the Pentateuch is Deuteronomy 34, that chapter provides only a brief denouement in relation to what has already been told. The culmination of the Pentateuch’s literary arc arguably occurs in the preceding chapter, the blessing of Moses in Deuteronomy 33. Indeed, the combination of Moses’ song in Deuteronomy 32 and Moses’ blessing in Deuteronomy 33 brings the Pentateuch to its rhetorical conclusion with a highly lyrical accent. Moreover, the significance of both these chapters is confirmed by their influence on ancient interpreters.10 Moses’ blessing of the Israelites in Deuteronomy 33 follows the pattern of paternal end-of-life blessings found elsewhere in the Bible. It consists of introductory and concluding statements of blessing directed towards the entire people of Israel, with individual blessings for each tribe appearing within that larger literary frame.11 The repetition of the terms YHWH, Jacob, and Jeshurun (Deut. 33.2-5) in reverse order at the composition’s conclusion (Deut. 33.26-29) gives an inclusio structure to the whole.12 The terminology of blessing serves as a bright thread stitching the poem together (Deut. 33.11, 13, 20, 23, 24). As in Genesis 1, blessing is again a marker of favour and increase (Deut. 33.13-16, 23-24, 28) but now also of protection and victory in war (Deut. 33.2-3, 7, 11-12, 17, 20-22, 27, 29). Deuteronomy 33 expresses the core reality of Israel’s favoured status before God: what Israel’s election means for Israel and what the nature of Israel’s blessing truly is. By contrast, Deuteronomy 32 provides a poetic account of the historical tradition within which Israel’s elect status was established – the story of Israel’s blessing.13 Both of these poetic compositions have found their place quite naturally in the present form of the book of Deuteronomy by following the covenantal curses and blessings (Deuteronomy 27–28) appearing at the end of Moses’ rehearsal of the law (Deuteronomy 12–26). Moses’ final discourse (Deuteronomy 29–30) then draws a contrast between ‘All who hear the words of this oath and bless themselves, thinking in their hearts, “We are safe even though we go our own stubborn ways”’ (Deut. 29.19) and those whose adherence to God’s direction results in genuine blessing. There is a choice to be made between a path of self-deception and the way of blessing (Deut. 30.19, ‘I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life that you and your descendants may live’; cf. Deut. 30.1, 15). In the logic of this presentation, ‘curse’ is functionally synonymous with attempting to bless one’s self and go one’s own way, while divine blessing results in ‘life’.14

See Herbert W. Basser, Midrashic Interpretations of the Song of Moses (New York: Peter Lang, 1984); Sidnie W. Crawford, ‘Reading Deuteronomy in the Second Temple Period’, in Reading the Present in the Qumran Library: The Perception of the Contemporary by Means of Scriptural Interpretations, ed. Kristin de Troyer and Armin Lange (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 127–40; Ananda B. Geyser-Fouché and Young Namgung, ‘The Deuteronomic View of History in Second Temple Judaism’, Verbum et Ecclesia 40, no. 1 (2019): e1–7; Roger Syrén, The Blessings in the Targums: A Study on the Targumic Interpretations of Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 33 (Åbo: Åbo akademi, 1986). 11 A specific reference to the tribe of Simeon is missing, but various proposals have been made to locate this tribe implicitly within the blessing for either Judah or Levi. 12 See Stefan Beyerle, Der Mosesegen im Deuteronomium: Eine text-, kompositions- und formkritische Studie zu Deuteronomium 33 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997). 13 See Petra Schmidtkunz, Das Moselied des Deuteronomiums: Untersuchungen zu Text und Theologie von Dtn 32,1–43 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020). 14 There are also prominent Pentateuchal stories about human manipulation of blessing (e.g. Gen. 27; 32.22-32; Num. 22–24). Such stories ‘reflect an awareness that blessing is not at one’s disposal’. Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 272. 10

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While curse and blessing are depicted as two abiding options, they are also broadly historicized. Both curse and blessing will ‘happen to’ (Heb. bw’ + ‘al) Israel in the future (Deut. 30.1) and in sequence. Curse will come in the form of exile, and blessing will be experienced as a restoration to the land. Both exile and return are all but inevitable (Deut. 30.1-5). It seems likely that such explicit attention to exile indicates the later provenance of this material in Deuteronomy as having probably originated in the postexilic period. In its present literary context, however, this information about the future is not styled as historical recollection but rather as both divine foresight and prophetic vision (see Deut. 32.21: ‘For I know what they are inclined to do even now, before I have brought them into the land that I promised them on oath’). Here the eventual loss of the land is acknowledged even prior to Israel taking possession of it. Yet, although exile and return are cited as prime historical realizations of curse and blessing, there persists a sense that every future generation of Israel will have to make the same decision.15 The Pentateuch not only eventuates in extended descriptions of curse and blessing but also insists on the need to choose between the two. In describing that choice, moreover, the Pentateuch advocates for blessing and life. As in the first chapter of Genesis, blessing (Deut. 30.16) remains understood in terms of prosperity, longevity, and fruitfulness (Deut. 30.5, 9, 20). Blessing continues to be conceived in relation to the land (Deut. 30.5, 9, 16, 18, 20). The synonymous use of the terms ‘life’ and ‘blessing’ at the end of Deuteronomy mirrors the close relationship between the origin of animate life and the divine provision of blessing detailed in Genesis 1.16 Both at the beginning of the Pentateuch and its end, the point is made that life is not merely a biological function but is also a quality of existence and that the fullness of life is made available by God through the medium of blessing. This fully realized life requires conscious choice and disciplined behaviour: the acceptance and maintenance of a creaturely posture with respect to the creator.

An outer and inner frame The outer Pentateuchal frame established between Genesis 1 and Deuteronomy 33 is matched by a similar frame within the book of Genesis, which also culminates in a series of blessings within its penultimate chapter (Genesis 49). There are further similarities between the conclusions of Genesis and Deuteronomy, as Erich Zenger has pointed out: Jacob’s blessing of his twelve sons (Gen. 49.1-28) is followed by notices of the death and burial of Jacob with reference to the land of the promise (Gen. 49.29-33; 50.4-14), while Moses’ blessing of the twelve tribes (Deuteronomy 33) is likewise followed by notices of the death and burial of Moses with reference to the land of the promise (Deut. 34.1-8; cf. Deut. 32.48-52).17 Not only

On this temporal aspect of Deuteronomic rhetoric, see Brent A. Strawn, ‘Slaves and Rebels: Inscription, Identity, and Time in the Rhetoric of Deuteronomy’, in Sepher Torath Mosheh: Studies in the Composition and Interpretation of Deuteronomy, ed. Daniel I. Block and Richard L. Schulz (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2017), 161–91. 16 Cf. Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 543, on Deuteronomy 30: ‘In the micro-context, Deut. 28 is in view, in the macro-context Gen. 1–3 again.’ 17 See Erich Zenger, Einleitung in das Alte Testament, 8th edn, ed. Christian Frevel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2012), 79. 15

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do both series of blessings make use of the twelve tribe tradition and animal imagery, but both also refer to the future as well as to the past.18 Moreover, shared language exists in each series.19 The clearest example occurs in the respective blessings given to Joseph. References to the blessings of ‘heaven’ and ‘the deep that lies beneath’ (Gen. 49.25; Deut. 33.13), ‘the everlasting hills’ (Gen. 49.26; Deut. 33.15), and ‘the head of Joseph, on the brow of the prince among his brothers’ (Gen. 49.26; Deut. 33.16) are found in both texts.20 Predictably, historical–critical scholarship has endeavoured to clarify the direction of influence behind these shared references: Is Deuteronomy 33 borrowing from Genesis 49 or is Genesis 49 borrowing from Deuteronomy 33?21 But thus far, all such diachronic proposals leave unanswered questions.22 More important is the sheer fact of the duplicate language and how it encourages an intertextual awareness of the similar content and function shared by both lists. The Pentateuch widens what is initially a list of sons (Genesis 49) into a corresponding list of tribes (Deuteronomy 33). Yet the pattern of steadily broadening blessing begins even earlier in Genesis. This blessing motif has long been noticed within Genesis, in which it functions hand in hand with an explicit ‘promise’ theme. From the blessing of Abraham in Gen. 12.1-3, through to God’s repeated promises to Israel’s ancestors, right through to Genesis 49, blessing/promise connects the various literary units within Genesis into a coherent whole.23 Less widely recognized is how blessing, as both present reality and future vision, has been extended to function as an overarching theme within the received form of the entire Pentateuch. David Clines’ synchronic study of the Pentateuch notably identifies this synthetic effect: ‘The theme of the Pentateuch is the partial fulfilment – which implies also the partial non-fulfilment – of the promise to or blessing of the patriarchs. The promise or blessing is both the divine initiative in a world where human initiatives always lead to disaster, and are an affirmation of the primal divine intentions for humanity.’24 The role of blessing in Genesis 1 signals this theme at the outset of the Pentateuch. The placement and content of a similar series of blessings at the conclusions of both Genesis and Deuteronomy and the verbal links between them support such an interpretation.

See Geula Twersky, ‘Genesis 49: The Foundation of Israelite Monarchy and Priesthood’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 43, no. 3 (2019): 317–33. 19 See Hans U. Steymans, ‘The Blessings in Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 33: Awareness of Intertextuality’, in South African Perspectives on the Pentateuch between Synchrony and Diachrony, ed. Jurie le Roux and Eckart Otto (New York: T&T Clark, 2007), 71–89. 20 See Steymans, ‘The Blessings in Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 33’, 74. 21 See Joel D. Heck, ‘A History of Interpretation of Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 33’, Bibliotheca Sacra 147, no. 585 (1990): 16–31. It could also be that both poems are drawing upon a common source. 22 See Steymans, ‘The Blessings in Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 33’, 89: ‘none of the diachronic hypotheses established for the setting of Gen. 49 and Deut. 33 satisfies or convinces’. 23 See Richard S. Briggs, ‘The Book of Genesis’, in A Theological Introduction to the Pentateuch: Interpreting the Torah as Christian Scripture, ed. Richard S. Briggs and Joel N. Lohr (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 31–4; Rolf Rendtorff, The Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch, trans. John J. Scullion (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990), 43–100. For Rendtorff, moreover, some of this promise material is editorial and exhibits a holistic awareness of the Pentateuchal story. 24 David J. A. Clines, The Theme of the Pentateuch, 2nd edn (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 30. 18

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Blessing and curse There is a shadow side to the motif of blessing in Genesis, namely, a sense of threat and the motif of curse. Just as blessing and curse are paired at the end of Deuteronomy, the two creation accounts at the beginning of Genesis set forth blessing and curse as two real possibilities. James Barr raised searching questions about the absolute goodness of creation even in Genesis 1, since in that account darkness and the waters both play threatening roles at the origin of the world, and neither one is explicitly said to be created by God.25 Barr, therefore, suggested that the term ‘good’ is used in Genesis 1 to mean ‘satisfactory’ rather than ‘perfect’. This sense of a less-than-perfect creation is intensified in the second creation account. In this account (Gen. 2.4–3.24), a figure like the snake, a creature that questions God’s creational intent and encourages other creatures to resist God’s instructions, can exist. Is this snake ‘good’? Also, how is the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ (Gen. 2.9, 17; cf. Gen. 3.5) to be understood within the context of a good creation? What is the origin and character of the ‘evil’ it partly reflects? Why is death now an actual possibility, while it was unacknowledged in Genesis 1?26 The term ‘blessing’, so prominent in the first creation account, does not appear in the second creation account at all. Instead, the account culminates in a list of curses (Gen. 3.14-19). Here ‘curse’ (Heb. ’rr), like blessing, relates to reproduction, intersubjective relationships, and the land. The snake will travel upon the earth on its belly; the woman will experience pain in childbirth, and her husband will ‘rule over’ (Heb. mšl + b) her; the man will toil on the land until he returns to the dust from whence he came. These calamities, in other words, are inversions of the blessings announced in Genesis 1.27 Creatures creeping on the earth were formerly blessed, but here the snake’s mode of locomotion is an expression of curse. Human fertility had signalled blessing, and now it brings pain and patriarchy. The bounty of the land was readily available before. Only with hard work will the land continue to yield agricultural nourishment. The literary format of Genesis in which blessing (Genesis 1) is followed by curse (Genesis 2–3) has typically been sequentialized by biblical interpreters. This move has significantly impacted Christian theology by generating the doctrinal tradition of a ‘fall’ into sin. As they stand, the twin creation accounts do suggest a sequence of some sort, especially in the way that Genesis 1 avoids any mention of curse and Genesis 2–3 refrains from any reference to blessing. The combination of the two accounts seems to insist not only that blessing is intrinsic to the creation and prior to its curse but also that curse was a secondary and avoidable development. Even though the term for ‘sin’ (Heb. ḥaṭṭā’t) is absent in Genesis 2–3 as well, it does appear (without any explanation for its origins) in the following account of Cain and Abel, where it is, all of a sudden, a known reality (Gen. 4.7). Yet just as the alternation of curse and blessing is simultaneously historicized and existentialized at the conclusion of Deuteronomy, the beginning of Genesis likewise

See James Barr, ‘Was Everything That God Created Really Good? A Question in the First Verse of the Bible’, in God in the Fray: A Tribute to Walter Brueggemann, ed. Tod Linafelt and Timothy K. Beal (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 60. 26 See Barr, ‘Was Everything That God Created Really Good?’, 61; Bruce Wells, ‘Death in the Garden of Eden’, Journal of Biblical Literature 139, no. 4 (2020): 639–60. 27 See J. Andrew Dearman, ‘The Blessing in Torah: Preaching the Gospel Beforehand’, Austin Seminary Bulletin 105, no. 2 (1990): 40. 25

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existentializes blessing and curse (note the reverse order) even as it sequentializes them. The notion of blessing in Genesis 1 haunts the narrative in Genesis 2–3. There is no sense in Genesis 1 that such blessing could entirely depart from human experience. However, blessing seems more elusive and challenging to maintain in Genesis 2–3. Conversely, even in Genesis 1 there is an awareness that blessing is not mechanical or automatic and that effort is needed on the part of animate creation to live up to the blessing that God extends. In this fashion, the two creation accounts introduce blessing and curse at the beginning of the Pentateuch not only as steps in a process but also as abiding options for Israel. Their literary combination underscores the need to choose wisely (cf. Gen. 3.6). When Genesis 1–3 is read in this way as a compound introduction to the Pentateuch, mirroring its compound conclusion in Deuteronomy 27–33, it comes as no surprise to encounter language about ‘life’ in Genesis 3.20-24, since ‘life’ language is prominent at the end of Deuteronomy too. The status of the human being as knowing ‘good and evil’ (Gen. 3.22) emphasizes how a fateful choice must be made. Furthermore, the ‘tree of life’ and Eden are neither destroyed nor rendered otiose at the end of the second creation account. They are instead preserved and guarded. This ongoing but hidden quality of the garden lends a symbolic cast to the story and implies the typification of the story’s contents. Just this kind of figural understanding is evident in Ezekiel’s use of garden story motifs in his prophetic dirge over the king of Tyre (Ezek. 28.11-19). The term ‘covenant’ (Heb. bĕrît) does not appear in Genesis until Genesis 6.18, in the story of Noah. But there, it is closely related to the theme of creation (Gen. 6.19-20), the motif of life (Gen. 6.20), the problem of evil (Gen. 6.5), the avoidance of curse (Gen. 8.21), and the provision of divine blessing (Gen. 9.1). So the Primeval History (Genesis 1–11) extends the basic blessing– curse dichotomy of Genesis 1–3 and brings it into relation with the covenant tradition even before Gen. 12.1-3.28 A large-scale covenantal pattern within the Pentateuch was also identified by Rolf Rendtorff, who focused his attention on what he perceived to be a ‘parallel structure’ in the Primeval History and the account of Sinai (Exod. 19–34).29 As he described it: In both cases, the first gift of God (creation/covenant) is endangered by human sin and threatened with destruction because of God’s wrath. In both cases God changes his mind because of the intervention of one man (Noah/Moses). In both cases God promises not to bring destruction again (on humanity/on Israel), and in order to confirm that he (re) establishes his covenant.30 From this perspective, if a covenantal choice between blessing and curse is framed by both the Pentateuch’s introduction and its conclusion,31 then the Sinai account at the core of the Pentateuch expresses the substance of the covenant itself.

Feldmeier and Spieckermann observe that all of the foundation myths in Genesis are blessing stories. See Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 273. 29 Rolf Rendtorff, Canon and Theology: Overtures to an Old Testament Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 125–34. 30 Rendtorff, Canon and Theology, 134. 31 See Dearman, ‘The Blessing in Torah’, 41: ‘The Torah is framed by the language of blessing and curse.’ 28

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Worship as the Pentateuchal core Samuel Balentine has detailed how the structure of the creation account in Genesis 1 is also mirrored by the subsequent Pentateuchal material focused on worship: Corresponding to the number seven in the liturgical drama of creation, the instructions for building the tabernacle are conveyed in seven speeches (Exod. 25–31), the implementation of these instructions is carried out by seven acts of Moses (Exod. 40.17– 33), the instructions for sacrificial activities are reported in seven speeches (Lev. 1–7), and the duration of important rituals, including the ordination of the priests, is seven days (Lev. 8.33).32 The seven speeches of Exodus 25–31 not only correspond numerically to the seven-day pattern of Genesis 1, but the culminating seventh speech (Exod. 31.12-17) also concerns the holiness of the sabbath, corresponding specifically to the seventh day in Genesis 1. Exodus 31 describes the sabbath as a ‘perpetual covenant’ (Exod. 31.16) and explicitly refers back to Genesis 1 by relating how ‘in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed’ (Exod. 31.17).33 This close literary patterning not only underscores the central position of worship within the Pentateuch but also serves to explicate creation and worship with regard to each other. According to the Pentateuch’s representation, creation is liturgical, and worship is creational. As Balentine summarizes: ‘It is not just that the tabernacle and its rituals correspond to God’s created order. The Torah also understands Israel’s ritual world to have the capacity to sustain and, if necessary, to restore God’s design for creation.’34 Israel’s worship is both a reflection of God’s created order and a means for maintaining that order. While not limited to the cultic realm, blessing is nonetheless an essential element within sacrificial practice (Exod. 20.24). For this reason, ‘life’ is also a standing motif in Israel’s worship. The term does not refer to something other than physical life and encompasses health, security, and longevity. These mundane values are affirmed and kept within the scope of what ‘life’ is taken to mean (e.g. Pss. 37.3-4; 103.2-5). But ‘life’ means, even more, to have a portion in the land and community of Israel (e.g. Ps. 16.5-6, 10-11) and to know and be known by Israel’s God (Ps. 73.25).35 God’s steadfast love is finally better than simple biological existence (e.g. Ps. 63.3-4), and God’s goodness is reliably available in Israel’s worship (e.g. Ps. 65.4). Indeed, successful worship brings rejuvenation to the land as well as to its inhabitants (e.g. Ps. 65.9-11a). God’s blessing is life (Ps. 133.3). The Pentateuchal premium on worship is evident from its overall structure in which the divine revelation at Sinai occupies the central portion of the composite text, extending at least from Exodus 19 through to the remainder of Exodus, Leviticus, and the first section of

Samuel E. Balentine, The Torah’s Vision of Worship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 64. See further Bernd Janowski, Gottes Gegenwart in Israel: Beiträge zur Theologie des Alten Testaments (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener, 2004), 214–46. 34 Balentine, The Torah’s Vision of Worship, 64. 35 See Bernhard W. Anderson, with Steven Bishop, Out of the Depths: The Psalms Speak for Us Today, 3rd edn (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 114–15. 32 33

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Numbers.36 The Sinai sojourn lasts eleven months and represents something like a ‘Sabbath day experience’ at the core of Israel’s story, ‘a virtual suspension of time to enable the community to reflect on the importance of their covenantal commission to become partners with God’.37 The rest of the Pentateuch, especially Deuteronomy, can then be read as an elaboration of how Israel is to fulfil its vocation as ‘a priestly kingdom and a holy nation’ (Exod. 19.5-6) and live into God’s blessing.38 This elaboration takes a legal, covenantal form because the purpose of Israel’s law is also understood to be the preservation and promotion of life (Deut. 32.46-47).39 As Patrick Miller keenly observed, the ‘kerygmatic offer of life’ is ‘the key to Deuteronomy as a whole’.40 As in the Psalter, in Deuteronomy ‘life’ is not spiritualized, and physical existence is considered a divine blessing. However, there is a qualitative aspect of life which exceeds the physical and hinges on listening to God (e.g. Deut. 8.3: ‘one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord’). As in the Psalter also (Pss. 37.28; 106.3), justice is emphasized as a necessary pursuit for life to flourish (e.g. Deut. 16.20).41

Blessing at the heart of worship Significantly, the Priestly (or Aaronic) Blessing appears in Num. 6.22-27, towards the conclusion of the extended Sinai account. The historical importance of this prayer is apparent from the discovery of two versions of it on amulets dating to the late seventh or early sixth century bce,42 as well as from its centrality to the liturgical practice of the Second Temple and traditional Judaism.43 Raik Heckl notes that the Priestly Blessing comes at the end of the instructions regarding the priestly tabernacle, said in Num. 7.1 to be completed. The blessing is tightly constructed, with three lines of increasing length, containing three, five, and seven Hebrew words: ‘The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to

The Sinai event is foreshadowed earlier in Exodus (e.g. Exod. 3.12) and textually prolonged through a series of supplementations running through to Numbers 9. Only in Num. 10.11-12 does the Sinai event reach its full conclusion and the journey of the Israelites continue from that narrative location. 37 Balentine, The Torah’s Vision of Worship, 127. 38 Similarly, Claus Westermann, Blessing in the Bible and the Life of the Church, trans. Keith Crim (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 29: ‘the books Exodus through Numbers present the account of God’s saving deeds by which he established his people in history. The two books that precede and follow – Genesis and Deuteronomy – are chiefly concerned with the concept of blessing that God bestows on his people’. 39 See Terence E. Fretheim, ‘Law in the Service of Life: A Dynamic Understanding of Law in Deuteronomy’, in A God So Near: Essays on Old Testament Theology in Honor of Patrick D. Miller, ed. Brent A. Strawn and Nancy R. Bowen (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 183–200. 40 Patrick D. Miller, ‘“That You May Live”: Dimensions of Law in Deuteronomy’, in Concepts of Law in the Social Sciences, Legal Studies, and Theology, ed. Michael Welker and Gregor Etzelmüller (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 143. 41 See Richard H. Hiers, Justice and Compassion in Biblical Law (New York: Continuum, 2009). 42 See Gabriel Barkay, Marilyn J. Lundberg, Andrew G. Vaughn, and Bruce Zuckerman, ‘The Amulets from Ketef Hinnom: A New Edition and Evaluation’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 334 (2004): 41; Jeremy D. Smoak, The Priestly Blessing in Inscription and Scripture: The Early History of Numbers 6:24–26 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). This is the earliest biblical text ever discovered in an extra-biblical source. 43 See Avie Gold, Bircas Kohanim/The Priestly Blessings: Background, Translation, and Commentary Anthologized from Talmudic, Midrashic, and Rabbinic Sources (Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1986). 36

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you, the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.’ Each line begins with an invocation of God’s holy name. The total number of words – fifteen – is identical to the word value of this name, the Tetragrammaton. The careful delimitation of the text and its appearance at the end of the tabernacle account lead Heckl to conclude that the blessing was added as a ‘supplementary pericope’ to the book of Numbers in the Persian period.44 Its purpose was to present an authoritative script for earlier instructions concerning priestly blessing (Lev. 9.2224), displacing any other blessing formulas that may have existed at the time and providing a standardized text for the liturgy of the Second Temple. Indeed, it is possible to read Num. 6.22-27 as a resumption of the narrative in Leviticus 9, with everything now appearing between Lev. 10.1 and Num. 6.21 as an expanded series of priestly instructions.45 As Heckl summarizes: ‘Numbers 6 is a step on the way toward the canonization of Torah. The authority of Moses as the mediator of the will of God is used to privilege one text and its usage and together with it the entire complement of older passages and their priestly interpretations.’46 Blessing is thus placed at the very heart of the Pentateuch’s shape and message.

The covenantal shape of Pentateuchal blessing It is usually thought that the roots of Israel’s understanding of blessing lie in pre-yahwistic religion.47 Some instances of blessing in the Bible point in such a direction, particularly the use of blessing formulas in greetings and departures (e.g. Gen. 47.7; 1 Sam. 13.10; 2 Sam. 13.25). The routinization and widespread employment of these formulas likely indicate an ancient, cross-cultural network of assumptions and practices. In the present shape of the Pentateuch, however, blessing has been assigned an overarching covenantal function. Moreover, the Pentateuch itself has been structured covenantally so that blessing and curse demarcate two basic stances with regard to the God of Israel. These two possibilities are presented as primordially resident within the fabric of creation (as described in Genesis 1–3), even as they remain real possibilities for Israel’s future existence in the land (as sketched in Deuteronomy 27–33). The location of the Priestly Blessing in Numbers 6 emphasizes the contemporary availability of blessing at the centre of the Pentateuch. This blessing occupied a climactic place in the daily liturgy of the Second Temple. In this way, the Pentateuch tells the story of Israel’s heritage and expresses the present reality of God’s claim on

Raik Heckl, ‘The Aaronic Blessing (Numbers 6): Its Intention and Place in the Concept of the Pentateuch’, in On Dating Biblical Texts to the Persian Period: Discerning Criteria and Establishing Epochs, ed. Richard J. Bautch and Mark Lackowski (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 136. 45 The significance of Leviticus 9 is similarly emphasized in Gary A. Anderson, ‘The Tabernacle Narrative as Christian Scripture’, in The Identity of Israel’s God in Christian Scripture, ed. Don Collett, Mark Elliott, Mark Gignilliat, and Ephraim Radner (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020), 81–95. On diachronic grounds, Wellhausen likewise treated the present tabernacle account (Exod. 25–31; 35–40; Lev. 8–10; Num. 7) as a series of supplementations. See Julius Wellhausen, Die Composition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bücher des alten Testaments, 4th edn (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1963), 134–44. 46 Heckl, ‘The Aaronic Blessing’, 138. 47 See Johannes Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 1:182–212. 44

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Israel, urging Israel to honour that claim.48 The canonical shape of the Pentateuch is not only horizontal and didactic but also perpendicular and peremptory. This interpretation of the Pentateuch’s canonical format presents a check on narrative approaches, which focus predominantly on the Pentateuch’s horizontal story shape and temporal unfolding. While the Pentateuch certainly is a story, it is also a story fashioned with an eye towards its own reception, to the present-future of its audience. The resulting relativization of the Pentateuch’s history-likeness opens up fresh avenues for comparison with traditional Jewish approaches to biblical interpretation, especially regarding the ‘simultaneity’ of the Pentateuch’s contents.49 As for the biblical view of creation, to come full circle, a keener appraisal of the Pentateuch’s canonical formatting leads to less preoccupation with material origins and greater attention to the quality of life envisioned in the biblical texts.50 Access to the fullness of created life through blessing is precisely what lies at the centre of Israelite worship and what worship makes available to the Israelite worshiper. This aspect of the biblical understanding of creation is particularly evident in five respects:

i. The liturgical exposition of creation in Genesis 1, in which the seven-day cycle culminates in the creation of the sabbath itself.



ii. The corresponding sevenfold structure of the tabernacle account in Exodus 25–31, which also culminates in the sabbath as a ‘perpetual covenant’.



iii. The emphasis on blessing in Genesis 1, a practice occupying a central place in Israel’s worship (as echoed and emphasized in Numbers 6).



iv. The stress on ‘life’ at the conclusion of the combined creation account in Genesis 1–3.



v. The similar stress on ‘life’ in the concluding chapters of the Pentateuch (Deuteronomy 27–33), which set forth a fundamental choice between an existence of atomizing self-absorption and the fullness of life lived in community before God.

The biblical tradition epitomized this network of convictions by confessing faith in the ‘living God’ (Pss. 42.2; 84.2).51 The basic shape of the Pentateuch is accordingly covenantal, but blessing and curse are not just presented as two possible responses to its covenantal summons. The Pentateuch is a literary work of advocacy: it urges Israel to choose life. The Pentateuch casts a vision of how Israel may live out blessing among the nations. On analogy with the priests who bless the people in worship (Num. 6.22-27), Israel is to be ‘a priestly kingdom and a holy nation’

Cf. Dearman, ‘The Blessing in Torah’, 41: ‘The Torah bristles with the tension between God’s irrevocable resolve to bless and the final Mosaic injunction in Deuteronomy that life and death decisions stand before the present generation of the people of God.’ 49 See Sylvie A. Goldberg, Clepsydra: Essay on the Plurality of Time in Judaism, trans. Benjamin Ivry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016); Jon D. Levenson, ‘The Eighth Principle of Judaism and the Literary Simultaneity of Scripture’, The Journal of Religion 68, no. 2 (1988): 205–25. Strawn likewise describes the ‘transhistoricism’ of Deuteronomy and also points to Levenson. See Strawn, ‘Slaves and Rebels’, 184–9. 50 See further Jürgen Moltmann, The Living God and the Fullness of Life, trans. Margaret Kohl (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015). 51 See Siegfried Kreuzer, Der lebendige Gott: Bedeutung, Herkunft und Entwicklung einer alttestamentlichen Gottesbezeichnung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1983); Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living. 48

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(Exod. 19.5-6) on behalf of the other peoples of the world (Deut. 26.18-19)52 – in covenantal collaboration with non-human animals as well (Gen. 9.8-17). The Pentateuch is ultimately a manual for creation care. Through the medium of Israel’s faithfulness, the blessings made available by God in creation are to be realized by all animate life.

Further reading Balentine, Samuel E. The Torah’s Vision of Worship. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999. Bauckham, Richard. Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2010. Davison, Andrew. Blessing. London: Canterbury Press, 2014. Feldmeier, Reinhard and Hermann Spieckermann. God of the Living: A Biblical Theology. Translated by Mark E. Biddle. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011. Moltmann, Jürgen. The Living God and the Fullness of Life. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015. Westermann, Claus. Blessing in the Bible and the Life of the Church. Translated by Keith Crim. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978.

See Siegbert Riecker, Ein Priestervolk für alle Völker: der Segensauftrag Israels für alle Nationen in der Tora und den Vorderen Propheten (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2007). 52

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CHAPTER 4 CREATION AND THE PROPHETS

Abigail Pelham

Introduction: Affirming/questioning The prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible1 present YHWH in no uncertain terms as the creator of the world and of Israel2 as his own particular world-within-the-world. At the same time, the world the books present is a creation in crisis. YHWH assesses his creation, and Israel in particular, as having failed to meet his expectations. He resolves, therefore, to destroy Israel in the interest of making it anew per his vision of how it ought to be. The main speaker in the prophetic books is YHWH himself. This detail seems often overlooked as scholars try to piece together the identity of the prophets and how their messages were transmitted. Yet, when one reads the books, what is primarily heard is YHWH speaking to a prophet, intending the speech to be repeated to its addressees. The book of Job, from the wisdom literature, identifies chapters 38–41 as YHWH’s speeches, but readers do not usually identify Jeremiah 7, for example, as a speech made by YHWH, even though that is what it is, as is the bulk of the prophetic material. When YHWH speaks in Job, different readers have different reactions. Some find YHWH’s words an appropriate response to Job’s concerns, while others find YHWH’s words evasive or worse. Job himself responds with ambiguous language that has been variously interpreted. YHWH believes that his words respond appropriately to Job’s complaints, but whether readers are intended to agree is less certain. John Curtis suggests that: ‘[T]he author . . . has constructed the Yahweh speech as an ironic caricature of the god who is too big to care about the petty affairs of men.’3 For Curtis, although YHWH speaks as if he has authority, readers are intended to see him as a blustering bully and reject his claims. I am not convinced that the author intends readers to view YHWH as an unqualified bully. Still, YHWH’s words about himself and his world do raise questions about his identity and his activity rather than providing one with answers that can be accepted at face value. In the same way, in the prophetic books, YHWH speaks authoritatively about himself as creator, but readers may find some of his claims suspect. As the creator of a creation in crisis, YHWH chooses a particular course of action and does not question the correctness of his choice; readers, however, may wonder what actions are proper to a creator and whether the actions YHWH chooses are defensible. The prophetic books both unquestioningly affirm YHWH’s power as creator and cast a sideways, questioning glance at the nature of that power.

This chapter discusses the fifteen prophetic books collectively that, as a unit, present a coherent statement about YHWH’s creation of the world. Some differences of focus exist, of course, and this chapter necessarily involves simplification and the use of an organizing frame based on what typically appears. 2 In what follows, the collective term ‘Israel’ will be used to refer to Israel and Judah. For YHWH, from whose perspective the books are narrated, both kingdoms comprise the same people. 3 John B. Curtis, ‘On Job’s Response to Yahweh’, Journal of Biblical Literature 98, no. 4 (1979): 508. 1

Creation and the Prophets

In this chapter, then, both aspects of the prophetic depiction of YHWH as creator will be explored.

YHWH’s creation: A demonstration of power and authority In the prophetic books, YHWH presents himself as the creator of the world, an identity that other speakers also acknowledge. In Isaiah, YHWH describes himself to the Judahites in exile as: ‘[Y]our Maker, who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth’ (Isa. 51.13), and as ‘your Redeemer, who formed you in the womb . . . the Lord, who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who by myself spread out the earth’ (Isa. 44.24; see also Isa. 45.12; 48.13a; Jer. 51.15; Zech. 12.1). The point of these verses is not to demonstrate how YHWH created the world, however, but rather to establish the fact of his power and authority over the world and its inhabitants in their entirety. In the book of Jonah, when the sailors learn that Jonah’s god ‘made the sea and the dry land’ (Jon. 1.9b), they are not interested in the particulars of his creative process; instead, they are terrified because they immediately recognize that Jonah’s god’s status as creator gives him the power and authority to do ‘as it pleases [him]’ (Jon. 1.14b) with land, sea, and living beings. Whatever actions this god took to make the world, that he is the one who has done so means that they are putty in his hands. Stephen Lee makes the argument that b’rā (to create), that most significant of creation verbs (given that it is only ever used with God as the subject), ‘consistently conveys . . . YHWH’s supreme power and sovereign control over all of his creation’, rather than the production of something new.4 Also, John Levenson writes: ‘The creation narratives . . . are best seen as dramatic visualizations of the uncompromised mastery of YHWH . . . over all else.’5 The combat myth of creation, or Chaoskampf, attested most famously in the Babylonian epic Enūma Eliš, clearly demonstrates the connection between creative activity and power. In Enūma Eliš, the young god Marduk slays the chaos monster Tiamat, uses her severed body to create earth and sky, and establishes his temple–palace in Babylon. That Tiamat is the material from which the cosmos is made means that the resurgence of chaos remains an ever-present threat to the created order, and Marduk and his earthly representative – the Babylonian king – must be persistently vigilant, exercising force when necessary to ensure that order is maintained. Ever since Hermann Gunkel, in his 1895 book Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton),6 indicated similarities between Genesis 1 and Enūma Eliš, the question of whether biblical authors and their original audiences understood YHWH’s creation of the world to have been accomplished through combat with chaos has been entertained by scholars. The answer seems to be that the Chaoskampf trope was well known in ancient Israel but can be seen to have been employed in different ways by biblical authors, with some taking its veracity as a matter of course and

Stephen Lee, ‘Power Not Novelty: The Connotations of ‫ ברא‬in the Hebrew Bible’, in Understanding Poets and Prophets: Essays in Honour of George Wishart Anderson, ed. A. Graeme Auld (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 203. 5 John D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 3. 6 Hermann Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit. Eine religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung über Gen. 1 und Ap. Joh. 12 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1895). 4

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others presenting alternative modes of creative activity. Stretching out the heavens and laying the earth’s foundations do not seem like combative activities, yet, as Norman Habel points out: ‘The motif of . . . laying the foundations of the earth . . . is often associated with the widespread Chaoskampf tradition. . . . The correlation of . . . “he who stretches out the heavens” and “he who founds the earth”, suggests the possibility that they are both drawn from earlier mythic traditions.’7 The difficulty is knowing, when elements of a myth appear, whether an entire mythic system is implied or whether the absence of the entire myth means that the author is deliberately refusing to acknowledge its applicability. However, it probably does not matter whether YHWH’s creation of the earth is envisaged as having occurred through his defeat of an oppositional force or more peacefully. When YHWH announces, ‘It is I who by my great power and my outstretched arm have made the earth, with the people and animals . . . and I give it to whomsoever I please’ (Jer. 27.5), whether YHWH’s ‘outstretched arm’ was holding a tool with which to smooth out the heavens or a sword with which to dismember a chaos monster, YHWH’s point is that his created earth belongs to him to do with as he pleases. Whether created through combat or calmly crafted, the world is YHWH’s, and he has power and authority over it.

The creation of Israel Prophetic depictions of YHWH as creator of the world serve as a backdrop to his creation of Israel as a people and a nation. As Richard Clifford notes: ‘To the ancients, human society organized in a particular place’ was the intended outcome of creation rather than ‘the physical world’.8 Because YHWH is the creator of the world, he has power over it in its entirety, but the part of the creation that seems to matter most to him is Israel. Within Israel, YHWH intends to manifest his desires for what his created world ought to be like. Various depictions of YHWH’s creation of Israel appear in the prophets. In some, Chaoskampf imagery gives cosmic significance to YHWH’s delivery of Israel from Egypt. For example, YHWH says in Isaiah: ‘I am the Lord . . . the Creator of Israel . . . who makes a way in the sea . . . who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down . . . they are extinguished’ (Isa. 43.15, 16b, 17). Here, YHWH creates Israel by defeating chaos, embodied in the Egyptians, using the sea as a weapon. The correspondence to the Chaoskampf is not exact, but the presence of its elements indicates that it is in the background. This proclamation of creation through combat is set in the context of Judah’s exile in Babylon; YHWH’s message is that just as he had the power to deliver the Israelites from Egypt, so he has the power to deliver the Judahites from Babylon, and he has the power to do these things because he created the world through combat with chaos. Whatever form chaos may take, YHWH has the power to defeat it and to create the world according to his desires. Other passages in the prophets use imagery of parent and child (Hos. 11.1a, 3-4), potter and clay (Isa. 64.8b; Jer. 18.2-6), and planter and plant (Isa. 5.1-4; Jer. 11.17a) to describe YHWH’s making of Israel, and others refer to YHWH’s deliverance of the ancestral Israelites from Egypt

Norman C. Habel, ‘He Who Stretches out the Heavens’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1972): 418. Richard J. Clifford, ‘The Hebrew Scriptures and the Theology of Creation’, Theological Studies 46, no. 3 (1985): 509.

7 8

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and the covenant made with them (Isa. 43.15-17; Jer. 11.4-5; 31.32; Hos. 13.4-5; Amos 2.10; Mal. 2.10). Another striking depiction of YHWH’s making of Israel – this one focused on Jerusalem – occurs in Ezekiel 16, where Jerusalem is described as an abandoned baby who YHWH has transformed into a wealthy and beautiful woman, ‘fit to be a queen’ (Ezek. 16.13b). Jerusalem’s identity as YHWH’s wife is entirely created by YHWH, who says to her: ‘Your fame spread among the nations on account of your beauty, for it was perfect because of my splendour that I had bestowed on you’ (Ezek. 16.14). A similar kind of creation is portrayed in Hosea 2, where YHWH addresses Israel as his wife whom he has created by giving her ‘grain . . . wine . . . oil . . . silver and gold . . . wool and . . . flax’ (Hos. 2.8, 9b). The point being made throughout is that, as creator of Israel, YHWH has power and authority over Israel, just as, as creator of the world, he has power and authority over the world. Moreover, YHWH’s expectations for Israel, as YHWH’s special world-within-the-world, are particularly exacting. YHWH’s interactions with the natural world and with other nations are usually portrayed as having the shaping of Israel as their goal. Although some of the prophetic books envision a future in which Israel will provide positive benefits for the larger world – in Zech. 8.22a, for example, YHWH foresees a time when ‘many peoples and strong nations shall come to seek the Lord of hosts in Jerusalem’ – this seems to be a by-product of YHWH’s efforts, but not his primary intention.9

Creator as destroyer Although in the prophets YHWH presents himself as the creator of the world and of Israel, if all were right with his creation he might have nothing to say. The burden of his speech in the books regards his disappointment with Israel. YHWH may have successfully stretched out the heavens and founded the earth, but his idea for what the world of his making would be like, as exemplified in Israel, has not come to fruition. What ought to have been a location of ease and enjoyment – the productive vineyard; the shapely ceramic bowl; the beautiful, obedient wife – requires instead forceful subjugation. It requires, in short, what chaos requires if it is to be kept in check. Casey Strine and Carly Crouch point out that, whereas in the normal scheme of combat mythology, defeat by a foreign nation would indicate one’s own god’s failure to maintain order, in the prophetic material ‘the conquest of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile are . . . rationalized through a . . . restructuring of the tradition’, whereby Israel is recast as chaos and foreign nations become YHWH’s order-bringing weapons.10 In every prophetic book except Jonah, the destruction of Israel at YHWH’s instigation is described, often with cosmic implications encompassing the earth and the heavens. In Amos, for example, this vision is reported: ‘I saw the Lord standing beside the altar, and he said:

So John Collins, reflecting on Isaiah 24–27: ‘Zion emerges . . . as the center of a restored world order. . . . The universalism of this scenario is often noted, but it is a Zion-centric universalism.’ John J. Collins, ‘The Beginning of the End of the World in the Hebrew Bible’, in Thus Says the Lord: Essays on the Former and Latter Prophets in Honor of Robert R. Wilson, ed. John J. Ahn and Stephen L. Cook (New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 150. 10 Casey A. Strine and Carly L. Crouch, ‘YHWH’s Battle against Chaos in Ezekiel: The Transformation of Judahite Mythology for a New Situation’, Journal of Biblical Literature 132, no. 4 (2013): 902. Strine and Crouch are writing about Ezekiel, but the same observation applies to other prophetic literature. 9

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Strike the capitals . . . and shatter them on the heads of all the people. . . . [N]ot one of them shall escape’ (Amos 9.1). As the passage continues, cosmic upheaval is depicted in association with YHWH’s intention to annihilate the people of Israel: ‘The Lord . . . touches the earth and it melts . . . and all of it rises . . . and sinks again. . . . [He] calls for the waters of the sea, and pours them out on the surface of the earth’ (Amos 9.5, 6b). In Isaiah, Israel is described as a vineyard planted by YHWH whose expectation of good grapes has been thwarted by the vineyard’s production of wild grapes, despite YHWH’s husbandry (Isa. 5.1-2). YHWH resolves to ‘remove [the vineyard’s] hedge, and it shall be devoured . . . and . . . trampled down. I will make it a waste’ (Isa. 5.5b–6a). Here, as in Amos, the breaking down of Israel is coupled with images of the unsettling of the earth itself: ‘[T]he anger of the Lord was kindled against his people, and he stretched out his hand against them. . . . [T]he mountains quaked, and their corpses were like refuse in the streets’ (Isa. 5.25). To effect the destruction of Israel, YHWH uses other nations as his weapons, as Isaiah chillingly narrates: ‘He will raise a signal for a nation far away. . . . They will roar over [the land] . . . like the roaring of the sea. And if one looks to the land – only darkness and distress’ (Isa. 5.26a, 30). This attack by YHWH is comparable to his undoing of the order he previously established. The sea seems to overwhelm the land. Darkness seems to cover the sky. YHWH indicates that he intends to continue destroying ‘until cities lie waste without inhabitant . . . and the land is utterly desolate’ (Isa. 6.11b). When creation is understood as ‘the emergence of a stable community in a . . . life-sustaining order’,11 as it was in ancient Israel, an empty land is an uncreated land. Similarly, in Jeremiah, YHWH reveals his plan to use Babylon as his weapon to uncreate Israel, saying: ‘I am bringing evil from the north . . . a destroyer of nations . . . has gone out from his place to make your land a waste . . . without inhabitant’ (Jer. 4.6b-7). The prophet then reports this vision: ‘[T]he earth . . . was waste and void . . . the heavens . . . had no light . . . there was no one at all . . . the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins’ (Jer. 4.23-26a). Here, as in Isaiah, YHWH’s destructive activities brought against Israel are equivalent to the undoing of the created world itself.12

Justification for destruction Throughout the prophetic books, YHWH justifies his decision to destroy Israel and, as sometimes happens, by extension, the world in its entirety. Although YHWH’s identity as the creator is presented as giving him the power and authority to do as he pleases, he insists that he does not act destructively without cause. In Ezekiel, YHWH begs, ‘Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed against me’, insisting: ‘I have no pleasure in the death of anyone. . . . Turn, then, and live’ (Ezek. 18.31a, 32). Social injustice and cultic impropriety are the main charges YHWH levels against Israel. In Amos, YHWH accuses: ‘[T]hey sell the

Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 12. Michael DeRoche finds additional references to cosmic uncreation resulting from Israel’s unfaithfulness to YHWH in Hos. 4.1-3 and Zeph. 1.2-3, where the prophets name ‘three groups of animals . . . [which] represent the three spheres in which the animal kingdom lives. . . . [T]he list is representative of all animal life, and the prophets mean to announce a total destruction’. Michael DeRoche, ‘The Reversal of Creation in Hosea’, Vetus Testamentum 31, no. 4 (1981): 403. 11 12

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righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals – they . . . trample the head of the poor into the dust’ (Amos 2.6b-7a). In Isaiah, he charges: ‘[Y]ou . . . set a table for Fortune and fill cups of mixed wine for Destiny . . . when I spoke, you did not listen, but you did what was evil in my sight’ (Isa. 65.11b, 12b). The world is not as YHWH intended it to be, so YHWH decides: ‘I will destine you to the sword, and all of you shall bow down to the slaughter’ (Isa. 65.12a). In Jeremiah, YHWH sends the prophet to watch a potter at work. He instructs Jeremiah to notice how when ‘the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled . . . he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him’ (Jer. 18.4). The lesson is not that the potter has the skill to make satisfactory vessels at every attempt. Instead, YHWH’s lesson is that the potter has the power and authority to do with the clay whatever ‘seems good to him’, and if what ‘seems good’ is destructive, that does not negate the potter’s primary identity as a creator. In the same way, a creator-god has the power, authority, and responsibility to judge his creation and to destroy what seems ‘spoiled’ in the interest of making something better. ‘Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done?’ YHWH asks rhetorically, explaining: ‘Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand’ (Jer. 18.6). YHWH insists that, like the potter, he does not act without cause when he chooses to destroy, but rather only destroys what he judges to be ‘spoiled’, to fix it. He advises: ‘Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings’ (Jer. 18.11b), but is answered with outright refusal: ‘[E]ach of us will act according to the stubbornness of our evil will’ (Jer. 18.12b). When the clay does that, the potter – if he is any good at his job – can only flatten his spoiled attempt at a vessel and begin again.

The new creation The world YHWH desires to make is characterized by peace and abundance. Throughout the prophetic books, oracles of destruction alternate with oracles of salvation, in which YHWH reveals his plans for his new, unspoiled creation. The new world will be a place of prodigious abundance for the people of Israel: ‘[T]he mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it’ (Amos 9.13b); ‘[T]he produce of the ground . . . will be rich and plenteous. . . . On every lofty mountain . . . there will be brooks running with water’ (Isa. 30.23b, 25a); ‘[T]he pastures of the wilderness are green . . . the fig tree and vine give their full yield. . . . The threshing-floors shall be full of grain, the vats shall overflow with wine and oil’ (Joel 2.22, 24). In this ideal world, the people of Israel, too, will be multiplied abundantly: ‘Jerusalem shall be inhabited like villages without walls, because of the multitude of people and animals in it’ (Zech. 2.4b; see also Isa. 49.19b-20; Jer. 23.3; Ezek. 36.10b-11a). Peace will accompany this abundance. YHWH describes how ‘The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid. . . . The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp. . . . They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain’ (Isa. 11.6, 8a, 9a; see also Isa. 65.25; Ezek. 34.25; Hos. 2.18). Interspecies violence will be abolished, and, with equal novelty, interpersonal violence will disappear. In the new creation, ‘nations . . . shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’ (Isa. 2.4b//Mic. 4.3). Moreover, once YHWH has remade the world, the new creation will last forever. Isaiah ends with YHWH’s proclamation of permanence: ‘For as the new heavens and the new earth . . . 61

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shall remain before me . . . so shall your descendants and your name remain. From new moon to new moon, and from sabbath to sabbath’ (Isa. 66.22-23a). In Hosea, YHWH says to his remade Israel: ‘I will take you for my wife forever . . . in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love . . . in mercy . . . [and] in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord’ (Hos. 2.19-20). What YHWH plans to make will never be unmade. This time, YHWH will get it right.

The non-appearance of the new creation This chapter began by claiming that the prophetic books both unquestioningly affirm YHWH’s power as creator and cast a sideways, questioning glance at that affirmation. What follows explores some of the uncertainties the books raise about YHWH’s creative power. The most obvious sideways, questioning glance might be cast by the observer who notes that the new world YHWH has promised never comes to fruition. The hills flowing with wine and the friendly asps remain fantasies. As Robert Carroll points out, the failure of this world to materialize provided ‘the necessary condition for the growth of subsequent movements of reinterpretation . . . [which] are the clearest evidence that the problem of unfulfilled predictions was . . . felt to be a serious flaw’.13 YHWH’s new creation has been reimagined by various faith communities as an event promised for the future, but the prophetic texts retain the flaw, permitting different interpretations. Habakkuk ends with a description of current experience that is a far cry from the abundance promised for the post-destruction new creation: ‘[T]he fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines . . . the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food’ (Hab. 3.17). The prophet affirms his faith that ‘the Lord is my strength’ (Hab. 3.19a), but it is an affirmation made in the teeth of despair against indications to the contrary. In his speeches, YHWH insists that destruction is an activity proper to a creator whose creation has disappointed him. He announces his plan to destroy what he judges to be ‘spoiled’ in order to create anew. Yet, his failure to create this new world casts doubt on his identity as a creator. If the old creation was ‘spoiled’, and the new creation never materializes, what kind of creator is YHWH?

The conundrum of YHWH’s powerful words In Genesis 1, God makes the world using the power of his speech. In the prophets, YHWH insists that his words are similarly potent: what he says will happen will happen. In Isaiah, for example, he claims: ‘[A]s the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth . . . so shall my word be . . . it shall accomplish . . . the thing for which I sent it’ (Isa. 55.10a, 11). The snag, however, is that, although YHWH’s words may be effective in certain situations, in others, they fail because their addressees are not listening: ‘Though I write for [Israel] the multitude of my instructions, they are regarded as a strange thing’, YHWH complains in Hosea 8.12. Similarly, in Isaiah, YHWH laments: ‘O that

Robert P. Carroll, When Prophecy Failed: Reactions and Responses to Failure in the Old Testament Prophetic Traditions (London: SCM Press, 1979), 40. 13

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you [Israel] had paid attention to my commandments! Then your prosperity would have been like a river, and . . . your offspring would have been like the sand’ (Isa. 48.18a, 19a). YHWH’s commandments have not resulted in deeds of obedience, and it is precisely obedience that YHWH requires if the world he wants to make is to be achieved. His words cannot bring the world of his desires into existence if no one listens to his speech. Indeed, the destruction YHWH plans seems calculated to give his words the necessary amplification for his addressees to hear them. In Zechariah, this sequence is detailed. YHWH describes how he commanded his people to ‘show kindness and mercy to one another’ (Zech. 7.9b), an instruction that has been ignored (see Zech. 7.11b). Because of this, ‘the Lord . . . scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations. . . . Thus the land they left was desolate’ (Zech. 7.12b, 14a). After this destruction, YHWH plans to repopulate the land anew. The people of Israel will once again ‘be my people’, he says, ‘and I will be their God, in faithfulness and in righteousness’ (Zech. 8.8b). Now, YHWH believes, his instructions will be followed. He commands: ‘Speak the truth to one another, render . . . judgements that are true and make for peace, do not devise evil in your hearts’ (Zech. 8.16b-17a). These latter commandments will be made efficacious by the unspoken ‘or else’ that gestures back to Israel’s prior destruction. In the same way, Isaiah ends with the righteous inhabiting their new world, being required to regularly look upon ‘the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled’ (Isa. 66.24a). For the new creation to exist, there must be heads on spikes prominently displayed, lest the inhabitants of the new creation forget what could be their own fate. But, of course, neither in Isaiah nor in Zechariah has this new world been created, so any threats by which its security is maintained are moot. Whatever power YHWH’s words give him over the natural world and foreign armies, permitting him to achieve his aims in those spheres, they seem singularly ineffective when it comes to his own people. If he could only have made them listen, the world of his envisioning would already exist. It may well be that YHWH’s words are instrumental to his destruction of Israel, but the prophets never show an example of YHWH’s words creating in the way he desires. Despite his claims, he never succeeds.

The problematical potter analogy When YHWH sends Jeremiah to the potter’s house, the lesson YHWH intends him to learn is that creators are also, rightfully, destroyers whenever their creation does not meet their expectations. Yet, there are other lessons that the analogy of the potter could teach, and these problematize YHWH’s use of the potter and the clay as an analogy for himself and Israel. For example, when YHWH interprets the potter’s reworking of his ‘spoiled’ vessel as demonstrating the creator’s authority over the creation, YHWH does not notice that the potter’s remaking is part of the normal iterative process by which an artist works towards a finished product. For the potter, there is nothing problematic about his need to rework a particular vessel. For YHWH, however, that his creation has not turned out to plan is a crisis. Something has gone horribly wrong, and what has caused it to go wrong is Israel’s failure to obey YHWH’s commands, by which the world of his desires ought to have been made. Yet, the potter does not blame the clay for what is a normal part of the process. If blame could be assigned, the potter, not the clay, would be responsible. If Israel is YHWH’s ‘spoiled vessel’, then the analogy of the potter suggests a failure in YHWH’s shaping activities rather than a failure on the part of Israel to 63

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properly conform to YHWH’s faultless technique. Moreover, unlike YHWH, the potter does not work with sentient material. YHWH proposes to behave towards his sentient creation as if it is insentient, and in this, more than anything, his intended lesson flounders. ‘Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand’ (Jer. 18.5b), YHWH announces. He is both correct, in that he plans to destroy and reshape Israel as he sees the potter doing, and incorrect, in that Israel is nothing like the clay except that YHWH made it and is powerful enough to destroy it. In Isaiah, YHWH accuses his people of not understanding their proper place in relation to him, saying: ‘Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? Shall the thing made say of its maker . . . “He has no understanding”?’ (Isa. 29.16). YHWH intends to indicate his people’s lack of understanding, yet his assertion that ‘clay’ does not talk back to its maker might also be seen as demonstrating that YHWH’s creation is not clay anymore, if it ever was. Whatever YHWH has on his hands, it is not clay if it is talking back. Moreover, a potter would know clay when he saw it, which suggests that YHWH is no potter. This is not to say that YHWH is not the creator of Israel, but only to say that the relation a potter has to clay is not analogous to YHWH’s relation to Israel or the world. Whatever a potter might be justified in doing does not apply to YHWH.

YHWH’s weapons To destroy Israel, as he believes is his right, YHWH employs the finest weapons of the day – first Assyria, which he describes as ‘the rod of my anger’ (Isa. 10.5), is sent to ‘tread [Israel] down like the mire of the streets’ (Isa. 10.6b), and then Babylon, ‘a golden cup in the Lord’s hand’ (Jer. 51.7), containing ‘the wine of wrath’ that ‘the nations . . . shall drink and . . . go out of their minds’ (Jer. 25.15b, 16a). To destroy Babylon after it has served its purpose, YHWH uses another nation, which he describes as ‘my war-club . . . [with which] I smash nations’ (Jer. 51.20a). YHWH is not interested in reforming Assyria or Babylon but only in using them as he remakes Israel. The nations that function as YHWH’s tools of annihilation often suffer the same fate they have meted out while also bearing the blame for having been so used. In Zechariah, YHWH proclaims: ‘I am extremely angry with the nations . . . for while I was only a little angry, they made the disaster worse’ (Zech. 1.15). Terence Fretheim highlights this verse as providing a way of accounting for YHWH’s apparent use of excessive violence. It demonstrates how ‘God’s agents of judgment commonly exceed their mandate; God’s response to the consequent disasters includes tears, lament, and regret’.14 Although YHWH may be genuinely distressed by the destruction wrought by his chosen weapons, it seems puzzling that he chose these weapons if he did not foresee this outcome. According to Fretheim, ‘God uses the means available in that time and place to accomplish the divine purposes.’15 That is, YHWH would have preferred to wield more manageable weapons, but, of necessity, he picked the only weapons at hand.

Terence E. Fretheim, ‘“I was only a Little Angry”: Divine Violence in the Prophets’, Interpretation 58, no. 4 (2004): 365. 15 Fretheim, ‘“I was only a Little Angry”’, 369. 14

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Surveying his arsenal, as it were, YHWH shrugs: ‘Well, it’s the Death Star or nothing, so the Death Star it will have to be.’ When the Death Star obliterates Israel, YHWH insists that destruction on this scale was not what he had in mind. Yet, although YHWH may sometimes lament the destructiveness of his chosen weapon, at other times, it seems clear that the kind of weapon he wants is one capable of cosmic uncreation. He chooses Assyria and Babylon because they are the best weapons for the job. Only afterwards does he seem to get the idea of blaming the weapon. Perhaps, after all, his obliterated creation does not look like something with which to begin again, as he had expected it would. Before becoming the destroyer, YHWH insists that he only plans to destroy in the service of creation. Walter Brueggemann describes YHWH’s violence in the prophets as ‘counterviolence, which functions . . . in the service of a non-violent end’.16 This is undoubtedly how YHWH views his plans for destruction. He is justifiably dismayed by the rampant injustice that characterizes his creation and his people’s failure to remain faithful to his cult. To fix these problems, he believes he needs to unmake his creation and then make it again, as potters do. Thus, he picks up weapons of uncreation – powerful armies that seem to have been crafted expressly to get the job done – and uses them to uncreate the world, or at least those parts of it that he wants to get right. Perhaps having used extreme violence in the service of ‘a non-violent end’, he discovers that he is no longer the same god he was before. YHWH may have learned from the potter that destruction is part of a creator’s rightful work, but perhaps by throwing down his discharged weapon he discovers that the potter’s lesson was not intended for him. Having become the destroyer, does YHWH find that his identity is no longer that of creator? Is that why the world of his dreams does not rise from the ashes of the world he has destroyed? Perhaps, seeing his creation in ruins and realizing that he does not know how to rebuild it better, the eyes that give him the sideways, questioning glance are his own.

Conclusion In the prophets, YHWH speaks with authority about himself and his creation, presenting a scenario in which, as creator of the world and of Israel in particular, he is justified in destroying what he has made when it has not turned out to plan, to remake it in alignment with his desires. It may be, though, that YHWH is an unreliable narrator who cannot make the world he imagines, however vividly he may describe it. The non-materialization of YHWH’s new creation casts doubt on his beliefs about his own capabilities. If the prophetic books told a story in which the new world did appear after the destruction of the old, complete with all the promised bells and whistles of outrageous abundance and unending peace, the violence that had been necessary to bring it into being might not be in question. YHWH’s announcement, ‘I will punish the world for its evil. . . . I will make mortals more rare than fine gold . . . [and] I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place’ (Isa. 13.11a, 12a, 13a), might be accepted as a harsh necessity in YHWH’s

Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 244. 16

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effort to make a new and better world. Readers might say, ‘Fair do’s’, in response to YHWH’s description of his plan to ‘deliver you [Jerusalem] into [the nations’] hands’ so that the nations can ‘bring a mob against you, and . . . stone you and cut you to pieces with their swords’, permitting YHWH to ‘satisfy [his own] fury on you’ (Ezek. 16.39a, 40, 42a). Similarly, when YHWH describes his planned destruction of Israel as ‘like [the breaking] of a potter’s vessel that is smashed so ruthlessly that among its fragments not a sherd is found’ (Isa. 30.14a), the response could be: ‘Yes, but remember, YHWH, like the potter, plans to remake the broken vessel into a better one.’ As it is, however, when YHWH’s new creation does not appear in place of the old, the atrocity of YHWH’s violent acts is foregrounded. It becomes clear that it has all been for nothing. Violence in the service of peace is revealed as a delusion. Perhaps no one is more surprised about that than YHWH himself. Although references to the Chaoskampf appear in the prophets, the full myth is not delineated, making it uncertain whether the original world and Israel within it were understood as having been created through YHWH’s combat with chaotic enemies. However, the world that is unambiguously depicted as created through combat is YHWH’s new creation. YHWH comes as a warrior to destroy a chaotic Israel and to create a new Israel from a remnant of its people, just as Marduk defeats Tiamat and uses her dismembered body to create his world. Whether the Chaoskampf is applied in the beginning or not, it applies here and now. YHWH announces that he will create through combat, intending to achieve through force what he could not achieve through persuasion. But no creation happens. The new world that was to have been made possible by the destruction of the old does not come into being. Destruction does not result in creation but only in destruction. In this way, the prophetic books, in which YHWH speaks with certainty about the value of creation through combat, debunk the myth. A world of peace and abundance cannot be made by violence, and YHWH, if he is to achieve the kind of creation he desires, must find another way to do it.

Further reading Ahn, John J. and Stephen L. Cook, eds. Thus Says the LORD: Essays on the Former and Latter Prophets in Honor of Robert R. Wilson. New York: T&T Clark, 2009. Crouch, Carly L. War and Ethics in the Ancient Near East: Military Violence in Light of Cosmology and History. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. Eidevall, Göran. Prophecy and Propaganda: Images of Enemies in the Book of Isaiah. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009. Fretheim, Terence E. God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005. Grabbe, Lester E. and Robert D. Haak, eds. ‘Every City Shall Be Forsaken’: Urbanism and Prophecy in Ancient Israel and the Near East. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. O’Brien, Julia M. Challenging Prophetic Metaphor: Theology and Ideology in the Prophets. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. Paas, Stefan. Creation and Judgement: Creation Texts in Some Eighth Century Prophets. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Scurlock, Joann and Richard H. Beal, eds. Creation and Chaos: A Reconsideration of Hermann Gunkel’s Chaoskampf Hypothesis. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2013.

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CHAPTER 5 FROM WONDER TO WISDOM

William P. Brown

It nearly goes without saying that nature, in all its sheer vastness and complexity, elicits a sense of awe or wonder. Just ask the Himba, a seminomadic people of the Namibia desert, as they look up at the stars.1 Or ask John Muir, ‘The Father of National Parks’ in America, who once said, ‘When one is alone at night in the depths of these woods, the stillness is at once awful and sublime. Every leaf seems to speak’.2 Likewise, something profound is felt when gazing up at the Milky Way on a clear night or listening to the silence deep in the dark woods. Call it ‘awe’. With some help from recent psychological research, this chapter explores the contours of awe in certain biblical descriptions of creation, particularly in the book of Job and Psalm 104. It argues that the ancient authors, like modern psychologists, acknowledged the experience of awe in creation while also recognizing its transformative impact in human behaviour as an outgrowth of wonder and wisdom discerned in creation.

Awe among the sages The sages responsible for the so-called wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible (i.e. Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes) found creation to be a more profound source of theological reflection than national history or temple worship. In place of ancient Israel’s history from Abraham to the fall of Judah, the natural world stands front and centre in much of the wisdom literature. In other words, ‘wisdom understands the natural world as pedagogical’.3 Take, for example, the testimony given in Prov. 30.18-19: Three things are too wonderful for me; four things I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a woman.4

See Jen Smith, ‘Scientists Learn More about the State of Awe’, Sierra, accessed 22 August 2020, https://www​.sierraclub​ .org​/sierra​/green​-life​/scientists​-learn​-more​-about​-state​-awe. 2 Linnie M. Wolfe, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 295. 3 David G. Smith, Practice of Wisdom (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 52. 4 All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. The Hebrew word ‘almâ specifically designates a ‘young woman’. 1

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Here, creation imparts a sense of mystery: apparently, there is nothing quite like ships, snakes and sex (along with soaring raptors) to evoke a sense of wonder. Each example is unique, each one captivating in its own right, each one at home within its own domain, from the sky to the bedchamber. This itemized sampling of wonders begins with objects of wild nature, but it also includes an example of human technology (‘ship’) and of human intimacy. In each case, wonder is tantamount to mystery: the sage confesses a distinct lack of understanding as to how the eagle can soar in the sky, how the snake can slither on a rock, how a ship can stay afloat in a perfect storm, and how sexual intimacy happens. But such ignorance is not a source of frustration but rather one of captivation, a matter of ‘wonder’. Indeed, this two-verse proverb is itself something of a puzzle. It invites the reader, as it did the rabbis,5 to ponder what these examples of wonder could possibly share in common: soaring eagles, slithering snakes, floating ships, and love-making couples. But the matter of wonder in Proverbs is more than simply a puzzle or a matter of ‘how to’. Such wonder lies beyond mere curiosity. The sages may be curious, but curiosity does not exhaust their sense of mystery. Mystery also lies in imagining, in wondering amid the wonder. Proverbs 30.18-19 invites the reader to imagine what it might be like to soar in the clouds, to slither on a rock, to survive a perfect storm on a tiny ship, and to engage in sexual intimacy, all with varying degrees of familiarity, depending on who is doing the imagining. But it is the first two examples, both drawn from wild nature, that no human perceiver can ever fully know yet is ever free to imagine. Such is the multilayered depth of wonder reflected in this proverb. But what exactly is wonder and its nearly identical twin, awe? At base, wonder is an emotional response; it cannot be simply willed into existence. It is a response to something unexpected or novel that rivets the attention. On the one hand, wonder carries an unsettling, disruptive element that challenges or questions how one sees the world. On the other hand, there is the element of desire, specifically the desire to know,6 or what Jerome Miller refers to as ‘the eros of inquiry’.7 It is no coincidence that Socrates claimed ‘wonder’ (to thaumazein) as ‘the only beginning of philosophy’ – the love of wisdom (Theaetetus, 155d).8 Wonder freely traverses between experiences of order and disorientation, fear and fascination. It ranges ‘from childlike delight to profound destabilization and even pain and death – a “cognitive crucifixion”’.9 With such divergence, one might conclude that the notion of wonder is fundamentally incoherent. Not so. Common to all experiences of wonder is their power to attract rather than repel. As Abraham Heschel states about awe: ‘Unlike fear, [awe] does not make us shrink from the awe-inspiring object, but on the contrary draws us near to

The rabbis proposed that each ‘way’ left no trace. Cf. Wis. 5.9-14. See the discussion in Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10–31: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 871. 6 Historically, curiosity was often seen as antithetical to wonder until the advancement of science beginning in the late sixteenth century. See Celia Deane-Drummond, Wonder and Wisdom: Conversations in Science, Spirituality, and Theology (West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006), 1–8. 7 Jerome A. Miller, In the Throe of Wonder: Intimations of the Sacred in a Post-Modern World (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 15, 53. 8 Plato, Theaetetus, Sophist, trans. Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 54–5. 9 Lisa H. Sideris, Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 15. 5

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it.’10 The affiliative power of awe or wonder distinguishes it from fear, an avoidance response. And yet, like fear, wonder can ‘stop us dead’ in our mindless routines, shattering our ‘illusion of control and omnipotence’11 while simultaneously arousing our desire to venture forth in a new direction with new understanding or wisdom. Wonder cultivates an emotional and cognitive openness that is genuinely receptive yet ever restless. Such are the two sides of wonder: awe and inquiry. Born of awe, wonder is ultimately more active than awe, for it seeks to understand. While awe arrests the perceiver, riveting their attention, wonder animates the perceiver, evoking their desire to know: ‘In wonder I want to leap or run, in awe to kneel.’12 Or as the biblical sages contend: ‘the fear of YHWH is the beginning of wisdom’.13 Such reverential ‘fear’ or awe is not a paralysing kind of ‘fear’ but an animating, affiliative kind that leads to wisdom. And the link between the ‘fear of YHWH’ and wisdom, between reverentia and sapientia, is wonder. Wonder is the kind of awe that gestures towards wisdom. According to the sages, one has to kneel before God in awe before leaping up and running the path of wisdom. The contours of awe in experimentation Research psychologists define ‘awe’ as an emotion located ‘in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear’.14 Put more technically by the researcher Paul Piff, awe is ‘an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that defy one’s accustomed frame of reference in some domain. People typically experience awe in response to asocial stimuli like natural wonders, panoramic views, and beautiful art’.15 Given a spatial-like point of origin, awe ‘arises via appraisals of stimuli that are vast, that transcend current frames of reference, and that require new schemata to accommodate what is being perceived’.16 The ‘prototypical awe experience, at least in Western cultures, involves encounters with natural phenomena that are immense in size, scope, or complexity (e.g. the night sky, the ocean)’.17 All experiences of awe have in common the perception of ‘vastness’, whether in size or complexity, that ‘dramatically expands the observer’s usual frame of reference in some dimension or domain’.18 Piff and others undertook a series of studies to determine the behavioural consequences of awe, particularly whether awe produced prosocial behaviour. Awe was elicited in a variety of

Abraham J. Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), 77. Celia González-Andrieu, Bridge to Wonder: Art as a Gospel of Beauty (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012), 36. 12 Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 54n53. 13 Prov. 9.10; Ps. 111.10; cf. Prov. 1.7. 14 Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, ‘Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion’, Cognition and Emotion 17, no. 2 (2003): 297. For more on the biblical implications of this original study, see William P. Brown, ‘Wisdom’s Wonder and the Science of Awe’, in T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and the Modern Sciences, ed. John P. Slattery (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 39, 42. 15 Paul K. Piff et al., ‘Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108, no. 6 (2015): 883. 16 Piff et al., ‘Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior’, 884. Italics added. 17 Piff et al., ‘Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior’, 884. 18 Piff et al., ‘Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior’, 884. 10

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ways over several different studies: the recollection of a natural scene, viewing nature-based video of nature imagery such as scenic vistas, mountains, plains, forests, and canyons; viewing nonnature-based awe conditions such as ‘droplets of colored water colliding with a bowl of milk . . . shot at 5,000 frames per second, 200 times slower than real-time’;19 viewing a video of negative conditions of awe, using a montage of threatening natural phenomena such as tornados and volcanoes. In measuring the resulting levels of ‘prosocial behaviour’, such as generosity or altruism, the researchers found no appreciable difference between negative and nonnature-based awe conditions. Both elicited similar increases in the ‘small self ’, meaning ‘triggering a sense that one’s individual being and goals are relatively insignificant’.20 Moreover, the nonnature-based condition for eliciting awe demonstrated that ‘vastness’ could be measured not only by physical size but also by ‘complexity’. The researchers suggested that awe ‘can be aroused by entities both large and small (e.g. those vast in complexity)’.21 In a final experiment, the researchers compared results from participants looking up at a grove of particularly tall trees with participants looking at tall buildings, both on a university campus. The expectation was that ‘atypically tall trees would violate people’s expectations and elicit awe in a way that a tall building, not atypical from others on campus, would not’;22 this was found to be so.

Contours of awe in biblical creation Equipped with the named psychological contours of awe and their effects on human behaviour, this chapter now turns to the biblical witness. To recap, the two central features of awe are (i) an experience of ‘vastness’, which elicits a diminution of the self while ‘transcend[ing] current frames of reference’, and (ii) the construction of ‘new schemata to accommodate what is being perceived’.23 Or, put more simply: vastness and reorientation. Both aspects apply well to the way creation is described by God (YHWH) in the book of Job (chapters 38–41). Nevertheless, there is far greater depth to awe and wonder elicited in the book of Job than can be accounted for experimentally, at least within these two identified features of awe. Job in awe The story of Job need not be rehearsed fully except to say that Job, the paragon of righteousness and ‘the greatest of all the peoples of the east’ in wealth (1.3), suffers a series of catastrophes, from the loss of his children and property to the loss of bodily health, all because of a test of Job’s piety by God at the provocation of ‘the satan’ (haśśāṭān), a member of the divine assembly who serves as a sort of roving, independent prosecutor. As Job sits on his ash heap, his friends

Piff et al., ‘Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior’, 891. Piff et al., ‘Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior’, 892–3. 21 Piff et al., ‘Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior’, 893. 22 Piff et al., ‘Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior’, 894. 23 Piff et al., ‘Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior’, 884. 19 20

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come to console him, but to no avail. Job complains bitterly, blaming God for his misfortune while defending himself against his friends’ accusations. After so much talk devolving into violent debate, God finally appears and, through the power of poetry, reveals to Job the wonders of creation without ever explaining why Job has suffered so. In the end, God vindicates Job for having ‘spoken of [God] what is right’, unlike Job’s friends (42.7). Job is restored of his possessions and with the same number of children, seven sons and three daughters. The focus here is on the answer God (named YHWH in this section) gives Job in chapters 38– 41. Job has a twofold response, indicating his state of awe coupled with a sense of resolution. First, he says: Therefore, I declared what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. (42.3) Here Job admits to having spoken out of ignorance of the ‘wonderful things’ (niplā’ōt) YHWH has shown him. As in Proverbs 30.18-19, such ‘wonders’ connote a sense of mystery. YHWH’s revelation exposed Job’s ignorance, requiring a new orientation in how he looks at the world. Job also confesses to finding some degree of resolution in YHWH’s answer: I heard you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye has seen you. Therefore, I withdraw (my case), yet I am comforted over dust and ashes. (42.6) Having withdrawn his complaint against YHWH, Job declares he is ‘comforted’.24 He has now ‘seen’ YHWH and no longer finds any reason to persist in his lawsuit. Job’s twofold response reflects a seeming tension: insignificance and ignorance, on the one hand (42.3; see also 40.45), and comfort, on the other (42.6b). Such is the polarity of awe for Job.25 Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt ask how can awe be ‘profoundly positive and terrifyingly negative’ simultaneously.26 The issue is pressed further in the study by Piff et al. discussed earlier, in which ‘negative’ or threatening conditions of awe can also lead to positive or prosocial behaviour. What exactly has Job ‘seen’ in YHWH’s answer that prompts such a seemingly paradoxical response? Is it positive or negative? Is it ‘vast’, and how so? And what is the existential result for Job? The vastness of creation What Job sees of God begins in terror: Job first beholds the ‘whirlwind’ (38.1; 40.6). Not a particularly comforting vision, the image recalls the death of Job’s children when a ‘great wind’

For detailed linguistic argumentation around ‘withdraw’, and translation issues around ‘comforted’, see William P. Brown, ‘Job and the “Comforting” Chaos’, in Seeking Wisdom’s Depths and Torah’s Heights: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Balentine, ed. Barry R. Huff and Patricia Vesely (Macon: Smyth & Helwys, 2020), 251–7. 25 Or within my terminological framework, such is the convergence of awe and wonder for Job. 26 Keltner and Haidt, ‘Approaching Awe’, 303. 24

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caused the house to collapse upon them (1.19). Job’s vision of YHWH, to understate the issue, constitutes a ‘negative awe condition’.27 YHWH’s voice immediately takes centre stage, with the verbal replacing the visual, spanning four chapters. YHWH offers Job a poetic panorama of creation itself. For Job to see YHWH, he must see creation through YHWH’s eyes, a creation that extends far beyond Job’s own purview. The poetry revels in the language of extremities, ranging from the ‘pathway to where light dwells’ (38.19) to the ‘gates of deep darkness’ (v. 17) and ‘recesses of the deep’ (v. 16), from the ‘storehouses’ of snow and hail (v. 22) to the ‘expanse of the earth’ (v. 18). YHWH asks Job whether he can ‘bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion’ (v. 31). YHWH, moreover, points out to Job the ‘waste and desolate land’, remote from human contact, where channels of rainwater irrigate the desert yielding new life (vv. 25-27). Such domains testify, in Job’s earlier words, to the very ‘outskirts of [YHWH’s] ways’ (26.14), now brought front and centre to his attention. To put Job in his place, YHWH transports Job to many places, covering the cosmos’ heights, depths, and extremities. Job is both transfixed and transported; in the process, YHWH turns Job’s world not so much inside out as outside in. According to YHWH, the world is so vast that it swallows Job up and scales him down. Job’s confessed result is a ‘small self ’ or an overwhelming sense of insignificance. When invited to respond, Job can only say: Look, I am so insignificant (qallōtî); what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, I will not do it again. (40.4-5) Job’s self-professed silence, complete with an appropriate hand gesture, not only acknowledges YHWH’s superior might but also signals Job’s state of awe. The vastness of creation has made its mark: Job considers himself insignificant. But this is only the first step. Reorientation Vast as it is, YHWH’s creation extends Job’s understanding far beyond his imagining. But creation from YHWH’s perspective also upends Job’s own perspective. As a result, Job suffers what could be called a ‘cognitive crucifixion’ marked not only by an expansion of his perspective but by a shift of paradigmatic proportions. The animals are key. YHWH’s answer showcases various wild creatures, near and far, wild and mythic (38.39–39.30; 40.15–41.26). Each one is given its poetic due. The first animal, the lion, as with nearly every creature, is introduced with a challenge: Can you hunt prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert? (38.39-40)

Piff et al., ‘Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior’, 892.

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Such a question effectively turns Job’s world on its head. Contrary to what Job might have expected, YHWH does not challenge Job to ‘gird up’ his ‘loins’ against the lion to kill it (cf. 38.3) as if to test his physical prowess. Instead, YHWH challenges Job to provide for it (38.39; cf. Ps. 104.21). There may also be a subtler nuance at work: to ‘hunt prey for the lion’, one must become like a lion. Who is a better hunter for the lion than a lion? In any case, YHWH is inviting Job to shift his perspective from dominant human to hungry lion. Such a shift is more vivid with the mountain goat: Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you observe the birthing of does? Can you count the months that they must complete? Do you know the time they give birth, when they crouch down to give birth to their offspring, to deliver their young? Their young ones thrive and grow up in the open; they leave, never to return. (39.1-4) YHWH focuses on mountain goats and deer in their process of giving birth, as well as on their young developing into adults. To know such matters intimately is to be either God or a goat (or deer). The poetry expresses both an admiration and a poignancy in the lives of these mountain mammals. YHWH, in effect, is sharing their lives for Job to behold in awe and wonder. But for what purpose? Enter the onager, or wild ass, a quintessentially free creature who sees things a bit differently than does Job: Who has set the onager free? Who has loosed the bonds of the wild ass, to which I have given the desert for its home, the salt land for its dwelling place? It laughs at the city’s commotion; it does not hear the driver’s shouts. It ranges the mountains as its pasture, searching after all manner of greenery. (39.5-8) The onager’s perception effectively reverses Job’s perceptual map: it scorns the ‘commotion’ of the city while flourishing in the wilderness, its home. Job views the wilderness as the domain of chaos and his own urban context as the locus of civilized order, just the opposite of what the onager sees. Through divine poetry, Job is invited to see the world as the onager sees it, in direct contradistinction to his own. The onager, moreover, proves to be a far different creature from what Job had imagined. For Job, the onager was a convenient metaphor for struggling outcasts eking out their survival on the margins: ‘Like onagers in the desert they go out to their toil, scavenging for food’ (24.4b). From Job’s perspective, the figure of the onager casts the poor as pitiable scavengers subsisting in the wilderness. Harsher are Job’s words six chapters later, where he calls them a ‘senseless and disreputable brood’ (30.8). From YHWH’s perspective, however, the onager is far from pathetic. This quintessentially free creature is subject to no one. 73

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No beast of burden is the onager, unlike its domesticated cousin (cf. Num. 22.22-35). Instead of the farm fields and caravan trails, the wilderness is the onager’s natural element; the salt lands are its ‘dwelling places’ (39.6). YHWH goes on to describe other animals, all wild, each in its own way and deservedly at home in creation, from the wild ox, which refuses to serve any master, to the carefree ostrich, which laughs at the ‘horse and its rider’ in the hunt (39.38). Like the ostrich, the horse ‘laughs at fear’, charging into battle with raging excitement and ‘swallowing the ground’ in its path (39.24). Such poetic vividness places Job not on the warhorse to ride and control it but rather in its head, as it were, to experience its god-awful strength and the thrill of charging into battle (vv. 21-25). Speaking of battle, next comes a description of the soaring hawk and the nesting vulture (39.26-30), the latter spying out its ‘prey’, namely, the slain on the battlefield (v. 30). Job ‘sees’ it all through the eyes of the raptor. As Job was challenged to provide prey for the lion, he now sees prey that is destined for the vulture, and it is human. YHWH’s answer concludes with two equally terrifying creatures: Behemoth and Leviathan (40.15-24; 41.1-34 [Hebrew 40.25– 41.25]). As mythic figures of chaos, these two creatures are magnificent in their monstrosity, embodying both positive and negative aspects of awe. Taken together, from the lion to Leviathan, this list of animals reveals a creation that is wild and bursting with creativity, a creation pulsing with ‘pizzazz’.28 But there is more to YHWH’s answer than simply creation’s vastness to elicit Job’s awe. Amid all the awe, YHWH is teaching Job something about creation, thereby transforming awe into wonder and wisdom. Job’s wise wonder comes from the radical shifts in perspectives demanded from him in YHWH’s poetic revelry. Job sees creation from YHWH’s perspective, particularly in the first part where Job witnesses the expanse and extremities of the cosmos (38.4-38). But regarding creation’s wild kingdom, YHWH’s perspective compels Job to see the world through the eyes of YHWH’s creatures (38.39–39.30; 40.15-24; 41.1-34 [40.25–41.25]). In YHWH’s eyes, they are subjects unto themselves who see the world through themselves. Job, as a result, is taken into their perceptual maps, reversing his own. The invariable result is an empathic connection with the wild. Perhaps most dissonant for Job is YHWH’s validation of ‘chaos’ in creation. The overall movement of YHWH’s revelatory answer proceeds from creation to chaos, rather than the reverse, as is typical of biblical creation accounts.29 The monstrous figure of Leviathan marks the culmination of creation. In YHWH’s world, this monster of the deep is not slated for destruction but is meant to thrive with unrivalled royal status (41.34 [41.25]; cf. 40.11-12). It is Leviathan, not Job, much less humanity, who bears royal status (cf. 29.25). All in all, YHWH’s reconstruction of creation is not just an exercise in cognitive dissonance but an experience of ‘cognitive crucifixion’. In YHWH’s answer to Job, ‘shit happens’ – radically so. How does Job handle this? If Job was part of a psychological experiment,30 what would be the behavioural

See Kathleen M. O’Connor, ‘Wild, Raging Creativity: The Scene in the Whirlwind (Job 38–41)’, in A God So Near: Essays on Old Testament Theology in Honor of Patrick D. Miller, ed. Brent A. Strawn and Nancy R. Bowen (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 171–9; Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament (Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 2001), 139. 29 Carol A. Newsom, ‘The Book of Job: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections’, in The New Interpreter’s Bible, ed. Leander E. Keck (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 4:597. 30 In a way, Job is set up for an experiment in the beginning. ‘Does Job fear God for nothing?’ is the ‘experimental’ question that launches the narrative (1.9), a ‘test’ to see whether Job reveres God beyond his own benefit. In light of the research discussed above, self-serving awe is psychologically a self-contradiction. 28

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outcome? That remains to be seen. But first, a slight detour must be taken to discern more fully the connection between wonder and wisdom in creation.

Terra sapiens in Psalm 104 Creation in biblical tradition not only elicits a sense of wonder and awe, it also reflects the creator’s wisdom: YHWH founded the earth by wisdom, and established the heavens by understanding. By [YHWH’s] knowledge the deeps burst open, and the clouds let drop the dew. (Prov. 3.19-20) Reflected throughout creation, divine wisdom is evident from top to bottom, from the celestial sphere to the watery depths and, in between, the meteorological realm. Woven into the very fabric of creation, YHWH’s wisdom is readily discernible. Here, divine wisdom is reflected in the course and occasional ‘chaos’ of natural events, from the inundation of floodwaters to the gentle dew in the morning, all at YHWH’s bidding. The great biblical scholar Gerhard von Rad once defined biblical wisdom as the ‘self-revelation of creation’.31 God’s creation, in short, is revelatory of God’s wisdom. Similarly, in Psalm 104, God’s creation gives testimony to divine wisdom but with one additional aspect: biodiversity: YHWH, how many are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is stock full of your creatures. (v. 24) The psalmist proclaims in awe the plenitude and diversity of life in creation, all testifying to YHWH’s wisdom. To illustrate how manifold creation is, the psalmist takes taxonomic delight in listing a whole host of animals: onagers, birds, cattle, storks, mountain goats, coneys, lions, and, yes, Leviathan – all attesting YHWH’s wise handiwork, alongside cedars and other trees. By listing various animal species, the psalmist offers a sample of the vast panoply of life. As species are varied and numerous, so also are their habitats and niches, from towering trees and flowing wadis to mountainous crags and the deep dark sea. The psalm acknowledges that each species has its suitable habitat: the trees are for the birds (vv. 12, 17), the mountains are for the wild goats, the crags provide shelter for the coneys (or rock hyrax; v. 18), and the lions have their dens (v. 22). As for human beings, they have their place but not a dominant place in relation to the other creatures. In God’s cosmic mansion, there are many dwelling

Gerhard von Rad, Wisdom in Israel, trans. James D. Martin (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972), 144–76. See esp. pp. 169–72. 31

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places. Humanity’s place in creation is as legitimate as that of any other species, but it is not singled out as central within the psalm’s purview. Instead of assuming a dominant place in the ‘great chain of being’, humanity in Psalm 104 is given a non-anthropocentric entry into the great encyclopaedia of being. Creation is not simply a habitat for humanity; it is a habitat for diversity. With such habitational accommodation and biological diversity, the world, according to the psalmist, could be called a Terra sapiens, a ‘wise world’ that reflects something of the Deus sapiens.

Back to Job Similarly, in Job, the protagonist encounters a world cosmically wrought and biologically replete. Does the Joban version of creation, in all of its awe and wonder, offer any wisdom? To put it another way, does Job learn anything from YHWH’s answer? One would hope so since YHWH primarily plays the role of a pedagogue, specifically that of a docent pointing out the ‘wonders’ of creation to Job. But creation proves to be more than YHWH’s cabinet of curiosities. Creation reflects a wisdom that Job could not have gained from his own narrow, anthropocentric perspective. By truly seeing various wild creatures as YHWH sees them, Job comes to understand their habits and habitats, in short, their ‘ways’. Job learns of their dignity and value as bona fide members of YHWH’s creation. Job comes to understand them as subjects in their own right, not objects to be despised, but subjects that elicit awe and wonder, each in their own way. Clearly, one lesson learned in both Job and Psalm 104 is that YHWH holds a preferential option for life flourishing in all its manifold diversity. In Job, the diversity and freedom of life are part and parcel of YHWH’s justice (mišpāṭ [40.8]). Job learns something of YHWH’s justice operative throughout creation, which is far from merit based or rooted in retribution. In addition, Job learns of his place in YHWH’s wild creation. While at first glance it seems that Job has no place in YHWH’s creation – he is nowhere listed in YHWH’s litany of creatures – there is one magnificently fearsome creature that bears a peculiar connection to Job: Violà Behemoth, whom I made with you! It eats grass like cattle. Its strength is in its loins, and its power in the muscles of its belly. It stiffens its tail like a cedar; the sinews of its thighs are tightly woven. Its bones are tubes of bronze, its limbs like iron bars. It is the first of God’s acts – only its Maker can approach it with a sword. (40.15-19) Behemoth is ‘made with’ Job. Despite their differences, Behemoth and Job are deemed fellow creatures, and so, by extension, are all the creatures of the wild. For all the alien alterity of creation, Job finds his place ‘with’, not against or apart from, those creatures that he has ‘othered’ 76

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in one way or another. This revelation of Job’s connection with the creatures of the wild adds an ironic twist to Job’s lament given much earlier: I go about in sunless gloom; I stand up in the assembly and cry for help. I am a brother of jackals, and a companion of ostriches. (30.28-29) Rejected by his friends and alienated from his community, Job complains that his only companions now are jackals and ostriches. These two animals are poetically associated with scenes of urban destruction and social mourning.32 The jackals and ostriches represent the wild occupying cities laid waste by natural or military disasters. For Job, these creatures are the most unwelcome of companions because they signify his devastation. But now, because of YHWH’s answer with its dignification of the wild, Job is shown to be actually in ‘good company’. YHWH claims that ostriches and jackals are nothing to complain about, yet all to wonder about. And they are with him. In his bewilderment before God and creation, Job is ‘be-wilded’ by God and creation. In his awe, Job has discovered the missing link to life in all its alien diversity and dignity. It is himself. So what has Job learned? What wisdom is to be gained from the ‘self-revelation of creation’? Job discovers that he is connected to these creatures by the creator, sharing in common with them the irrepressible exercise of life and their inalienable dignity. Animal ‘outcasts’ (from the point of view of human dominance) have become Job’s new ‘companions’ as he himself has been cast out of his community. He has learned that such companions bear their own dignity and enjoy their own freedom. Having come to see the world through the eyes of God and, in so doing, through the eyes of God’s wild creatures, Job cannot remain unaffected. Indeed, he is left transformed. While little is said in the poetry or prose about Job psychologically, a clue can be found in the epilogue, in which there is a very different kind of Job functioning within a very similar patriarchal world to the one he once had (42.7-17; cf. 1.1-5). In the epilogue, awe is proven to have its moral consequences now that Job is back living in his familiar, now fully restored, home life. But the moral impact of awe directs the reader’s attention not to Job’s new life per se, restored as it is, but to Job’s new way of life, as revealed by one single yet very telling act on his part. With the same number of children as before (see 1.2), Job the patriarch commits the unprecedented act of sharing his inheritance with his three daughters, who are named and deemed wondrously beautiful (42.13-15). In biblical antiquity, the family’s wealth was passed on to the sons, while the daughters had to marry outside the family for economic survival. But not in Job’s household. Job cares about the dignity and economic well-being of all his children, daughters and sons alike, much like YHWH’s care for all wild creatures. He does so out of empathy by realizing his daughters’ struggles in a maledominated world. The exercise of empathy, Job demonstrates, turns out to be a wise thing to do, and in exercising empathy, Job upends patriarchal convention as much as YHWH has upended Job’s world. In doing so, Job serves the cause of justice (see Prov. 1.3).

See Isa. 13.20-22; 34.13; Jer. 9.11; 10.22; 49.33; Lam. 5.17-18; Ezek. 13.4; Mic. 1.8; Mal. 1.3.

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In his journey from wonder to wisdom, from awe to empathy, Job moves through several stages, beginning with his sense of insignificance vis-à-vis the vastness of creation and the overwhelming power of the creator to a state of comfort over his smallness in light of his newfound connection to creation and finally to a self-transformation that, in turn, transforms his entire household. It is a journey from awe to wisdom to empathy, concluding with an unconventional act of compassion. One wonders in the end how Job led his life for another 140 years, ‘full of days’ (42.17). Such is what the narrator leaves us to wonder about.

Further reading Brown, William P. Wisdom’s Wonder: Character, Creation, and Crisis in the Bible’s Wisdom Literature. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014. Brown, William P. Sacred Sense: Discovering the Wonder of God’s Word and World. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015. Deane-Drummond, Celia. Wonder and Wisdom: Conversations in Science, Spirituality, and Theology. West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006. Fuller, Robert C. Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006. González-Andrieu, Cecilia. Bridge to Wonder: Art as a Gospel of Beauty. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012. Miller, Jerome A. In the Throe of Wonder: Intimations of the Sacred in a Post-Modern World. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992.

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CHAPTER 6 CREATION IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

Stephen C. Barton

Introduction The subject of ‘creation’ is multifaceted and all-embracing. Its dimensions are religious, cultural–symbolic, historical, doctrinal, liturgical, rhetorical, epistemological, political, moral, and material – all of which help to explain why accounts of how the present and future relate to creation, including what was ‘in the beginning’, have such weight. Indeed, given its normative potency for societies and groups in specific historical contexts, it is not surprising that creation is a matter of ongoing interpretation or that its invocation and performance in law and life become a focus of identity and controversy in times both ancient and modern. Scripturally speaking, ‘creation’ is how life in time and space is differentiated, classified, ordered, narrativized, and performed in relation to God as creator and sustainer of all that is.1 Like ‘covenant’, creation is a relational category expressing the dependence of all that is on God in God’s sovereignty. In respect of the Gospels, written as they are in light of the death and resurrection of the Messiah, who is understood as the revelation in history of a new order of things, creation is reframed christologically and eschatologically in terms of the one who is (to co-opt the language of the Apocalypse) ‘the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end’ (Rev. 22.13). The scope of this reframing is vast, and its creativity in Gospel texts is profound. Aspects of that creativity include attention to the following: (i) creation texts such as Genesis 1–3, including their implications for the existential realities of evil and death; (ii) wisdom texts and the idea that the wisdom of God is implicated in and mediated through creation; (iii) the temple, cult, calendar, and festivals in their significance in maintaining creation in alignment with the will of the creator; (iv) the Torah, including sabbath law, as a key to creation’s mysteries and, not least, (v) Jesus’ proclamation and embodiment of the kingdom of God in the context of ancient ideals of kingship, cosmic harmony, and communal well-being.

Creation as Gospel-shaping: Beginnings and endings Indicative of how creation is enlisted in relation to Jesus and the end of all things is how creation shapes the Gospel texts literarily and theologically. Creation and narrative are intertwined. History, in its literary expression, is presented as creation fleshed out.

On differentiation and classification, see Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 217–34. 1

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Beginnings A remarkable feature of the Gospel narratives (shared with several other New Testament texts2) is that they begin their accounts of Jesus from the beginning – from creation. In relation to the traditions of Israel and Judaism, this is by no means unprecedented. It is what the redactors of the Pentateuch do in placing the books of Genesis and Exodus at the beginning of their history of Israel. It is reflected in the strategy of the priestly author of the book of Jubilees in offering, as a secret revelation transmitted by angels to Moses on Mount Sinai, halakah in the form of an elaboration of Genesis 1 – Exodus 12.3 It is also what Josephus does in beginning his history of the Jewish people from the story of creation.4 For Josephus, as for his forebears and contemporaries in Judaism, creation is profoundly historical and constitutional. Here, Shemaryahu Talmon’s observation about ‘the blending of creation with history’ and about the way Jewish liturgy and life historicize creation by making creation present in the everyday is pertinent: The Hebrew Bible tends to view creation in historical terms and to conceive of history in imagery drawn from the creation accounts. In his daily prayers, morning and evening, a Jew praises God, ‘who alone effects mighty deeds, makes new phenomena . . . master of wondrous acts who in his benevolence forever renews creation day after day’. This understanding of creation as forever being present in the life of the individual and the community culminates in a prayer which is recurrently offered on the New Year festival after the sounding of the shofar, the ram’s horn: ‘This day the world was called into being. This day all creatures of the universe stand in judgment before thee as children or as servants. If as children, have pity on us as a father pities his children; and if as servants, we call upon thee to be gracious unto us and merciful in judgment of us, O revered and holy God’.5 This historicization of creation is also apparent in the Gospels. It is as if the story of Jesus and his significance cannot be communicated adequately apart from the larger story of how God in God’s sovereignty relates to the world of time and space. This is widely recognized in the Fourth Gospel, with its ‘In the beginning was the Word’ (Jn 1.1) re-narrating Genesis 1 to present the one who becomes incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth as no less than the key to creation and to universal salvation, the ‘true light which enlightens everyone’ (Jn 1.9a; cf. Gen. 1.3). Creation reinterpreted and particularized is the overture to the christological symphony which follows. The Synoptic Gospels do it differently: but, for them also, the creation of the world by God, as narrated in Genesis, and the creation of Israel under Moses, as narrated in Exodus, are crucial sites of orientation and ongoing significance for their respective stories of Jesus. Regarding Mark: the very first word of his Gospel – Ἀρχὴ; Archē – echoes the Ἐν ἀρχῇ (en archē) of Gen. 1.1 (in the LXX), while at other points, Genesis and creation are engaged

See Col. 1.15-20; Eph. 1.3-14; Heb. 1; Nils Dahl, ‘Christ, Creation and the Church’, in The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, ed. William D. Davies and David Daube (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 422–43. 3 See Jub. 1.27, 29; 2.1. 4 See Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 1.27. 5 Shemaryahu Talmon, ‘The Biblical Understanding of Creation and the Human Commitment’, Ex Auditu 3 (1987): 118. 2

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explicitly.6 Even more important is the book of Exodus (as interpreted by Isaiah), quoted at the beginning of Mark’s Prologue (Mk 1.2-3; cf. Exod. 23.20; Isa. 40.3; Mal. 3.1), signalling that Jesus is inaugurating a new exodus, an event itself redolent of creation.7 Matthew, strikingly, begins his Gospel with the words Βίβλος γενέσεως (Biblos geneseōs; Mt. 1.1), an opening with several connections between the story of the birth of Jesus and the primeval history: (i) Matthew uses the same formula for genealogies found at the beginning of Genesis (Gen. 2.4 and 5.1, LXX) as if Jesus is being enrolled in a much larger narrative of creation and fulfilment, and (ii) as a likely allusion to the title, ‘book of Genesis’, it implies that the story of Jesus about to be told is the story of creation seen in a new light. Like Matthew, Luke also ‘locates’ Jesus genealogically early on (see Lk. 3.23-38). But, significantly, whereas Matthew traces Jesus’ genealogy in descending order from Abraham, Luke traces it in ascending order to ‘son of Adam, son of God’ (Lk. 3.38). The effect – in line with Luke’s message of universal salvation – is to ascribe to Jesus the universal significance of the first Adam from the creation story.8 Endings If creation (and exodus) motifs shape Gospel beginnings, they also shape Gospel endings – in the twofold sense of what Jesus prophesies about the end time and how the story of Jesus ends. Indeed, the two senses are intertwined, as if to suggest that the end time of creation and the climax of human history begin with the ending of the story of Jesus. Limiting the discussion to Mark’s Gospel and turning first to Jesus’ prophecies, what stands out is the extent to which the end time is characterized as the unmaking of creation. Thus, Mark 13 has Jesus prophesy suffering of a kind ‘such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now’ (Mk 13.19). Pivotal is the temple’s destruction (Mk 13.2) – pivotal because the temple was understood as a microcosm of the cosmos and where daily divine service, properly performed, kept the cosmos in life-sustaining order and motion.9 Then come the dire corollaries: the disintegration of international order (Mk 13.7-8a), geological upheaval (Mk 13.8b), social enmities of the most unnatural kind (Mk 13.9, 12-13), and the collapse of precisely what God put in place according to Genesis 1 (‘. . . the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken’; Mk 13.24-25). In sum, and evoking Genesis 1.1 in such a way as to dramatize the sense of catastrophe, ‘heaven and earth will pass away’ (Mk 13.31a): but not before the rescue of the elect ‘from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven’ (Mk 13.27). So along with warnings of uncreation, there is also the intimation of new creation, not least in the birthing imagery of the phrase, ‘the beginning of the birth pangs [ἀρχὴ ὠδίνων; archē ōdinōn]’ (Mk 13.8b).

Compare the explicit allusions to Genesis, where archē is used, in Mark 10.6 (on which more below) and 13.19. So Rikki E. Watts, ‘Exodus’, in New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, ed. T. Desmond Alexander and Brian S. Rosner (Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 478: ‘The Exodus cannot be understood apart from Genesis. It fulfils the patriarchal promises of progeny and land . . . and begins a new creation, albeit in microcosm, whereby God establishes a new humanity, provides them with a new Edenic land, and dwells among them.’ 8 Paul takes the Adam/Christ analogy much further. See Rom. 5.12-21. 9 See Jon D. Levenson, ‘The Temple and the World’, The Journal of Religion 64, no. 3 (1984): 275–98. 6 7

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All this is reinforced in the ending of the story of Jesus in Mark 14–16. It is as if the unmaking (and remaking) of creation is offered as the hermeneutical lens through which to see what happens to Jesus and what happens to Jesus as the catalyst for the same unmaking and remaking. This time, the temple being destroyed is the body of Jesus (Mk 14.58; 15.29). The king-messiah, God’s vice-regent in creation, is being undone in torture and death (Mk 15.16-32). As if in cosmic sympathy, the solar system is dissolving, for there is darkness at noon ‘over the whole land [or better, earth]’ (Mk 15.33; cf. Mk 13.24). And the temple curtain, richly embroidered with cosmic symbols,10 is despoiled, being ‘torn in two from top to bottom’ (Mk 15.38). Nevertheless, that the story of Jesus ends with the angelic announcement of Jesus’ having been raised (i.e. by God) speaks of the eschatological overcoming of the forces of uncreation – above all, the overcoming of death and the powers of evil. As such, the final intimation is one of new creation and new life in the kingdom of God. Concerning Gospel beginnings and endings overall, then, motifs drawn from Genesis and Exodus provide the Synoptic evangelists with essential ingredients for showing that the ways of God with creation and cosmos have reached their fulfilment in Jesus – that Jesus is the key to the purposes of God in space and time, to the mystery of salvation, and to how to live in the face of evil, suffering, and death.

Creation and the understanding of God in the Synoptics As well as influencing the shaping of the Gospel narratives, creation motifs underlie their essential subject matter. Most important in this connection are the characterizations of God and of God’s relation to the world. Here, the fundamental assumption is the recurring scriptural testimony, from Gen. 1.1 on, to God as creator of all things, the sovereign Lord ‘who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them’ (Exod. 20.11; Ps. 146.6; cf. Pss. 33.6-9; 104) and who reigns from his throne in heaven (see Pss. 11.4; 103.19). But also, there is the complex shaping of creation traditions by various ‘voices of authority’ in Israel and Judaism – especially those associated with temple and cult, wisdom and prophecy11 – all reinterpreted in the light of Jesus and the Spirit within the historical matrix of the fraught social realities of the parting of the ways between church and synagogue. In brief, eschatologically oriented re-imaginings of scriptural creation motifs allow for a re-narration of God’s relation both to the world and to God’s chosen people with a view to the generation of new understandings of existence and the legitimation of new forms of community. Matthew’s Gospel is a case in point. Shaped by traditions of wisdom and apocalyptic, Matthew’s story of God’s presence in Jesus and the scriptural account of creation (including that of Israel) are intertwined and mutually interpreting. Thus, the fulfilment of the divine plan of salvation is told in a way that both links and distinguishes heaven and earth (Mt. 5.34-35),

Cf. Josephus, Jewish War, 5:212–14: ‘Before these [doors] hung a veil . . . of Babylonian tapestry, with embroidery of blue and fine linen, of scarlet also and purple, wrought with marvellous skill. Nor was their mixture of materials without its mystic meaning: it typified the universe. For the scarlet seemed emblematical of fire, the fine linen of the earth, the blue of the air, and the purple of the sea. . . . On this tapestry was portrayed a panorama of the heavens, the signs of the Zodiac excepted [for Jews do not worship animals].’ 11 Cf. George J. Brooke, ‘Creation in the Biblical Tradition’, Zygon 22, no. 2 (1987): 235–41. 10

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creation and new creation (Mt. 19.28), and Israel and the eschatological family of ‘all nations’ (Mt. 28.19). Characteristic of this binary world view, God is transcendent – an ontological and moral–relational quality signified cosmographically. God is the ‘heavenly Father’ (Mt. 6.26), his dwelling is in ‘the heavens’ (Mt. 6.9), and his realm is ‘the kingdom of the heavens’ (Mt. 4.17).12 As such, God is distinct from and sovereign over creation (see Mt. 11.25). But as the ‘heavenly Father’, God cares for his people on earth, doing so in two ways: First, God’s care is providential and universal, as in Jesus’ famous double invitation to his followers and the accompanying crowds to ‘Look at the birds of the air! . . . Consider the lilies of the field!’ (Mt. 6.26, 28), as the way of wisdom for restraining anxiety over mundane matters. Second, God’s care is revelatory and salvific, as in Jesus’ thanksgiving prayer in the face of rejection in the cities: ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants’ (Mt. 11.25). A corollary of God’s transcendence is that God’s care for the world is mediated, a mediation carried out by celestial and terrestrial agents. In the cosmology of the Gospels, heavenly and earthly space is populated by beings, visible and invisible. Angels, for example, are particularly prominent in Matthew – as heavenly messengers revealing the divine will (see Mt. 1.20), shaping the course of human action (see Mt. 2.13, 19), representing the ‘little ones’ to God in heaven (Mt. 18.10), and acting on behalf of the heavenly Son of Man at the end-time judgement (see Mt. 13.41-42, 49-50; 24.31; 25.31). Among other celestial beings, a star, understood as a heavenly agent, is present to guide the magi (Mt. 2.2, 7, 9-10); likewise, the sun (noting, ‘his sun’) rises, and the rain falls, at the Father’s behest (Mt. 5.45). Supreme among God’s agents, however, is Jesus – ‘God with us’ (Mt. 1.23; 28.20) come in judgement and mercy. In ways evocative of the birth of Israel with Moses and the exodus, Jesus calls eschatological Israel into being through a ministry of preaching, teaching, and healing (see Mt. 4.23; 11.2-6). Then, following his epochal death and resurrection – evoking cosmological sympathy in the form of earthquakes (see Mt. 27.51; 28.2) – Jesus himself, as the one to whom ‘all authority in heaven and on earth has been given’ (Mt. 28.18), sends out agents of the kingdom. An ending becomes a new beginning. What began with the creation of the heavens and the earth in Gen. 1.1, and what began again with the Βίβλος γενέσεως (biblos geneseōs) of Jesus the Messiah of Mt. 1.1, is beginning again with the mission to ‘all nations’ (Mt. 28.19) towards a temporal ending of ‘the age’ determined by God as sovereign (Mt. 28.20).

Creation and the portrayal of Jesus in the Synoptics Creation, the kingdom of God, and Jesus as Messiah and Son of God Fundamental to the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus and his mission is his proclamation in speech and action of the breaking in of the kingdom of God/heaven (see Mk 1.15a//Mt. 4.17). An

Matthew’s cosmographic interest is evident in his practice of changing ‘the kingdom of God’, in his Markan source, to ‘the kingdom of the heavens’ (cf. Mt. 4.17//Mk 1.15). The plural form occurs thirty-two times in Matthew. See Jonathan T. Pennington, ‘Heaven, Earth, and a New Genesis: Theological Cosmology in Matthew’, in Cosmology and New Testament Theology, ed. Jonathan T. Pennington and Sean M. McDonough (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 29–30. 12

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important question, therefore, concerns the relation between God’s sovereignty over time and space from the beginning and God’s sovereignty in the present and future in and through Jesus. In John’s Gospel, the relation is given provocative expression in the presentation of Jesus as God’s Word (λόγος; logos) – the Word through whom creation came into being (see Gen. 1.3; Ps. 33.6) – becoming flesh and collaborating with God in doing God’s ongoing, lifebestowing ‘work’ (see Jn 4.34; 5.17, 20, 36; 9.3-4; 10.37-38).13 In the story of a Jesus whose ‘sign’–miracles resonate with scriptural narratives of creation and exodus, and in the work of the Spirit in bringing people to new birth (see Jn 3.3-8), creation becomes a new creation and an eschatological community comes into being. In the Synoptics, however, the relation of God in creation to God in Jesus is conveyed somewhat differently, focusing on the tensive symbol ‘kingdom of God’. Put briefly, the kingdom as embodied in Jesus is creation reaching fulfilment, God’s sovereignty over all things in time and space being brought to fruition with the advent of the Messiah, God’s Son. Mark’s Prologue (1.1-15) is a brilliant expression of this, with its stories of Jesus’ baptism and testing culminating in his kingdom proclamation. At the baptism, as Jesus emerges out of the water, he sees the heavens ‘torn apart’ (Mk 1.10). The verb schizein (here σχιζομένους) is used only here and at the crucifixion where the curtain of the temple is ‘torn in two [ἐσχίσθη εἰς δύο; eschisthē eis duo]’ (Mk 15.38). The link is intentional.14 What is signified at the beginning and end of the Gospel is ‘an irreversible cosmic change’.15 The rending of the heavens allowing the descent of the Spirit represents the eschatological response to the plea of the Isaianic prophet – ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!’ (Isa. 64.1a) – a plea that has in view the creation of ‘new heavens and a new earth’ (Isa. 65.17a). And the rending ‘from top to bottom’ of the temple curtain, adorned as it was with symbols of heavenly bodies in the colours of the cosmos,16 represents the end of the old order of things, with Jesus in death proclaimed ‘Son of God’ (Mk 15.39), and with the new life of the resurrection in the offing (Mk 16.1-8). Furthermore, the portrayal of the Spirit ‘descending like a dove’ on Jesus (Mk 1.10) – evoking Gen. 1.2, where the Spirit moves over the surface of the waters like a bird – reinforces this sense of cosmic change and new creation with the revelation of the Son of God. But there is more. The same Spirit that has descended upon and empowered Jesus ‘immediately’ drives him into the wilderness to be tested by Satan as if to begin the cosmic battle with the powers of darkness without delay (Mk 1.12). That Jesus as God’s Son is victorious is not made explicit: but it is implied in the remarkable dénoument unique to Mark: ‘and [Jesus] was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him’ (Mk 1.13b). The vision portrayed here with the maximum economy is of the restoration of Paradise.17 Jesus, in companionable relationship with the wild animals and being waited on by the angels, evokes the peace in creation that the

See Peder Borgen, ‘Creation, Logos and the Son: Observations on John 1:1–18 and 5:17–18’, Ex Auditu 3 (1987): 88–97. 14 See Michael F. Bird, ‘Tearing the Heavens and Shaking the Heavenlies: Mark’s Cosmology in its Apocalyptic Context’, in Cosmology and New Testament Theology, ed. Jonathan T. Pennington and Sean M. McDonough (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 49–55. 15 Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 165. 16 See fn 11. 17 See Richard Bauckham, Living with Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2012), 111–32. 13

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first Adam forfeited by succumbing to temptation by the serpent. Perhaps even more evidently, it represents the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy of the eschatological peace between human and non-human creatures in a renewed creation that would accompany the coming of the Davidic Messiah: The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. . . . They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isa. 11.6, 9) This is a vision of Eden, God’s ‘holy mountain’ (see Ezek. 28.13-14), restored in Israel in the messianic age. So now, as the divine Son, the eschatological Adam and the Davidic Messiah, having bested Satan in initial combat and made peace with the wild beasts, Jesus is ready to appear in public to announce with full authority the in-breaking of the kingdom of God (see Mk 1.15). The cosmic battle now becomes street-level, and the rest of Mark’s narrative is the revelation of the divine sovereignty in Jesus’ teaching, healings, exorcisms, wondrous works, and, above all – and most paradoxically – in his life-giving, death-defeating, death and resurrection. Creation in the teaching of Jesus God’s kingship over creation is an ordering activity with a view to generating, sustaining, judging, and renewing life in holiness and wholeness. This ordering activity is manifest in Israel in law, prophecy, wisdom, and the symbols and rituals of the cult. Just so, as God’s Son and kingdom agent, it is not surprising that Jesus is portrayed as, inter alia, an authoritative interpreter of Torah and a teacher of eschatological wisdom – and that such portrayals have creation as a significant point of reference. i. Jesus’ interpretation of the Torah.  A case in point is the dispute over the divorce law in Mk 10.2-12 and its parallels.18 The thrust of Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees’ appeal to the Deuteronomic law permitting divorce (see Deut. 24.1) is to allow the book of Genesis – and specifically, the story of creation (noting the quotations from Gen. 1.27c and 2.24) – to trump the book of Deuteronomy: But from the beginning of creation ‘God made them male and female’. ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate. (Mk 10.6-9) The underlying rationale is eschatological, reflected in the concentration of references to ‘the kingdom of God’ (at Mk 9.47; 10.14-15, 23-25) in this crucial central section of the Gospel (Mk

See Lutz Doering, ‘Marriage and Creation in Mark 10 and CD 4–5’, in Echoes from the Caves: Qumran and the New Testament, ed. Florentino G. Martínez (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 133–63. 18

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8.27–10.45). The reality of God’s coming in power to overthrow evil and to renew his people is envisaged as (in some sense) a restoration of Eden, a return to how God intended things to be ‘from the beginning’. It is the principle of Endzeit gleich Urzeit (‘the end as the beginning’), with the practice in the eschatological community of lifelong marital oneness as a testimony to God’s sovereign will – to ‘what God has joined together’ (Mk 10.9a). Of course, other Synoptic texts show this is not the whole story. On the one hand, there are traditions of a casuistic kind regulating (and therefore implicitly accepting) divorce (see Mk 10.10-12; Mt. 5.32; 19.9; Lk. 16.18). On the other hand, there are traditions favouring singleness and celibacy. Thus, the Jesus of Matthew speaks of ‘eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’ (Mt. 19.12c); and in Luke, eschatology and the ascetic life are close corollaries (see Lk. 2.36-38; 9.57-62; 14.20; 17.26-27; 18.29-30; 20.34-36). But here, too, interpretations of paradisal existence, in the form of speculation concerning the sexual life of Adam and Eve, may have played a part (see 2 Bar. 56.6).19 A second instance concerns disputes over sabbath law and observance. At several points, the Synoptic Gospels tell of complaints against Jesus for alleged infringements of the sabbath (e.g. Mk 3.1-6 and parallels; Lk. 13.10-17). The complaint against Jesus’ disciples for plucking grain on the sabbath is one such (see Mk 2.23-28; Mt. 12.1-8; Lk. 6.1-5). In the background is the prohibition in the Decalogue about work on the sabbath and subsequent developments in Jewish sabbath halakah. Significantly, the two versions of the commandment offer differing, if complementary, rationales. The Deuteronomic version sets the command to rest and the prohibition of work in the context of what it means to be God’s covenant people liberated from slavery (see Deut. 5.12-15). The version in Exodus sets the command in the context of God’s universal concern for the well-being of humankind as a whole, the warrant for which is the Genesis creation narrative: ‘For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it’ (Exod. 20.11; cf. Gen. 2.1-3). Against this background, two elements of Jesus’ defence of his disciples stand out. The first is the eschatological messianism implicit in Jesus’ appeal to the precedent set by David (‘Have you never read what David did . . . ?’, at Mk 2.25). The second is the climactic saying unique to the Markan Jesus (‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath’, at Mk 2.27), a defence redolent of the universalistic rationale evident in Exod. 20.11 and rooted in the story of creation. In this connection, Lutz Doering draws attention to the use of a form of the verb ginomai in Mk 2.27 (as in, ‘The sabbath was made [ἐγένετο; egeneto] for humankind’) as implying a reference to ‘the institution of primordial Sabbath’ in Gen. 2.1-3. He proceeds: ‘One possible interpretation of this relation [to the Genesis narrative] is to view it in the context of a restoration of paradisal conditions proclaimed by Jesus as part of his eschatological mission of the kingdom of God.’20

See Gary Anderson, ‘Celibacy or Consummation in the Garden? Reflections on Early Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the Garden of Eden’, The Harvard Theological Review 82, no. 2 (1989): 121–48. 20 Lutz Doering, ‘Sabbath Laws in the New Testament Gospels’, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, ed. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino G. Martínez, Didier Pollefeyt, and Peter J. Tomson (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 217. 19

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ii. Jesus as a teacher of eschatological wisdom.  Comparable with Jesus’ appeals to creation regarding Torah interpretation are the creation motifs in his wisdom teaching.21 A good example comes in the Sermon on the Mount, at Mt. 6.25-26 (par. Lk. 12.22-24): Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you nor of more value than they? Jesus here addresses the danger of personal and social anxiety, both likely corollaries of adherence to the radical values and practices of askēsis (self-discipline) consonant with participation in the kingdom of heaven (see Mt. 6.19-24).22 The text resonates with scriptural wisdom traditions such as Job 38.41, according to which God ‘provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food’ (see Ps. 147.9; Pss. Sol. 5.910). In Mt. 6.25-26, an argument for God’s providential care for faithful disciples is advanced by appeal to an analogy with divine providence in the non-human creation, with the direction of the analogy running from the lesser to the greater. That disciples (and by implication human beings generally) are, on this argument, accorded more worth than birds is taken as a given and doubtless reflects the exalted status accorded humankind in the Genesis creation narrative (see Gen. 1.26-28). At the same time, the positive worth of all God’s creatures is taken as a given. Dale Allison’s reflection on the kind of theology represented here is pertinent: ‘Because [Matthew] 6.26 draws an inference about God from the birds, it also offers a sort of simple natural theology: Jesus gathers something about God’s dealings with humanity by looking at how God works in the natural world (cf. Job 12.7–8; Prov. 6.6–11).’23 iii. Jesus as a teacher in parables. Communicating the ‘mystery’ of the in-breaking kingdom of God (see Mk 4.11) ‘by looking at how God works in the natural world’ is especially characteristic of Gospel parables, a genre of ancient wisdom particularly prominent in Israelite and Jewish prophetic and apocalyptic circles whose prophets, seers, and mystics sought to discern the hand of God in world history, especially in times of crisis. As far as the Gospels are concerned, it is as if the revelation of God’s power in the story of Jesus and his followers is so against all the odds, so ‘hidden in plain sight’, that the disclosure of its truth requires the aid of figurative speech like parables, including parables drawn from the created order. In this connection, images of an organic, agricultural kind are powerful, not only because they speak from and into a predominantly agrarian environment, but also because they are particularly apt for conveying ideas rich in moral–symbolic potential – ideas of new beginnings,

As the Gospels show, such wisdom often takes the form of analogies, aphorisms, parables, allegories, and stories, all rooted in the wisdom and prophetic literature of the scriptures. 22 A similar wisdom injunction, again taking birds as the basis for the analogy, comes in the mission instructions in Mt. 10.28-31 (par. Lk. 12.4-7). 23 Dale C. Allison, The Sermon on the Mount: Inspiring the Moral Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 147. 21

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of growth and decay, of vulnerability and flourishing, and of the seasons and the passing of time. They also draw upon a tradition. Hosea, for example, addresses Israel as follows: ‘Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap steadfast love; break up your fallow ground; for it is time to seek the Lord, that he may come and rain righteousness upon you’ (Hos. 10.12). An oracle in Jeremiah runs similarly: ‘For thus says the Lord to the people of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem: “Break up your fallow ground, and do not sow among thorns”’ (Jer. 4.3; cf. Isa. 55.10).24 So, in Mark’s collection of kingdom parables in chapter 4, the ultimate victory of God through Jesus as the climax of history is revealed (and concealed) in images of seed, soil, yield and harvest, tree branches and nesting birds (see Mk 4.3-8, 14-20, 26-32). What the Parable of the Sower suggests, for example, is that God’s rule on earth will triumph magnificently – hence the climactic, abundant yield of fruit, ‘thirty, sixty and a hundredfold’ (Mk 4.20) – but that it will do so ‘despite all evidence to the contrary’,25 as the failures and opposition depicted in the first three-quarters of the parable imply. The qualification (‘despite . . .’) is crucial. It corresponds with the broader narrative concerning the ever-increasing hostility to Jesus culminating in the crucifixion, and it comports well with what is implied about the lived experience of followers of Jesus – their suffering and ultimate vindication – in the time following (see Mk 8.34-38; 9.49-50; 10.35-40; 13.9-13). With the climactic arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem, a cursed fig tree signifies eschatological judgement upon the temple and the nation (see Mk 11.12-14, 20-23//Mt. 21.18-22) against the scriptural backdrop of Jer. 8.13: ‘When I wanted to gather them, says the Lord, there are no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree; even the leaves are withered, and what I gave them has passed away from them.’ Again, in a parable Jesus tells in the temple, a vineyard and its murderous workers (see Mk 12.1-12 and parallels) serve as an allegory of the history of Israel and its leaders in their spurning of God’s messengers and does so against the scriptural backdrop of the song of the vineyard in Isa. 5.1-7, with its shocking climax: ‘For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness but heard a cry!’ (Isa. 5.7). Taking the parables overall, it is evident that images from creation are intertwined with Gospel history. Such images serve as a prime rhetorical vehicle for history’s interpretation by virtue of their location within the Gospel narrative and their resonance with the larger biblical narrative of creation, election, judgement, and salvation.

Jesus as Lord of/in creation Creation is critical, not only for the Gospel portrayals of what Jesus says but also for what Jesus does, whereby he shows that he is truly Messiah and vice-regent in God’s kingdom. Thus, a striking element of the Synoptic narratives are the accounts of what is commonly called the

See John Drury, The Parables in the Gospels: History and Allegory (London: SPCK, 1985), 26–8, 52–3. Drury draws particular attention to 2 Esd. 4.26-32 (cf. also 8.41; 9.31) for its use of images of seed, sowing, and harvest in a context of revelation for the purpose of shedding light on Israel’s experience in a time of catastrophe. 25 Marcus, Mark 1–8, 295. Italics in the original. 24

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‘nature miracles’.26 But, of course, the designation is potentially misleading. To speak of ‘nature’ miracles isolates them artificially from the wider Gospel narrative of Jesus as a saviour who (at least in a representative fashion) brings rescue, healing, and peace to reality as a whole. Therefore, rather than refer to Jesus’ ‘nature miracles’, more justice is done to Gospel sources to talk of Jesus’ lordship in creation. To take one example: Mark’s version of the story of the stilling of the storm (in Mk 4.35-41) shows Jesus as a God-like lord of the sea. Tell-tale along these lines are the following: First, the story follows hard on Jesus’ teaching in parables about the hidden but gradually advancing presence of the kingdom (or power) of God (see Mk 4.1-34). This sets the cosmic scene for Jesus’ exercise of power, as God’s divine agent, in the storm-stilling. Second, the setting is a boat in peril on the ‘sea’ (θαλάσσα; thalassa) (Mk 4.39; cf. Mk 4.1). This setting is evocative, for the sea is a particularly significant scriptural setting for God’s self-revelation as sovereign power and source of life both in creation (see Ps. 93.1-4) and in salvation (see Exod. 15), and Mark has no less than three sea stories revealing the power and authority of Jesus (see Mk 4.3541; 6.45-52; 8.13-21).27 In fact, Mark’s storm-stilling resonates with the narrative of revelation in Ps. 107.23-32 concerning people who ‘went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the mighty waters’: ‘they saw the deeds of the Lord, his wondrous works in the deep . . . he made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed’. Third, in language reminiscent of God’s sovereignty over the sea (see Job 26.11-12; Pss. 18.15; 104.6-7; 106.9), Jesus ‘rebukes’ the wind and silences the sea (Mk 4.39), as earlier, he has rebuked and silenced an unclean spirit (see Mk 1.25). Like God in creation and salvation, Jesus conquers the life-threatening, even demonic, forces of chaos. Fourth, the disciples’ response, with their ‘great fear’ in counterpoint with the ‘great calm’ of the seas (see Mk 4.39b, 41a; cf. Mk 5.15, 33; 10.32; 16.8), is typical of responses to revelations of God’s power in creation and rescue (see Pss. 47.2-4; 89.7-8; 96.1-4; 99.1-3). Finally, the story’s climax poses, in the form of a question, the answer to which the episode itself points. To the question, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’ (Mk 4.41b) – resonating as it does with the Psalmist’s question in Ps. 89.8-11 – the necessary answer is that Jesus, the Messiah and revealer of the kingdom of God, is lord in God’s creation and, as such, the one who delivers from evil and death.

Jesus as agent of creation’s healing Similar to Jesus as lord of/in creation exemplified at the mythological level by the storm-stilling (see Mk 4.35-41) and the walking on the water (see Mk 6.47-52) are the Gospels’ portrayals of Jesus as healer and exorcist. In different but overlapping ways, all three Synoptics witness to Jesus’ healings and exorcisms as integral to his identity and mission. In the background are scriptural accounts of prophets of God (such as Moses, Elijah, and Elisha) as agents of healing,

Examples include the multiplication of loaves, the walking on water, the stilling of the storm, the large catch of fish and, in the Fourth Gospel, water becoming wine. 27 On the story of Jesus’ walking on the sea and its profound resonance with the picture in Job 9.4-11 (LXX) of God the Creator walking on the sea and ‘passing by’, see Richard B. Hays, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), 24–6. 26

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as well as texts that speak of healing in utopian terms as the corollary of return from exile and a time of new beginnings (see Isa. 35.5-6). In Mark, exorcisms have cosmological significance as the overpowering of Satan and his minions by the Son of God (see Mk 1.23-27, 32-34; 3.22-27). Especially noteworthy is the elaborate story of the Gerasene demoniac (see Mk 5.1-20) with its movement at the symbolic level from uncreation – in images of death, defilement, derangement, chaotic multiplicity, and social alienation – to creation restored – with the unclean spirits dispatched to the sea, and the man who was a demoniac now at peace, ‘sitting there, clothed and in his right mind’ (Mk 5.15) and subsequently reintegrated into society (Mk 5.19). Significantly, the destruction of the unclean spirits in the sea has likely scriptural echoes, not only in traditions relating to the Genesis story of the great flood (see Gen. 6–8; cf. 1 En. 67; Jub. 10.1-14) but also in the destruction of the Egyptian army in the sea as narrated in the book of Exodus (see Exod. 14.1–15.22). It is as if Jesus, Moses-like, is a warrior for God whose battle with the forces of chaos and evil brings liberation and the possibility of a new beginning (see Mk 5.19-20). A new beginning is also conveyed in Gospel stories of healing, suggestive again of creation restored and God’s rule made manifest. Distinctive in Luke, for example, is how Jesus’ healing and teaching ministry – understood as the fulfilment of Isaianic prophecy (see Lk. 4.16-30; 7.21-22; cf. Isa. 58.6; 61.1-2) – challenges the priestly holiness system of classification and distinction based on Genesis 1 (see Lev. 17–26) as given ritual–symbolic expression in cult and temple.28 In a profound ideological development, holiness predicated on separation from things and persons ‘unclean’ is displaced in Luke in favour of holiness predicated on divine mercy (ἔλεος; eleos) upon all (see Lk. 1.50, 54, 58, 72, 78; 7.13; 10.33; 15.20), given expression in practices of indiscriminate benefaction, especially towards the ‘unclean’ and marginalized (see Acts 10.34). Jesus raises the dead (see Lk. 7.11-17; 8.40-42a, 49-56), heals a leper (see Lk. 5.12-16), brings relief to a chronic menstruant (see Lk. 8.42b-48), makes a paralysed man walk again (see Lk. 5.17-26), gives release to the demonized (see Lk. 4.31-37; 8.26-39; 13.10-17), and offers welcome to sinners (see Lk. 7.36-50; 15.1-32; 19.1-10). Remarkably, such a welcome occurs even in Jesus’ final moments. At the climax of Luke’s passion narrative, and in response to a criminal’s entreaty, Jesus promises a place with himself ‘today’ in Paradise (Lk. 23.42-43).29 And, as if in divine confirmation of the new ‘kingdom of God’ order of things (see Lk. 11.20), Jesus is exalted to heaven at the Gospel’s end (see Lk. 24.51; Acts 1.9-11). Importantly, in Jesus’ exaltation via resurrection and ascension, one last boundary is transcended: ‘In piercing the barrier between earth and heaven, Jesus restructures how reality is understood, both now and in the days to come.’30 As Luke’s second volume makes plain, this restructuring of reality, carried forward in the teaching, healings, and exorcisms performed by the apostles, enables, in turn, the coming into being of a new, boundary-transcending, eschatological community (see Acts 2.43-47; 4.32-

See Jerome H. Neyrey, ‘The Symbolic Universe of Luke–Acts: “They Turn the World Upside Down”’, in The Social World of Luke–Acts: Models for Interpretation, ed. Jerome H. Neyrey (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1990), 271–304. 29 On ‘paradise’ (paradeisos) as the ‘garden of Eden’ (Gen. 2.8-16; 3.1-24), or as ‘God’s garden’ (Ezek. 31.8), or as the ‘garden of the Lord’ (Isa. 51.3), see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Luke the Theologian: Aspects of His Teaching (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989), 209. 30 Steve Walton, ‘“The Heavens Opened”: Cosmological and Theological Transformation in Luke and Acts’, in Cosmology and New Testament Theology, ed. Jonathan T. Pennington and Sean M. McDonough (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 60. 28

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37; 10.44-48; 13.44-49; 15.8-9) in lively communication with heaven and finding existential expression in joy, gladness, and praise (see Lk. 24.50; Acts 2.25-28, 46-47; 8.8, 39; 13.48, 52; 16.34).

Conclusion: ‘Our Father’ To speak about creation in the Synoptic Gospels is to speak about God and God’s relation to time, space, people, and values as reflected in the various ways the Evangelists tell the story of Jesus. It is to speak about how scriptural stories of beginnings – the beginnings of the world and the beginnings of the people of Israel – give the Evangelists life-giving ways to think about their past, present, and future (including the future of all things) in the light of Jesus and the Spirit. It is to speak about the meaning of existence as given by God in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of God’s Son understood both as the ultimate victory in the battle against the forces of chaos and death and as the revelation of redeemed sociality. Creation in the Synoptic Gospels is an invitation to learn and practise what it means to call God, ‘Father’ (Mt. 6.9//Lk. 11.2).

Further reading Adams, Edward. The Stars Will Fall From Heaven: ‘Cosmic Catastrophe’ in the New Testament and Its World. London: T&T Clark, 2007. Bauckham, Richard. Living With Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2012. Brooke, George J. ‘Creation in the Biblical Tradition’. Zygon 22, no. 2 (1987): 227–48. Collins, John J. ‘Cosmos and Salvation: Jewish Wisdom and Apocalyptic in the Hellenistic Age’. History of Religions 17, no. 2 (1977): 121–42. Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. ‘Biblical Cosmology’. In Backgrounds for the Bible, edited by Michael P. O’Connor and David N. Freedman, 231–40. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1987. Pennington, Jonathan T. and Sean M. McDonough, eds. Cosmology and New Testament Theology. London: T&T Clark, 2008. Talmon, Shemaryahu. ‘The Biblical Understanding of Creation and the Human Commitment’. Ex Auditu 3 (1987): 98–119. Van Kooten, George H., ed. The Creation of Heaven and Earth: Re-interpretations of Genesis 1 in the Context of Judaism, Ancient Philosophy, Christianity, and Modern Physics. Leiden: Brill, 2005.

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CHAPTER 7 CREATION IN JOHN’S GOSPEL

Vicky Balabanski

Introduction The word ‘creation’ (κτίσις) does not appear in the Gospel of John. Yet the opening verses of the Gospel establish such a profound connection with the first creation narrative of Genesis that creation is made foundational to the story that will be told. The great affirmations of the first creation story in Genesis – the pronouncement of God creating light and darkness, day and night, the waters above and below, those powers that illuminate and rule, the material world and indeed all life, including humanity and its purpose – are expounded narratively as the Johannine story unfolds, so that the creation is never very far from view. The Fourth Gospel evokes creation in sensory as well as symbolic ways. Creation is valued in this Gospel as the locus of God’s glory, most clearly seen in the Word made flesh; and, for the believer, creation is the tangible medium of revelation. Scholarly interest in exploring creation in John’s Gospel, initiated in the twentieth century by Edwyn Hoskyns,1 has increased in recent years.2 This reflects increased attention to the use of the Old Testament in the Gospel of John and the emergence of ecological lenses through which to interpret the Gospel. These angles of approach are necessarily quite different from one another. If one brings into the foreground Genesis 1–3 as the key intertext, then words and phrases that are closely affiliated with creation will yield a range of allusions to the foundational stories in Genesis. This is undoubtedly an approach that has generated some persuasive results.3 There is, however, as yet no scholarly consensus on which allusions should be considered foundational – are, for instance, the gardens and gardener of John 18–20 allusions to Genesis 2–3, and, if so, is this to be attributed to the authorial level, or does it reflect the imaginative context of the reader or interpreter?4 Nor is there a consensus as to whether these allusions,

E. C. Hoskyns, ‘Genesis I–III and St John’s Gospel’, The Journal of Theological Studies 21, no. 2 (1920): 210–18. Some key contributions include Masanobu Endo, Creation and Christology: A Study on the Johannine Prologue in the Light of Early Jewish Creation Accounts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002); Anthony M. Moore, Signs of Salvation: The Theme of Creation in John’s Gospel (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2013); Carlos R. Sosa Siliézar, Creation Imagery in the Gospel of John (London: T&T Clark, 2015); Mary Daly-Denton, John: An Earth Bible Commentary – Supposing Him to be the Gardener (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017); Dorothy A. Lee, Creation, Matter and the Image of God: Essays on John (Hindmarsh: ATF Press, 2020). The publication of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ in 2015 has also prompted further scholarship on creation. See Francis J. Moloney, ‘The Gospel of Creation: A Biblical Response to Laudato Si’, Salesianum 78 (2016): 583–605. 3 Adam Kubiś surveys and evaluates the scholarly discussion regarding allusions to the creation stories of Genesis 1–3, ultimately arguing that creation forms a thematic axis for interpreting the Fourth Gospel as a whole. Adam Kubiś, ‘The Creation Theme in the Gospel of John’, Collectanea Theologica 90, no. 5 (2020): 375–414. 4 See Ruben Zimmermann, ‘Symbolic Communication between John and His Reader: The Garden Symbolism in John 19–20’, in Anatomies of Narrative Criticism. The Past, Present, and Futures of the Fourth Gospel as Literature, ed. Tom Thatcher and Stephen D. Moore (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008). The Garden symbolism goes back to 1 2

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once identified, should be seen as establishing continuity between John’s vision of creation and the Genesis accounts, or whether discontinuity and contrast are more significant for interpretation (cf. the contrast indicated in Jn 1.17).5 Then again, if one brings to the fore the deepening global climate crisis and concern for creation as the interpretive entry point, then the methodological pathway may give prominence to creation without locating this in the authorial level of the text.6 Given the wide range of possible entry points into a study of creation in John’s Gospel, some methodological reflections on the approach adopted in this study are in order. As set out in the opening paragraph, this chapter assumes that creation is foundational to the unfolding story of the Word made flesh. However, the focus of this chapter will not be on establishing and analysing the intertextual allusions to the creation stories of Genesis 1–3, nor will it frame the discussion by identifying and studying creation imagery (such as water, light, wind, grain, harvest, vine, and branches).7 Instead, to keep the wide-angle focus on identifying a Johannine doctrine of creation, some heuristic questions will assist in shaping the parameters of the chapter: How does the opening of the Gospel depict creation? What are the temporal–spatial parameters of creation depicted in the narrative? How is creation linked with the self-revelation of the invisible God? These questions will help determine whether a Johannine theology of creation is discernible in the Gospel. In the process of tackling these questions, certain Johannine terms connected with creation will constantly reappear: πάντα, all things; ἡ σάρξ, flesh; ὁ κόσμος, the world; and ἡ ζωή, life. The interpretive contexts will include Hellenistic Judaism and the Graeco-Roman world, with a particular focus on the contrasting views of creation in Platonic and Stoic cosmologies. The pathway of this study builds a cumulative rather than direct picture of creation, attending to the text, intertexts, and contexts. In doing so, it seeks to honour the richly imaginative and symbolic world of the Johannine depiction of creation.

How does the opening of the Gospel depict creation? The first five verses of John 1 can be designated the proem of the Gospel.8 This proem depicts creation coming into being through the Word. These verses have particular significance for all

patristic exegesis. See Moore, Signs of Salvation; Daly-Denton, John; Kubiś, ‘The Creation Theme in the Gospel of John’, 398–9. 5 See Anthony J. Kelly and Francis J. Moloney, Experiencing God in the Gospel of John (New York: Paulist Press, 2003), 3–34. 6 See Norman C. Habel, ‘An Ecojustice Challenge: Is Earth Valued in John 1?’, in The Earth Story in the New Testament, ed. Norman C. Habel and Vicky Balabanski (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 76–82; Elizabeth Wainwright, ‘Which Intertext? A Response to An Ecojustice Challenge: Is Earth Valued in John 1?’, in The Earth Story in the New Testament, ed. Norman C. Habel and Vicky Balabanski (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 83–8; Vicky Balabanski, ‘John 1 – the Earth Bible Challenge: An Intra-textual Approach to Reading John 1’, in The Earth Story in the New Testament, ed. Norman C. Habel and Vicky Balabanski (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 89–94. 7 See V. J. John, ‘Ecology in the Fourth Gospel: The Use of Creation Images in John’, Indian Journal of Theology 46, nos. 1–2 (2004): 13–25. 8 Peter Williams sets out evidence that contemporary convention of seeing vv. 1–18 as a literary unit does not have extensive ancient support. Instead, the earliest manuscripts (P66, P75, Codex Vaticanus, and Codex Sinaiticus) indicate a division after v. 5. John Chrysostom later calls these opening verses prooimia in his Homily on Jn 6.1, which leads me

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that is to follow. The words ‘in [the] beginning’ (Ἐν ἀρχῇ), together with the depiction of God speaking, the prominence of light and darkness and the use of ἐγένετο ‘into being’ (Jn 1.3; LXX Gen. 1.3) establish an undeniable connection with Genesis 1. There is no doubt that the very same beginning – the creation account in Genesis 1 – is in view. However, instead of the expected subject (God) and the expected objects (the heavens and the earth), the subject here is the Word/Logos that was in the beginning, in relationship to God (πρὸς τὸν θεόν, turned towards God) and indeed fully identified with God (θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος, the Word was God). Embedded in the first verse of the Gospel is the foundational Johannine paradox: ‘the Word is God but is also in some way distinct from God’.9 The initial focus of Jn 1.1-2 is not yet on creation itself but on setting the context of the beginning as divine relationship. The first explicit glimpse of creation in the Gospel is in Jn 1.3, which states: ‘All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.’10 This suggests that creation – πάντα, all things – will be more than the backdrop to the salvific story for humanity. The ensuing story will be a restoration or even re-creation of the foundational order of the cosmos. Not one thing is excluded from this vision of creation (Jn 1.3b). Just as in the Genesis 1 account, light and darkness, day and night, and the waters above and below all belong to the good creation, they also do in John’s creation. Creation is no dualistic cosmic battleground. In the beginning, all things, though various and contrasting, were a harmonious whole. Put this way, all things – the whole of creation, and not only humanity – are the primary focus of this epic story.11 All things are named in verse 3 and are linked with life (ἡ ζωή) in verse 4a. Only then is humanity introduced (v. 4b). The chain of connection runs from the divine Word to the creation of all things, to life itself, and from there to light, and then to the enlightenment of humanity. Therefore, interpreters need to notice afresh the priority of all creation (πάντα). One could call verse 3a-b the Johannine creation account: ‘All things came into being through him [i.e. the Word], and without him not one thing came into being.’ This places creation and the creative Word in the closest possible relationship and states emphatically that nothing that exists is exempt from the Word’s creative act.12 This account is immediately elaborated in verses 3c, 4, and 5: ‘What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν).’ The proem of the Gospel, Jn 1.1-5, depicts creation as it ‘should be’, pronounced good by God in the first creation account of Genesis. However, by the end of verse 5, all is not well. Light and darkness are no longer harmonious contrasts but now oppose one another. The choice of the verb καταλαμβάνω, meaning ‘seize’, ‘win’, ‘overtake’ – or perhaps with a middle

to the designation of vv. 1-5 as ‘proem’ – a preface or prelude. Peter J. Williams, ‘Not the Prologue of John’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33, no. 4 (2011): 375–86. 9 Douglas Estes, ‘Dualism or Paradox? A New “Light” on the Gospel of John’, The Journal of Theological Studies 71, no. 1 (2020): 104. 10 Just as in Gen. 1.1-2, John opens in vv. 1-2 with pretemporal primordial reality that precedes creation. 11 This claim is controversial, as some scholars hold that the ‘Prologue’ of John’s Gospel is about ‘God’s plan for humankind’, not about creation. See John Ashton, The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 3. 12 Not one thing gives strong emphasis to this declaration.

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sense, ‘understand’ – does seem to suggest that the conflict to be set out in verses 10-11 is already being anticipated here. The depiction of creation in John’s Gospel proceeds with many opposing pairs – light/dark, above/below, life/death – which are vying for an ascendency over the fate of humanity. The hint of disharmony in Jn 1.5 anticipates the explicit acknowledgement in Jn 1.10-11 that creation is marked by the failure of humanity made in the image of God to know and receive the Word. The second Genesis creation narrative, which gives an account of the presence of evil in a good world, hovers close, though there are few verbal allusions.13 Nothing less than a rebirthing of humanity – to be in the image of God, as children of God – is required. All things are caught up in humanity’s losing its filiation with God. This conflict is not, however, embedded into the very fabric of creation, if indeed verse 3 holds true, that all things without exception come into being through the Word – darkness as well as light. The aetiology of the conflict is only hinted at, as it is mentioned only after the naming of humanity in verse 4. Humanity’s predilection to love darkness rather than light (Jn 3.19-20) is also introduced there. In a Jewish context, the opening words position the proem as Midrash – a homily, commentary, or expansion on Gen. 1.1-5.14 As Midrash, it is the similarity with, the divergence from, and the elaboration on Genesis 1 that are significant, building a context of expectation and surprising those expectations with different material. As a proem to a lengthy prose narrative, the Fourth Gospel as a whole, the hymnic quality of these verses, so often recognized by scholars, is also undeniable.15 This midrashic proem introduces the Word (‘Logos’) into the creation account. With its Greek philosophical roots, Logos was, by the first century ce, ‘commonplace’ – not just for Philo but also in Jewish circles more generally. In this opening sentence, the divine speech of Genesis 1 is synthesized with the Jewish wisdom tradition and also personified. This was taking place in other Jewish translations and paraphrases of Genesis as well, such as the Aramaic Targumim Onkelos and Neofiti, in which the Word (‘Memra’) of God speaks and performs the creative actions of God. Official rabbinic theology later named this the heresy of ‘Two Powers in Heaven’ (b. Hag., 15a) and sought to suppress such developments.16 The conflict depicted in the Gospel between the Jewish leadership and Jesus mirrors theological developments that were not narrowly confined to the Johannine tradition. In wider Jewish circles, the influence of Hellenistic philosophy and cosmology by the first century ce in Asia Minor was substantial. Against the background of the Greek philosophical tradition, the presence of Logos in the beginning, distinct from – yet intimately connected with – God, resonates with Hellenic and Hellenistic ideas of creation. Diverse philosophical schools were influenced by Plato’s discourse

LXX Genesis 2.7 and 19 refer to every human being and animal as ψυχή ζῶσαν, a ‘living creature’ or ‘soul’. Both terms are significant in the Gospel of John; one must lay down the ψυχή in order to receive life (Jn 12.25). Later in the Gospel story, the imagery of a garden will become reminiscent of Genesis 2. See Daly-Denton, John, 13–26. 14 Daniel Boyarin, ‘Logos, a Jewish Word: John’s Prologue as Midrash’, in The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 549. 15 For example, Ben Witherington, III, John’s Wisdom: A Commentary on the Fourth Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 47–52. 16 See Boyarin, ‘Logos, a Jewish Word’, 546–7. 13

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‘concerning the universe’ (peri tou pantos, ‘concerning all things’) known as Timaeus, in which Socrates and Timaeus discuss cosmology (how the world came into being), time, and eternity. This discourse was very influential across the philosophical schools and shaped Hellenistic ideas more generally. In this account, the Most High God, who is the Maker and Father of the universe and wholly good, desired to make the cosmos so that, as far as possible, all things should be good and nothing evil.17 From a state of discordant and disorderly motion, God brought the cosmos into being as a Living Creature endowed with soul and reason, containing within itself all the living creatures which are by nature akin to itself.18 A long and intricate cosmogony ensues, distinguishing the soul and the body, and prioritizing the soul as prior in birth and excellence. After the creation of time, four categories of creatures were formed, of which the first was the ‘heavenly kind of gods’, the stars.19 Then the Most High God speaks directly to them, saying that three mortal kinds of creature remain to be made: But if by my doing these creatures came into existence and partook of life, they would be made equal unto gods; in order, therefore, that they may be mortal and that this Worldall may be truly All, do ye turn yourselves, as Nature directs, to the work of fashioning these living creatures, imitating the power showed by me in my generating of you.20 By fashioning mortals, these ‘heavenly kind of gods’ are to give them food, and when the mortals waste away, the stars receive mortals back to themselves. Built into the fabric of this cosmogony was the concept that mortal creatures – human beings – owed their allegiance and gratitude to those lesser gods that formed them. This account envisaged a cycle of reincarnation, according to whether the mortals lived justly or unjustly, mastering or being mastered by pleasure and pain, fear and anger.21 It also envisaged an ensuing hierarchy according to gender and species until Logos–reason would be restored.22 Various philosophical schools took these ideas in different directions.23 In particular, Stoics emphasized the role of Logos, intelligence–reason, in shaping the beneficent order and restoring all things into a harmonious whole.24 Stoic ideas were a kind of philosophical Koine, or common language, that crossed national and social boundaries and were very widely known in the first century ce, particularly in Asia Minor.25

Plato, Timaeus. Critias. Cleitophon. Menexenus. Epistles, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 30A (pp. 54–5). 18 See Plato, Timaeus, 30BCD (pp. 54–7). 19 See Plato, Timaeus, 39E–40A (pp. 82–5). 20 Plato, Timaeus, 41C (pp. 88–9). 21 See Plato, Timaeus, 41DE–42AB (pp. 88–93). 22 See Plato, Timaeus, 41BCD (pp. 88–91). 23 Epicureans emphasized the role of pleasure and pain as primary motivators for all choice and avoidance, but downplayed the involvement of the gods. Stoics, on the other hand, did not see pleasure and pain as central. See A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, Volume 1: Translations of the Principal Sources with Philosophical Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 90; Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 10.34; Cicero, On Ends, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 1.37-9 (pp. 40–5); Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, 2nd rev. edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 5.156-234. 24 See Vicky Balabanski, Colossians: An Earth Bible Commentary. An Eco-Stoic Reading (London: T&T Clark, 2020), 24. 25 See Balabanski, Colossians, 19. 17

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The prominence given to Logos in Jn 1.1 (and subsequently in Jn 1.2-4a via the pronouns referring to it) suggests that this proem is shaped to address an audience familiar with Stoic ideas so that the creation story being articulated resonates with the broadest possible array of Jewish and Graeco-Roman audiences. The Fourth Gospel positions itself to connect with diverse creation narratives, making clear that all things were created thoroughly good. It is human failure that brings about evil. The Stoic context may offer further insight into another aspect of creation found in Jn 1.16. The reference to ‘the (divine) fullness’ (πλήρωμα), from which humanity receives grace upon grace, has long baffled scholars, even while they note the parallel with Col. 1.19; 2.9, and Eph. 1.23; 3.19, and 4.13.26 In Stoic thought, divinity is not disembodied: ‘fullness’ embraces both material and spiritual reality. When Col. 2.9 states that in Christ, ‘the whole fullness (πλήρωμα) of deity dwells bodily’, there is no need to explain to the recipients of the letter that embodied reality and divinity, God’s presence, are not opposites. This word πλήρωμα in Jn 1.16 is best understood not against the background of a developed Gnostic framework27 but rather as a collective term for the full expanse of God’s spiritual and material blessings. This brings πλήρωμα into close connection with all things, with creation itself. The fullness of God, beneficent creation, offers grace upon grace to humanity so that every good thing, whether material or spiritual, is a gift from God.28 The Gospel of John and the Letters to the Colossians and Ephesians arguably were written for people familiar with Stoic ideas and who shared this view of creation as permeated with divine presence. The question of the meaning of πληρώμα in Jn 1.16 is important in shaping how one understands the Johannine understanding of creation. Is the divine fullness active and available in this world, as the Stoic background suggests, or is it removed from creation, as the Gnostic background suggests? The value ascribed to creation is very different in these two frameworks.

Creation as the temporal–spatial landscape of reality Many scholars have observed the distinctive Johannine depiction of time and space in the Fourth Gospel. Alan Culpepper has shown how narrative time in the Gospel can be understood according to the order, duration, and frequency of related events.29 Chronological time is invoked in various ways, including through sequences of days (e.g. ‘the next day’, Jn 1.29, 35, 43), through the use of numerals (e.g. ‘on the third day’, Jn 2.1) and through the extensive use of prolepsis and analepsis. This Gospel depicts a story of Jesus’ ministry that spans two-and-

See C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John: An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text, 2nd edn (London: SPCK, 1978), 168. 27 For example, the Gospel of Truth opens with a reference to ‘the Word that came forth from the pleroma’, equating pleroma with Heaven or God’s presence. For the full text in translation, see Harold W. Attridge and George W. MacRae, ‘The Gospel of Truth’, in Nag Hammadi Codex I (The Jung Codex): I. Introductions, Texts, Translations, Indices, ed. Harold W. Attridge (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 55–122. 28 For further discussion of ‘fullness’ against a Stoic background, see Balabanski, Colossians, 119–24. 29 See R. Alan Culpepper, The Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 52–75. 26

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a-half or three years, set against a narrative time reaching back to the beginning and reaching forward to a future already being revealed (e.g. Jn 16.4). However, the Fourth Gospel also plays with chronology. Time stretches and contracts according to the significance of what is being told. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the depiction of ‘the hour’, but also in such a phrase as ‘a little while’ (Jn 16.16-18) or the timing of the harvest that has already arrived (Jn 4.35-38). The temporal – ‘horizontal’ – parameters of John’s story are at the disposal of the One through whom all things were created. The unifying work of the Son of Man is also to be seen as bringing chronological time to a still point of unity: ‘Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad’. Then the Judeans said to him, ‘You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am’. (Jn 8.56-58) Johannine christology subsumes the chronology of time and spatial reality within itself. This is only possible because they are subject to the One through whom all things came into being. In the Gospel of John, creation is understood protologically rather than eschatologically. This Gospel looks back to the foundational reality articulated in the opening verses so that the eschatological future is a restoration of right relationship between the Word and all things and a restoration of glory to its rightful place. Much attention is given to the vertical parameters of John’s depiction of reality, namely, to those things above and below and the associated contrasts of light and darkness, life and death, Spirit and flesh. Many scholars have seen in these contrasts a proto-gnostic framework that came to be fully articulated in such second-century writings as The Gospel of Truth. If one simply sees one side of these pairs as good and the other as evil, then one does indeed have not just insipient but rather fully-fledged dualistic thinking. However, in the Johannine framework, creation consists of both above and below, light and darkness, and life and death; in each case, the one does not exist without the other. Therefore, the affirmation of Jn 1.3 needs to be heard afresh: ‘All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.’ Douglas Estes makes a strong case that John’s Gospel is not dualistic but paradoxical.30 This is indeed an important matter concerning creation in the Gospel of John, as it is crucial to understanding how the contrasting pairs stand in relation to one another. For example, are the oppositional pairs to be understood ontologically as binary opposites so that only one part of humanity, or only one part of reality, is connected with the divine and worthy of salvation? This would indeed lead in a Gnostic direction, which is fundamentally pessimistic with regard to creation. Alternatively, are the pairs part of a rhetorical strategy to persuade the reader/ listener to embrace or continue in faith in Jesus so that they may have life (Jn 20.30-31)? Such a rhetorical strategy would seek to establish a way of viewing the world that equates to sight rather than blindness. The extensive use of such oppositional pairs would imply that

See Estes, ‘Dualism or Paradox?’, 90–118. Estes argues that paradoxical thought was more prevalent in the cultural milieu of the ancient Mediterranean world than was dualism, and then offers an interpretation of the opening and closing of the Fourth Gospel as paradox. He concludes by examining the light/darkness pairing as a test case. 30

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paradoxical language is necessary to convey Johannine theological concepts and maintain ‘insight’ into this depth of meaning.31 This equates more obviously with the direction the Johannine Epistles take, where the opposites exhort the recipients to persevere in the word of life revealed to them (e.g. 1 Jn 2.9-11). A question, however, does arise with regard to a passage like Jn 8.23: ‘You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world.’ It is hard to hear this as a rhetorical strategy, as the oppositional ‘worlds’ seem closed to each other.32 The saying recalls the dialogue with Nicodemus, particularly Jn 3.12-13, and here again, the origin of Jesus is in view, emphasizing the gulf between Jesus and humanity. Nevertheless, commentators note that Jesus continues to reveal himself to those from this world and to tell them how the gulf between above and below can be overcome. In Jn 8.24, Jesus warns about death but also invites his interlocutors into belief so that the gulf will be overcome. The gulf is not absolute but depends on whether people entrust themselves to the One who spans the chasm. Creation only divides into binary opposites as a result of the stubborn predilection of humanity for ‘darkness’ to mask their deeds (Jn 3.19). The role of ‘the Son’ in this Gospel is often depicted as bridging the divides. So, for instance, at the end of chapter 1, the Son of Man is revealed as the bridge between above and below, between heaven and earth: ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’ (Jn 1.51). Here the imagery evokes Jacob’s vision of a ladder connecting heaven and earth (Gen. 28.12), which came to him at Bethel, meaning the House of God. For the Johannine community, the House of God is no longer the Jerusalem Temple but the body of Jesus (Jn 2.21), which now enables true worship, whatever the location of the believers (Jn 4.21-24). Various other Johannine passages portray Jesus as the link between heaven and earth: Jn 3.13; 5.26-27; 6.62; 8.26-27 and 12.32-33. The foundational act of bridging a divide widely held in Platonic thought to be unbridgeable is Jn 1.14: ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ Although it is difficult for contemporary interpreters not to read this verse Platonically as asserting a dualism between flesh and spirit,33 it is possible with the help of Stoic ideas to see Jn 1.14 as a bridging of divides without denigration of the flesh: a paradox without dualism. In Stoic thought, the divine Logos was embodied and permeated reality. However, in their thought, the Logos was not evenly distributed throughout the cosmos but was most densely present in the sage, whose life was devoted to wisdom. However, despite the concept of divine permeation, there was doubt as to whether any human sage had been entirely in harmony with Logos.34 The Prologue of John asserts that

Estes mentions this, but does not explore it further. See Estes, ‘Dualism or Paradox?’, 105n66. A core Johannine paradox is ‘dying to live’. See, for example, Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 2:835–66. 32 ‘World’ is a term used both positively (e.g. Jn 3.16; 6.33, 51) and negatively (e.g. Jn 7.7; 14.17). For a discussion of the shifting semantic fields of κόσμος, see Balabanski, ‘John 1’, 89–94. 33 Estes names two main reasons why this is difficult. First, ‘the influence of key dualistic texts (Plato, Nag Hammadi and possibly Qumran literature), the history of interpretation and unfamiliarity with the language games of oral cultures. Second, modern interpreters are not trained in paradox, nor riddles or dialectic’. Estes, ‘Dualism or Paradox?’, 102. I would add that the triumph of (Neo-) Platonism in the history of interpretation profoundly obscures the influence of Stoic concepts. 34 See A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (London: Duckworth, 1974), 204. 31

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there was indeed one in whom the Logos was fully present. Here lies the surprise of Jn 1.14: there was indeed an incarnate human being in whom the Logos was fully embodied. Seen this way, the surprise of Jn 1.14 arises not because of the flesh, which was capable of bearing divinity, but because of the unique and complete embodiment which dwelt among us – the full fleshly incarnation of the Word, hidden and yet revealed. Thus, the paradox does not lie between flesh and spirit, nor between the deity and creation; the paradox lies in the tension between the infinite and the particular, between the invisible and unknowable God and the visible incarnate revelation of God.

Creation as key to the self-revelation of the invisible God Creation is the means whereby the believer can know and experience the unknown, invisible God. To know and experience the invisible God (Jn 1.18), a tangible means of revelation is necessary. Creation is the means whereby the unknown God reveals Godself, through the material world and ultimately through the Son. The Johannine Jesus is the nexus of revelation, the key to bridging the gulf so that humanity can perceive the glory of God in the flesh (Jn 1.14). An important aspect of the Gospel’s doctrine of creation is the concept of flesh (σάρξ). This refers to the very stuff or matter of creation, which the Word both creates (Jn 1.3) and with which the Word is fully identified in the incarnation (Jn 1.14). However, flesh is not of its own accord capable of conveying life (Jn 6.63). The Prologue hints that the flesh may exercise a will (Jn 1.13), but the scope of the flesh in Johannine usage is quite different from Pauline usage: it is limited but not opposed to God.35 One might say that flesh, infused with Spirit, equates to life. I hold that the Johannine concept of flesh is inclusive of non-human creation. One’s anthropocentric tendency is to interpret flesh as referring exclusively to humanity. However, interpreting flesh as inclusive of all things is closer to the vision of this Gospel. In Jn 17.2a, the word ‘flesh’ signifies all things over which the Father has given the Son authority. However, the term is obscured by most contemporary translations, as is the neuter ‘all’ in Jn 17.2b. A better translation of this verse might read: ‘. . . since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all that you have given him’ (italics mine). To narrow the authority of the Son to humanity alone would not be in keeping with the neuter form of πάντα in Jn 1.3; 3.35; 12.32;36 13.3; and 17.10, nor with 1.10-11a, where the neuter τὰ ἴδια (own things) casts a wider vision than simply humanity. Like πάντα, the phrase τὰ ἴδια becomes synonymous with creation as a whole. Interpreting Jn 17.2 as inclusive of all things presents these questions: What is eternal life, and is it only for human beings? And in what way could flesh bear the life of God? It is beyond

For a comprehensive study of the Johannine usage of ‘flesh’, see Dorothy A. Lee, Flesh and Glory: Symbolism, Gender, and Theology in the Gospel of John (New York: Herder & Herder, 2002), 29–64. 36 There is a significant textual variant in Jn 12.32. The original hand of Codex Sinaiticus and P66 read ‘all things’ (πάντα) and not ‘all people/men’ (πάντας), as do the Old Latin manuscripts and most of the other versions. I consider it likely that the neuter ‘all things’ is the more original reading. See also, though more tentatively, Lee, Creation, Matter and the Image of God, 51. 35

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the scope of this chapter to offer a comprehensive answer to these questions.37 But the enfleshed resurrected Christ, who breathes on the disciples (Jn 20.22), who is capable of embrace and touch (Jn 20.17, 27), and who cooks a hearty breakfast for his friends (Jn 21.5-13), portrays an eternal life that is anything but disembodied or disconnected with creation. Creation is the bridge for the believer to move from surface perception to depth perception, from unbelief to belief. The senses are fundamental in this Gospel, not only sight and hearing but also touch, taste, and smell.38 Only through the senses can the human imagination perceive more than just the ordinary significance of things such as bread, wine, light, and water. Creation is necessary to comprehend both the ordinary and the revelatory significance of such things. The rich symbolic valency of so much of creation could not be replaced with a narrower palette. This chapter began by raising the question of whether there is a Johannine theology of creation. The ensuing argument emphasized Jn 1.3 and 1.14 and resisted the tendency to see dualism at the heart of the Johannine vision of reality. Instead, the creation – the material and spiritual imprint of the creator – is celebrated in this Gospel as the locus of God’s ultimate self-revelation, the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1.14). In becoming flesh, the Word became embedded in creation, and this divine choice both values and makes sacred the material world. John 1.14 does not say that the Word became human, but that the Word became flesh – a term shared by all life. This means that the Word participated in the physical world and so is significant for all creatures, indeed for all creation. Every aspect of divine revelation is predicated on this central affirmation, and creation is the medium whereby God’s self-revelation takes place. So a Johannine theology of creation is intimately connected with Johannine christology. One can only grasp what the Johannine I AM sayings with predicate may mean – the light of the world, the gate of the sheep, the bread of life, for example – through the creation. Creation bears the significance of the revelatory discourse of the Word. It might even be said that there is symbiosis in this relationship – all things came into being through the Word, and the Word made its home among all flesh. The epic story narrated in this Gospel is that the Word is not only central in creation but also in re-creation. Indeed, the filiation between humanity and God is once again possible for those who entrust themselves to the light (Jn 1.12), and it is this story that the Gospel tells. But ultimately, all things will be drawn into the life-giving embrace of God. As the Johannine Jesus proclaims before the crowds, ‘I, when I am lifted up, will draw all things to myself ’ (Jn 12.32). The ultimate goal of this epic story is the restoration of right relationship between all things and their source – the love, mutual honour, and unity of the Father and the Son (Jn 17.21-26), made known through and shared with the Holy Spirit (Jn 16.13-16). Humanity is central to this story, being restored to being children of God, but the picture is not complete without the restoration of all things, humanity and creation together.

For an exploration of how the life of God connects with non-human creation, see Denis Edwards, Deep Incarnation: God’s Redemptive Suffering with Creatures (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2019). 38 See Dorothy A. Lee, Hallowed in Truth and Love: Spirituality in the Johannine Literature (Preston: Mosaic Press, 2011), 167–98. 37

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Further reading Daly-Denton, Mary. John: An Earth Bible Commentary – Supposing Him to be the Gardener. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017. Endo, Masanobu. Creation and Christology: A Study on the Johannine Prologue in the Light of Early Jewish Creation Accounts. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002. Estes, Douglas. ‘Dualism or Paradox? A New “Light” on the Gospel of John’. The Journal of Theological Studies 71, no. 1 (2020): 90–118. Kubiś, Adam. ‘The Creation Theme in the Gospel of John’. Collectanea Theologica 90, no. 5 (2020): 375–414. Lee, Dorothy A. Creation, Matter and the Image of God: Essays on John. Hindmarsh: ATF Press, 2020. Moore, Anthony M. Signs of Salvation: The Theme of Creation in John’s Gospel. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2013. Sosa Siliézar, Carlos R. Creation Imagery in the Gospel of John. London: T&T Clark, 2015.

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CHAPTER 8 PAUL, SLAVERY, AND CREATION

Batanayi I. Manyika

Introduction It is the nature of slavery to serve the norms of its context. It achieves this through the support of military might and legal dictates.1 While the violence inherent in all forms of slavery is well documented,2 one is hard-pressed to find an outright denunciation of Roman slavery in Paul’s writings. Instead, the institution is portrayed as an integral component of Paul’s milieu, a key metaphor for allegiance to God and Christ, allegiance to the new society, bondage to sin and its concomitant effects, and subservience to idols (Rom. 1.1, 6.15-23, 8.15; 1 Cor. 7.22; 2 Cor. 4.5; Gal. 5.1; Phil. 1.1). For these reasons, modern readers of Paul navigate the complex nuances of his engagement (or non-engagement) with the institution, deciphering meaning based on each letter’s contingency. Several scholars have read Paul’s words on slavery through the portal of reconstruction, wherein the apostle’s situatedness vis-à-vis the institution is given a primacy that safeguards against anachronistic conflations with later forms of slavery.3 Interpreters also read Paul’s letters in concert, informed by the coherence of his theological frame vis-à-vis the slavery metaphor – a difficult task that has registered disparate views in the history of Bible interpretation.4 Be that as it may, this chapter discusses the nature and function of slavery in general, creation (and new creation) motifs in Paul’s writings, and the latter’s dependence on slavery metaphors. This Pauline focus on slavery and creation is elucidated via the treatment of Rom. 8.12-25. The chapter concludes with considerations of how slavery and creation inform life in the global ecclesial community.

Defining slavery Slavery marks people groups directing their existential trajectories within redacted paradigms of commodification, utility, and power. One may say that the slave lives in a liminal space

See Werner Eck, ‘The Emperor, the Law and Imperial Administration’, in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society, ed. Paul J. du Plessis, Clifford Ando, and Kaius Tuori (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 98; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 36. 2 See Seneca, Epistulae morales, 47.3-19; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. 3 See Douglas A. Campbell, Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014), 271–3; Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press 2003), 20–2, 63–5. 4 See Peter Stuhlmacher, Der Brief an Philemon (Zürich/Einsiedeln/Köln: Benzi​ger/N​eukir​chen-​Vluyn​/Neuk​irche​ ner-V​erlag​des Erziehungsvereins, 1975), 58–66; Markus Barth and Helmut Blanke, The Letter to Philemon (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 203–4. For an overview of some of the scholarly treatments of slavery metaphors in Paul over the last century and a half, see John Byron, Slavery Metaphors in Early Judaism and Pauline Christianity: A Traditio-Historical and Exegetical Examination (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 3–14. 1

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where, on the one hand, they are a mere tool in a master’s toolkit and, on the other, a fully integrated member in a master’s household – albeit limited to the servile station. This tension presents a rigid ontology that essentially broadcasts what it means to be human, who is recognized as human, and the dictates that police such social frameworks. Despite its broad history, it is vital to underscore that slavery is neither monolithic in its expression nor unitary in its motivations. For these reasons, it is necessary to advocate a definition of slavery that is both specific to Paul’s era and general enough to encompass the institution’s evolution across contexts. Such a definition may seem elusive; however, the utility of the attempt may delimit and aid the interpretive enterprise to follow. Hendrik Goede has noted that descriptions of slavery are legion and posits that ‘there is currently no general theory of slavery that allows a single definition of slavery for all cultures and times’.5 Dan Nässelqvist and Georgina Jardim share this view: ‘No single description of slavery fits the various forms it took in the ancient world.’6 Yet, despite the convergence of thought between these authors, it is incumbent upon Paul’s readers to make sense of inherent commonalities and divergences related to slavery across epochs and contexts. Gary Meadors defines slavery as a ‘state of being subjected to involuntary servitude . . . [that] usually included being legally owned as property by another person’.7 Here, one hears echoes of Aristotle’s suggestion that regardless of context or form, elements remain common to different forms of slavery across geographical and epochal spectra.8 Curious is the way Aristotle weaves markers of dominance with estimations of cognitive prowess to validate slavery while differentiating between humans and non-humans. In his description – presupposed on the binary statuses of slave and free, and male and female (see Gal. 3.28; Col. 3.11) – the luminary establishes a hierarchy that serves as a reference point for various forms of slavery for years to follow.9 Here, it is important to note the dual categories of slaves presented by Aristotle – the ‘natural’ and the ‘legal’. He links the former kind to the household, the basic unit of Graeco-Roman society and, by extension, the economy. Thus, according to Aristotle, the natural slave was fated to be a household tool, contributing to the broader economy by knowing, accepting, and dutifully participating at their station.10 Concerning legal slaves, Aristotle acknowledges those who enter the servile order through unjust actions such as kidnappings or war. He points out what he deems an inconsistency between advocates of justice and the consequences of unjust war, including the enslavement of the formerly free:

Hendrik Goede, ‘The Exhortations to Slave-Owners in the New Testament: A Philological Study’ (PhD diss., NorthWest University, 2011), 13. 6 Dan Nässelqvist and Georgina Jardim, ‘Slavery’, in The Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2016), https://app​.logos​.com​/books​/LLS​%3ALBD​/headwords​/Slavery. 7 Gary T. Meadors, ‘Slave, Slavery’, in Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology, ed. Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 740. 8 See Aristotle, Politics, 1254b, 21–4. 9 Latter forms of slavery, the African colonial project (also known as the scramble and partition of Africa) and neoimperialism, presuppose a hierarchy whose zenith is occupied by a powerful and idealized white/western elite. Although the categories that flow from the Roman project do not wholly transpose into the African experience, the framing philosophies behind both bears more than mere resemblance. See Thomas C. Oden, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2007), 9–32. 10 See especially Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1161a, 30–b6. 5

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But some persons, simply clinging, as they think, to the principle of justice, . . . assert that the enslavement of prisoners of war is just; yet at the same time they deny the assertion, for there is the possibility that wars may be unjust in their origin and one would by no means admit that a man that does not deserve slavery can be really a slave – otherwise we shall have the result that persons reputed of the highest nobility are slaves and the descendants of slaves if they happen to be taken prisoners of war and sold.11 While Aristotle betrays sympathy for the legal slave, he nevertheless takes the necessity of slavery for granted and, in doing so, underscores slavery as an indelible order in society. He validates the slave order by arguing that slaves are ‘morally and intellectually inferior, and therefore, their subordination was just and beneficial, not only to the one they served but to themselves’.12 Recently, Lisa Bowens underscored the persistence of this world view by citing a poem by Josiah Priest from 1843.13 In the poem, Priest effectively uses a trident-shaped argument to justify the perpetual servitude of Black Africans. First, he appeals to the supposed lower intelligence on the part of the forcibly displaced Africans, mirroring what Aristotle says regarding the natural slave in Politics (1254b 21–24).14 Second, Priest validates the Black African’s servitude by appealing to divine dictate, using an anachronistic and ethnocentric interpretation of Gen. 9.18-28. On this reading, the slave is considered perpetually evil and morally questionable, mirroring a character estimation prevalent in the first-century Mediterranean world. Third, a universal legislative perspective affirming worldwide Black servitude precipitates Priest’s view on Africans. In this argument, Black Africans are, by design, subject to subservience. Like Aristotle millennia before, the penchant for describing the slave or the subjugated through legal dictates serves the architects of legislation and not the slaves. It reminds the slave of the power vested in the status quo and, by extension, controls any ambition for freedom that may arise from the servile order through the very laws that are pronounced. In the ancient world, legislation was written by the free and had multiple touchpoints with the broad categories of slave and free.15

Aristotle, Politics, 1255a18. Alex Hon Ho Ip, A Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation of the Letter to Philemon in Light of the New Institutional Economics: An Exhortation to Transform a Master-Slave Economic Relationship Into a Brotherly Loving Relationship (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 136. 13 See Lisa M. Bowens, African American Readings of Paul: Reception, Resistance, and Transformation (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2020), 15–40. 14 This strategy, later called IQ racism, is analogous to slave tendencies in the Mediterranean world. Arguably, it emboldens later xenophobic expression and the subjugation wrought on unsuspecting societies. 15 Based on Roman legal codes which at various stages limited the master’s authority over a slave, it is critical to dispel portrayals of slaves as nothing less than human beings. Although slavery tended to dehumanize the slave, in practice the law served both the free and the enslaved via the assumption that both are human. Granted, this premise was muted variably in the interpretation and implementation of the law. Nevertheless, a premise that considers slaves in the Mediterranean milieu as wholly subhuman presents interpretive problems both in the reconstruction of history and in the engagement with texts that depend on the history one reconstructs. Bartchy points out the same: ‘In the Roman tradition, slaves on the one hand were rigorously regarded in much legislation as things (instrumentum vocale – a “speaking tool”), yet, on the other hand, they were regularly treated as well as free human beings and were normally granted Roman citizenship when set free, as happened regularly.’ S. Scott Bartchy, ‘Slavery (New Testament)’, in Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David N. Freedman (Garden City: Doubleday, 1992), 6:66. See Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 89. 11 12

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In his seminal monograph, Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson inscribes three intersecting axes of power common to slavery, regardless of context or epoch. First, he notes how slavery and violence work hand-in-glove to box the weak into a state of perpetual submission. Second, he cites the psychological strategies undergirding the institution and how they condition collective interests. Third is an axis he calls ‘the cultural facet of authority’.16 Here, Patterson posits that ‘authority rests on the control of those private and public symbols and ritual processes that induce (and seduce) people to obey because they feel satisfied and dutiful when they do so’.17 Viewed from this vantage point, Patterson considers slavery ‘one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination, approaching the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the master, and of total powerlessness from the viewpoint of the slave’.18 There is a continuity between Patterson’s analysis of the three axes and Aristotle’s global descriptions of slaves. However, it is the organization of the axes, as presented by Patterson, that this chapter will draw from. Against such a backdrop, one can define slavery as the purchase, ownership, commodification, exploitation, subjugation, and use of human beings as animated tools to meet personal or communal needs or wants.19

The indispensability of Graeco-Roman slavery Imperial hegemony relied heavily on mass labour, a fact corroborated by the number of slaves and the extent of military exploits in the Mediterranean world. Statisticians count around one million slaves in the Mediterranean region between the second and first centuries bce. By Paul’s day, these numbers had dropped due to the end of the Punic wars and the hostile economic climate that ensued. Thus, a conservative range of six hundred thousand to a million slaves in the first-century Mediterranean context is reasonable. Slavery was the invaluable fuel that drove the engine of Graeco-Roman industry.20 Not only were slaves valuable to the imperial project, but their dependability could not be left to chance. An uncontrollable servile order posed an existential threat to the stability and prosperity of the empire. For this reason, legislation that protected the status quo was penned and disseminated.21 This legislation had as its surrogate the strong arm of violence, evident

Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 2. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 2. 18 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 1. 19 This definition accords with discourses from the second-century Greek sophist Dio Chrysostom: ‘So they dropped their discussion about the particular man in question and his slavery, and proceeded to consider the general question: Who is a slave. And the consensus of their opinion was that when anyone gets possession of a human being, in the strict meaning of the term, just as he might of any item of his goods or cattle, so as to have the right to use him as he likes, then that man is both correctly called and in fact is the slave of the man into whose possession he has come.’ Dio Chrysostom, Slavery and Freedom 2, 24. 20 See Richard A. Horsley, ‘The Slave Systems of Classical Antiquity and Their Reluctant Recognition by Modern Scholars’, Semeia 83/84 (1998): 31. 21 Three pieces of legislation are notable. The first is the lex Fufia Caninia (c. 2 bce), a law that stipulated the numbers of slaves that could be manumitted upon the death of the paterfamilias. The second law to note was the lex Aelia Sientia (c. 4 ce), which prescribed the minimum age for it to be legally permissible for a paterfamilias to manumit a slave. The same laws stipulated that the slave needed to be at least thirty years of age to qualify for manumission. If the slave was manumitted before then, they would forfeit the path towards citizenship. Third, is the lex Junia Norbana 16 17

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in cases where social conditioning was challenged. Various forms of violence were used to protect the interests of the empire from otherwise enterprising slaves seeking to undermine the system. These included techniques such as corporal punishment, withholding the peculium (an extension of money on behalf of a master), sexual abuse, verbal denigration, branding, and the use of metal collars.22 Although the Roman system designed social controls to curb the deviancies of slaves, runaway slaves, truant slaves, and slave rebellions were common. Thus, a matrix of controls ranging from the legislative to the social characterized slavery in the firstcentury Mediterranean context. Having defined slavery and the milieu in which it was conceived, a new vista of questions grounded in the experiential emerges. Specifically, how did a person become a slave? What factors brought about enslavement? Who was responsible for maintaining slavery? These questions shall now be treated in this discussion on the different routes into slavery – even considering their individuated and overlapping use across different epochs of Roman hegemony. Routes into slavery and the slave’s social realities Classifying the routes that led to slavery under the categories of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ is necessary to differentiate between motives and prevalence. While various routes may have led thousands into subjugation, assuming a uniform expression of causes across the broad Graeco-Roman period is erroneous. Some became slaves through personal choice, whereas others were forced or born into the order. For some who became slaves, their journey towards enslavement was defined by one or several routes this chapter now turns to. War The Roman political infrastructure was built on efficient and ruthless military might. Walter Scheidel observes how this machinery fed the conquered into slavery from the era of the republic to that of the empire. This servile supply route was entrenched in the Roman system, leading Scheidel to remark: The sale of freshly seized enemy combatants and civilians was standard practice: the term employed for this process, sub corona vendere, was so ancient by the second century bc . . . it may refer to the captives’ wearing wreaths or perhaps rather to their being surrounded by a circle of guards.23

(c. 19 ce), a law that created a liminal category for slaves who were manumitted but were without full citizenship. Former slaves who were in this category typically expended their energies and amassed wealth, resources, and social capital to improve their family name and the status of their posterity. See Eck, ‘The Emperor, the Law and Imperial Administration’, 103. 22 See Christy Cobb, Slavery, Gender, Truth, and Power in Luke–Acts and Other Ancient Narratives (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 24–7. 23 Walter Scheidel, ‘The Roman Slave Supply’, in The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 1, The Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 293.

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Evidently, for the conquered, war was a direct path to subjugation. However, it is prudent to acknowledge that Roman slave traders also relied on war efforts from neighbouring societies, creating a matrix of trade that was not solely reliant on Roman military ambition. The Roman machinery existed within a broader slave economy that reached as far west as Gaul and as far south as Africa. Richard Horsley comments on this supply route as follows: ‘The humiliating journey began with the sale to one of the canabae or parasitic “camp follower” slave-traders who followed the army ready to obtain war-captives “wholesale” and then sell them for handsome profits to “retailers” of “speaking tools”.’24 With the passing of time and the transition from the republic to the empire, the supply of slaves through conquest diminished significantly. This meant that the typical household had slaves in the single digits. However, households serviced by large slave workforces continued to exist, despite their numbers depleting over time, and a household boasting a large workforce symbolized power, social capital, and wealth.25 Abandonment and piracy The abandonment of children may be considered the most heinous route into slavery because it took advantage of the most vulnerable while championing economic and social gain for clients, brokers, and traders. In this route, a paterfamilias who intended to control the size of his family – due to economic reasons – would abandon unwanted children at well-known rubbish dumps, creating a supply chain for slave traders who would habitually forage for foundlings – children who were left among the refuse.26 It is vital to consider the abandonment of children as one of the links in a long economic chain that provided labour to households and enterprises. It did not function as a sole supply method but was complemented by the violence of piracy and kidnapping. Recorded in 1 Tim. 1.10 is a vice list that resembles the order presented in the second half of the Decalogue (Exod. 20.12-16). Notable in this list is the hapax legomenon ἀνδραποδιστής (slave trader or kidnapper), a term that is nestled among several vices that contradict the spirit of the gospel (1 Tim. 1.11). Although the term became an affront to an individual’s character in public discourse,27 its use in 1 Tim. 1.10 serves as a counterpoint to behaviour inconsistent with Christian codes of ethics around children, as seen, for example, in Didache 2.2. In reconstructing the demand for slaves in the Mediterranean context, Peter Arzt-Grabner discusses the costs related to integrating foundlings into a paterfamilias’ household, noting

Horsley, ‘The Slave Systems of Classical Antiquity’, 39. See Keith R. Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 66. 26 ‘T h e raising of foundlings as slaves is well documented in Roman Egypt, especially in wet-nursing contracts: crude calculations suggest that given known levels of adult slave prices, it made sense to rear foundlings despite the considerable risk of premature death.’ Scheidel, ‘The Roman Slave Supply’, 298. 27 See Plutarch, Moralia, 632; Plato, Apology of Socrates, 33a–b. According to Albert Harrill, ‘“slave trader” . . . was a term of abuse. It functioned as a convenient stereotype within the topos for expressing contempt, one of many epithets . . . used to slander an opponent. Often, however, the legal charge was more rhetorical than actual: only an assertion of, not an argument for, the opponent’s criminality. . . . When applied to a person or a group one disliked, this epithet functioned in Greek and especially Roman oratory to brand opponents as renegades – lacking proper auctoritas and so endangering the citizenship of compatriots and the orderly administration of society. In this way, ancient moral philosophy used the slave dealer as an anti-type of the virtuous and law-abiding person’. J. Albert Harrill, Slaves in the New Testament: Literary, Social, and Moral Dimensions (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 121, 123. 24 25

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how a foundling offered a prospective slave owner the opportunity to manage costs and the possibility of shaping the child into a customized servant from an early age.28 Despite the low social estimation accorded to those who lived on human trafficking, the malleability of the foundling made this a popular and lucrative route for kidnappers. Within this economy, girls constituted the greater number of foundlings as they were more prone to abandonment when a paterfamilias decided to limit the size of his domus. Birth While the use of foundlings to replenish slave numbers was common, it is necessary to distinguish urban realities from rural happenings. A rural-based paterfamilias would normally use ‘continuous (yearly) pregnancy to supply the family with workers and to secure care in old age’.29 In urban areas, the reality was different. Abortions sanctioned by the paterfamilias were commonplace. Although such procedures were unsafe, they nevertheless gave a paterfamilias control over the size of the family. It is worth noting the blurred boundaries between the abandonment and birth routes into slavery and the implicit continuum between them. Children born into slavery (vernae) were always the offspring of one or two slave parents. In cases where one of the parents was a slave, the probability of the ‘free’ parent being a freedman or a citizen of Rome was considerable. Bible scholars have noted how, over time, slaves became expensive ‘commodities’ and how several households adapted by ‘breeding’ their own slaves.30 Masters who needed, or wanted, to add to their slave contingent employed two strategies: (i) the promotion of sexual liaisons between female slaves and the freedmen who associated with the household (including the paterfamilias) and (ii) promoting ‘loose marriages’ (contubernium) between slaves who were romantically attached. These marriages were not protected by law and were an expression of the master’s power because he could dissolve them without warning if he were ever displeased with the slaves.31 Further, offspring from such unions effectively belonged to the master and were counted among the servile order in the household. This expression of the master’s dominance accords with what Patterson describes in his three axes mentioned earlier. Such activity can also be considered within the paterfamilias’ extra-legal social control.32 It was common for a paterfamilias to use females (and young males)33 as sexual outlets for debauched pleasure, for

See Peter Arzt-Grabner, ‘The Case of Onesimos: An Interpretation of Paul’s Letter to Philemon Based on Documentary Papyri and Ostraca’, Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi 18, no. 2 (2001): 597–8. 29 Cynthia L. Westfall, Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle’s Vision for Men and Women in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016), 139. 30 Barth and Blanke, The Letter to Philemon, 7; Martin Goodman, The Roman World 44 bc–ad 180, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2012), 198. 31 See Lynn Cohick, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 260–1. 32 See Cohick, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians, 258. 33 Horsley notes the high demand for young males at brothels, which were common fixtures in the Subura region area of Rome. He emphasizes how patrons of such establishments went to extra lengths to delay the ‘onset of puberty by various means, including castration’. Horsley, ‘The Slave Systems of Classical Antiquity’, 44. Corroborating this view, Justinian I says: ‘Further, if someone castrates your slave-boy and thus increases his value, Vivanus writes that the lex Aquila should not apply, but that you should instead bring the action for insult or sue under the edict of the aediles for four times his value.’ Justinian I, The Digest of Justinian, ed. and trans. Alan Watson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 1:286. 28

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bolstering his slave numbers, and for bartering in honour transactions. This reality also rings clear in Herodas (‘Gastron: Bittana, I am a slave: use me as you wish and do not suck my blood night and day’34) and Petronius (‘Even so, at fourteen years I was my master’s favourite. No disgrace in obeying your master’s orders. Well, I used to amuse my mistress too’35). However, in ancient Roman culture, monogamy was not an exclusivist ideal, and society did not frown upon a paterfamilias’ sexual liaisons with slaves outside the confines of matrimony.36 Rather, categorizing wives as household managers and providers of heirs pervaded the context creating a two-tier ethic where a paterfamilias was one thing to his domus and another to his familia. Court rulings and debt relief Debt, bankruptcy, and court rulings were another slave supply route for the empire. Free persons searching for solvency also exploited the route between the legal system and servile order. In some cases, the individual would add members of their household to the self-sale, a behaviour pattern most common during the era of the republic. Debt, murder, arson, tax evasion, and avoiding military draft were sure ways of being sentenced to slavery by local courts. Moreover, legal pronouncements came upon the condemned en route to enslavement. One can note the emperor’s knowledge and participation in such pronouncements – via the courts’ appeal system – demonstrating the role of legislation in the Roman world.37 Nevertheless, some scholars have overstated the attractiveness of slavery in the Roman milieu by using a descriptive interpretation of the law. Scheidel’s observation on how self-sale was not only a matter of securing solvency but was also used as an avenue towards upward social mobility, ‘with an eye to a career and later manumission’, is one such approach.38 It is based on laws written to curb fraudulent scams involving slave traders and slaves.39 Patterson

Herodas, ‘Mimes’, in Theophrastus Characters, Herodas Mimes, Sophron and Other Mime Fragments, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Rusten and I. C. Cunningham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 237. 35 Petronius, ‘Satyricon’, in Petronius Satyricon, Seneca Apocolocyntosis, ed. and trans. Gareth Schmeling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 177. 36 See Jennifer A. Glancy, ‘Slavery and the Rise of Christianity’, in The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 1, The Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 466. Ari Bryen presents the legal frameworks that dictated the boundaries of sexual intercourse: ‘[S]ex with prostitutes and one’s own slaves was acceptable, as was sex with non-citizens. Sex with someone else’s slave might still be considered iniuria, if it was felt to offend the master; the praetor also offered an action for “corrupting a slave”. Sex with degraded citizen women was not stuprum if their degradation barred them from marriage; namely if they had engaged in prostitution, acted on stage or been condemned in a public trial or for adultery.’ Ari Z. Bryen, ‘Crimes against the Individual: Violence and Sexual Crimes’, in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society, ed. Paul J. du Plessis, Clifford Ando, and Kaius Tuori (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 329. 37 While this is observable, Harrill warns against overstating the role of legal codes in reconstructing the practice of the law: ‘[L]egal codes, at best, provide only inexact knowledge about social practice and, at worst, can build a highly misleading model of slavery. Reading law codes as descriptive rather than prescriptive overlooks the course of juridical decisions in the practice of law (jurisprudence).’ J. Albert Harrill, The Manumission of Slaves in Early Christianity (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995), 14. 38 Scheidel, ‘The Roman Slave Supply’, 300; cf. Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, 72; Byron, Slavery Metaphors in Early Judaism and Pauline Christianity, 8–9. 39 For instance, an ἀνδραποδιστής could collude with a free person to sell the free person into slavery. The free person would, in turn, gain their freedom and split the proceeds from the sale with the ἀνδραποδιστὴς. If discovered, the parties involved were punished with actual enslavement. 34

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has a different argument (in my opinion, a more convincing one), underscoring how a person who entered the servile order with the noble intention of becoming solvent could easily slip into permanent slavery if they were not mindful, instead of slavery being an opportunity for personal social improvement.40 While it is facile to demonstrate self-sale in broader society, questions of how this expressed itself in Pauline churches are worth exploring. Echoes of self-sale into slavery can be traced in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: ‘You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of humans’ (1 Cor. 7.23). While Paul’s words could be dismissed as metaphorical, or considered ‘a remarkably comprehensive maxim for Christian ethics’,41 the reality of such practice within the new society is presented towards the end of the first century by Clement of Rome: We know that many among ourselves have delivered themselves to bondage, that they might ransom others. Many have sold themselves to slavery, and receiving the price paid for themselves have fed others. (1 Clem. 55.2) With these four routes into slavery and the sociopolitical conditions that made them possible set, no one route could be considered independent of the others. Enslavement was a complex matrix involving a blend of any number of the routes stated. Having established the backdrop to Paul’s world in relation to slavery, this chapter now proceeds to explore the following two questions: What are the touchpoints between slavery and creation–new creation motifs in Pauline literature? And what are the implications of the said touchpoints in the life of the global church? To answer these questions, it is necessary to state upfront that Graeco-Roman imagery of slavery is blended with Israel’s metanarrative of redemption, harkening back to the exodus. Thus, in the treatment of Rom. 8.12-25, the blended metaphors of slavery from both backgrounds are assumed.

Paul’s overarching slavery theory Like many of Paul’s letters that mimic some Graeco-Roman epistolary conventions – yet deviate from said conventions on key features – Romans conveys partial markers consistent with epistolary traditions in the apostle’s day.42 In Rom. 1.1a, Paul self-designates as ‘a slave of Jesus Christ’ (δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ), a strand in a triad inclusive of his apostolic calling and gospel ministration. Although Paul’s self-identification as a ‘slave’ may come across as

See Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 124–6. Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids/Nottingham: Wm. B. Eerdmans/Apollos, 2010), 327. 42 James Thompson and Bruce Longenecker identify Paul’s partial reliance on the ancient letter form in Philippians. See James W. Thompson and Bruce W. Longenecker, Philippians and Philemon (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 14–17. This could be considered a corollary to Paul Robertson’s view of Paul’s social location and the influences on his epistolary production: ‘[P]eople like Paul and Philo were not exceptions or piecemeal amalgams of different, distinct cultures, but rather were sites of complex intersections of a host of understandings and practices that existed in different degrees in a variety of people in the wider socio-historical context of the ancient Mediterranean.’ Paul Robertson, Paul’s Letters and Contemporary Greco-Roman Literature: Theorizing a New Taxonomy (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 12. 40 41

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straightforward, based on the use of the epithet in other letter openings,43 the rhetorical function of the term δοῦλος (slave) in the προοίμιον (exordium) and the rest of the letter is a strategy that undergirds Paul’s overarching slavery theory. The προοίμιον in Romans, like other exordia in Paul’s writings, serves to introduce the central topic of the occasion while courting the audience’s favourable disposition to what is later developed.44 Because slavery is central to the exordium and functions as a pivotal theological referent in Romans 6–8, the sociocultural and historical conventions that inform Paul’s metaphor warrant some explication. Worth noting are the twin wings that carry the metaphor in Paul’s thought: the first is the Christian interpretation of a Graeco-Roman cultural symbol; the second is the inextricable link between Paul’s world view and its dependence on Hebrew scripture. This amalgam produces thriving conditions for a ‘distinctive mix which is Pauline slave theory’.45 Graeco-Roman slavery and Paul Discussions about slavery often launch from the morbid happenings of the transatlantic slave trade (TAST), which occurred from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Typically, interpreters use the chattel slavery of this period as an interpretive lens that they uncritically employ to explicate other forms of slavery.46 Although the TAST partially represents other forms of slavery in both motive and expression, the tendency to interpret all forms of slavery through European imperialistic ambition risks masking key differences between the firstcentury Graeco-Roman world and other epochs. Where the TAST was driven by European hegemony, the Industrial Revolution, and racism, Graeco-Roman slavery depended on philosophical constructs that reached back to Aristotle and was guided by geopolitical upheaval and violence in the Mediterranean world.47 The upheaval and violence were instrumental in preserving and propagating Rome’s supremacy. These seeped into every aspect of life, even influencing the glossary of terms used in day-to-day parlance. So common was the vocabulary

The designation of δοῦλος also appears in Phil. 1.1 and Tit. 1.1. Here it assumed that Titus is a Pauline composition contrary to the authorship debates that purport otherwise. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to venture into those debates. 44 Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 3.1425a6: ‘But in those speeches and in epic poems the introductions provide a sample of the story, so that the listeners may know beforehand what it is about, and that the mind may not be kept in suspense, for what is indeterminate leads astray; so then he who puts the beginning, so to speak, into the listener’s hand enables him, if he holds fast to it, to follow the story.’ Romans registers at least fifteen slavery metaphors whose concentration is most pronounced in Romans 6–8. 45 Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 186. 46 See, for example, Allen D. Callahan, ‘Brother Saul: An Ambivalent Witness to Freedom’, in Onesimus Our Brother: Reading Religion, Race, and Culture in Philemon, ed. Matthew V. Johnson, James A. Noel, and Demetrius K. Williams (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 143. 47 See Bartchy, ‘Slavery (New Testament)’, 6:66; Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity, 3rd edn (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 59–61; Douglas J. Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 371–2. The differentiation of Graeco-Roman slavery from TAST is key to establishing Pauline authorial intent. However, this should not be transposed into discussions that rightly critique the hermeneutical strategies that made slavery possible in TAST. In TAST, readings of Paul that took the Haustafel out of historical context were employed to justify the mass kidnappings, forced transportation, and enforced servitude of African people from West Africa. While it is inaccurate to collapse the Graeco-Roman slavery reality into TAST, and vice versa, the need to interrogate the commonalities between the two, including the sociopolitical factors that gave rise to slavery in the industrial and colonial eras, merits investigation. 43

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of slavery that it was unsurprising when symbols specific to the household – the basic cell of the imperial organism – became synonymous with broader militaristic and imperialistic intentions. Therefore, Paul’s dependence on slavery nomenclature is unsurprising and confirms the interconnectedness between the household, house churches, and orders of utility and dominance within the empire.48 Ebed-Yahweh in Paul The ebed-Yahweh (slave of God) moniker refers to the relationship between Yahweh and key Hebrew Bible figures – examples of which include Moses (2 Kgs 18.12), Joshua (Judg. 2.8), David (2 Sam. 7.5), and the prophets (Amos 3.7; Zech. 1.6). While the term can be restricted to the honorific,49 a reductionistic reading limited to virtuous ascription clouds the nuanced way in which Paul employs δοῦλος in Romans. This chapter considers the term a signifier of allegiance and submission to Yahweh within an inverted honour paradigm, wherein Paul harkens to Hebrew Bible figures while demonstrating the virtue of abasement consistent with the condescension of Christ.50 Thus, slavery is a dynamic metaphor that registers continuity with the motif of Yahweh’s faithful servants while appropriating the same in the apocalyptic reality of the Christ event. Concerning the subject at hand, one could argue that an understanding of slavery in Romans 8 necessitates Paul’s presentation about creation – its status and eschatological end.

Slavery and creation in Paul: An analysis of Romans 8.12-25 In Rom. 8.12-25, Paul pivots around the slavery metaphor to explicate a continuum that begins in the post-regenerated state (8.12) and precipitates in the revelation and adoption of the sons of God (8.19, 25). In 8.12, he uses ὀφειλέται (debtors) in a negative construction to demonstrate that believers owe their present status to the Spirit’s activity, a point supported by the conditional clause that begins εἰ δὲ πνεύματι (but if by the Spirit) in 8.13b. Noticeable in this statement is the contrast between σάρξ (flesh) and πνεύμα (Spirit), indicating diametrically opposed modes of living. According to Paul, a living that is directed by σάρξ has a bleak end, whereas living by πνεύμα mortifies the abased deeds of σάρξ leading to life, a point echoed by Michael Gorman: ‘the fate of the baptized is conditional – dependent upon their ongoing cruciform mortification of the old way of life. . . . For those who do live according to the Spirit, the end result is that which the law promised but could not deliver: resurrection and life’.51

See Rom. 1.1; 6.15-23; 8.15; 1 Cor. 7.22; 2 Cor. 4.5; Gal. 5.1; Phil. 1.1. Various positions detailing the possibility of what Paul may have meant regarding δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ have been presented. Some consider the term to be one given by Yahweh to particular people commissioned to accomplish particular tasks. Another view considers the designation an offshoot of Israel in relation to their subjugation in Egypt. For the various positions on ebed-Yahweh, see Byron, Slavery Metaphors in Early Judaism and Pauline Christianity, 3–8. 50 See Phil. 2.4-11. 51 Michael J. Gorman, Romans: A Theological and Pastoral Commentary (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2022), 8.9–13, ePub. 48 49

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The ‘Sons of God’ An analysis of verses 12-17 shows that Paul uses multiple identity markers to refer to believers. In verse 12, he uses ἀδελφοί (brothers), a gender-inclusive term addressing the collective audience of the believing community. In the same verse, he employs ὀφειλέται (debtors), an expression shaped by economic and social dimensions within a relational framework. The apostle then employs τέκνα θεοῦ (children of God), κληρονόμοι (heirs), and συγκληρονόμοι (co-heirs) in quick succession in verses 16 and 17. All these epithets underline additional relational dynamics between believers and God. However, by far the strongest moniker in this section is the υἱοὶ θεοῦ (sons of God), in 8.14, 19, and 23, which works in tandem with τέκνα θεοῦ (children of God) in 8.16 and 21. Susan Eastman demonstrates that uncritical treatments of υἱοὶ θεοῦ from 8.14 and 8.19 and 8.23 have led to imprecise understandings of what Paul is communicating in Romans 8 and, indeed, the entire epistle.52 She underscores how the Hebrew Bible uses υἱοὶ θεοῦ and the corresponding τέκνα θεοῦ to depict the relationship between God and God’s chosen people. In Romans, categories are transformed based on the movement from paradigms presented in passages such as Deut. 32.5-6, 19-22; Isa. 1.2-4; 30.1, 9; and Hos. 1.10; 11.1 to those in Rom. 8.12-25. The appropriation of Hebrew Bible verses in Romans corroborates a continuum between ancient depictions of Israel as children of God, the Roman believers (in their diversity as Jew and Gentiles53) as children of God, and the apocalyptic adoption of the singular σώματος (body) in verse 23 as sons of God. Thus, according to Eastman, the use of υἱοὶ θεοῦ in 8.14 diverges from that in 8.19 and 8.23 because the first is limited to believers, wherein the latter broadens the category to include Israel and the body of Christ. While questions abound on how ‘Israel according to the flesh’ interfaces with the body of Christ,54 Eastman, nevertheless, is clear that ‘their destinies are inextricably intertwined’.55 It is through this window that this chapter adds κτίσις (creation) as a third link to the catena of Israel and the body of Christ, a discussion this chapter shall pick up in sections to follow. The Spirit and adoption From Rom. 8.12 to 8.25, two additional subjects are worth citing. The first is the pervasive activity of the Spirit (which can be traced across the span of Romans 8). The second is the pronounced use of τέκνα θεοῦ and its interplay with the slavery metaphor. Here, humanity and creation are depicted as slaves to sin (controlled by fear) and corruption, respectively (vv. 15, 21). For humanity, and more specifically, for believers, this is reflected on as a past event as communicated by the aorist plural verb ἐλάβετε (you received) found in the construction οὐ γὰρ ἐλάβετε . . . ἀλλ᾽ ἐλάβετε (you did not receive . . . but you received) (8.15). The phrase ἀλλ᾽ ἐλάβετε clarifies a new category of relationship, distinct from previous enslavement in which a πνεῦμα δουλείας (spirit of slavery) controlled believers’ outlook, placing them in a

Susan Eastman, ‘Whose Apocalypse? The Identity of the Sons of God in Romans 8:19’, Journal of Biblical Literature 121, no. 2 (2002): 263–77. 53 See Rom. 1.16; 9.4. 54 See, for example, Colin G. Kruse, Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2012), 342n345. 55 Eastman, ‘Whose Apocalypse?’, 269. 52

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perpetual disposition of φόβος (fear), a disposition that is pictured as regressive by the phrase πάλιν εἰς φόβον (again into fear). Rather, in the new disposition, the πνεῦμα υἱοθεσίας (spirit of adoption) induces a different outlook, one in which the Fatherhood of God is recognized, declared, and accepted by believers through the pronouncement αββα ὁ πατήρ (Abba, Father!) (8.15). Thus, φόβος and the pronouncement αββα ὁ πατήρ stand in apposition, just as πνεῦμα δουλείας is antithetical to πνεῦμα υἱοθεσίας. They demonstrate distinct outputs that flow either from enslavement or sonship, respectively. This is confirmed by Gorman: ‘God’s Spirit is not a Spirit . . . that creates slaves and thus fear of a tyrannical, abusive master who is ready to condemn and punish. . . . The Spirit marks them out as people liberated from slavery and fear, and as members of God’s family by adoption.’56 Roman adoption undergirds Paul’s argument in 8.14-17. However, the concept of υἱοθεσία (adoption) did not exist in the Hebrew Bible or in the Second Temple milieu, despite passages such as Gen. 48.5 and Jer. 3.19.57 In contrast, υἱοθεσία was prevalent among Roman elites in corresponding times. Such adoption served two purposes. First, it provided heirs to families that struggled with fertility. Second, it perpetuated hereditary lines by providing curated outcomes for those who adopted. While cases of young children being adopted are well documented, these were not common. Adoption usually involved older men adopting younger men (relatives, children of close friends, or exceptional slaves) who had desirable skills and were able to procreate.58 Therefore, when Paul presents πνεῦμα υἱοθεσίας (spirit of adoption) in 8.15, his frame of reference is the Roman milieu. Since Rom. 8.14-17 presents God in the mould of a paterfamilias, it is plausible to consider the sonship of believers – and their inheritance – as an expression of the Father’s power.59 Furthermore, while believers have experienced a transfer in allegiance – moving from the enslaving powers of Satan, sin, and death to the domus of the Father – it is imprecise to classify their new status as altogether devoid of slavery paradigms. Paul uses the slavery metaphor positively when addressing believers’ new status.60 However, he uses it negatively when speaking of the ancient powers that universally plague the human experience. In 8.12-25, the metaphor is used as an overarching frame whose apex is ‘adoption, the redemption of our bodies’ (8.23). On creation liberated and slavery The transition from 8.17 to 8.18 is marked by λογίζομαι γάρ (For I consider), where γάρ serves to dynamically ‘indicate some sort of continuation of thought between what immediately precedes and what follows’.61 Preceding 8.18 is the mention of suffering (συμπάσχομεν)

Gorman, Romans, 8.14–17, ePub. On which, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 500. 58 For further discussion on these matters, see Hugh Lindsay, ‘Adoption and Heirship in Greece and Rome’, in A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, ed. Beryl Rawson (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 354–60. 59 See Fitzmyer, Romans, 501–2. 60 See Fitzmyer, Romans, 499–500. 61 Thompson and Longenecker, Philippians and Philemon, 717. 56 57

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captured in the conditional clause εἴπερ συμπάσχομεν ἵνα καὶ συνδοξασθῶμεν (if indeed we suffer with him so that we may be glorified with him) (8.17). Paul uses the subject of suffering as a hinge to develop what he presents in 8.1-16. Although suffering is the focal point of Paul’s argument in 8.17-39, the use of λογίζομαι γάρ presents a punctuation point in the thesis’ thematic progression. Robert Jewett observes how the use of λογίζομαι γάρ in 8.18 is ‘the only occurrence in the first person singular’ of this form in Romans.62 This he ascribes to the ‘comparative and contrasting’ agenda at the heart of Paul’s discussion on suffering – which is dependent on conventions of argumentation that use ἄξιος (‘weighing as much, of like value, worth as much as’63). Thus, 8.18 introduces a logical counterpoint in which discussions about present suffering and future glory are adjudicated in a focused treatment of κτίσις (creation). The suffering faithful Although the subject of suffering in Romans is directed to believers’ present realities, it is also connected to Christ and creation. Regarding Christ, one may posit that his sufferings – necessary for his glorification and the securing of his implied status as ‘heir of God’ – are archetypal of believers’ suffering. Thus, the mention of suffering in Rom. 8.17 faces three thematic directions: the historical, wherein Christ suffers to the point of death;64 the present, wherein believers have the injunction to suffer in cruciform patterns (8.17); and the cosmic, in which creation was subjected to purposeless futility and eagerly longs for the ‘revealing of the children of God’ (8.19). It is, therefore, consistent to note that the believers’ suffering is not limited to the anthropocentric domains of subjective experience or community. Rather, Paul’s presentation of suffering offers a vista of understanding anthropological and cosmological anticipations of future liberation from suffering. For Paul, a believer’s suffering is not individuated but rebounds in the present and in the eschaton affecting the broader domain of creation. The suffering creation The term κτίσις (creation) appears in Rom. 8.19-22, 39, following its earlier use in 1.25. Its meaning encompasses the created, the creature, and the domains of authority. Alluded to in the term is the Genesis narrative, together with the subsequent Adamic fall. Regardless of the prevalence of the Genesis frame in Paul, this has not prevented some from interrogating Paul’s use of κτίσις in Romans, settling on other frames of motivation.65

Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary, ed. Eldon J. Epp (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 508. Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott, ‘ἄξιος’, in An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon Founded upon the Seventh Edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1896), 85. 64 See also Phil. 2.4-11. 65 Neil Elliot, for example, foregrounds a framework that is rooted in the Roman milieu, instead of the narrative of Genesis 1–3, to interpret Paul’s use of κτίσις in Romans. He considers κτίσις a referent to ‘Roman imperial ideology and iconography’. Regarding the former, he draws a clear line between κτίσις and ‘the ritual founding of cities’ in the first-century Mediterranean milieu. Regarding iconography, he considers creation in dynamic frames that rely on metaphors of ‘perception and anticipation’ and ‘active and strenuous participation’. Neil Elliot, ‘Creation, Cosmos, and Conflict in Romans 8–9’, in Apocalyptic Paul: Cosmos and Anthropos in Romans 5–8, ed. Beverly R. Gaventa (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013), 152–6. See also Jewett, Romans, 511–13. 62 63

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The textual movement of 8.12-25 (from the individual to the communal to the cosmic) could be deemed a backdrop to Paul’s mode of reasoning. In this reasoning, all reality – the human and non-human, the non-believing, the natural and the supernatural – is covered in his rhetorical thrust, a point confirmed by Frank Thielman: ‘Paul describes the entanglement of all creation in the suffering that Adam introduced into the world with his rebellion against God.’66 However, unlike Thielman, who works from a unitary totalizing view, Gorman introduces a nuanced portrayal of κτίσις that is attentive to the anthropomorphic frames that Paul employs in the passage. For Gorman, Rom. 8.18-39 depicts ‘creation, personified as a sentient creature, or a community of sentient creatures. . . . The groaning (8.22) of creation is a community lament’.67 Gorman’s observation takes its departure point from Paul’s use of the verbs συστενάζω (to groan together) and συνωδίνω (to suffer agony together) in 8.22. Thus, one may conclude that creation, in its unity and diversity, is depicted as groaning and suffering in agony and anticipation. Beverly Gaventa provides considerable insight into Paul’s use of ἀποκαραδοκία, ‘waiting– eagerly’ (8.22). In line with Gorman’s nuance, Gaventa states: ‘It is not too much . . . to suggest that both “all creation” and “we” are understood to be in the process of giving birth.’68 Furthermore, she delimits the confines of the birthing metaphor by underscoring that, ultimately, ‘creation does not give birth’.69 Although creation may groan and agonize, it is passive in realizing what it yearns for. It takes an external protagonist, God,70 who has ‘subjected creation in hope’ to act decisively in the revelation and adoption of the υἱοὶ θεοῦ – the very longing that creation carries. In 8.23, Paul describes adoption as τὴν ἀπολύτρωσιν τοῦ σώματος ἡμῶν (the redemption of our body). By doing so, he layers and connects household metaphors with somatic eschatological longings. Here, the term ἀπολύτρωσις (redemption) is used, continuing from its earlier appearance in 3.24. In addition, passages such as 5.12-17 and 6.15-23 underscore the implied need for ἀπολύτρωσις by foregrounding the enslaving power of sin. Whereas ἀπολύτρ ωσις is used only twice in Romans, most of its uses across the rest of the New Testament (1 Cor. 1.30; Eph. 1.7; 4.30; Col. 1.14; Heb. 9.15; 11.35) and secondary literature signify the ransoming or releasing of slaves or the subjugated.71 Thus, Paul is working with a slavery backdrop going back to 6.15-23 to demonstrate the common need for liberation latent in the shared destinies of the υἱοὶ θεοῦ and the κτίσις. Therefore, Paul’s use of the slavery backdrop presents a slavery continuum in which the υἱοὶ θεοῦ and κτίσις have an inextricable mutual end.72 Added to this mutuality is the transformation of categories from ‘slaves of sin’ to ‘sons of God’ centred on the prevailing understanding of slavery in the first-century milieu. God is a paterfamilias who

Frank S. Thielman, Romans, ed. Clinton E. Arnold (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2018), 400. Italics mine. Gorman, Romans, 8.19–22, ePub. 68 Beverly R. Gaventa, Our Mother Saint Paul (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 57. 69 Gaventa, Our Mother Saint Paul, 62. 70 Although some have rightly pointed out that the subject of 8.20 is ambiguous, the passage’s dependence on the Genesis narrative, implied presentation of God in the mould of a paterfamilias, and the prevalence of the υἱοὶ θεοῦ moniker are ample proof that the one who ‘subjects creation in hope’ and the one who ‘adopts the sons’ are one and the same being – God. 71 See Dan. 4.30 LXX; Lk. 21.28. 72 See Fitzmyer, Romans, 509. 66 67

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purchases ‘slaves of sin’ through the works of Christ and accords them the status of ‘sons of God’.

Creation and the global church In Rom. 8.24-25, the term ἐλπίς (hope) appears five times in various forms. This ἐλπίς faces the future while remaining anchored in the accomplishments of Christ. Paul here presents salvation in dynamic vogue wherein the future of both creation and the believing community is treated in the same frame. The use of ἐλπίς in verses 24-25 is also linked to the earlier iteration in 8.20. This same hope regulates creation’s expectation and the believing community’s outlook. This point is underlined by Gorman: ‘Like the material world, human bodies are destined not for destruction but for salvation. Thus, believers’ salvation is not yet complete but is experienced in hope, sharing the anticipation of the entire creation and requiring patient endurance.’73 Viewed from the perspective of the global church, creation and the diverse family of believers are participating in an endurance that harkens to a future reality. As they do, they recognize the reach of Christ’s accomplishments in the believing community and in the cosmos. If the groaning of creation – captured in the words συστενάζω (to groan together) and συνωδίνω (to suffer agony together) (8.22) – demonstrates plurality, diversity, and unity, it becomes a pastoral necessity to democratize the chorus of suffering. The church is a global family of believers whose suffering is universal yet particular. To graduate into profound levels of catholicity and participation, the church in any location must hear the groans from distant locales and blend them with the immediate. This tension would contribute to missional participation that is not predicated on the ills of ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and racism. Like the corrective of listening beyond one’s confines, the believing community can be encouraged to hear the groans of all creation – even as it longs for its adoption as God’s children.

Conclusion Readings of Rom. 8.12-25 provide rich insight into Paul’s anthropology and creation theology. This chapter has sought to add to this great deposit by underscoring the role of the slavery metaphor in providing a canvas on which Paul etches portraits of the ‘sons of God’ and creation, respectively. Where some modern Bible interpretative strategies have castigated Paul’s perceived support of slavery, this chapter sought to retrace Paul’s intention and contextual frames vis-à-vis the first-century milieu. The chapter demonstrates that Paul’s dependence on the institution of slavery in Romans 8 fits within a positive estimation – unlike when he presents creation and communities ensnared by sin. Thus, slavery is used as a rhetorical and theological frame that demands a first-century delimitation before it is extrapolated to other contexts and experiences far removed from Paul. Such delineation showcases the apostle’s genius and creativity, demanding subsequent interpreters to delve beyond the strata of the visceral and

Gorman, Romans, 8.23–7, ePub.

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expedient. In Rom. 8.12-25, Paul showcases a blended slavery world view reaching back to the ebed-Yahweh figures while interfacing with Graeco-Roman symbols. It is this very slavery world view that forms the bedrock on which discussions around creation and the ‘sons of God’ depend. Paul is a missional theologian whose preoccupation is interpreting all reality – from the story of Israel to the person of the Messiah – through apocalyptic frames. His presentation of creation is organized by a central conviction that in the advent of Christ, all those who have become members of God’s household live with culture-defying hope rebounding with groans and eager expectation of the revelation of the ‘sons of God’ – and so groans all creation.

Further reading Burroughs, Presian Renee. Creation’s Slavery and Liberation: Paul’s Letter to Rome in the Face of Imperial and Industrial Agriculture. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2022. DeHart, Paul J. Creation and Transcendence: Theological Essays on the Divine Sublime. London: T&T Clark, 2021. Hahne, Harry A. The Corruption and Redemption of Creation: Nature in Romans 8.19–22 and Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. London: T&T Clark, 2006. Oden, Thomas C. How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity. Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2007. Wu, Siu Fung. Suffering in Romans. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2015.

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CHAPTER 9 ECOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY IN THE SECOND TESTAMENT

Keith Dyer

Increasingly one hears that religion, particularly Christianity, has disqualified itself from any meaningful contribution to mitigating the ecological crises affecting our planet because it has been implicated too deeply in causing the problems to participate in any possible solutions.1 The reasons usually given for this failure include Christianity’s affirmation of human exceptionalism (privileging humanity’s being made in God’s image; Gen. 1.26-27), human dominion (emphasizing Gen. 1.26, 28, and not 2.15), and a transcendent human destiny (interpreting the book of Revelation to mean that God will destroy earth and the ‘saved’ will be taken to heaven). The first two of these factors were the focus of Lynn White’s seminal article ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’ (1967), which, if anything, understated Christian culpability for ecological vandalism but which has provoked much discussion and reinterpretation of Genesis ever since.2 The third factor, which assumes the first two as given, has had a multiplier effect on the consequences of emphasizing human exceptionalism and dominion by fuelling the economic exploitation of earth for the benefit of those elites able to enjoy the spoils before they are raptured off to eternal bliss while all that is left behind is trashed. This bizarre and heretical distortion of Christian eschatology owes its origins to the other end of the biblical canon – the book of Revelation – and has already had catastrophic implications for earth by undermining the understanding that humans participate within creation by ‘working, cultivating, and gardening the earth’ (Gen. 2.5, 15; 3.24) rather than by manipulating and exploiting it.3 Such claims may seem to be exaggerations to those unfamiliar with populist evangelical and Pentecostal cultures and their commercial and political connections, but a most virulent

A more fundamental question is whether the great monotheistic religions founded in the relative calm of the Holocene (the last 10,000 years) are equipped to survive a return to climate chaos, a challenge issued in Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2017). At the very least, such a challenge should motivate urgent engagement with Indigenous wisdom and knowledge, shaped by its connections back into the 50,000 years preceding the Holocene. See the response by Mark G. Brett, ‘Redeeming Eden: Biblical Ethics in the Anthropocene’, in Theology on a Defiant Earth: Seeking Hope in the Anthropocene, ed. Peter Walker and Jonathan Cole (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022), 145–60. 2 Lynn White Jr., ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–7. See also Lynn White Jr., ‘Continuing the Conversation’, in Western Man and Environmental Ethics: Attitudes toward Nature and Technology, ed. Ian G. Barbour (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1973), 55–64. 3 For ‘serve’ and ‘preserve’ (in Gen. 2.15), see Brett, ‘Redeeming Eden’, 145–60. The ‘dominion’ language in Gen. 1.26, 28 implies a ‘responsibility for’ and a ‘participation with’ rather than ‘control over’ and ‘exploitation of ’ earth. The archē (rule over) language needs to be qualified by the strong critique of human rule and power throughout the biblical canon, and in light of participationist, servant, and ‘shepherd’ language (Mk 10.42-45; Rev. 1.6; 5.10). See J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005). 1

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form of the rapture heresy,4 the Left Behind books, has sold around eighty million copies and has spawned films, computer games, and other merchandise. As Alissa Wilkinson observes, ‘no story – or, really, brand – has capitalized on the Rapture more successfully than Left Behind, the massively popular franchise about the coming of the Antichrist’ which has ‘captured conservative American evangelicalism’,5 and diminished any interest they might have had in caring for the planet. In the words of one influential preacher, ‘God intended us to use this planet, to fill this planet for the benefit of man [sic]. Never was it intended to be a permanent planet. It is a disposable planet. Christians ought to know that.’6 Or as put even more bluntly by the bumper sticker: ‘Jesus saves people, not whales.’7 Underlying the expectation of the rapture, and even more widely assumed in the broader Christian culture, are dualistic understandings of earth–heaven and body–soul, such that heaven is understood to be the ultimate destiny of believing souls; again, often to the detriment of earth and the human body.8 Any suggestion that Christians speak with one mind on these matters is untenable, but obviously there is a pressing need to re-examine the assumptions and exhortations about human and planetary destiny in the Second Testament and the ways they are expressed today. After a brief foray into ecological and eschatological themes in general, and then in the Gospels and Paul’s letters, this chapter will describe and develop further those readings of Revelation that challenge the view that earth is disposable and that the faithful need only to ‘wait on the Lord’ for deliverance from a mess of humanity’s own making. Eschatological awareness does not have to trump ecological awareness and action.

Ecological and eschatological themes This is a Second Testament problem – or at least a problem for those who seek to interpret that canon today – since the basis for such a negative view of earth’s destiny is claimed to be found mainly in the book of Revelation, framed and coloured by the politics, wars, and increasingly polarized thinking of the past two centuries, and particularly since the advent of ‘rapture’ terminology.9 The realization that context and culture exercise such a powerful

I use ‘heresy’ in a non-judgemental way towards those involved to refer to a doctrine that departs substantially from the biblical texts and the history of their interpretation, and from the love of God shown to humanity in Christ. Paul says he would rather be ‘cut-off from Christ’ (Rom. 9.2) than forsake any of his people being (effectively) ‘left behind’. 5 Alissa Wilkinson, ‘The “Left Behind” Series was Just the Latest Way America Prepared for the Rapture’, The Washington Post, 13 July 2016, https://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/news​/act​-four​/wp​/2016​/07​/13​/the​-left​-behind​-series​-was​-just​ -the​-latest​-way​-america​-prepared​-for​-the​-rapture/. 6 John MacArthur. Cited in Paul Braterman, ‘“God Intended it as a Disposable Planet”: Meet the US Pastor Preaching Climate Change Denial’, The Conversation, accessed 4 June 2022, https://theconversation​.com​/god​-intended​-it​-as​-a​ -disposable​-planet​-meet​-the​-us​-pastor​-preaching​-climate​-change​-denial​-147712. 7 Given the role of whales in maintaining (‘cultivating/gardening’) one of earth’s largest carbon sinks by harvesting and circulating plankton and other microorganisms in Antarctic waters, we might well ask if the whale can indeed save us. 8 Norman Habel has described this view as ‘Heavenism’. See The Earth Bible Team, ‘Ecojustice Hermeneutics: Reflections and Challenges’, in The Earth Story in the New Testament, ed. Norman C. Habel and Vicky Balabanski (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 3–7. 9 The interpretation of 1 Thess. 4.17 as referring to a rapture (a snatching away) of the faithful separate from a ‘final/ second coming of the Lord’ is attested from the late seventeenth century (Increase and Cotton Mather) and was widely popularized by Nelson Darby in the 1830s and the Scofield Reference Bible in the early twentieth century. There has 4

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influence over eschatological hermeneutics should not surprise; it has ever been thus. Eschatology in the biblical canon has always been expressed in (and sometimes corrupted by) language relevant to the contemporary context, as have any implied or explicit implications for the wider creation. This is evident both within the texts of the First and Second Testaments and in their interpretation’s subsequent history. One can trace the influence on Hebrew thinking of the Akkadian and Babylonian acceptance of human mortality (‘gathered with the ancestors’) and the hope found in the yearly seasons and renewal of life (‘firstfruits’) or the morphing of a prophetic this-worldly hope (‘every man under his own fig-tree’) into one that, under the influence of Zoroastrian dualism, perhaps, longs for divine judgement and justice beyond death. Similarly, expressions of ultimate hope have been shaped in the Second Testament by various cultures and philosophies, both positively (in, for example, Hebrew prophetic and apocalyptic language in Mk 13; Stoic ekpyrosis (conflagration) and palingenesis (re-creation) in Mt. 19.28; 2 Pet. 3.7, 10-13; and Graeco-oriental soul–sky journeys in 2 Cor. 12.1-5; Rev. 4.1) and negatively (in, for example, Graeco-Roman apotheosis in 1 Cor. 15.12-57; Rev. 9.111; and Roman imperial hubris in Rev. 6.5-6; 13.4; 17.4, 9, 18; passim). Such a sequence of connections does not suggest an evolutionary progression (linear or circular) from bucolic through prophetic and apocalyptic phases to pondering survival in a post-apocalyptic scenario. For, inevitably, times of stress and trauma can intrude at any stage and engender alternative scenarios and imaginaries. The crises of exile and the two destructions of the Jerusalem Temple shattered the comfortable continuities of communal and national identities and left their imprint in the reinterpretation and rewriting of biblical texts. Consequently, any possible expressions of ultimate eschatological hope (‘The End’) are salted with watchwords exhorting alertness to the many other historical ends – personal, communal, national – and their cosmic indicators. Yet the focus is never only on the ultimate destiny of individual souls, as the fate of heaven and earth is always central.10 What is it that underlies these various biblical expressions of ultimate hope expressed in the face of human abuses of power, the persecution of people, the exploitation of the planet, and death? Two fundamental desires are expressed as a continuum, not a polarity – justice and love.11 Justice as redressing the consequences of evil and the abuse of power, using language such as ‘judgement’, the ‘vindication’ of Jesus and the faithful/martyrs, ‘punishment’ of the wicked, ‘fall’ of Babylon, and ‘transformation’ of all creation. And love, expressed as mutual care and the absence of fear (even the fear of death), using language such as acceptance into the ‘sleep of the ancestors’, ‘Abraham’s bosom’, the ‘arms of God’, ‘my Father’s house’, ‘resurrection’, ‘renewed heaven and earth’, ‘the New Jerusalem’, and ‘the healing of the nations’. Some of this

been much discussion over whether this rapture will precede the great tribulation, occur in the middle (after three and a half years), or at the end of the seven-year tribulation. Unsurprisingly, the first option is preferred, but all of them show scant regard for earth or its inhabitants. The book of Revelation does not mention a ‘rapture’ in any form. See Barbara R. Rossing, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 10 See Mk 13.24-31 and parallels, 2 Pet. 3.13, and Rev. 21.1-5, following Isa. 65.17. 11 Their interrelationship is well expressed in Cornel West’s oft-repeated dictum ‘Justice is what love looks like in public’, and especially with his framing, ‘to be human you must bear witness to justice’ and ‘to be human is to love and to be loved’. Cornel West, Hope on a Tightrope (Carlsbad: Hay House, 2008), 181, 210.

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language is read today as androcentric, as if concerned only with (individual) human destinies. But that is to impose modern individual self-importance on ancient texts. The watchwords are always plural (blepete, ‘take heed’; agrupneite, ‘watch’) and associated with cosmic signs and consequences. Where justice and love overlap, there is transformation, not only of humans but also of the whole kosmos (cosmos; see 2 Cor. 5.17-19). So the Second Testament texts must be read in light of the ecological emergency, not by forcing them to mean what one thinks might be relevant for today, but by forcing those who already see them as pertinent to rethink the inherited interpretations that have distracted humans from the care of this planet. Even so, attempting to distinguish the theme of ecology in the Second Testament runs the risk of reinscribing the common assumption of the present era that humans exist separately from ‘the environment’ (that which surrounds them) such that humans can ‘fix it’; or, on those other readings of Revelation, not bother to ‘fix it’ at all because the ultimate destiny of the faithful is thought to be ‘heaven’. This objectification of creation as if human beings can stand apart from it is the very root of the problem identified by White. None of the biblical texts share this modernist assumption. Human ‘exceptionalism’ (if that is at all a fair description of how humanity is described biblically) is not expressed in terms of separation from, or superiority over, creation but rather in terms of increased responsibility for and participation in creation. From Genesis onwards, the goodness and centrality of creation (which for humans begins with earth but extends beyond) is the ‘good’ common to all, of which humans are an inseparable part and in which humans have particular responsibilities and roles because of the agency given to them. These responsibilities are not absolute, immutable, all-powerful, or global – for humans are not gods but rather participate with God and creation, so they are intuitive, cooperative, and local. Human creatures are gardeners and tillers of the earth; herders and shepherds of domestic animals; and defenders of the wild spaces, where Jesus went to pray (Lk. 3.21; 5.16; 6.12; 9.28) and was ‘with the wild beasts’ (Mk 1.12).

Jesus traditions The Jesus traditions present an emic (insider) view of creation. Jesus does not ‘use the environment’ (that which surrounds him) to illustrate transcendent or otherworldly truths but speaks as a participant–observer within creation, particularly of life in the village and the wilderness. There are approximately thirty-seven parables in the four Gospels (not counting the parallels separately), of which thirteen have a distinctly rural content, seven are distinctly urban, and seventeen could be either. The basileia (kingdom) parables are even more strongly ecologically aware. There are nineteen explicit basileia parables in the Synoptic Gospels (twelve in Matthew, two in Mark, and five in Luke), of which eleven use stories of the natural world as similes for the basileia (‘with what shall I compare the basileia . . .’), including seeds, sowing, sourdough, fishing, and fig trees. In addition, there are basileia parables that focus on workers in vineyards and agricultural estates. One can see how different contexts shape ecological awareness; Luke is more attuned to urban locations, with seven of his parables assuming that context and with twice as many references to cities than Mark (per 1,000 words). Yet overwhelmingly, the creation is understood positively and is omnipresent in the teaching of Jesus, with judgement being reserved for humans, and particularly for unrepentant religious 123

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leaders – though the tares, unclean fish, and goats are used symbolically for this in three parables. The parables represent about one-third of the total Jesus traditions, but many of his other sayings show the same positive interest in the natural world, referring to sparrows, flowers, fishing, donkeys, mountains, indications of weather conditions, and prayer and banquets in the wilderness, such as the symposium of the people on ‘the green grass’ (Mk 6.39). The Fourth Gospel replaces the parables with strong I AM metaphors, but these are also embedded in the realities of everyday life: the bread of life, the light of the world, the gate and shepherd of the sheepfold, life itself, and the true vine. The Johannine emphasis on eternal life (life into the aeons; Jn 6.27) has sometimes been separated from the reference to abundant life and deferred to some kind of future spiritual existence in heaven, where Jesus goes to prepare a place for us in the ‘many mansions’ (Jn 14.2) there (generating a whole genre of gospel music about streets of gold and Nashville mansions). But aeonic life comes ‘down from heaven’ (Jn 6.33, 51) and is available as abundant life now (Jn 6.63; 8.12; 10.10; 20.31), to be renewed through death by resurrection (Jn 5.29; 6.54; 11.25). Clearly, in some Second Testament texts, individuals’ ‘reward’ may be kept in heaven (Mt. 5.12; 6.20), and their citizenship be based in heaven (Phil. 3.20; that is, made secure with God, as in Mt. 6.20), but the ultimate move is from heaven to earth, just as Christians pray using the Lord’s prayer (‘your will be done on earth as in heaven’, Mt. 6.10), and as is fulfilled in the seer John’s vision of the New Jerusalem and Throne of God coming down to dwell on a renewed earth (Rev. 21.2, 5). Thus, the connections between the Jesus traditions and heavenism are tenuous at best and rest on prior assumptions about the sinfulness of matter and the duality of the material and the immaterial world, of body and soul – assumptions that the texts don’t share. There are texts about hating the world and about this evil, sinful world (kosmos) that refer to the unjust and oppressive world systems constructed by humans, but even so, it is this kosmos that God so loved (Jn 3.16). There are no texts that refer negatively to earth (gē or gaia) or the creation (ktisis) as such apart from judgement oracles on particular cities and those that name various locations, such as gehenna, hadēs, and the outer darkness. These are, respectively, the valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem (variously a rubbish dump and place of idolatry), the Greek God of the under-earth (Pluto for Romans), and the outermost darkness (where there is ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’; Mt. 8.12; 13.42; passim). In some eschatologies, these locations have acquired the meaning ‘hell’ from the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic languages, referring both to the underworld and the god of the underworld, and used as a translation in the King James Version of the Bible. From there, ‘hell’ has become a place of eternal punishment conceived as the antithesis to heaven (along with the ‘abyss’ and ‘lake of fire’ in Revelation). Together with influence from medieval religious art, Dante’s Inferno and the dualities of high modernism, ‘hell’ has assumed an importance in some Christian theologies that is out of proportion to its diverse and infrequent biblical forerunners – gehenna (twelve occurrences, seven of them in Matthew, three in Mark, one each in Luke and James; none in Paul); hadēs (ten, two each in Matthew, Luke, and Acts, and four in Revelation), and ‘outer darkness’ (three in Matthew). Again, biblical and more recent contextual influences on the shaping of eschatology are evident here, suggesting that Matthew’s use of gehenna and the ‘outer darkness’, together with almost all of the parables with violent endings, is related to the trauma of Jewish communities in the decade of the Jewish War and its aftermath, as the Romans paraded their Jewish captives and slaughtered them for entertainment in cities such as Antioch on their way back to Rome. 124

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Is it possible to speak of justice to victims of extreme trauma without mentioning violence? Do fictive narratives of God’s violence towards the perpetrators of violence assist victims to move beyond violence? It is no surprise that the three texts that speak of these things the most are Matthew, James (gehenna, Jas 3.6), and Revelation (‘abyss’, hadēs, and ‘lake of fire’) – three texts of late-first-century Jewish believers in the Eastern Mediterranean. Understanding their context can help decide whether these expressions are foundational for Second Testament eschatology or are examples of particular responses to counter the abuses of dominant powers. This may appear to discount an apocalyptic view of Jesus altogether. On one level, this is true, for the adjective ‘apocalyptic’ does not occur in the Gospels, and the noun apokalypsis (unveiling) occurs only once, in Lk. 2.32, where it refers to the revelation to the gentiles. If this is the sense in which it is meant, then one might happily apply it to Jesus as the apocalypse (revelation) of God, as do both Paul (Gal. 1.12; 2.2) and the seer John (Rev. 1.1). If, however, the meaning of ‘apocalypse’ is taken from recent popular dictionaries (where one typically finds ‘noun: catastrophe, disaster, the complete and final destruction of the world, as described in the biblical book of Revelation’ or something similar) then one has a significant problem, as this is not the sense in which the word is used in biblical literature. It may be countered that Jesus himself speaks of such world-ending events and is, therefore, apocalyptic in that contemporary sense as well. Still, even here, extreme caution should be exercised. The so-called ‘apocalyptic discourse’ of Jesus (Mk 13; Mt. 24; Lk. 17 and 21) is no longer as apocalyptic (in that catastrophic sense) as was once thought.12 The ‘apocalyptic woes’ (‘When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed . . . for nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines’, Mk 13.7-8. Lk. 21.11 adds ‘plagues . . . and dreadful portents’) are frequently observed throughout history, which is the very point that Jesus makes: ‘the end is not yet’ (Mk 13.6, 8). Even the cosmic signs of darkened sun and moon and falling stars (Mk 13.24-27 and parallels) are now rightly seen (as they were for most of church history) as significant markers for historical events: the sun turns blood red with the fires of great battles; the Tigris flows backwards with the death of a Caesar; a star is said to rise at the birth of a Messiah, or at the apotheosis of an emperor from the smoke of his funeral pyre; or a star falls at the death of a king or leader. These signs are not ‘just symbolic’ but rather very literal, cosmic, and ecological, just as Peter interprets Joel in Acts 2.19-20 on the Day of Pentecost, and Stephen sees the vindicated Human One as he is being stoned (Acts 7.55-56). Within the observable cosmology of the day, they fix the date and location of significant events in the minds of hearers and are used by many ancient historians as indications of, and memory markers for, divine revelations and judgements. For all the present knowledge of space and cosmology, many today have very little awareness of what happens in the night skies above them and which events repeat and which are particular, so assumptions are made that this kind of language necessarily refers to cosmic disintegration. One should ask if the Jesus traditions contain any sense that earth will end or be destroyed, or do these cosmic signs convey other truths? The saying ‘heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away’ (Mk 13.31 and parallels) has sometimes been interpreted as an affirmation by Jesus of the prerogative of

See Keith D. Dyer, The Prophecy on the Mount: Mark 13 and the Gathering of the New Community (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998). 12

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the creator to de-create the universe, but about which he (Jesus) knows nothing (Mk 13.32). I once argued this viewpoint myself but have been persuaded that it is best understood as an emphatic affirmation that Jesus’ words will never pass away, along the lines of the following: this (A) cannot happen, but it is more likely than this (B) happening; or perhaps as in a more recent idiom: ‘Hell will freeze over (as if), but my love will never grow cold.’ This seems to make better sense of the saying, for if it were intended to convey that (wicked) earth will be destroyed and replaced, why is ‘heaven’ mentioned first as passing away (so also in Rev. 21.1)? Why would it be necessary for the abode of God to be destroyed along with earth? Indeed, it may be asked whether there was any conception that earth could be totally destroyed in the pre-nuclear world. Perhaps the closest idea to that is the rebirth-through-fire understanding of the Stoics, which seems to lie behind 2 Pet. 3.7, 10-13.13 Where, then, is eschatological hope located within the Jesus traditions? The central focus is found in the resurrection sayings and accounts. Some have argued also for the parousia (appearance/presence) texts (found mainly in Matthew and Paul, and about which see further below), but certainly there is a strong conviction that Jesus will ‘stand again’ (anastasis) and ‘be raised up’ (ēgerthē) and vindicated by God (Mk 8.31; 9.31; 10.33; 16.6; and parallels) as the firstfruits of the general resurrection from the corpses (nekrōn, and as glimpsed in Mt. 27.51-54 with an ‘earthquake’). This is God’s clear endorsement of the Way of Jesus in both life and death – a Way that affirms human embodiment in this earth (‘from dust to dust’, Gen. 3.19) and that looks to the fulfilment of God’s basileia in this life and on this planet, for ‘deeply joyful are the poor, for theirs is the basileia of God’ (Lk. 6.20), and ‘deeply joyful (also) the humble, for they shall inherit the earth’ (Mt. 5.5). This cosmic transformation where love and justice coincide, and where martyrs ‘stand again’, was an unexpected climax to the apocalypse (revelation) of Jesus for his followers, despite the narrative forerunners and clues scattered through the Gospels. Hence the chaotic resurrection accounts that conclude the stories of Jesus and that were passed on to Paul (1 Cor. 15). Who were the first witnesses – women (the Gospels) or men (the tradition passed to Paul)? Where did the appearances occur – in Jerusalem (Luke), and Galilee (Matthew and John), or Galilee (Mark)? Were they visionary or physical encounters? Could the resurrected Jesus be touched (Luke and John) or not (John)? Was the Spirit passed on directly by Jesus (John) or later at Pentecost (Luke)? Was Paul’s Damascus Road encounter a resurrection appearance, or was it a claim made to boost his apostolic credentials? Does ‘resurrection’ include all creation, or is it only for humanity? On these latter questions, the most straightforward answers are found in the earliest texts about these matters, namely, the Pauline corpus.

Pauline traditions The testosterone-laden forums at international biblical conferences that discuss Pauline theology – dominated by white males, myself included – have been reluctant to explore

For diverse views on this discussion, see Edward Adams, Constructing the World: A Study in Paul’s Cosmological Language (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000); Edward Adams, The Stars Will Fall from Heaven: ‘Cosmic Catastrophe’ in the New Testament and Its World (London: T&T Clark, 2007); N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (London/Minneapolis: SPCK/Fortress Press, 1992), esp. chap. 10. 13

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the ecological credentials of the Apostle to the ethnē (gentiles, nations). His readers have continued, in the main, to interpret a bookish Paul as separate from his ‘environment’, and as if he had never traversed the Taurus mountains through the Cilician Gates or been shipwrecked on the high seas, and as if his only interests were theological and ecclesiological. Yet it is Paul that writes of creation (ktisis) more than any other Second Testament author (seven times in Romans alone) and of the kosmos more than any tradition except the Johannine literature. This has often been obscured by interpreters focusing on Paul’s supposed imminent eschatology, which is sometimes said to overwhelm his ethics (and therefore his ecology) as indicated by his use of such terms as apokalypsis, parousia, and erchomai (coming). Paul is the one major user of the noun ‘apocalypse’ in the Second Testament and, indeed, in all Greek literature until the second century. Thirteen of the eighteen uses of ‘apocalypse’ in the Second Testament texts occur in the Pauline corpus, mainly in the earlier seven letters. So as Paul is the first substantial user of the noun ‘apocalypse’ in the Greek language, one should let his meaning inform one’s eschatology rather than the descriptions and polarities of a supposed literary genre dating from the nineteenth century and later. Paul’s use of apocalypse is not about the destruction of the world, dualistic thinking, or mysterious sky journeys as such (though apparently, Paul had one of those too; 2 Cor. 12.1-5), but is instead a way of conceptualizing the implications of God’s affirmation of the way, the faithfulness, of Jesus Christ. In Paul’s letters, there are at least two main frameworks for interpreting this term: as God’s ‘liberating invasion of the cosmos’ through Christ (following J. Louis Martyn and the legacy of Ernst Käsemann and Karl Barth)14 and/or as ‘disclosure of divine wisdom’ and ‘unveiled fulfilment’, often highlighted in the work of Chris Rowland.15 The former stresses the newness of God’s action in Christ, and the latter the continuity with past revelations through the prophets and Lady Wisdom. Given that Paul himself associates apocalypses (revelations) with prophetic utterances and interpretations in some texts (see 1 Cor. 14.6, 26, 30), opposing these two views too strongly would be unwise. One should also be careful not to overemphasize the novum of God’s revelation in Christ (lest one lapse into supersessionism) and careful not to think that the interventions of God occur without ethical obligations on our part (lest one lapse into a lazy dependence on an interventionist God to save humans from the wrath of their own making). It would be unfair to blame Paul for this rather than those who only read the first part of his letters and miss the ethical imperatives at the end of his letters. For Paul, the apokalypsis of Jesus Christ does not overwhelm ecology but rather initiates its transformation. Hear Paul on ecological action: ‘For the creation waits with eager longing for the “apocalypse” of the children of God’ (Rom. 8.19). It is not humans who should be waiting for God to do something. Instead, God and the creation wait for humans! They wait for the revealing of, and the realization by, humanity that humans are called to act according to their divine calling as agents within creation, tending to its ongoing transformation and sustainability. But, some may ask, what of the parousia of Jesus Christ (or the ‘rapture’ as some have construed it)? Is not this a source of hope in ecologically unstable times when the task seems too big for humans alone? Indeed, for some, the climatic and political extremes of contemporary times are seen

J. Louis Martyn, ‘The Apocalyptic Gospel in Galatians’, Interpretation 54, no. 3 (2000): 255. Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 11, 14, 203, 246, 254. 14 15

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as signs that surely ‘the Lord is coming soon’ and as confirmation that humans do not have to do anything about them. Such a view is to misconstrue Jesus’ parousia as the coming again of Jesus, which is described in both Paul (Rom. 2.5-16) and Revelation (19.11-16) as how God fulfils ultimate hope that the basileia of love and justice will transform all reality, with human participation. The way of the silent slain lamb (or for Paul, Christ crucified) triumphs over the violence of human empires through the faithful witness of word (the sword-in-the-mouth) and deed. This is the unified telos (goal and end) of the cosmos,16 not a yo-yo eschatology of parousia/rapture, ‘second coming’ (a phrase that does not occur in the Second Testament), and ‘secret raptures’, as in some sectarian movements, when the predicted date failed to eventuate. Matthew uses the parousia language of Jesus (as Son of Humanity) only in chapter 24, in association with the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple and the troubled times thereafter (24.3, 27, 37, 39), and not as part of Jesus’ final promise (28.20). It refers to the Son of Humanity’s vindication (by ‘raising’) and to his prophetic words as Jerusalem falls and the faithful remnant flees northwards (24.15-22). Even though the parousia of the exalted and vindicated Son of Humanity cut short the mission to Israel (10.23), he has saved the elect in the ‘days of Noah’ (24.37-39) to fulfil that mission and will be with them until the consummation of the age (28.20). For Matthew’s communities, the parousia is not an escape from the consequences of human abuse of power on earth but rather the reassurance of the presence of God in Jesus through those traumatic times. Paul uses the parousia terminology of Jesus early on in his writings to Thessalonica,17 and once in 1 Corinthians (1 Cor. 15.23), but thereafter only mundanely of Paul’s own arrival or presence (Phil. 1.26; 2.12; 2 Cor. 10.10), or that of his colleagues. It is not that Paul gave up on eschatological expectations or saw that these were fulfilled already. Rather, he preferred in his subsequent letters to disassociate it from the troubles brewing in Judea and to speak instead of the ‘ultimate Day of the Lord’, or of ‘that Day’, or of ‘the judgement’; one should note that even the language using erchomai (the coming of the Lord) parallels the disappearance of the parousia language.18 Paul, formerly ‘zealous for the Law’ (Phil. 3.6), has no interest in the revolutionary agenda of some of his former colleagues nor in any messianic parousia centred on the Temple. The revelation of Jesus Christ to him has convinced him that the time for the salvation of the ethnē is now and is not to be deferred until after the re-establishment of Israel, as was envisaged by some other prophetic agendas, when the nations will come to worship in Jerusalem. Paul’s letters may appear to be anthropocentrically focused on the many pastoral, ethical, and theological issues relevant to each community he addresses, and he is indeed a pastoral and contextual theologian. The communities he addresses consist primarily of the lower echelons

For this unified telos, see Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitch (London: SCM Press, 2002); Richard Bauckham, ‘Conclusion: Emerging Issues in Eschatology in the Twenty-First Century’, in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 671–89. 17 1 Thess. 2.19; 3.13; 4.15; 5.23, all used of the Lord or Lord Jesus Christ; 2 Thess. 2.1, 8, of the Lord Jesus Christ and his parousia; and in 2 Thess. 2.9, the parousia of the lawless one. Parousia in 1 Cor. 16.17 refers to the arrival of Stephanus, Fortunatus, and Achaicus, and in 2 Cor. 7.6 to Tit.; 2 Cor. 10.10 refers to the (unimpressive) parousia of Paul’s body. 18 Of the seventy-four occurrences of erchomai in the Pauline corpus, only six refer to the eschatological coming of the Lord (1 Thess. 1.10; 5.2; 2 Thess. 1.10; 2.3; 1 Cor. 4.5; 11.26). There are no eschatological uses of erchomai in Galatians, Romans, or the later Pauline letters. 16

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of society – slaves, exiles in the diaspora, freedmen and women struggling to survive with little agency – so questions of how to relate to the earth are seldom addressed explicitly. But when Paul does step back and address the bigger picture, it is clear that he understands the revelation of God in Jesus to have cosmic and earthly significance. The groaning of creation (Romans 8) and its connection with human repentance and responsibility have already been referred to. It is seen again when Paul writes of God working through Jesus to reconcile the whole cosmos (2 Cor. 5.17-20) and that this is a ministry (a servanthood) entrusted to human beings. In the first part of that same chapter, Paul seems to some to affirm dualities between earth and heaven, and between human bodies and eternal heavenly existence, but that is only if one reads these texts with individualistic western eyes. The whole Corinthian correspondence is about the body–life of the faithful community (the ekklēsia) and the upbuilding (oikodomeō) of that communal life in the Spirit through heavenly values of love and justice (‘we are having a building, oikodomē, from God’, 2 Cor. 5.1). That is the context in which those verses need to be read. The climax of Paul’s transformational eschatology is his extended reflection on the nature of the resurrection (1 Cor. 15), which explicitly includes considering all creation (1 Cor. 15.35-42). Again, spiritual individualism sometimes obscures this emphasis on wider ecology, corporate resurrection, bodily resurrection, and transformation of everything, such that ‘God will be all in all’ (1 Cor. 15.28). Yes, all bodies are raised as spiritual bodies (1 Cor. 15.44) and not as flesh and blood (1 Cor. 15.50), but that does not mean for Paul that they are non-material; after all, everything ‘will be transformed in an atom, in the blink of an eye’ (1 Cor. 15.51-52). More recent distinctions between spirit (as if ruach and pneuma, breath/wind, contain no atoms) and the physical (a translation imposed on psuchikos, soulish?, in 1 Cor. 15.44, 46) force the Pauline text into modernist binaries that have bedevilled humanity’s relationship with the material world. Fortunately, the explorations of process and physicalist interpreters are beginning to challenge our misguided assumptions about what Paul has written and to restore and develop ways of envisioning ecological eschatology ‘so that what is dying may be swallowed up by life’ (2 Cor. 5.4).

The book of Revelation Revelation is the most ecologically aware book in the Second Testament. No other text refers to trees, grass, rivers, animals of various kinds, the sea, and wider cosmic phenomena as frequently as does the Revelation to John, and only the Synoptics and Acts mention the wilderness more often. No other text envisages such a range of living beings (mammals, birds, and hybrids) around the throne, in heaven, on earth, and beneath earth. Not that these references are all benign. The natural environment is laid waste as the consequences of the misuse of power and wealth are felt in the cosmos, from the four horsemen onwards (Rev. 6.1). The ‘wild animals of the earth’ (Rev. 6.8) bring death, and one may also wonder what John means when he refers to ‘every unclean and detestable bird and beast’ (Rev. 18.2), and the beasts that emerge from sea and land (Rev. 13). Yet John never portrays the earth (gē) or cosmos as being evil, or as controlled by evil.19 On the contrary, the earth joins the battle against the powers of evil and

The common translation of Rev. 11.15 implies an evil cosmos replaced by God’s rule, but see further below.

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acts in support of God’s transforming purposes (Rev. 12.14-16), just as the faithful slaves of God are also called to witness to, and participate in, the triumph of the true word (sword-inmouth) over human violence (sword-in-hand). Thus, it is as a part of creation (and not apart from creation) that one will read Revelation as beings embedded in the web of life and death, aware that Revelation itself refers to the natural world more frequently than any other text in the biblical canon. Many of these references to grass, trees, rocks, and animals describe their progressive distress and destruction as a consequence of human abuse of power: The first angel blew his trumpet . . . and a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up . . . a third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. (Rev. 8.7-9) Such language in Revelation is echoed today by scientists and ecological activists, as can be seen in Elizabeth Kolbert’s summary of current trends towards mass extinctions: ‘one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion’.20 There is no suggestion here of some kind of prediction–fulfilment schema for interpreting Revelation, similar to ticking the boxes on a fridge magnet to show when the End is nigh. Rather, such coincidence in language illustrates prophetic truth-telling rather than a prediction; truth that stands through all the centuries since it was written; namely, that human empires and abuses of power have grave consequences for the earth and all its inhabitants. Yet there is hope and challenge and humour and brutal political satire to be found in reading Revelation alongside the realities of the times, then and now, not as the prediction and fulfilment of bizarre conspiracy theories, nor as the inevitable judgement of an angry God, nor the wild dreams of a fanatic or someone ‘under the influence’, but rather as the sober and insightful descriptions of the consequences for this planet of human greed and stupidity, interspersed with the urgent call for humanity to change its ways, to repent. And repentance, a change of way and will, is regularly called for by John, beginning with the ekklēsiai of Asia Minor (eight times in Rev. 2–3, with warnings about the consequences if they don’t) and followed by the failure of the rest of humanity to repent amid plagues (Rev. 9.20, 21; 16.9, 11). Thus, the recurring sequences of seven seals, trumpets, and bowls that impact so drastically on the cosmos and its inhabitants are prophetic in the usual biblical sense of that word, not as predicting an inevitable future but as speaking truth in the present time of the hearers and calling for repentance, lest things get worse. There is no fatalism here since prophetic literature readily accommodates God’s change of heart in response to human repentance. Jeremiah makes it clear that a prediction is always revisable (Jer. 18.5-11), and John the Seer is equally insistent that he writes as a prophet (Rev. 1.3; 10.11; 22.7, 9-10, 18-19). From this perspective, as in Romans 8, it is not humanity, faithful or otherwise, who waits, but God – waiting for a change of ways even as God permits or gives limited authority to

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014), 17.

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the angel messengers, such that the consequences of human idolatry of power and wealth continue to wreak havoc on all creation.21 The disasters brought on by the opened seals, trumpets, and bowls are frequently referred to as God’s judgements and actions because of God’s wrath or anger. But note the repeated use of ‘it was given/allowed (edothē)’ and ‘they were given authority’ (Rev. 6.2, 4, 8; 7.2; 9.3, 5; 11.2; 13.5 [twice], 7 [twice]; 16.8), expressing the constrained permission given by God for the consequences of human stupidity to play out. So John is invited to see the divine perspective on the inevitable consequences for the world (kosmos) and its inhabitants (oimumenē) of predatory political systems as they accumulate wealth in the centres of power, and he is told to write it all down and circulate it to call people to repent and change their ways. If John was indeed exiled to Patmos as a punishment for his witness to the truth of the way of Jesus (the wording in Rev. 1.9 is ambiguous), then he may have been a person of some standing in Asia Minor, as exile is not an option offered by Roman authorities to the vast majority of the population. Nevertheless, John consistently identifies himself as a brother, a prophet, a fellow sufferer, and a slave (doulos) of God, who shares nonetheless with the ekklēsiai in the basileia and endurance with Jesus (Rev. 1.9) and in the high calling of being a basileia and priests to God (Rev. 1.6; 5.10).22 This designation of ordinary non-citizens and slaves as a basileia and as priests to the One God is audacious indeed in the context of the elite families of Asia Minor and their open competition to win Roman patronage for their cities by gaining permission to build statues and temples to the imperial families.23 The extraordinary wealth and power of those who could fund such marble temples and then buy the priestly appointments is still evident in the material culture remaining today. Thus, to suggest that those gathered from the margins had a priestly and basilic calling from a God who had no visible temple is an extraordinary claim and one that only makes sense in the context of Jewish traditions, over against the dominant Graeco-Roman culture. John’s repeated use of basilic language (some thirty-eight times, with only one ‘kingdom of God’ saying in Rev. 12.10, exceeded only by Matthew and Luke) has been taken by many recent commentators as evidence of his direct anti-imperial critique; since, they argue, Babylon really means Rome, and basileia really means Empire.24 But constructing such polarized opposition – a dualism of good and evil – results in uncritical reversal rather than transformation. Such a conclusion rests on two assumptions. First, that basileia is the Greek equivalent of imperium in the first century; it isn’t and doesn’t become so until the fourth century and later – the Roman Caesars are king-makers, imperators, autokrators, Augusti, Sebastoi, not mere kings, and their

See the discussion of the classic problem of theodicy in this connection, in Catherine Keller, Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2021). 22 The many textual variants around these two verses have profound implications, but I follow Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and others in adopting the earlier readings in support of the basileia and priesthood of all believers, but not in their deferral to the New Jerusalem only. See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgment, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1998), 122–3. 23 See Steven J. Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading Revelation in the Ruins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 24 See, for example, Stephen D. Moore, Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006), 38n31; Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther, Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1999), 224. 21

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realm is not a basileia, but comprises many of them.25 Second, it is assumed that the translation of Revelation 11.15 should split the genitive string in a way that no other genitive string in Revelation has been split to create an opposition between ‘the world empire’ and the ‘empire of our Lord and Messiah’ – again succumbing to dualistic assumptions about the nature of the book of Revelation. Rather: ‘The basileia of the kosmos of our Lord and of his Christ has come . . .’ (Rev. 11.15). The ekklēsiai addressed by John are not defined by their opposition to Empire but by their calling as a basileia and as ‘priests’, ‘prophets’, ‘saints’, and ‘slaves’ of God from all nations. This is their true everyday identity and constitutes their worship of God – informed by, but not limited to, the words and hymns of praise in Revelation that frame and sustain their communities amid alienation and suffering. Their agency is enabled by their corporate identity, within which they embody a non-exploitative relationship with each other and with all creation. There is, of course, an implicit critique of Roman hegemony in the refusal to use any of the imperial vocabularies in Revelation. Rome and its Caesars are never directly named or alluded to, and the christology of Revelation is subversive of all claims made by the Caesars, given that the exalted Christ with the sword-in-the-mouth who is Lord of Lords and King of Kings (Rev. 17.14; 19.16) is twenty-eight times called the ‘slain’ Lamb, thus utterly redefining basileia and hegemony of any kind. Moreover, only God is called ‘pantokrator’, the Almighty; this is not a Roman imperial claim in the first century. So even though the political and visual context of the Roman Empire is vital for the interpretation of Revelation, the basilic language must be interpreted from within eastern culture and the basileia tou Theou (kingdom of God) parables and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. That the gatherings of the powerless – slaves, tribes, foreigners, ethnē – should be said to participate in a basileia as priests to God resonates most fully with the upside-down nature of Jesus’ parables of the basileia. John Caputo describes this as ‘an unruly kingdom – a kingdom of weakness, of foolishness, of the madness of turned cheeks, of questionable searches for lost sheep, and of unending forgiveness – a decidedly redemptive transformation of the concept of kingdom’.26 The references to Thanatos (Death) and Hadēs (Rev. 1.18; 6.8; 20.13, 14), Abaddon (Destruction) and Apollyon (Destroyer) (Rev. 9.11), evoke what is perceived to be a chaotic ecosystem ruled by competing deities that Rome alone claims to control – bringing the Pax Romana to land and sea. When John speaks of Death/Thanatos riding the fourth horse, followed by Hadēs (Rev. 6.8), and of Thanatos and Hadēs being ‘thrown into the lake of fire’ (Rev. 20.14), this has revolutionary implications for those living near the temples of Hadēs and cowered by such powerful religio-political institutions of the day. The calling of faithful basilic communities out of Babylon (Rev. 18.4) challenges the imperial control claimed over land and sea and its use of human technology and power to manipulate nature for political and

As noted by Edwin Judge, ‘The Latin term rex was never accepted as a title suitable for the leaders of the Roman res publica, as the state continued to be called officially for the next 500 years at least. It was not until Heraclius (AD 610ff) that the Greek term basileus officially displaced autokrator, the translation of imperator’, though the term was widely used of the Roman ruler by others from the third century onwards. Edwin A. Judge, ‘“We Have No King but Caesar.” When Was Caesar First Seen as a King?’, in The First Christians in the Roman World: Augustan and New Testament Essays, ed. James R. Harrison (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 399. 26 Paraphrased in B. Keith Putt, ed., The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 11. 25

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economic gain. Voicing these truths undercuts the fear of death for those who spend their lives saving money with funeral associations and gives hope to those who do not have the means to ensure a proper burial for themselves or their loved ones. The threat of a ‘second death’ (Rev. 2.11; 20.6, 14; 21.8) turns the tables on the gatekeepers of the chthonic temples, whose power lay in controlling access to the afterlife after the first death. The evidence of early Christian burials within known places of worship (such as in the Church of St Philip on the hill above Hierapolis) indicates that this alternative understanding of death and human destiny became a reality that overcame fear and transformed life, death, and the understanding of the cosmos for followers of Jesus. These changes had local geographical and ecological significance and did not only lead to a future spiritual hope. Yet far from evil dominating the book of Revelation or earth itself – or being in some kind of dualistic stand-off with God – John repeatedly asserts that God has defeated all forms of evil power through the ‘Lamb slain before the foundation of the cosmos’ (Rev. 13.8), and by the casting down to earth of that ‘great serpent/drakōn who is Satan and the devil’ (Rev. 12.9; 20.2). It is human beings who are now exhorted to participate in renewing earth by completing this victory by standing firm in ‘the witness of Jesus which is the spirit of prophecy’ (Rev. 19.10). The battle is bookended by the transcendent Christ who assures victory by the sword-in-themouth – the Word of God – and humanity’s role to speak and enact this Word is evident because, in the interim between that christological inclusio, it is only the saints, the witnesses, the slaves of God and priests to God, together with earth, who have a voice (phonē).27 The slain Lamb has no voice except through the members of the ekklēsiai; the forces of evil (the satanic trinity of the Serpent, Sea Beast, and Land Beast) have no voice – no ability to speak a true Word – they deal only in fake news and conspiracy theories. It is humanity’s daily witnessing, works, and worship that enact divine justice and that voice and embody truth. Revelation is not noted for its links to the Pauline traditions, and in many respects, it appears closer to Matthew and James. The repeated charge, ‘I know your works’ (Rev. 2.2, 19; 3.1, 8, 15), directed at the ekklēsiai, the complaint that ‘I have not found your works perfect’ (Rev. 3.2), and the exhortations to ‘continue to do my works until the end’ (Rev. 2.26) where awaits a judgement ‘according to works’ (Rev. 20.12, 13) and a repayment ‘according to works’ (Rev. 22.12), all make uncomfortable reading for those brought up on the mantra ‘saved by faith alone’. John seems to be exhorting a lot of work for those who might think they are waiting (faithfully) for God to intervene. The apparent paralysis of governments with historical links to churches when it comes to action on climate change makes matters worse. Seeing how John’s prophetic analysis of power structures lays bare the manipulation of religion, wealth, and power for the benefit of the (male) elite in the first century helps one understand why it is still so hard to change ways today.

There is a pervasive tendency to interpret John as indicating that in the end, the Lamb becomes the Lion (reversing hear/see in Rev. 5.5-6), in the form of the all-conquering warrior on the white horse (Rev. 19.11-16). See Stephen D. Moore, Untold Tales from the Book of Revelation: Sex and Gender, Empire and Ecology (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014), 146; and (effectively) Keller, Facing Apocalypse, 141: ‘the text indirectly blends the Lamb and the (endlessly lionized) Judge and Warrior–Word. . . . The vision foregrounds the Lamb, which John “sees”; whereas he only “hears” the Lion who “has conquered.”’ But the rider, like the Lamb, is covered with blood before the battle commences, and fights only with a sword-in-mouth – the word of witness. 27

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The seventh and final trumpet sounds in Rev. 11.15 and is followed (as in the parallel seventh seal) by scenes of thankful worship around the throne of God. The liturgy concludes with the sobering statement: ‘. . . and to destroy the ones destroying the earth’ (Rev. 11.18). The arguments over what this might mean get heated, but could worshippers possibly conclude the liturgy in this way today with such a statement without implicating themselves? In various places, many forests burn, at least partly, as a consequence of the strange way humans relate to ‘our environment’. Humans do things to ‘it’ when it doesn’t cooperate. Rather than local cool burnoffs regularly to remove undergrowth, humans bulldoze massive firebreaks and drop firebombs to start burnoffs because it is more efficient. When it gets out of hand, humans fly in giant water bombers and drop fire-retardant liquids on everything. The desire for increased profits in the short term leads to widespread forest clearance and huge monocultural plantations, maintained by the widespread use of herbicides and insecticides and requiring hundreds of bee hives to be trucked in for pollination. And so a third of the bees die, a third of the crops fail, a third of the land dries up, and so on. But with careful attention to land and waters, and the humility to learn skills and management wisdom from those who never sought to exploit the land to make a profit but who have lived on it sustainably since before the Holocene, things could still be turned around. Nature is waiting eagerly for humans to change their ways (Rom. 8.19) – to resist the temptation and arrogance of both speculative and heroic interventionist science and the lazy armchair ride of interventionist theology – leaving it all up to God, or those who think they are God, to fix. God ‘intervenes’ through human creatures in humble wisdom and thoughtful communal action. There is much to be repented of if human creatures are to live up to their high calling as a basileia and priests to God. May humans not sit passively by, hearing and seeing but not doing – mistakenly thinking that their worship excludes politics, their liturgy is only words, and that their witness is simply to wait for God to achieve a transformation in which they are not prepared to participate.

Further reading Adams, Edward. The Stars Will Fall from Heaven: ‘Cosmic Catastrophe’ in the New Testament and its World. London: T&T Clark, 2007. Collins, John J. ‘Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre’. Semeia 14 (1979): 1–20. Habel, Norman C. and Vicky Balabanski, eds. The Earth Story in the New Testament. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002. Keller, Catherine. Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2021. Moore, Stephen D. Untold Tales from the Book of Revelation: Sex and Gender, Empire and Ecology. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014. Neville, David J. A Peaceable Hope: Contesting Violent Eschatology in New Testament Narratives. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. Rossing, Barbara R. The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

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CHAPTER 10 PATRISTIC REFLECTIONS

Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

Patristic doctrines of creation: Sources and main issues In early Christian thought, creation is an act of God. Patristic theories were based primarily on the Genesis account of creation (often read through the lens of Plato’s Timaeus and that of Platonism) and on the Johannine Prologue, which posits the Logos–God as the principal agent in creation. Even the ‘pagan’ Amelius (fl. third century), from the circle of Plotinus (c. 204–70), read and commented on John’s Prologue, perhaps with Origen’s Commentary on John in mind. Christian thinkers did not wholly absorb distinct Greek and Jewish cosmological systems;1 the Bible itself was already Hellenized, and creationism was also an option in Greek (Platonic) philosophy.2 Creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing, became the standard Christian doctrine, but it was far from being the only option, as Justin (c. 100–c. 65), Calcidius (fl. fourth century), if Christian, and others indicate. The notion of divine power (δύναμις) plays a key role in early creation theologies, especially in work by Justin, Bardaisan (154–222), Clement (c. 150–215), Origen (c. 187–c. 255/6), Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 395). God’s power is both the agent of creation and an aspect of divinity that can be known along with its operations. The notion of ‘double creation’ is also central to much patristic thought. It refers to creation in two axiological stages, the first superior to the second. Here, Plato’s Timaeus offers a source of inspiration: the intellect (νοῦς), the superior part of the soul, is created by the Demiurge, and the inferior parts by minor, ‘younger’ divinities. The reason for pursuing this idea of double creation relates to questions of theodicy, a concern also for Plato (c. 429–c. 347 bce), who in his Myth of Er coined its tenet: ‘the god is not responsible’ for evil.3 The supreme God is not responsible for creating the faculties involved with moral evil.

Philo and ‘Gnosticism’ Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 bce–45 ce), who exerted an extraordinary influence on future patristic thinkers such as Clement, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, interprets the Bible’s creation accounts in light of Platonism. His double creation theory contemplates, as does Plato’s Timaeus, the creation by God and by God’s collaborators. Based on the plural in Gen. 1.26, ‘let us create the human being’, Philo posits a plurality of creators – God created the intellect,

See Paul M. Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5. 2 See David Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 3 Plato, Republic, 617e4–5. 1

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but God’s collaborators (angels, ‘powers’) created free will (αὐτεξούσιον), the faculty that can fall into evil. God is, therefore, not directly responsible for evil. The intelligible creation of the human being corresponds to the human created ‘in the image’ of God (κατ’ εἰκόνα, Gen. 1.26-27), and the sense–perceptible creation to the ‘moulded’ (πλασθείς) human (Gen. 2.7). The former is the ideal prototype – an Idea or genus, the intelligible level of the creation in the Logos, or the intellect, intelligible (νοητός), incorporeal, neither male nor female, immortal by nature.4 The latter is the sense–perceptible human – corporeal, mortal by nature, composed of body and soul, and gendered.5 The body derives from the earth, the soul ‘from the Father and ruler of all’.6 The creation of humanity was not double in time but rather in principle.7 There is the heavenly human (οὐράνιος) and the earthy one (γήϊνος).8 The heavenly is ‘in the image of God’ and does not participate in the ‘corruptible earthly substance’; the earthly is moulded (πλάσμα) and is not a direct creation/offspring (γέννημα). According to Philo, the human being is created as an image of the Logos (in ‘the intellect, the soul’s hegemonic’ or ‘rational faculty’, which is an impression of the divine, eternal Logos),9 which is the image of God.10 God introduced ‘two humans into Paradise: the moulded human, and the human in the image of God: God received the latter, but threw out the former’.11 This explains the mortality of the body and the immortality of the nous (mind). Sometimes, however, Philo speaks not of nous versus body but of two kinds of nous – one ‘more earthly’ (γ εωδέστερος), an ‘earthly and corruptible intellect’, and the other more immaterial (ἀϋλότερος) and heavenly.12 Philo also offers a Platonizing account of the ‘double creation’ of the world: the intelligible world was created on ‘day one’, before time, with reference to the Monad,13 and the sense–

On nous in Jewish and Christian Platonism, see Jörg Frey and Manuel Nägele, eds, Der νοῦς bei Paulus im Horizont griechischer und hellenistisch-jüdischer Anthropologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021). 5 See Philo, De opificio mundi, 66; 134. 6 Philo, De opificio mundi, 135; Philo, De migratione Abrahami, 3. 7 Philo, De opificio mundi, 69–71; Philo, Legum allegoriae, 1.31; 1.53; 1.88-90. 8 See Philo, Legum allegoriae, 1.31; cf. Philo, Legum allegoriae, 2.4. 9 See Philo, De opificio mundi, 69; Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis, 2.62; Philo, De plantatione, 18–19; Philo, Quis rerum divinarum heres sit, 58. 10 See Philo, De confusione linguarum, 97; Philo, De opificio mundi, 134, 139. Gregory of Nyssa, who often relies on Philo, sometimes through Origen’s mediation, will expand on Philo’s notion within his theory of apokatastasis (restoration) that passes through the theology of the image: ‘[Christ], to restore you into the image of God, out of love for humankind, became “image of the invisible God” [εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου], so as to be configured to you in the form he took on, that, thanks to him, you might be again configured to the impression of his archetypal beauty, to become again what you were from the beginning.’ Gregory of Nyssa, Gregorii Nysseni Opera 8/1.194.14–195.5. See also Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 372–440; Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, ‘Gregory of Nyssa on the Soul (and the Restoration): From Plato to Origen’, in Exploring Gregory of Nyssa: Philosophical, Theological, and Historical Studies, ed. Anna Marmodoro and Neil B. McLynn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 110–41. 11 Philo, Legum allegoriae, 1.53. 12 Philo, Legum allegoriae, 1.88-90. Similarly, in ‘Gnosticism’, the creation of the human being is often represented as double: the intellect, soul, or spirit comes from the divine realm, while the body is moulded by the Demiurge or the evil archons. 13 See Gregory E. Sterling, ‘“Day One”: Platonizing Exegetical Traditions of Genesis 1:1–5 in John and Philo of Alexandria’, The Studia Philonica Annual 17 (2005): 118–40. 4

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perceptible on days two to six. God first created ‘the world constituted by the Ideas, the noetic cosmos’, and then the ‘corporeal world’, using the ‘incorporeal and more divine paradigm’.14

Bardaisan and Justin Within the exemplarist model of creation already present in Plato’s Timaeus, in imperial Platonism, and in Philo,15 Bardaisan, a Syriac theologian, describes the intelligible paradigms of all creatures (Ideas, Forms, logoi) as decorations on the body of Christ–Logos–Wisdom, who is the agent of creation. Bardaisan, as cited by Porphyry (c. 234–c. 305), describes a statue that represents the cosmic Christ as Logos containing the paradigmatic logoi of creatures and Intellect (symbolized by placing a divine image in a ruling position).16 Christ is God’s Intellect, the Logos who created the world qua power. According to Bardaisan, the elements–beings pre-exist the present world, which derives from the divine Logos’ ordering, but they are still God’s creatures.17 For Bardaisan, the creative power of the primordial Logos is marked by ‘the Mystery of the Cross’,18 a view found also in Justin, Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 202), Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662).19 Ephrem transmits Bardaisan’s appellations of Christ as ‘Power of the primordial Logos’ and as ‘Power of creation’20 – ‘The Power of the primordial Logos, which has remained in creation, made everything.’21 Here, the Logos is both the creator and conservator. Bardaisan attributes the roles of Logos and Power to the divine agent in creation: ‘God’s Wisdom . . . established the world and created humanity’;22 the stars and elements are its instruments. Christ is God’s creative Power: all existing beings ‘are submitted to the power of their Creator’.23 Justin, who received advanced education in Platonism, had already stressed the Logos’ divinity, eternity, and role in creation: ‘The Logos of Wisdom is itself God, begotten by the universal Father, Logos, Wisdom, Power, and glory of the Father; it is this who said: “The Lord established me as the principle [ἀρχή]”.’24 Justin applies to Christ what is said in scripture about Wisdom’s creative role. This approach is followed by Origen, who refuses Justin’s creation theory out of pre-existent matter.25 Justin, qua Christian Platonist, claims that Plato’s Timaeus

Philo, De opificio mundi, 15–35. See Philo, De opificio mundi, 16. 16 See Stobaeus, Physica, 1.3.56; 1.66.24–70.13. 17 See Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, Bardaisan of Edessa: A Reassessment of the Evidence and a New Interpretation (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2009), 107–24, 152–254. 18 See Ramelli, Bardaisan of Edessa, 314–52. 19 See Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 263–8. 20 Ephrem, Prose Refutations, 2.215.22-27; 154.28-39. 21 Ephrem, Prose Refutations, 2.220.10. 22 Bardaisan, Liber Legum Regionum, 8 (Ramelli). 23 Bardaisan, Liber Legum Regionum, 4 (Ramelli). 24 Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 61.1. 25 See Justin, First Apology, 10.2; cf. Justin, First Apology, 59. 14 15

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spoke of Christ’s cross without knowing it and posits it in the creation itself (as Bardaisan also maintains) – the creator ‘made an X-sign across the universe’.26

Origen of Alexandria For Clement, the Logos is the principle of the Spirit’s powers, embracing them in a superior unity, and the primary agent of creation through these powers.27 Christ–Logos is the transcendent unity of all, ‘One as all’ (ὡς τὰ πάντα ἕν), while the Father is ‘simply One’ (ἁπλῶς ἕν). Origen adopts this theory – whereas the Father is absolutely and simply One (πάντη ἕν ἐστι καὶ ἁπλοῦν), the Christ–Logos is ‘One through All’ and ‘One as All’.28 Origen’s Christ is the first, the last, and all that is in between, since Christ is ‘everything’,29 on account of the involvement in the creation of the Christ–Logos–Wisdom: We claim neither that creatures are uncreated and coeternal with God, nor that God at first did nothing good and turned to activity only later, because that famous biblical sentence is true: ‘You have made everything in Wisdom’ [Ps. 103.24]. Now, if everything has been made in Wisdom, since Wisdom has always existed, then in Wisdom there have always been – in the form of a prefiguration and preformation – those things which later have been also created as substances.30 Origen’s theory is a middle way between the eternity of creatures and an anthropomorphic conception of God qua craftsman, implying a creation in time before which God was idle. In his First Principles, Origen details that the Son–Logos–Wisdom contains in itself from eternity the ‘principles’, ‘reasons’, and ‘metaphysical forms’ of the whole creation.31 In the act of creation, these paradigms became substances (οὐσίαι). To explain this, Origen uses the metaphor of a project in an architect’s mind, a metaphor already employed by Philo to offer an account of the (‘Middle Platonic’) Logos as the cosmic paradigm:32 A house or a ship are built according to architectonic models; so, one can say that the principle of the house or ship consists in the paradigmatic logoi found in the craftsman. Likewise, I think, all things were made according to the logoi of the future realities that God had already manifested beforehand in Wisdom. It is necessary to maintain that God created/founded [κτίσας], so to say, a living Wisdom, and handed it the task of

Justin, First Apology, 60.1. See Matteo Monfrinotti, Creatore e creazione: il pensiero di Clemente Alessandrino (Rome: Città Nuova, 2014); Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, ‘The Logos/Nous One-Many between “Pagan” and Christian Platonism’, Studia Patristica 102 (2021): 11–44. 28 Origen, Commentarii in evangelium Joannis, 1.20.119. 29 Origen, Commentarii in evangelium Joannis, 1.31.219. 30 Origen, First Principles, 1.4.5. 31 Origen, First Principles, 1.2.2. Here, initia, rationes, and species correspond to ἀρχαί, λόγοι, and εἴδη. 32 See Philo, De opificio mundi, 17–20. 26 27

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transmitting the structure and forms, and, to my mind, also the substances [οὐσίαι], from the archetypes contained therein to beings and matter.33 Creation is an immediate act of God’s will, sufficient for the coming into being of all. Ammonius Saccas (175–242) and Pantaenus (120–216) anticipate Origen in this regard. Ammonius’ view is reported by Hierocles of Alexandria (fl. c. 430): everything was created by God’s will without pre-existent matter (thus, ex nihilo) ‘because God’s will [βούλημα] is sufficient for the coming into existence [ἀρκεῖν εἰς ὑπόστασιν] of beings, since God created each creature by wanting it [θέλων πεποίηκεν]. God knows the existing beings qua his own will, since he has created these beings by wanting them [θέλων]’.34 Likewise, Pantaenus maintains that the logoi or paradigms of all in God’s mind are called by scripture ‘divine wills’ because the Godhead creates everything by its will and knows all beings as its own will (ὡς ἴδια θελήματα): ‘for, if God has created all things by his will [θελήματι] . . . God knows his own will [τὸ ἴδιον θέλημα]’.35 The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo36 was already supported by Tatian (c. 120–c. 180),37 Theophilus (d. c. 184), Irenaeus, Tertullian (155–22), Hippolytus (c. 170–c. 235), and, especially, Origen. In his homily on Ps. 38.10, Origen claims that every creature is ex nihilo: before God, each creature is nothing (nihil) because it is from nothing (ex nihilo). Only God, ‘the One who Is’ (Exod. 3.28), and ‘is eternally’, is (est). That Origen maintains that God created all, including matter, is also attested by Rufinus (c. 344–411)38 and is proved by a Greek text by Origen himself where he polemicizes against those who deem matter uncreated and contends that God created everything from non-being (ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων).39 The coeternity of matter with God, along with metensomatosis (the idea that each soul changes many bodies), is one of the few points of divergence between ‘pagan’ and Christian Platonism.40 Eusebius (c. 260–c. 339) reports a passage in which Origen criticizes those who thought that God, like a craftsman, could not create ‘without a pre-existent, uncreated matter as a substratum’ (χωρὶς ὕλης ἀγενήτου ὑποκειμένης), but they do not consider ‘the power of God’.41 God, Eusebius insists, creates through his will (βούλησις), which is sufficient (ἱκανή) for the constitution of all. This coincides with positions taken by Ammonius Saccas and Pantaenus. Origen’s words bear a striking similarity to those of Ammonius: ‘God’s will is sufficient to create’ beings (ἱκανή ἐστιν αὐτοῦ ἡ βούλησις ποιῆσαι γενέσθαι). Origen concludes: ‘It is equally absurd that matter may subsist without being created, given that it is so much, great and capable of God’s creative Logos.’42 Origen engages in a reductio ad absurdum with the

Origen, Commentarii in evangelium Joannis, 1.19.114-115. Apud Photius, Bibl. Cod., 251.461b, 462b. 35 Maximos the Confessor, ‘Ambigua ad Iohannem’, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. and ed. Nicholas P. Constas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1:109. 36 On which, see Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994); Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl, eds, Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018). 37 See Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos (Pros Hellēnas), 5.3. 38 See Rufinus, Apologia ad Anastasium papam, 6. 39 See Origen, Commentarii in evangelium Joannis, 1.17. 40 See Rufinus, Origenis in Genesism homiliae, 14.3. 41 Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 7.20. 42 Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 7.20. 33 34

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thesis that matter is uncreated and coeternal with God,43 showing that it contradicts Plato’s Timaeus and its characterization of God as ‘demiurge, Father, benefactor, and good’.44 Origen thus claims to be the best interpreter of Plato. The argument that Origen uses – which differentiates God, who can create all ‘without (pre-existent) matter’ (χωρὶς ὕλης), and an artisan (τεχνίτης), who cannot – had already been proposed to deny the pre-existence of matter in God’s creation. Athenagoras (c. 133–c. 190), for example, argues that God created everything since, according to Plato, God is non-originated, while ‘matter needs an artisan and an artisan needs matter’.45 Here, Athenagoras is already seeking to argue that his doctrine was in accord with Plato’s own. Origen’s claim that his doctrine interprets Plato better than did the theory that posited pre-existent matter is not merely an apologetic move to defend a Christian doctrine. Origen’s exegesis, rather, parallels that of ‘pagan’ Platonists who interpret the Timaeus in the sense that the Demiurge produced matter (Plato’s ‘receptacle’); such Platonists include his teacher Ammonius Saccas, the Socrates of Neoplatonism. Porphyry, who knew Origen (and Ammonius), likewise postulates creation from no pre-existent matter: ‘the demiurgic Logos [δημιουργικὸς λόγος] can produce all because it needs no matter for the sake of existence [μηδὲν εἰς τὸ εἶναι τῆς ὕλης δεηθείς]’;46 it ‘creates perceptible realities just by thinking, generating the material immaterially’.47 As shown below, this theory was later developed by Gregory of Nyssa to explain how the immaterial God created matter. For Porphyry, as for Origen, matter, created by God, cannot be evil. Philo’s ‘double creation’ resurfaces in Origen.48 But Origen rejects Philo’s notion of ‘collaborators’ of God in creation, keeping only Christ–Logos as the primary agent of creation as intelligible cosmos. This, he argues, explains the plural in the sentence ‘let us create the human being’ (Gen. 1.26) as a reference to the three hypostases of the Trinity. In Origen’s theory, God initially created many intelligences, likely already equipped with spiritual bodies, since only the Trinity is entirely incorporeal. Originally, these intelligences were equal in harmony and unity, but after sin, humans had their spiritual bodies turned into heavy, mortal bodies and demons into dark, immortal bodies. Angels, conversely, kept their spiritual, luminous, and immortal bodies.49 Origen’s double creation theory is mitigated since rational creatures did not acquire bodies for the first time after sin but had their original spiritual bodies turned into heavier bodies. Each rational creature has only one body, from creation to the telos (end), but this changes qualities in accord with the spiritual advancement of the nous. Hence Origen develops the doctrine of ensomatosis (each rational creature has one body) in opposition to ‘pagan’ arguments for

Here Origen employs the word ἄλογον, ‘absurd’. Cited in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 7.20.8. See also Origen, First Principles, 2.4.3. 44 Cited in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 7.20.3. 45 Athenagoras, Legatio pro Christianis, 19.2. 46 Porphyry, In Platonis Timaeum commentaria, F55 (Sodano). 47 Porphyry, In Platonis Timaeum commentaria, F51 (Sodano). 48 See Origen, First Principles, 1.2.6; Origen, Commentarium in evangelium Matthaei, 14.16; Origen, Dialogue with Heraclides, 15.28; Origen, Homiliae in Genesim, 1.13; Origen, Homiliae in Jeremiam, 1.10. 49 See Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, ‘“Preexistence of Souls”? The ἀρχή and τέλος of Rational Creatures in Origen and Some Origenians’, Studia Patristica 56, no. 4 (2013): 167–226; Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, ‘Plagues and Epidemics Caused by D(a) emons in Origen and Porphyry and Potential Interrelations’, Vox Patrum 77 (2021): 89–120. 43

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metensomatosis (each soul changes many bodies). Like Philo, Origen teaches that the human being was created as an image of Christ–Logos.50 The biblical doctrine of creation in Genesis also provides the foundation for patristic thought concerning marriage. Origen, as an ascetic, does not elect marriage, but he does observe that God established it for a world subject to ‘genesis and corruption’. However, it will not exist in the state of beatitude: ‘if everything is made new in the eschaton, then all the really blessed goods of life must be of a different type there’.51 In his Commentary on Mt. 19.8, Origen cites Jesus’ words about creation: Moses allowed you to divorce your wife, but ‘from the beginning’, at creation, it was not so. Some leaders of churches permitted a woman to marry again while her husband was alive, ‘against the law established from the beginning in Scripture’. Nevertheless, this choice ‘is not completely unreasonable [πάντη ἀλόγως]’ if aimed at avoiding a divorced spouse falling into fornication.52 Within marriage, the union and concord of the spouses are more important than is carnal union. Origen bases this argument on his exegesis of the Genesis account of creation and, probably, with imperial Stoic ideas of marriage in view also. He notes that God states that the two spouses become ‘one flesh’ (Gen. 2.24) after the woman is created in Paradise and well before the spouses’ carnal ‘knowledge’ (Gen. 4.1), which happened after their postlapsarian expulsion from Paradise.53 Marriage is made by ‘concord, agreement, and harmony’ before intercourse and procreation.54

Gregory of Nyssa Gregory of Nyssa built on Origen’s theory of the Logos–Creator as the paradigmatic cosmos, depicting Christ–Logos–Wisdom as the seat of all Ideas of creatures: through Christ–Logos, these paradigms became creatures.55 God contemplated the Ideas of all realities in the divine Mind–Logos before their creation as substances, and ‘the Logos of Power’ brought these noetic paradigms to substantial reality.56 The source of the divine power is the Father, the Son is the Father’s power, and the Holy Spirit is the spirit of that power: creation is the work of the divine power.57 The cross manifests God’s power, which maintains all creatures in existence.58 The world was made by God’s creative, sustaining, and salvific power. The divine power governs the universe, but God’s essence (οὐσία) transcends it. Origen already stressed God’s artistic skills, providence, and power, which are everywhere in creation.59 Here, he and Gregory of Nyssa depend on De mundo, a work attributed to Aristotle and known already to Aristobulus

See Origen, Homiliae in Genesim, 1.13; Origen, First Principles, 1.2.6. Origen, Commentarium in evangelium Matthaei, 17.33.26-58; Origen, Origenes Werke 10.2.688-89. 52 Origen, Commentarium in evangelium Matthaei, 14.23-25. See PG 13.1244-50. 53 Origen, Fragmenta ex commentariis in epistulam i ad Corinthios, 29. 54 Origen, Fragmenta ex commentariis in evangelium Matthaei, 14.16. 55 See Gregory of Nyssa, On Perfection, 260B. 56 See Gregory of Nyssa, Apologia in Hexaemeron, 72B. 57 See Gregory of Nyssa, De hom. op. 3; Gregory of Nyssa, Gregorii Nysseni Opera 3.1.99-100. 58 See Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium, 3.3.39-40; Gregory of Nyssa, Gregorii Nysseni Opera 2.121-122; cf. Gregory of Nyssa, Gregorii Nysseni Opera 9.1.298-299. 59 See Gregory of Nyssa, Philoc. 2.4; 1.7. 50 51

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(fl. 181–124 bce) and Philo: ‘It is nobler and worthier of the divinity to dwell in the highest place, while its power permeates the whole of the cosmos.’60 That creation is an act of God’s will, sufficient for the coming into being of everything, is Pantaenus’, Ammonius’, and Origen’s doctrine and is also seen in Irenaeus.61 God’s omnipotent power creates as a substance whatever it wants (ἐθελήσῃ):62 God’s will is the matter and substance (οὐσία) of all creatures.63 Now, God’s will is the Son.64 Therefore, creation is an act of will: Immediately, without any interval, along with God’s will (βουλή), the work too appeared. For God’s will is at the same time power; it establishes in advance how all beings will originate, and provides the principles for the coming into existence of whatever has been conceived. . . . God’s will becomes substance [οὐσιοῦται], immediately transforming itself into nature. . . . God’s will became the matter and substance of creatures . . . it became the matter, structure, and power of the world.65 At the first impulse of God’s will (θέλημα), the essence of every creature appeared; God founded the powers/potentialities of all creatures instantly.66 Gregory of Nyssa follows Origen’s commitment to creatio ex nihilo. To explain how the immaterial God created matter, he postulates that God created intelligible qualities by thinking of them, and their concourse became matter.67 Gregory of Nyssa also remembers Plotinus, who defined sense–perceptible substance as a ‘concourse’ of qualities and matter.68 And he follows Philo and Origen, claiming that God’s activity and operations, primarily in creation, allow humans to know God while God’s essence remains inaccessible. Gregory of Nyssa’s work devoted to the biblical creation story, On the Hexaëmeron, is a defence and continuation of the exegesis of the Hexaëmeron undertaken by Basil (330–79), who had applied his scientific competencies to biblical interpretation.69 He also drew upon Philo’s idea of a double creation of the world, an idea mediated through Clement, Origen, and Eusebius.70 Gregory of Nyssa, like Origen, proposes a weak form of double creation in cosmogony and anthropogony because his thought is monistic rather than dualistic.71 In the

Aristotle, De mundo, 398b7–9. See also Aristotle, De mundo, 397b23–30; 398b7–11, 20–22. See Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 2.30.9. 62 See Gregory of Nyssa, De anima et resurrectione, 124. 63 See Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium, 2.68. 64 See Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium, 2; Gregory of Nyssa, Gregorii Nysseni Opera 1.288. 65 Gregory of Nyssa, De anima et resurrectione, 69A, 124B. See also Gregory of Nyssa, Gregorii Nysseni Opera 3/2.11.4-7; 10/1.24.11-12. 66 See Gregory of Nyssa, Homiliae in Hexaemeron, 9. 67 See Gerd van Riel and Thomas Wauters, ‘Gregory of Nyssa’s “Bundle Theory of Matter”’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 28, no. 3 (2020): 395–422. 68 See Plotinus, Enneades, 6.3.8.19-37. 69 Origen already defended scripture’s literal meaning in pursuing the spiritual one. But unlike Origen’s, Basil’s polemical target is ‘Gnostic’ allegoresis. See Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 128, 325; Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, ‘Plato in Origen’s and Gregory of Nyssa’s Conception of the ᾿Aρχή and the Τέλος’, in Plato in the Third Sophistic, ed. Ryan C. Fowler (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 211–35. 70 Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 11.6.19. 71 Like Origen, Gregory of Nyssa refuses to posit evil as a principle on a par with God and matter as coeternal with God. 60 61

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human being made in the image and likeness of God, there is neither male nor female; this division is ‘a departure from the prototype’ since in Christ there is neither male nor female (Gal. 3.28).72 Like Philo and Origen, Gregory of Nyssa distinguishes between the human made in the image of God (Gen. 1.26) and that which is moulded (Gen. 2.7). What is in the image of God is the intellect, understood expressly in terms of double creation: ‘Double is the creation of our nature, one which is assimilated to the divinity, and the other which is divided according to this division’ into genders.73 Scripture, he argues, first speaks of humanity’s creation in the image of God and only afterwards of ‘male and female’, which does not apply to God. The human nous is not like the cosmos but is rather like its creator, whereas mortal corporeality is beast-like. The priority belongs to the intellectual component (τὸ νοερόν); the association with irrationality is secondary. Gender difference ‘was created afterwards, as the last thing, added to the moulded human’, τῷ πλάσματι, in view of the Fall.74 Gregory of Nyssa cites Jesus’ statement that in the next life, humans will be like angels and not marry. The resurrection will be ‘the restoration of those who have fallen to their original condition’. Without the Fall, humans would have multiplied like angels and kept their original, angelic bodies. In the resurrection, they recover their angelic bodies. Indeed, ‘the body was made and created by God’s hands exactly as the resurrection will reveal it in due course. For, just as you will see it after the resurrection, so was it created at the beginning’.75 The human being, in the beginning, was created with a spiritual, angelic body, which only after sin was transformed into a mortal, gendered, and corruptible body. Creation was meant to be in harmony and concord, as a single body and soul; sin disrupted this, but unity and harmony will be recovered in the re-creation of all things.76 The Dialogue of Adamantius Creation is central to the Dialogue of Adamantius, the name Adamantius given to the principal speaker in a Greek dialogue who defended theological orthodoxy in the face of threats from Marcionites, Bardesanites, and Valentinians. According to the philocalists and Rufinus, who translated it, its protagonist is Origen, whose byname was Adamantius (‘man of steel’). Adamantius criticizes Epicurus (341–270 bce) for denying both the creation and the creator.77 Origen teaches his disciples all philosophical schools apart from Epicureanism because it denies divine providence and creation. Adamantius’ profession of faith begins with the assertion that God is one and the only creator of all: ‘there is nothing that has not been made or created apart from God alone: all other existing beings have been made and created’.78 Droserius, a fictitious follower of Valentinus, argues that evil stems from matter, is coeternal with God, and is not created by God. The concern, again, was theodicy.79 Plato had

Gregory of Nyssa, Opif. Hom., 16. Gregory of Nyssa, Opif. Hom., 18. See also Gregory of Nyssa, Opif. Hom., 20. 74 Gregory of Nyssa, Opif. Hom., 17. 75 Gregory of Nyssa, In Ecclesiasten homiliae, 1. 76 See Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, ‘Harmony between Arkhē and Telos in Patristic Platonism and the Imagery of Astronomical Harmony Applied to Apokatastasis’, The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 7, no. 1 (2013): 1–49. 77 Dialogue of Adamantius, 868c. 78 Dialogue of Adamantius, 835c. 79 See Dialogue of Adamantius, 841b–d. 72 73

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already claimed that ‘god is not responsible’ (ἀναίτιος) for evil, paving the way to ascribing evil to either matter or human free will. Valentinus ascribes evil to matter to show that God is not responsible for evil.80 Adamantius refutes this claim. Drawing on Gen. 1.1-2 and the Johannine Prologue, he argues that God created everything and that there exists nothing that God has not created. Likewise, Origen points out that Gen. 1.1 proves that God is the principle of all, to the exclusion of another principle coeternal with God.81 He rules out the notion that evil comes from creatures because God does not create evil. Adamantius’ opponents consider the Genesis account of creation as proof of the existence of uncreated matter, but Adamantius argues that Genesis does not prove this. Similarly, Origen declares the Genesis sentence Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi (‘the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep’) to be evidence of matter’s original lack of form and order, rather than of its coeternity with God.82 To reject the coeternity of matter with God, both Origen and Adamantius employ an argument to the effect that God created all.83 Among Christians, the main targets of criticism about pre-existent matter in creation are Gnostics and Marcionites, which Adamantius also attacks. Origen refutes Gnostics who assumed the coeternity of matter with God.84 Adamantius argues that it is pointless vis-àvis concerns related to theodicy to posit matter as coeternal with God and as the cause of evil because, even postulating that God had not created matter, God would have created its qualities. Therefore, God would still be responsible for evil.85 Origen already discusses the creation of material qualities by God. Like Adamantius, he theorizes that God creates matter and its qualities; no substance can exist without qualities.86 Arguing for the creation of matter ex nihilo against its pre-existence without qualities, Origen criticizes those who conclude that matter itself is uncreated while its qualities are created by God, asserting that matter exclusively consists of qualities. Origen disproves that pre-existent matter is subsequently given qualities from outside because matter without qualities can only be thought. To rule out that God is responsible for evil, Valens, an opponent of Adamantius, contends that matter and its qualities are uncreated and are coeternal with God. For Adamantius, however, this means that God created nothing. Valens argues that God is creator qua orderer of matter’s qualities. But, Adamantius objects, if God’s ordering was a change for the better, the origin of evil remains moot; if God picked only good qualities for creation, God could not, or did not want to, eliminate evil, namely, creation’s bad qualities.87 The treatment of matter’s qualities in the Dialogue depends on the issue of creation, as it also does in Origen’s works. Origen discusses the theory of the eternity of pre-existent matter deprived of qualities, which the demiurge/creator then added.88 He argues that if Celsus

See Dialogue of Adamantius, 844a. See Origen, Homiliae in Genesim, 1.1. 82 See Origen, First Principles, 4.4.6. 83 See Origen, First Principles, 1.3.3. 84 See Origen, First Principles, 2.1.4. Cf. Tertullian, Against Marcion, 1.15: ‘The world was created from an uncreated material substratum coeternal with God.’ 85 See Dialogue of Adamantius, 844b. 86 See Origen, First Principles, 2.1.4; 4.4.7. 87 See Dialogue of Adamantius, 845c–e. 88 See Origen, Against Celsus, 3.41-42; 4.57. 80 81

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(fl. 175–7) is not willing to concede that God created anything corruptible, he cannot explain from where or from whom matter received its qualities.89 Origen refutes Celsus’ theory that the spontaneous generation of insects from other animals, for example, proves that God is not the creator of everything since the transformation of qualities entails an ordering mind.90

Evagrius Ponticus Evagrius (345–99), influenced by Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen, is highly interested in the doctrine of creation. According to Evagrius, the Son (God’s ‘hand’) and the Spirit (the ‘finger of God’) are both active in creation.91 Both metaphors are also found in the Origenian Didymus the Blind (c. 313–98)92 and in Ambrose (c. 340–97).93 Evagrius, Didymus, and Ambrose may have drawn this double image from Origen, with whose writings they are familiar, and already Theophilus had applied this image to God – God created humans with God’s two hands, God’s Logos and Wisdom.94 Evagrius’ theory of double creation is an extension of that proposed by Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. He speaks of ‘first/primary’ and ‘second/secondary’ creation, but within the boundaries of a commitment to ontological monism. This ‘second’ creation, which is the subject of ‘natural contemplation’, will be eventually subsumed into the first: body into soul and soul into intellect. In his Letter to Melania, Evagrius refrains from speaking of the relationship between the fall of the intellects and their acquisition of sensible bodies, which require the soul’s mediation, stating that the intelligible creation was united to the sense–perceptible creation. The Spirit and Son communicate directly to some rational creatures, but to other, less advanced creatures, they communicate through intermediaries, namely, through God’s sensible (‘secondary’) creation, which is not evil, being from God.95 God desires creation as a mediation for the sake of those who ‘have placed a separation between themselves and their Creator due to their evil deeds’: ‘the whole ministry of the Son and the Spirit is exercised through creation, for the sake of those who are far from God’.96 God creates the first creation (incorporeal realities), then the second (bodies), after rational creatures disperse their wills in different directions instead of towards God alone.97 Being created by God, ‘none of the mortal bodies should be declared to be evil’.98 Rather, as in Origen’s system, evil arises from and depends upon wrong moral choices.

See Origen, Against Celsus, 4.56. See Origen, Against Celsus, 4.27; 4.57; 6.77. 91 See Evagrius, Kephalaia Gnostica, 2.12; Evagrius, Letter to Melania; Evagrius, Letter on Faith. Evagrius’ language in Letter on Faith is also preserved in Basil, Letter 8 (PG 32.265AB). 92 See Didymus, On the Holy Spirit (PG 39.1051A–C; 1076C; 1077AB). 93 See Ambrose, The Holy Spirit, 3.3. 94 See Theophilus, To Autolycus, 2.18. 95 See Ponticus Evagrius, Evagrius’s Kephalaia Gnostika: A New Translation of the Unreformed Text from the Syriac, trans. Illaria L. E. Ramelli (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015). 96 Evagrius, Letter to Melania, 5. 97 See Evagrius, Kephalaia Gnostica, 6.20. 98 Evagrius, Kephalaia Gnostica, 3.53. 89 90

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According to Evagrius, creation will be subsumed eschatologically from the physical to the intellectual level: ‘There will be a time when body, soul, and intellect will cease to be separate from one another, with their names and their plurality, since body and soul will be elevated to the rank of intellects.’99 The distinction between the creator and creatures is maintained, however.100 Like Origen, Evagrius denies the coeternity of creatures as substances with God: their creation as substances occurred only at a certain point: ‘I do not mean that rational creatures were eternally in God in their substance, since, although they were completely united to God in God’s Wisdom and creative Power, their actual creation did have a beginning.’101 The eternal existence of the paradigms of all creatures in God’s Wisdom (Christ) differs from their creation as substances only at a certain point; they did not exist from eternity in God in their substance but only as paradigms/prefigurations.102 Creation and restoration are related in patristic thought in many ways. One is Origen’s conviction that restoration will be the triumph of the creator: eternal damnation or ontological destruction signals the defeat of God’s creation. Another is through the seven days of creation (Hexaëmeron) and the seventh/eighth day of apokatastasis. The seventh day is God’s repose after history when the good will contemplate God103 (a notion developed further by Evagrius and Maximus). The eighth day indicates apokatastasis. Evagrius mentions two rests of God when the destruction of evil and ignorance will take place.104 The ‘eighth day’ will be the great Sunday, the telos and apokatastasis–deification. The sabbath will precede it as the rest of the rational soul,105 the seventh day of rest proclaimed and even observed by God in creation. The healing and corrective reign of Christ over all rational creatures will enable the eighth day when all creation will return to unity.106 The ‘seventh’ day is the aeon(s) to come when virtue will be rewarded and sins purified; the ‘eighth year’ is apokatastasis, when no evil or suffering will remain.107 Evagrius’ metaphysical monism, which relativizes his ‘double creation’ theory, implies that the seeds of virtue never die – not even in hell – since such were created by God, the Good. But evil, which is no creature of God, will eventually disappear from all creation.108

John Scottus Eriugena Early Christian theologies of creation were shaped more by the exposition of scripture than by philosophical cosmology,109 with scripture being the authoritative text for Christian thinkers. However, many ‘pagan’ philosophers had their religiously authoritative texts, such as the Chaldean Oracles, and even commented allegorically on scripture. Moreover, most patristic

Evagrius, Letter to Melania, 22. See Evagrius, Letter to Melania, 23–4. 101 Evagrius, Letter to Melania, 30. 102 See also Origen, First Principles, 1.4.4-5. 103 See Origen, Against Celsus, 5.59; 6.61. 104 See Evagrius, Kephalaia Gnostica, 3.68. 105 See Evagrius, Kephalaia Gnostica, 4.44. 106 Cf. Evagrius, Kephalaia Gnostica, 4.26; 5.8; 6.7. 107 Evagrius, Kephalaia Gnostica, 5.8. 108 See Evagrius, Kephalaia Gnostica, 1.40-41. Here Evagrius follows Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. 109 See Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 307. 99

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philosophers found in scripture the same views as in Plato. Therefore, when studying patristic theories of creation, scholars cannot downplay the role of Greek metaphysics, whether those associated with Platonism, Neoplatonism, or Stoicism. John Scottus Eriugena (c. 800–c. 877) conceives his Periphyseon as a commentary on the Genesis account of creation, which he reads according to the Neoplatonic exitus (πρόοδος) category. He models it after Origen’s Περὶ Ἀρχῶν (First Principles). He also translates Gregory of Nyssa’s De hominis opificio under the title De imagine, according to the ‘theology of the image’ based on Gen. 1.26-27.110 Eriugena ascribes to Gregory of Nyssa the theory that the human being ‘in the image of God’ is its intellect and related faculties.111 As in the case of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, Eriugena’s ontological monism mitigates his ‘double creation’ theory. The principle of creation is one; evil is no principle but only negativity. God has created humans and restores them along with all creation, whereas God rejects sin, of which God is not the creator. Thus, Eriugena grounds his doctrine of apokatastasis in a theology of creation. In God’s creatures, only what God made will remain.112 The movement that Eriugena depicts in Periphyseon parallels, as just noted, that delineated by Origen in Περὶ Ἀρχῶν: from the initial unity, to the present multiplicity and division, to the return back to God in the telos. Book Five of the Periphyseon is devoted to every creature’s return to God. This signals a universal restoration, a reditus to God that passes through Christ and the human creature, the reversal of the exitus from God in the creation. The general resurrection will be the universal restoration of all creaturely nature to its original state of creation.113 When God’s Logos assumed humanity, it assumed every creature; therefore, the salvation and restoration of all humanity implies the restoration of all creation.114 However, in commenting on the Genesis account of the creation of the human being, Eriugena also argues that humanity sums up all creation since it joins the animal and the intellectual natures.115 The human being is ‘an intellectual notion eternally produced in the divine mind’.116 The intelligible world is identified not only with Christ–Logos, as in Origen’s exemplarism, but also with the human being qua image of God.117 Eriugena details the stages of restoration, drawing a process of inclusion of the secondary into the primary creation: the dissolution of the body; its resurrection; its transformation into a spiritual body; the return of human nature to its primordial causes in God (God’s Ideas); and the return of the whole nature, together with its primordial causes (the Ideas), to God.118 Thus, God will be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor. 15.28).

See Cora E. Lutz, ed., Iohannis Scotti Annotationes in Marcianum (Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1939), 8.1; 8.4; Johannes Scotus Eriugena, Tutti i commenti a Marziano Capella, ed. Ilaria L. E. Ramelli (Milano: Bompiani, 2006). 111 See John Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1995), 4.12.799A; Eriugena, Annotationes in Marcianum, 17.8; Eriguena, Tutti i commenti a Marziano Capella, 135. 112 See Eriugena, Periphyseon, 5.935A. 113 See Eriugena, Periphyseon, 5.979CD. 114 See Eriugena, Periphyseon, 5.25. 115 See Eriugena, Periphyseon, 4.5-7. 116 Eriugena, Periphyseon, 4.7. 117 See John Scottus Eriugena, Iohannes Scotus Homilia et commentarius in evangelium Iohannis, ed. E. A. Jeauneau (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 230–1. 118 See Eriugena, Periphyseon, 5.8.876AB. 110

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The primordial causes of creation are the logoi of all things that dwell in God’s Logos and contain all substances and properties.119 That the logoi existed ab aeterno (from eternity) in God’s Logos–Wisdom, before being created as substances, was already posited by Origen.120 All the intelligible creation will be united to its creator and will be one and the same thing in it and with it. This will be the telos, the unification (adunatio) of all: the ‘double creation’ becomes one. This defence of ontological monism is a position articulated by all the main Christian Platonists, from Origen to Gregory of Nyssa to Eriugena. Eriugena denies that heaven and earth will be reduced to nothing since what God created cannot be annihilated121 – an argument already employed by Origen against the doctrine of annihilationism. This world’s matter is made of qualities, and to these it must return ‘since corporeal, sensible beings derive from incorporeal, intelligible beings’.122 Creation and emanation are also associated with Christian and ‘pagan’ Platonism. These two concepts in Patristic Platonism show intertwining and surprising elements of reciprocal influence, starting from the notion of the Logos–Creator in Clement and Origen. Eriugena’s notion of ‘emanation’ has been deemed by some to be ‘non-Christian’, but it represents precisely how Bardaisan, Clement, and Origen had already thought about creation: Christ–Logos– Wisdom creator through paradigms.

Further reading Champion, Michael W. Explaining the Cosmos: Creation and Cultural Interaction in Late-Antique Gaza. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Duggan, Michael W., Renate Egger-Wenzel, and Stefan C. Reif, eds. Cosmos and Creation: Second Temple Perspectives. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2020. Lollar, Joshua. To See into the Life of Things: The Contemplation of Nature in Maximus the Confessor and His Predecessors. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Marmodoro, Anna and Brian D. Prince, eds. Causation and Creation in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. McDonough, Sean. Christ as Creator: Origins of a New Testament Doctrine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Ramelli, Ilaria L. E. ‘Origen’. In A History of Mind and Body in Late Antiquity, edited by Anna Marmodoro and Sophie Cartwright, 245–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Ramelli, Ilaria L. E. ‘Matter in the Dialogue of Adamantius: Origen’s Heritage and Hylomorphism’. In Platonism and Christianity in Late Ancient Cosmology, edited by Ana Schiavoni-Palanciuc and Johannes Zachhuber, 74–124. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Slaveva-Griffin, Svetla and Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, eds. Lovers of the Soul, Lovers of the Body: Philosophical and Religious Perspectives in Late Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021.

See Eriugena, Periphyseon, 5.887AC. See Origen, First Principles, 1.2.2; 1.4.5. 121 See Eriugena, Periphyseon, 5.887BC. 122 Eriugena, Periphyseon, 5.886C–887A. 119 120

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CHAPTER 11 GNOSTICISM CREATION MYTHS AND LESSER GODS AMONG EARLY CHRISTIANITIES Michael A. Williams

‘Gnosticism’ is a contested category in modern scholarship due to its application to a confusingly diverse assortment of movements and tropes over the centuries and to the lack of consensus, even among specialists, on delineating the precise features of the category.1 The approach in this chapter leaves aside frustrating debates about defining ‘gnosticism’. Instead, the focus is on a single striking feature that characterizes certain creation myths: the ascription of a prominent role for lesser beings in creating the material cosmos. This single feature will be referred to here as ‘demiurgical’ myth. Identifying sources with some version of this feature is more straightforward and achievable than is agreeing on a typological or other definition of ‘gnosticism’. Of course, Plato’s Timaeus (fourth century bce) presents a demiurgical myth, with a divine demiurgos or ‘craftsman’, and ‘younger gods’ fashioned by this Demiurge, who help in creation (Timaeus 28c; 42d). Many subsequent interpreters of Plato adopted and revised his model. Here attention is concentrated on diverse forms of Christian demiurgy, many instances of which were influenced by Platonism, among other traditions. Creation myths in most cultures are stories intended to explain how and why humans experience the world as they do. They generally contain aetiologies explaining the origin of both good aspects of life in the world and the bad. Demiurgical myths are no exception. The Christian writer Tertullian of Carthage (fl. 200 ce) famously grumbled that proponents of demiurgical myths were preoccupied with the question, ‘Where does evil come from, and why?’2 That is certainly true of examples discussed here, although many of these stories also include a more positive message about the origin of good. Most Jewish writers, and then Christians, ascribed control of creation to one transcendent God. But sometimes, they asserted that God had divine helpers or agents in this process. Jewish Wisdom tradition portrays Wisdom as God’s agent in creation.3 The book of Jubilees 2.2

For example, see Ioan P. Culianu, ‘The Gnostic Revenge: Gnosticism and Romantic Literature’, in Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie, Band 2: Gnosis und Politik, ed. Jacob Taubes (München: Wilhelm Fink/Ferdinand Schöningh, 1984), 290; Michael A. Williams, Rethinking ‘Gnosticism’: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003); Antti Marjanen, ed., Was There a Gnostic Religion? (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005); Mark Edwards, ‘The Gnostic Myth’, in Christianity in the Second Century: Themes and Developments, ed. James C. Paget and Judith Lieu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 137–50. 2 Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics, 7. 3 For example, Wis. 7.22; cf. Prov. 8.30. 1

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speaks of a team of obedient angels; Philo of Alexandria refers to the role in creation of God’s powers or assistants;4 and in Christian sources, it is often the Logos or Christ.5 Evil or imperfection in the creation was typically accounted for in some other way. Some sources blame rebellious angels, as in 1 Enoch or in Jubilees 5.2, where the transformation of animals into carnivorous creatures is the fallout from the injustice resulting from the descent of sinning angels to take human wives. The myth of rebellious angels also appears in Christian sources,6 but the blame is often equally assigned to humans. For example, the Christian writer Theophilus says that all animals were originally tame and vegetarian, but some became vicious or poisonous due to the sin and injustice of humans.7 As is discussed below, demiurgical myths manifest important continuities with these motifs. However, in different ways and to varying degrees, they expand the depiction of lesser entities and their roles in creation. This chapter focuses on the essential outlines of these myths and a few significant differences among them.

Demiurgical angels Some Christian demiurgical myths portrayed angels as creators of humans and the cosmos in general, although these doctrines are remarkably diverse. The second-century Christian thinker Valentinus is a name almost always connected with demiurgical myth. Less is known about his own teaching than about later versions developed by admirers, but a handful of quotations allegedly from Valentinus have survived. Although none of Valentinus’ fragments presents a fully narrated myth, one fragment does mention angels who were awed by the material Adam fashioned by them since this moulded human reflected a transcendent, preexistent Human.8 The early heresiologist Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 125–202 ce) ascribed doctrines of creating angels to several figures. His account, most notably in Against Heresies, must be used with caution since it is not certain how much direct knowledge Irenaeus had of these figures. Also, his agenda is to depict these teachers as branches of the same rotten tree, a succession of false teachers borrowing from their predecessors, so that a genetic chain of error could be rattled back to a single villain, Simon of Samaria.9 There are conflicting reports about Simon, conventionally known as Simon Magus.10 In Irenaeus’ account, the high God (who later appeared as Simon) in the beginning had a first Thought about fashioning angels and archangels. Divine Thought then generated angels who created the world. Only after this are the angels said to have rebelled and held Thought captive until God later rescued her. Since

Philo, On the Creation of the World, 74–5; Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues, 179. For example among many examples, Jn 1.1; Theophilus, To Autolycus, 2.18, who refers to ‘Logos’ and ‘Sophia’ as God’s ‘hands’. 6 Loren Stuckenbruck, The Myth of Rebellious Angels: Studies in Second Temple Judaism and New Testament Texts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014). 7 Theophilus, To Autolycus, 2.17. 8 Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies (Strom.), 2.36.2-4. 9 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 23.1–25.6. 10 For example, see Karlmann Beyschlag, Simon Magus und die christliche Gnosis (Tübingen: Mohr, 1975). 4 5

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Thought was following the will of God in creating the angels, creation itself appears intended by God, with the dire state of things emerging only with subsequent angelic rebellion. With less detail, Irenaeus ascribes a similar doctrine of demiurgical angels to a certain Menander, characterized as Simon’s successor. Irenaeus says that Satornil (Lt. Saturninus) of Antioch taught that an unknown supreme Father himself created angels, archangels, and powers. A group of seven of these angels, one of them the God of the Jews, created the world and everything in it, including the first human, moulded after an image that burst forth from the supreme Father. The creature lay lifeless, but out of compassion, the supreme power sent a spark of life into the human, enabling it to stand. Irenaeus’ summary of this cosmogony offers no evidence of Satornil’s interest in discussing the remainder of the created order. There are significantly different accounts of the teaching of Basilides. Ancient writers provide a small number of quotations purporting to preserve Basilides’ words,11 but most of these fragments deal with ethics rather than with his views about creation. Apart from the fragments, the two oldest sources are Irenaeus and a significantly dissimilar account in the anonymous Refutation of All Heresies, a writing often ascribed to Hippolytus of Rome but possibly from another author.12 The account in Refutation of All Heresies contains a demiurgical doctrine but no reference to creation by angels at all, and it is treated in a separate section below. In Irenaeus’ report, there is an unknown first God, and then the emanation of other entities in the transcendent realm (Mind, Word, or Reason [Logos], Prudence, Wisdom, and Power). Power and Wisdom then gave birth to powers, rulers, and angels, inhabiting 365 heavens, and the angels in the lowest heaven created ‘the world and everything in it’.13 A doctrine of creation by angels is also ascribed to followers of the second-century Egyptian Carpocrates. According to Irenaeus, they taught that the world was created by angels very inferior to an unbegotten Father. Few other details about creation are included in his account, with most attention given to Jesus and his significance and to the experience and goal of human souls. According to Irenaeus’ description, the Devil was one of the ‘angels in the world’, although it is unclear whether the Devil was also imagined as one of the demiurges. However, there is a complicating factor with respect to Carpocratian doctrine because Clement of Alexandria conveys a starkly different picture in his report on the teaching of Epiphanes, reputedly the son of Carpocrates and representing the same school. Clement claims to possess actual writings of Epiphanes and appears to quote passages from a work entitled ‘Concerning Justice’.14 This work does not speak of angelic creators or present any demiurgical myth but rather presents a kind of primordialism. The one God created the world, but originally humans, like all animals, were created to engage in free love. Laws about marriage and property were only later invented

See Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions (Garden City: Doubleday, 1987), 418–44. 12 I indicate this uncertainty with quotation marks: ‘Hippolytus’, Refutation of All Heresies, 7.20.1–7.27.13; M. David Litwa, ed. Refutation of All Heresies – Translated with an Introduction and Notes by M. David Litwa (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016), 505–37. 13 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.24.4. 14 Clement, Miscellanies, 3.2.5-10. 11

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by humans. This teaching echoes elements of Plato’s depiction of a utopian society in the Republic.15 Angels appear in other demiurgical myths, although not always with prominence as the rebellious creators. For example, the Nag Hammadi Apocalypse of Adam (Apoc. Adam) distinguishes ‘the eternal God’ or ‘God of truth’ from the ‘god who created’ Adam and Eve, and from ‘powers’ who are with that creator.16 Angels are mentioned several times, but mostly positively, sometimes called ‘holy angels’.17 There are a few references to the nefarious influence of some angels, but with no mention of these as creators.18 Only one reference may connect an angel to the creation of humans: Apoc. Adam 75,8 speaks of ‘great humans’ who have not been defiled by desire because ‘their soul had not come from a defiled hand, rather, it came by a great command of an eternal angel’.

Wisdom and creation As mentioned earlier, Wisdom was depicted as an agent of creation in some Jewish traditions. In certain demiurgical myths, also, Wisdom plays a crucial role in creation, although in a more complicated fashion than in Jewish Wisdom texts. One set of examples shares, among other things, a specific mytheme – Wisdom’s ‘innocence’. Probably the oldest example is a myth in Irenaeus’ Against Heresies 1.29. After the description of the primordial realm of perfection with several supernal entities, Holy Spirit is emitted, who is also called ‘Wisdom’ (Sophia) and ‘Impetuous’ (Prunicus). Wisdom could not find a consort and impetuously ‘rushed forth’ but was saddened by her action since it was ‘without the consent of the Father’. Nevertheless, she is said to have acted ‘in innocence and goodness’ (simplicitate et benignitate), although the result of her action is the engendering of an ignorant and arrogant creator of the cosmos. This creator took away power from Wisdom and withdrew to create his cosmic realm and subordinate powers and angels, generating ‘evil, jealousy, envy, dissension, and desire’. Seeing this evil consequence, Wisdom was grieved and ascended above her offspring.19 Researchers have usually emphasized in this scenario the supposed ‘tragedy’ of Wisdom’s ‘fall’. Little attention is given to the point that Wisdom acted ‘in innocence and goodness’. Interpreters have commonly pointed to the name Prunicus (προύνεικος), translating it here and in some Nag Hammadi writings with words such as ‘whore’, ‘lewd’, ‘wantonly sexual’. However, although the term could sometimes be used in connection with sex, more often it connotes attributes like hastiness, impetuosity, temerity, boldness, or excessive competitiveness,20 which seems more in tune with Wisdom’s ‘rushing’ forth and that she did this ‘in innocence and goodness’. In this passage, Wisdom’s grief is not mentioned immediately after her offspring creates his material world, but only after she beholds moral evils that he unleashes.

Cf. Plato, Republic, 5.423e–424a, 449a–466d. For example, Apoc. Adam (NHC V) 64,7–13; 65,11–18.31-32; 66,14–27. 17 Apoc. Adam (NHC V) 64,15; 69,20; 71,13; 72,11; 75,8; 76,2.5.27; 85,17; cf. 78,13; 80,5.26; 82,1. 18 Apoc. Adam (NHC V) 77,20; 78,13; 81,11; 83,17. 19 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.29.4. 20 Anne Pasquier, ‘Prouneikos: A Colorful Expression to Designate Wisdom in Gnostic Texts’, in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, ed. Karen L. King (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 47–66. 15 16

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The account in Irenaeus’ Against Heresies 1.29 generally matches the first part of the myth in the Apocryphon (Secret Book) of John (Ap. John), a writing for which we have three Nag Hammadi copies and a fourth Coptic copy in Berlin Codex 8502 (BG). These include two shorter and two longer versions.21 Among these manuscripts, the mytheme of Wisdom’s ‘innocence’ appears at different points in the story.22 In the short versions, it occurs right after the demiurgical authorities create the first human body, and Wisdom prays to the Father of All to have back a ‘power’ that much earlier she had ‘impetuously’ given to her offspring, Ialdabaoth.23 In the longer version, it is after the later creation of the moulded female figure (Eve) whose presence is revelatory for Adam.24 In the first case, it is unclear whether Wisdom’s ‘innocence’ is looking back to her original action in producing and empowering Ialdabaoth or to innocence in her entreaty to the Father. In the second, it is said that ‘our sister Wisdom, who came down in innocence in order to set right her deficiency, was therefore called “Life”, that is, “the Mother of the living”’.25 All the versions speak of Wisdom having ‘given’ (Coptic. ti) power to Ialdabaoth, with which he created the cosmos and humans. Although modern translations often have Ialdabaoth ‘stealing’ that power, the translation ‘receive’ (Coptic. ji) is just as legitimate and fits better with clear statements that Wisdom ‘gave’ it to him.26 In all versions, it is not after Ialdabaoth creates the cosmos that Wisdom is upset and ‘repents’, but only after she observes his arrogant claims and wickedness. The reason the creation of the material cosmos per se is not the issue is perhaps that, in all versions of Ap. John, the material cosmos is modelled after the supernal realm.27 The longer recension underscores that Ialdabaoth could only do this because of the power he had received from Wisdom. This cosmos is an imperfect imitation, a generally Platonic theme. In the case of Ap. John, scholars have frequently read that imperfection as entirely diabolical, a wicked fake. However, the actual diabolical elements stressed in Ap. John pertain to the behaviour of demiurges after the creation of the cosmos. The material human body they create is characterized as a ‘tomb/cave’ or ‘prison’, but that, too, stems from Platonic tradition.28 The creation of the material world in Ap. John has commonly been characterized as a ‘mistake’. However, the theme of Wisdom’s ‘innocence’ and the other factors, such as the central role of Providence throughout, suggest a cosmogonic process under divine control from the start. There is no approval of the evil wrought by Ialdabaoth, any more than God in ‘orthodox’ Christian tradition applauds Satan’s evil. But Ap. John explains how, despite the prevalence of moral evil, creation nevertheless reveals the hand of divine Wisdom.

Michael Waldstein and Frederik Wisse, eds, The Apocryphon of John: Synopsis of Nag Hammadi Codices II,1; III,1; and IV,1 with BG 8502,2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995). 22 See Michael A. Williams, ‘“Wisdom, Our Innocent Sister”: Reflections on a Mytheme’, in Women and Knowledge in Early Christianity, ed. Ulla Tervahauta et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2017), 253–90. 23 Ap. John, NHC III 23,19–23; BG 51,3–6. 24 Ap. John, NHC II 22,19–23,16. 25 Ap. John, NHC II 23,20–24; IV 36,14–17 has a lacuna where the reference to Wisdom’s innocence would appear. 26 For a detailed explanation, see Williams, ‘“Wisdom, Our Innocent Sister”’, 265–72. 27 Ap. John, NHC II 13,1–5; BG 39,9–18 = NHC III 16,11–15; BG 44,7–9; cf. Karen L. King, The Secret Revelation of John (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 94. 28 For example, Ap. John NHC II 21,9–10 par; 27,8; cf. BG 69,9; Plato, Gorgias 493a; Republic 7.514a–520a; Phaedo 82e2; 92a1. 21

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The Trimorphic Protennoia (Tri. Prot.) (‘Three-formed First Thought’) apparently assumes a mythic narrative similar to Ap. John,29 and it includes the claim of Wisdom’s innocence. The demiurge Ialdabaoth, also called Sakla (‘fool’) and Samael, is said to have ‘received power that he had snatched away from the innocent one (i.e. Wisdom) whom he had first overpowered’.30 In another passage, the female Revealer First Thought states: ‘Behold, I am coming down to the world of mortals for the sake of my portion that has been in that place from the time when innocent Wisdom was overpowered, she who descended.’31 In a more lacunose passage, the Revealer declares: ‘I came into the world [of the] mortals for the sake of the spirit left behind in [it], which [came down], which came out of [innocent] Wisdom.’32 By contrast, nowhere in Ap. John does Ialdabaoth ‘overpower’ Wisdom, although he does attack Eve. Also, Tri. Prot. uses Coptic verbs for both ‘receive’ (ji) and ‘snatch’ (tōrp) for Ialdabaoth’s acquisition of power, and it includes no reference to Wisdom being ‘impetuous’ or ‘repenting’. The focus in Trim. Prot. is entirely on Ialdabaoth’s overpowering of ‘innocent’ Wisdom and his theft of power. Although Ialdabaoth and fellow archons are demiurgical agents in this writing, the responsibility for creation does not ultimately rest with them. The archons think they created everything, but it was actually First Thought operating through them. She hid within ‘all the principalities and powers and in the angels and in every movement and in all matter’.33 This is a message of divine control, a kind of cosmic pantheism. Divine control is also reflected in the fact that Eleleth, a divine light, called Ialdabaoth/Sakla/Samael into being to rule over the material realm.34 On this last point, one can compare the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit (otherwise called The Gospel of the Egyptians; NHC III,2 and IV,2). This writing lacks the ‘innocent Wisdom’ motif but, like Tri. Prot., it asserts that the divine luminary Eleleth was responsible for the appearance of Sakla (Ialdabaoth) by commanding that there be a ruler over ‘chaos and Hades’.35 A cloud named ‘material (ὑλική) Wisdom’ appeared, and through a minister of Oroiael, another divine luminary, the command of Eleleth was fulfilled. The chief ruler, Sakla, and a great Demon emerged from material Wisdom, and together they begot subordinate rulers. Wisdom’s innocence is also mentioned in the Nag Hammadi tractate Second Discourse [Logos] of Great Seth (Disc. Seth).36 Disc. Seth alludes to elements of a creation story rather than fully narrating one. ‘Innocence’ is a frequent theme, several times pertaining to the innocence of devotees.37 The one place where ‘innocence’ is applied explicitly to Wisdom states: For the things (or ‘persons’) that existed in the cosmos had been prepared by will of Wisdom our sister – who was impetuous (prounikos) – out of innocence. She had not been

Paul-Hubert Poirier, ed., La Pensée première à la triple forme: (NH XIII, 1) (Québec/Louvain: Les Presses de l’Université Laval/Éditions Peeters, 2006), 81. 30 Tri. Prot. 39,28–30. 31 Tri. Prot. 40,11–19. 32 Tri. Prot. 47,31–34. 33 Tri. Prot. 47,19–22; cf. 35,12–20. 34 Tri. Prot. 39,13–32. 35 Holy Book III 57,22–25//IV 68,5–9. 36 Gregory Riley, ‘Second Treatise of the Great Seth’, in Nag Hammadi Codex VII, ed. Birger Pearson (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 129–99. 37 For example, Disc. Seth, 49,29–50,1; 62,28–63,25. 29

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sent, nor had she requested anything from the All and the Greatness of the Assembly and the Perfection, when she first came forth to prepare dwellings and places for the Child of the light and the fellow workers.38 Wisdom’s innocence is in her creative activity, and her preparation of ‘dwellings’ refers to human bodies into which spirits would descend, houses that she fashions out of the ‘elements (stoicheia) below’.39 There is some ambiguity since the archons are also said to have created the material Adam,40 but possibly these archon demiurges are imagined as puppets controlled by Wisdom, similar to the theme in Tri. Prot.41 Therefore, in their different ways, the myths in Irenaeus’ Against Heresies 1.29, Ap. John, Tri. Prot., and Disc. Seth represent a commitment to the notion that divine Wisdom was behind creation in positive ways. Although Wisdom’s portrayal in such writings has been commonly seen as part of a hostile rejection of Jewish tradition, these myths insist on rescuing a positive role for ‘innocent’ Wisdom in effecting providential divine will and initiative in the creation of the cosmos. The Wisdom of Jesus Christ (Wis. Jes. Chr.) survives in two Coptic manuscripts (NHC III,4; Berlin Codex 8502,3) and a fragmentary Greek papyrus (P.Oxy 1081).42 Although Wis. Jes. Chr. does not explicitly call Wisdom ‘innocent’, the theme of Wisdom as transcendent is greatly enlarged. Adapting material from Eugnostos the Blessed, several supernal Wisdoms appear (e.g. Great Wisdom; First-begetter Wisdom, Mother of the universe; All-begetter Wisdom) as consorts of divine male saviour entities. The epithets applied suggest Wisdom’s role in the origin of all things. In another passage, ‘Wisdom’ tout court is said to have sent into created humanity spiritual identity in the form of a ‘drop’ of light to replace defectiveness with perfection.43 Wisdom in this writing ‘is never “fallen” but is identified with the “mother goddess”’.44

Converted demiurge(s) Some demiurgical myths depicted creator figures who have a change of heart and turn away from other demiurgical powers. Two writings with converted demiurges are found in Nag Hammadi Codex II: Nature of the Rulers (Nat. Rulers) (otherwise named Hypostasis of the Archons), and a writing that modern scholars often call On the Origin of the World (Orig.

Disc. Seth, 50,22–51,3. Disc. Seth, 51,3–7; 52,1–20. 40 Disc. Seth, 53,17; 62,27–30. 41 Modern translations often unnecessarily confuse the matter by rendering prounikos in the passage quoted above as sexual indiscretion – for example, ‘Sophia our sister – she who is a whore on account of (her) innocence’ (Riley, ‘Second Treatise of the Great Seth’, 151). It is more faithful to context and syntax to find here an assertion of innocent impetuosity. 42 Wis. Jes. Chr. appears to be a revision of the text Eugnostos the Blessed (NHC III,3; V,1), expanding the latter in places by the addition, among other things, of sections alluding to a creation myth similar to that in Ap. John. 43 Wis. Jes. Chr. (NHC III) 106,24–108,16. 44 Pheme Perkins, ‘Sophia as Goddess in the Nag Hammadi Codices’, in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, ed. Karen L. King (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 99. 38 39

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World).45 These creation accounts also grant an important role for Wisdom, but they are remarkable in their inclusion of a conversion of one of the demiurgical archons, Sabaoth.46 Nat. Rulers actually contains two creation narratives. In the first, a chief archon named Samael, born of matter, ignorantly boasts that he is the only divinity, unaware of the incorruptible realm above. He has several offspring, and the figure Faith-Wisdom (Pistis Sophia) organizes these archons after the pattern of the incorruptible realm. Then an image of Incorruptibility is reflected on the waters below, per ‘the Father’s will’, to unite all things with the light above. The archons cannot grasp the image, so they create a material human modelled partly after it and partly after their own image. The ensuing story adapts the Genesis paradise narrative with several distinctive changes. The spiritual element in Adam is transferred to Eve; when Eve is threatened by rape from the archons, the spiritual element transfers to the serpent, who then instructs the couple that eating from the tree of knowledge will not bring death; then, the spiritual element leaves the serpent. The couple eats from the tree; the chief ruler finds them, curses them and the serpent, and the couple is cast out of paradise. The Cain and Abel story and the birth of Seth are fairly similar to the content in Genesis. But Nat. Rulers adds a daughter, Norea, to the family, a motif with interesting antecedents in Jewish sources.47 Norea is a central hero in Nat. Rulers and her story introduces the second creation narrative. When the archons attempt to rape Norea, she calls God for help, and she is rescued by the angel Eleleth who reveals Norea’s divine ancestry. Eleleth’s discourse is the second creation account, containing some of the elements of the first one. Samael, also called Ialdabaoth, has seven offspring, and when he ignorantly boasts that he alone is God, he is cast down into Tartaros. One of his offspring, and therefore one of the original demiurges, Sabaoth, sees this and repents and condemns Ialdabaoth. Sabaoth is then enthroned in the seventh heaven, where he is taught about things above. Ialdabaoth becomes envious; Envy comes into being and begets Death, and Death begets offspring who govern the heavens. Remarkably, readers are reassured throughout that these things were taking place by the will of the highest God.48 Orig. World is a longer and more complex text than is Nat. Rulers, evidently drawing on more sources than the latter, resulting in apparent contradictions in detail within Orig. World’s narrative.49 But the two writings share, among other things, the motif of a converted Sabaoth, an Ialdabaoth offspring and member of the demiurgical team. Sabaoth was enthroned in the seventh heaven, a ‘place of rest because of his conversion’.50 Sabaoth was placed at Wisdom’s

Bentley Layton, ed., Nag Hammadi Codex II,2–7 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 1:220–59, 2:12–134; Louis Painchaud and Wolf-Peter Funk, eds, L’Écrit sans titre: Traité sur l’origine du monde (NH II,5 et XIII,2 et Brit. Lib. Or. 4926[1]) (Québec: Les presses de l’Université Laval, 1995); Marvin Meyer and James M. Robinson, eds, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The Revised and Updated Translation of Sacred Gnostic Texts, rev. edn (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 187–221. See these editions also for discussions of two other fragmentary surviving copies of Orig. World. 46 See Francis T. Fallon, The Enthronement of Sabaoth: Jewish Elements in Gnostic Creation Myths (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978). 47 Birger A. Pearson, ‘The Figure of Norea in Gnostic Literature’, in Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 84–94. 48 Nat. Rulers, 87,22; 88,10–11; 88,34; 96,11–12. 49 See the extensive analysis in Painchaud and Funk, L’Écrit sans titre. 50 Orig. World, 104,26–27. 45

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right and Ialdabaoth at her left; the right is called ‘justice’ and the left ‘injustice’. The converted Sabaoth (‘justice’) appears later in the narrative as creator of a beautiful Paradise.51 The demiurgical archons (now without Sabaoth) and their angels created animals, reptiles, and birds. They were allowed to create material humans in the likeness of the heavenly Light– Adam as a part of a divine plan. But the other part of that plan is that these demiurges would be thwarted through the later injection of spirit into humans.52 These authorities (again, not Sabaoth) were eventually cast down to roam on the earth as demons.53 The converted Sabaoth may serve as a model of conversion for devotees,54 but this is also a statement about cosmology. Although there are supernal entities higher than Sabaoth, enlightened ‘justice/righteousness’ in the cosmos is administered through him, one of the original demiurges, pitted against the injustice of demonic demiurges such as Ialdabaoth. Another instance of a converted demiurge, attested by the Refutation of All Heresies, is in the teaching of a certain Justin (not the Christian apologist Justin Martyr), who likely would have lived in the second century. Justin’s myth is allegedly from a book named ‘Baruch’.55 In this myth, all things came from three unbegotten principles: two male principles and a female principle. The first male principle, the ‘Good’,56 is the most transcendent of the three. The second male principle is ‘Elohim’, one of the names of God in Jewish scripture, while the female principle is called ‘Eden’ or ‘Israel’. Elohim is, therefore, not the highest entity, but he was the creator, working with Eden, and neither was aware of the Good above. Eden is Mother Earth and looked like a young woman down to the groin but like a serpent below that. Elohim and Eden were genuinely in love, and from their union twenty-four angels were begotten, twelve for each. Through their angels, Elohim and Eden created humans (from the upper part of Eden/earth) and animals (from Eden’s lower part, below the groin). Elohim gave spirit to the human and Eden supplied soul, rendering the first human a symbol of the marital unity and love of Elohim and Eden. Marriage and procreation are portrayed as good, and Eden’s dowry or power given to Elohim was the prototype for dowries that wives give to husbands ‘to this very day’.57 Therefore, creation was originally a happy picture, but unpleasantness emerged from Eden’s group of angels who move around the world continuously, bringing periods of distress (famine, hard times, affliction, or diseases).58 This is one of the rare instances where a demiurgical myth speaks of such evils of nature. The myth explains the origin of moral evil differently. One day Elohim wandered high enough to behold for the first time the light of the Good, and he ascended to sit at the Good’s right hand.59 Now aware of the higher realm, Elohim expressed regret that his spirit was bound in humans and requested that he be allowed to overturn creation. But the Good forbade this, saying it would be evil since ‘you and Eden created the

Orig. World, 110,2–3. Orig. World, 124,5–32. 53 Orig. World, 121,27–35. 54 Painchaud and Funk, L’Écrit sans titre, 301. 55 ‘Hippolytus’, Refutation of All Heresies, 5.24.2-3. See also Litwa, Refutation of All Heresies, 333. 56 Cf. Mt. 19.17, par; Plato, Republic, 6.508b–509b; 7.540a. 57 ‘Hippolytus’, Refutation of All Heresies, 5.26.10. 58 ‘Hippolytus’, Refutation of All Heresies, 5.26.11-13. 59 Cf. Ps. 110.1. 51 52

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world from mutual satisfaction. Therefore, allow Eden to possess the creation as long as she wishes, but you remain with me’.60 Elohim’s ascent, therefore, involves a paradox. Deserting his wife and his creation was the right move; there is no lover’s heartache on Elohim’s part. Yet his abandonment of Eden was contrary to their marriage contract. Eden became fiercely aggrieved and decided to take revenge by introducing adulteries and divorces to bring the pain of separation to humans. Elohim sent the angel Baruch to help the spirit within humans. Baruch commanded Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of knowledge, identified with one of Eden’s angels, Naas (‘serpent’). But Naas deceived Eve, committed adultery with her, and had sex with Adam, originating multiple sexual sins. The account reports a lengthy struggle over the ages between the good and evil cohorts of angels for control of humans, with success finally coming in Jesus’ teaching of humankind about Elohim and the Good.61 After his crucifixion, Jesus’ soul ascended like Elohim to be with the Good while his body was left behind with Eden, following the paradigmatic conversion in Elohim’s ascent, also the model for human initiates after life here below.62 Another example of demiurges undergoing conversion is in the account of Basilidean teaching in the anonymous Refutation of All Heresies, markedly different from what Irenaeus reports (see above). There is no mention of any angels. Rather, there is a radically apophatic theology and creation ex nihilo. Everything begins from absolutely nothing and a ‘non-existent God’ who wished to create a cosmos and initiated the process by planting a ‘non-existent seed’.63 From the ‘seed’ of the cosmos emerged three levels of ‘sonship’ that budded with differing potentiality. The first ascended to the level of the non-existent; the second was coarser and ascended less far; the third required purification and remained below. Two rulers (archons) function as demiurgical figures. The ‘Great Ruler’ is called a demiurgos and is credited with the celestial realm.64 The second sonship from the cosmic seed settled in the next lower region and was the demiurge of what is beneath him. The third oversees the earthly realm. Initially ignorant of anything above them, the two higher demiurges begat sons wiser than themselves, from whom they then received enlightenment. Consequently, the Great Ruler learned about the transcendent God, became fearful, converted, and began to acquire wisdom.65 The second ruler was likewise instructed by his son and converted. The enlightenment of the third sonship took place through Jesus; the details are obscure, but the general idea is that the ‘children of God’, the people of this sonship, will ascend as Jesus’ spirit ascended. The nonexistent God will then bring an ignorance again over everyone left in the second sonship and below it so that everything is separated into its proper place and nothing will pointlessly strain after something not natural to it. Then will occur the restoration (apokatastasis) of all things.66 The process of creation is, therefore, willed and orchestrated by the transcendent God from the outset. Once the cosmic ‘seed’ is planted, all the stages of development play out as intended.

‘Hippolytus’, Refutation of All Heresies, 5.26.18 (trans. Litwa). ‘Hippolytus’, Refutation of All Heresies, 5.26.29-32. 62 ‘Hippolytus’, Refutation of All Heresies, 5.27.1. 63 ‘Hippolytus’, Refutation of All Heresies, 7.21.5. 64 ‘Hippolytus’, Refutation of All Heresies, 7.23.7–24.3. 65 ‘Hippolytus’, Refutation of All Heresies, 7.26.2; cf. Prov. 1.7; Ps. 110.10. 66 ‘Hippolytus’, Refutation of All Heresies, 7.27.1-5. 60 61

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As in most other demiurgical cosmogonies discussed here, there is no real interest in creatures or features in the material cosmos except for humans, and in this case, even the creation of humans is not actually narrated.

Higher and lower demiurges Several examples of demiurgical cosmogony are commonly attributed to so-called Valentinianism, which represents adaptations of doctrines ascribed by early heresiologists to the teacher Valentinus.67 A lower demiurge is depicted somewhat sympathetically, as ignorant of the higher divine realm but not as an evil or devilish actor. In his account of these mythologists, Irenaeus comments that they and other demiurgical teachers nearly all assert that there is only one God, but they alter this God through faulty doctrine.68 This monotheistic intention is apparent in how higher divinity is assigned ultimate initiative and control in creation, sometimes with the label ‘demiurge’ applied not only to a lower figure but also to an entity in the transcendent realm. The realm of divine perfection (pleroma) typically consists of eternal divine attributes, or ‘aeons’. These aeons together contributed their most beautiful qualities to form a single ‘fruit’, the perfect representation of the divine, a pre-existent Christ figure (also called Jesus, Saviour, or Logos).69 According to Irenaeus, this Christ figure was the ultimate demiurge: ‘And therefore [the Valentinians] say that the Saviour had virtually done the creating.’70 The term here for ‘creating/fashioning’ is the verbal cognate of demiurgos, and the noun is actually applied to this Saviour in other Valentinian sources.71 The longest original text typically classified as Valentinian is the Tripartite Tractate (Tri. Trac.).72 After the unfolding of the realm of divine attributes of the ‘Father’, this writing presents a Wisdom myth, but with Logos (‘Reason’/‘Word’) playing the role Wisdom plays in other versions. Out of intense love, the Logos ‘rushed forward’ trying to comprehend the incomprehensible Father but inevitably fell short. He later repented of his action, remembered his former status, and prayed for help. He was finally restored to rest but in his own realm. The details of the narrative are too numerous to summarize here, but the basic theme is that the activity of the Logos produced conflicting classes of powers characterized by the dispositions of the Logos at different points.73 The Logos organized his kingdom as an assembly (ekklēsia) and paradise, modelled after the higher realm of perfection. He ordered this realm and its powers and selected one of the

The literature is enormous. See Einar Thomassen, The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the ‘Valentinians’ (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006); Ismo Dunderberg, ‘The School of Valentinus’, in A Companion to Second-Century ‘Heretics’, ed. Antti Marjanen and Petri Luomanen (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005), 64–99. 68 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.22.1. 69 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.2.6. 70 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.4.5; cf. A Valentinian Exposition (NHC XI,3) 35,10–36,38. 71 For example, Clement of Alexandria, Excerpts from Theodotus, 46.2–47.1; the teacher Heracleon (frag. 22, apud Origen, Commentarii in evangelium Joannis, 4.23) calls Christ ‘the true Creator (ktistēs)’. 72 Harold W. Attridge and Elaine H. Pagels, ‘NHC 1,5: The Tripartite Tractate’, in Nag Hammadi Codex I (The Jung Codex): Introductions, Texts, Translations, Indices, ed. Harold W. Attridge (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), 157–337. 73 Tri. Trac., 75,17–96,16. 67

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powers to be the ruler and demiurge.74 This demiurge was the creator of the material world, and yet he was actually only a tool used by the Logos ‘like a hand, to beautify and work on the things below’.75 Therefore, although lower demiurgical figures are important in such sources, creation is ultimately initiated by higher entities.

Demiurge unconnected to the high God Finally, there is at least one demiurgical myth in which the creator may not have even a derivative connection to the transcendent realm. Marcion (fl. 140 ce) is one of the earliest datable examples of a Christian demiurgical creation myth. The problem is that no writing from Marcion has survived, and one is essentially dependent on hostile accounts by his enemies. Numerous extensive studies have been published about his teachings and his movement;76 here, the attention is more restricted to Marcionite notions pertaining specifically to creation. Marcion saw the creator God of Jewish scripture as a lesser entity, God only of this world. The highest God was first revealed by Jesus as his Father and was previously unknown even to the creator. This Father had sent his son as an act of sheer grace to rescue from the world humans who have faith. For Marcion, the new authoritative scripture containing true revelation about that higher God consisted of ten letters of Paul and one Gospel, closely resembling what became the canonical Gospel of Luke. Marcion used Jewish scripture as a foil to contrast the faults of the creator and his law with the goodness and perfection of Jesus’ Father. He appears to have read the creation story in Genesis literally, and he found that narrative offensive. For example, Tertullian says that Marcion accused the creator of having a nature capable of sinning since the human soul that sinned originated from the substance of the creator’s breath (Gen. 2.7).77 Marcion disparaged the picture of the creator commanding Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of knowledge (Gen. 2.17); the creator knew they would fall and therefore was shoving them to the edge of sin’s cliff.78 When the couple hid among the trees after their sin, the creator had trouble finding them: ‘Adam, where are you?’ (Gen. 3.8-9).79 Irenaeus of Lyons claims that Marcion taught that Abel and other figures traditionally regarded as righteous did not partake of salvation when Christ descended into Hades, while Cain and others normally counted as rogues were saved.80 However, sources reveal little else about what Marcion might have said about the first chapters of Genesis. Gerhard May has pointed out that although Genesis is cited over three dozen times in Tertullian’s Against Marcion, only about a tenth of these citations represent with

Tri. Trac., 96,17–101,5. Tri. Trac., 100,31–32. 76 For one of the more recent studies, with citations of other scholarship on Marcion, see Judith M. Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 77 Tertullian, Against Marcion, 2.9.1. 78 Tertullian, Against Marcion, 4.38.2. 79 Tertullian, Against Marcion, 2.25.1. 80 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.27.3. 74 75

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certainty Marcion’s own use of Genesis rather than Tertullian’s. May concluded that Marcion appealed to Genesis very little for his cosmology but instead was more influenced on that topic by philosophical tradition.81 Tertullian ascribes to Marcion the belief that the higher God ‘has his own creation, his own world and his own heaven’, with this ‘heaven’ being identified with the ‘third heaven’ mentioned by Paul in 2 Cor. 12.2.82 Nevertheless, there are no details regarding how Marcion might have described the origin of that higher creation. It is possible that Marcion’s doctrine was an adaptation of a Middle Platonic model in which a first and transcendent God was distinguished from an ontologically lower Demiurge.83 Sources report little about what Marcion had to say about the material creation itself. He appears to have regarded matter as pre-existent, not created ex nihilo, and essentially evil.84 Certainly, the concept of matter as evil was elaborated by some later Marcionites.85 Marcion famously denigrated the human body, marriage, and procreation, and that is where his negative view of matter was primarily focused. What about the remainder of material creation – flora and fauna, waters, terrain, and so forth? Modern studies often assert that Marcion hated the entire created cosmos, but the evidence usually cited for that is slim. Apparently, he did find things such as sexual intercourse and distasteful processes of the body (e.g. defecation, the bloody aspects of childbirth) to be beneath the dignity of the highest God. But the assertion of hatred of creation as a whole has usually depended on a small number of proof-texts such as Tertullian’s comment about Marcion ‘joking’ (inrides) about tiny animals (animalia minutiora), apparently referring to things like spiders, bees, flies, stinging gnats, bed bugs, and so on.86 According to Tertullian, Marcionites insisted that the kindness of the supreme God is ‘of more value than any number of destructive insects’.87 It has even been asserted that Marcion had a pathological obsession with bugs and other pests, a ‘vermin-phobia’.88 Yet this reads too much into the evidence, and Marcion’s complaints about insects were more likely echoing conventional attitudes about pests.89 Although Marcion might have complained as much as anyone else about the nuisance of bugs – and with some humour, ribbing his opponents about their creator – this does not provide a picture of his daily engagement with the material creation. In fact, in the same passage where he mentions Marcionite joking about insect pests, Tertullian accuses Marcionites of being inconsistent since, despite their rejection of the creator, they employ

Gerhard May, Markion: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Mainz: Von Zabern, 2005), 44–5; cf. Gerhard May, ‘Marcion in Contemporary Views: Results and Open Questions’, The Second Century 6 (1987–8): 129–51; John G. Gager, ‘Marcion and Philosophy’, Vigiliae Christianae 26 (1972): 53–9. 82 Tertullian, Against Marcion, 1.15.1. 83 See Hans J. W. Drijvers, ‘Marcionism in Syria: Principles, Problems, Polemics’, The Second Century 6 (1987–8): 153–72. 84 Tertullian, Against Marcion, 1.14.4-5. 85 For example, Eznik of Kolb, On God, 358; see Eznik, A Treatise on God Written in Armenian by Eznik of Kolb (floruit c. 430–c. 450), trans. Monica J. Blanchard and Robin D. Young (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 181–5. 86 Tertullian, Against Marcion, 1.14.1-2. 87 Tertullian, Against Marcion, 1.17.1 (trans. Evans). 88 H. J. Schoeps, Aus frühchristlicher Zeit: Religionsgeschictliche Untersuchungen (Tübingen: Mohr, 1950), 257n7, alleging a ‘vermin-phobia’; cf. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma, 2nd German edn (Durham: Labyrinth Press, 1990), 67; Henry Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee to Gregory the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 88. 89 Cf. Robert M. Grant, Early Christians and Animals (London: Routledge, 1999), 32. 81

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water, oil, milk, honey, and bread in their rituals of baptism, Eucharist, and chrismation. The atria in their houses allow Marcionites to enjoy the creator’s sky; they feed on the fruits of the creator’s earth; they prize fish from the sea as a holy food; if offered a rose, Tertullian asserts, they would not loath its creator.90 Marcionites saw things in creation that they deemed unworthy of a supreme God. Still, Tertullian’s remarks suggest that not everything in creation disgusted them, and they might actually have appreciated many aspects of life in this world. Conclusion Space has not allowed discussion of all instances of demiurgical creation myth, but those examined illustrate several points: First of all, Christian demiurgy took an astounding variety of forms. Second, these forms exemplify a feature often overlooked; namely, that most of these mythologists (the most obvious exception being Marcion) envisioned creation as a process in accordance with divine providence, ultimately under the control of the highest divinity, unbeknownst to the lower demiurges. In this regard, most of these myths present versions of the perennial paradox inherent in world views where God is distanced from direct responsibility for evil, yet God’s ultimate control must somehow be affirmed. In several myths, the material creation is copied, albeit imperfectly, from the transcendent realm of divine perfection. Third, this notion of creation as a copy of the transcendent realm may explain why across the variety of demiurgical myths there is remarkably little attention to the natural world itself. Instead, the focus is on the anthropological dimension and morality; the created environment is essentially taken for granted. There are only brief, rather anodyne, mentions of animals or plants in some texts.91 Besides Marcion’s (possibly joking) reference to insect pests, demiurgical creation myths typically do not spend time on vicious beasts, poisonous snakes, and so forth, as terrors created by archons. By contrast, other Jewish and Christian creation myths sometimes touch at least briefly on the creation of animals. For example, the book of Jubilees describes the creation of aquatic creatures, birds, and land animals and their naming by Adam; it even explains the animals’ loss of ability to speak after Adam and Eve’s disobedience.92 Theophilus of Antioch claims that no animals were originally created with ferocious or poisonous powers; these were acquired only as the result of human sin.93 Origen of Alexandria blames demon possession for the savage and injurious actions of some animals.94

Tertullian, Against Marcion, 1.14.3-4; cf. Andrew McGowan, ‘Marcion’s Love of Creation’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 9, no. 3 (2001): 295–311. 91 Ingvild Gilhus has noted that there are references to ‘bestial’ characteristics in humans, and depictions of theriomorphic demiurgical entities. However, she observes, ‘in the Nag Hammadi “library” real animals are mentioned only in passing. Sometimes, as in the Apocryphon of John, they are not mentioned at all. When they are mentioned, they have only peripheral roles to play, as when Adam gives them names, they accompany Noah in the ark, or they are spontaneously generated by nature’. Ingvild S. Gilhus, Animals, Gods and Humans: Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman and Early Christian Ideas (London: Routledge, 2006), 219. 92 Jub. 2.11-13; 3.1-2, 28. 93 Theophilus, To Autolycus, 2.17. 94 Origen, Against Celsus, 4.92. 90

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Demiurgical myths also do not typically complain about distresses like famines, earthquakes, devastating storms, or other natural disasters, accusing the demiurge(s) of having created them. The Baruch book, with its depiction of natural distresses inflicted periodically by Eden’s angels, is a rare exception. Apoc. Adam mentions flood and fire, but these are allusions to biblical stories. As a result, although demiurgical myths generally explain the presence of moral evil in human experience, it is not clear that their explanations are evidence of some hopeless despondency about life in the created world. For they also explain the origin of good and advocate for allegiance to good as a value. Despite the ubiquitous experience of moral evil, there is a loud affirmation that good is rooted in the transcendent realm and achievable even in this life. Tertullian was justified in alleging that proponents of creation doctrines such as these were preoccupied with the question, ‘Where does evil come from, and why?’ However, the salient evil in creation that preoccupied various demiurgical myths was immorality and its demonic instigators, not vipers or earthquakes. And against moral evil, something could be done.

Further reading Dunderberg, Ismo. ‘Gnostic Interpretations of Genesis’. In The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible, edited by Michael Lieb, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowland, 383–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Foerster, Werner, ed. Gnosis: A Selection of Texts. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–4. King, Karen L. What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. Meyer, Marvin and James M. Robinson, eds. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The Revised and Updated Translation of Sacred Gnostic Texts. New York: HarperOne, 2009. O’Brien, Carl Séan. The Demiurge in Ancient Thought: Secondary Gods and Divine Mediators. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pagels, Elaine. ‘Exegesis and Exposition of the Genesis Creation Accounts in Selected Texts from Nag Hammadi’. In Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, and Early Christianity, edited by Charles W. Hedrick and Robert Hodgson Jr., 257–85. Peabody: Hendrickson, 1986. Williams, Michael A. ‘A Life Full of Meaning and Purpose: Demiurgical Myths and Social Implications’. In Beyond the Gnostic Gospels: Studies Building on the Work of Elaine Pagels, edited by Eduard Iricinschi, Lance Jenott, Nicola Denzey Lewis, and Philippa Townsend, 19–59. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Williams, Michael A. ‘On Ancient “Gnosticism” as a Problematic Category’. In The Gnostic World, edited by Garry Trompf, Jay Johnston, and Gunner Mikkelsen, 100–17. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.

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CHAPTER 12 CREATION IN SYRIAC CHRISTIANITY

Nebojsa Tumara

Introduction The early Christian doctrine of creation emerged from the encounter between Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman philosophical ideas at a time when the borders between religious communities were still not defined and different cosmological ideas freely circulated, producing divergent reflections about the dynamic that exists between God and the created world.1 In that respect, the world of Syriac-speaking Christians was no different. Extending from Hellenized Antioch and cosmopolitan Nisibis to the royal cities of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, it embraced a society in which Jewish communities coexisted with the different ethnicities of the Parthian and Sassanid Empires and where Jewish and Christian theologies blended with the ideas of Babylonian mythology, Iranian religions, Gnosticism, Manicheism, and even Buddhism. What differed is that a fluidity of ideas and identities persisted among Syriac-speaking Christians much longer than was the case among Christians of the Greek and Latin west. From its beginnings, the Syriac exegetical tradition was open to other traditions of interpretation and to the different versions and variant readings of the biblical texts. The influence of the Jewish exegetical tradition is evident among the early Syriac writers. At the same time, from the fifth century, Greek sources became influential, causing the Syrian writers of the sixth and seventh centuries to abandon the earlier traditions. It was only with the Arab conquest in the seventh century that equilibrium was established.2 Until then, the world of Syriac Christianity, and with it the doctrine of creation, was characterized by two poles – Hellenic and Semitic. Eventually, the Hellenic pole was assimilated and became an integral part of Syriac Christianity.3 In the beginning, there was the Peshitta The origins of Syriac Christianity are probably to be found among the Jewish followers of Christ who, somewhere in the second half of the second century, produced a Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible. Peshitta, meaning ‘simple’ or ‘straightforward’, as this translation has been known

See Paul M. Blowers, ‘Doctrine of Creation’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan A. Harvey and David G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 908. 2 See Bas ter Haar Romeny, ‘Exegesis, Old Testament’, in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition, ed. Sebastian P. Brock, Aaron M. Butts, George A. Kiraz, and Lucas Van Rompay (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2011), https://gedsh​.bethmardutho​.org​/Exegesis​-Old​-Testament. 3 See Sebastian P. Brock, ‘From Antagonism to Assimilation: Syriac Attitudes to Greek Learning’, in East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period, ed. Nina G. Garsoïan, Thomas F. Mathews, and Robert W. Thomson (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, Centre for Byzantine Studies, 1982), 17–34; Sebastian P. Brock, ‘The Two Poles of Syriac Tradition’, in Homage to Mar Cariattil: Pioneer Malabar Ecumenist, ed. Charles Payngot (Rome: Mar Thoma Yogam, 1987), 59. 1

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since at least the ninth century, was the first Syriac version of the Hebrew scriptures. It was translated from a text closely related to the proto-Masoretic family of biblical texts and was partly influenced by the oral Palestinian Jewish tradition, reflected also in the targumic literature. It appears that the Jewish community of Edessa produced this translation around 150 ce.4 Starting from the fifth century, the Peshitta served as a unifying force for a highly diverse Syriac Christianity and provided a specific terminology and theology for a doctrine of creation to develop among Syriac Christians. For example, the elusive Masoretic element tohu wabohu, which describes the amorphous form of the created land in Gen. 1.2, entered the Peshitta and subsequently the vocabulary of the Syriac language as the near transliteration tūh wavūh. More problematic was the Hebrew accusative particle eth, rendered as iath in the Peshitta and preserved only in Gen. 1.1, which troubled the later Syriac interpreters. Ephrem (c. 306–73), in his commentary on Gen. 1.1, identified this twice-repeated element with the Syriac noun for substance, thus assuming that in the beginning, God created the substance of the heavens and the substance of earth.5 Bar Hebraeus (1226–86) clarified that iath stands for the direct object in Palestinian Aramaic and corresponds to l (the preposition) in Syriac.6 By contrast, the noun kedem, meaning front, east, aforetime, and which is found in Gen. 2.8 of the Hebrew Bible and the Peshitta, was interpreted similarly in both Jewish and Syriac sources: the Garden of Eden was created previously, on the third day in the beginning.7

Creation in early Syriac Christianity Construction of the doctrine of creation among Syriac Christians, for the most part, follows the history of interpretation of the book of Genesis. However, from the textual witnesses that have survived so far, it is evident that no texts were exclusively dedicated to the exegesis of the Old Testament before the fourth century. The anonymous and scattered expressions of the early doctrine of creation from this period are found in the texts produced among the Christians of Syria influenced by Gnosticism, such as the Odes of Solomon from the second century, or the Hymn of the Pearl, composed probably in the third century and preserved as a passage in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas. There, the glorious garment of the first man is mentioned, with allusions to the riches and luxuries of Paradise. Bardais·an (154–222) If the first-century writer Mara bar Serapion and his short letter preserved in Syriac are excluded, Bardaiṣan can be introduced as the first known writer in the Syriac language and

See Jerome A. Lund, ‘Genesis in Syriac’, in The Book of Genesis, Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, ed. Craig A. Evans, Joel N. Lohr, and David L. Petersen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 538. 5 See Ephrem the Syrian, Selected Prose Works: Commentary on Genesis; Commentary on Exodus; Homily on Our Lord; Letter to Publius, trans. Edward G. Mathews, Jr. and Joseph P. Amar (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 74. 6 See Martin Sprengling and William C. Graham, eds, Barhebraeus’ Scholia on the Old Testament: Part I. Genesis–II Samuel (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931), 5. 7 Midrash Rabbah, Genesis I, trans. H. Freedman and M. Simon (London: The Soncino Press, 1961), 119–20, 178–9; Ephrem, Commentary on Genesis, 99–100. 4

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indisputably the first theologian to present an elaborated doctrine of creation in the Syriac tradition. His cosmological ideas are expressed in works such as Against Marcion and Chaldeans (or astrologers). These texts, which later tradition declared unorthodox, were eventually lost. Therefore, to reconstruct Bardaiṣan’s doctrine of creation, the Book of the Laws of the Countries – the only preserved text, presumably written by one of his disciples early in the third century – must be looked at as well as fragmentary secondary sources composed by his opponents. The reconstructed picture of Bardaiṣan’s thought is somewhat contradictory and undoubtedly underwent certain modifications and developments. His cosmological theories were probably never methodologically expressed, and as a philosopher of nature and an astrologer, he produced an eclectic system of his own, adopting elements of Greek philosophy and blending them with Iranian and Gnostic cosmologies. According to Ephrem, Bardaiṣan’s cosmological vision assumed that God was not a creator of the visible world but rather a being that arranged its pre-existing entities: from the beginning, next to God, there were five (or six) of these entities; four of them were considered pure – light, wind, fire, and water – while darkness was perceived as impure. It seems that Bardaiṣan also considered space a separate entity, one in which divinity and other entities dwelled, since Ephrem dedicated considerable effort to proving that space was not ‘like God’.8 On the other hand, in the Book of the Laws of the Countries, Bardaiṣan appears more in accord with the scriptural doctrine of creation and as one who operates within a Christian framework of ideas. In this source, as the main interlocutor, Bardaiṣan assumes a Christian identity and tries to refute the idea of astral determinism. Here he appears as an opponent of Marcionite’s dualism, arguing that God created this world and humankind and that creation is good; God created all the world, both visible and invisible, and the astral bodies. Nevertheless, there is a hierarchy in creation: the heavenly bodies rule over day and night (Gen. 1.17), while humans rule over the earth (Gen. 1.26, 28).9 Following the biblical creation narrative, Bardaiṣan also asserts the freedom of humanity, stating that humans are created in the image of God (Gen. 1.27), being greater than all other created things and equal to the angels. Unlike humans or angels, Bardaiṣan concludes, the sun, the moon, and the zodiac circle or elements of nature do not possess free will but are predetermined and ‘set up with a commandment’.10 Despite this, and although God is the creator of everything, the zodiac circle and the heavenly bodies are in some way mightier than humans and can exercise influence over human life. For example, the power of the planets impacts the human soul as it descends through the heavenly sphere.11 Paradoxically, Bardaiṣan also observes that the planets and the elements of nature, although subject to the commandments of God, still possess certain freedoms and will be judged at the end of days.12

Saint Ephrem’s Prose Refutation of Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan, ed. C. W. Mitchelli (London: Published for the Text and Translation Society by Williams and Norgate, 1912), 1:132, 135. 9 See Ute Possekel, ‘Bardaisan and Origen on Fate and the Power of the Stars’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 20, no. 4 (2012): 524. 10 The Book of the Laws of the Countries: Dialogue on Faith of Bardaisan of Edessa, trans. Han J. W. Drijvers (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2007), 10–12. 11 See The Book of the Laws of the Countries, 32. 12 See The Book of the Laws of the Countries, 14. 8

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It appears that Bardaiṣan assumed that the planets and elements were created from some sort of primordial substance that preserved some of its lost primordial energy.13 The eclectic ideas of Syriac Christianity’s first theologian were met with hostility and condemnation by later writers. Ephrem the Syrian was the first to address Bardaiṣan’s philosophy and present him as an arch-heretic. Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306–73) Ephrem is recognized as the author of the first orthodox articulation of Syriac theology in general and of its doctrine of creation in particular. On the one hand, he is influenced by the hermeneutics of midrash, and some of his Old Testament expositions parallel haggadic exegesis. On the other hand, his writings also bear elements of theoria, closely related to the Antiochene school of interpretation.14 Nevertheless, Ephrem is not a systematic theologian, and almost all his writings emerged as a product of the refutation of what he considered heresies; he wrote polemics against Jews, Marcionites, Arians, Bardaisanites, and Manicheans. His doctrine of creation is articulated particularly in his Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Prose Refutations, Hymns of Paradise, and Hymns Contra Haereses. In his disputatious stances against the dualistic concepts shared by the followers of Marcion, Bardaiṣan, and Mani, Ephrem emphasizes the unity of the creator who, in the beginning, made all things, visible and invisible. For him, God is the only self-existing, unchanging entity, and everything else is made by God, according to God’s free will, and is designed to be changed and manipulated. God’s creation is creation ex nihilo and originally appeared in its perfection. At the same time, Ephrem’s doctrine of creation is also christocentric: everything is made through Christ, resembles Christ, and is for Christ. Thus, for Ephrem, the doctrine of creation depicts the doctrine of Incarnation, where the day of the crucifixion represents a retroverted image of the first day of creation. For him, creation was a kenotic act of God, announcing the future kenotic act of the Incarnation.15 In his treatment of the biblical narrative about the creation of the first humans (Gen. 1.26– 2.25), Ephrem is particularly interested in five themes: (i) that the first humans were formed in the image and likeness of Christ; (ii) that Adam represents a microcosmos; (iii) that in Adam’s body, the first human is related to both God the Father and God the Son; (iv) that existence in the primordial Paradise and the eschatological Paradise differs; and (v) that the first Adam was created androgynous, a perfect union of male and female.16 In the exegetical vision of Ephrem, the first humans, after being elevated to priests and lords of creation, immediately sinned against their creator. Thus, the sixth day of creation was the day humans were both exalted and condemned. For Ephrem, Adam and Eve were formed neither mortal nor immortal; their state depended on their obedience or disobedience to God’s commandments. And temptation came in the form of the snake, who was nothing more than

See Possekel, ‘Bardaisan and Origen on Fate and the Power of the Stars’, 528. See Tryggve Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1–11 in the Genuine Hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, with Particular Reference to the Influence of Jewish Exegetical Traditions (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1978), 26–7. 15 See Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1–11, 133. 16 See Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1–11, 45. 13 14

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one of the creatures in whose guise the prince of this world dressed himself up. Envy stood behind Satan’s actions, while Eve was set in motion by her pride and lust, like a harlot. For Ephrem, angelic and human rebellion against the creator happened simultaneously, and the fall of Satan produced the fall of humans.17 After the transgression, God pronounced judgement on the first couple, on the snake condemned to the earth, and, secretly, on Satan and his hosts. Thus, the sixth day of creation, for Ephrem, represents a day of great degradation of the created world. The whole of creation experienced the catastrophic consequences of human disobedience. The intimate relationship between humans and the rest of creation is expressed in the idea that the created world represents a mirror of the human condition. At the same time, the degraded creation acts as a pedagogue who calls humans to repent and return to their former glory.18 As the representative of the undivided church, Ephrem the Syrian stands as a great teacher and authority, while his works described here influenced the subsequently diverse streams of Syriac Christianity. From the mid-fifth century until the advent of Islam Around the fourth century, Syriac-speaking Christians started to translate and engage with the texts of Christian literature produced in the Greek language. Consequently, they became involved in the christological controversies of the fifth century that divided Middle Eastern Christianity into three separate churches. Those who professed a Dyophysite position, already condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431, established an independent ecclesiastical structure in the Sassanid Empire that later developed into what is today called the Assyrian Church of the East. On the other hand, Christians who defended a Miaphysite christological position, opposing the decrees of Chalcedon, developed their own hierarchical structure in the sixth century and became known as West Syrians or Syrian Orthodox. These traditions produced the major corpora of Syriac literature, while for the Syrians who followed the Council of Chalcedon, Greek and, later, Arabic became the most important vehicles of theological expression. The years of the christological controversies gave birth to two of Syriac Christianity’s most important theologians – Narsai and Jacob of Serugh – whose writings were considered foundational in subsequent Syriac Christian traditions. Narsai (d. c. 500) Among the Syrians confessing Dyophysitism, which favoured the Antiochian tradition, was Narsai, an adherent of the teachings of Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350–428) and the founder of the School of Edessa.19 At the centre of his theological interests stand three themes: the

See Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1–11, 86–94. See Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1–11, 111, 122. 19 See Lucas Van Rompay, ‘The Christian Syriac Tradition of Interpretation’, in Hebrew Bible, Old Testament: The History of its Interpretation, I. From the Beginnings to the Middle Ages (until 1300), 1. Antiquity, ed. Magne Saebø, Christianus H. W. Brekelmans, and Menahem Haran (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 632–4. 17 18

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creation of the world, the salvation of humanity through the two natures of Christ, and the figure of Mary.20 Following Theodore’s footsteps, Narsai’s theology favours a historical reading of the Old Testament where, in his opinion, only a few passages prefigure the coming of Christ. This approach contrasted not only with his predecessor Ephrem but also with his Miaphysite contemporary and opponent, Jacob of Serugh. A fundamental theological commitment of Theodore of Mopsuestia is the idea that from the moment of the creation of the world, God envisioned two epochs or katastasis – the present, which is characterized by mortality, temptation, and sin; and the future, which will be perfect, immutable, sinless, and immortal. The second stage is introduced by the Incarnation of the Son of God and will properly start with the final resurrection of the dead. Following this line of thought, Narsai concludes that God plans to advance humans from the current imperfect age into the perfect world of the age to come after they reach maturity and become ready to enjoy everlasting life. Thus, for Narsai, God acts as a great teacher of humanity, and the story of creation is a story of instruction, where every single act of God’s creativity has a pedagogical function and serves to instruct both angels and humans about God’s force and love.21 At the same time, humans, as a divine image on earth, resemble the Holy Trinity, where the human soul points to the Father, reason stands for the Son, and life points to the Spirit. God’s image in humans is also expressed through their creative activity. They are called to create out of something just as their creator creates out of nothing. Furthermore, humans stand as a bond between heaven and earth since they represent the union of the visible physical and the invisible heavenly worlds.22 Developing further the ideas of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Narsai theorizes that the first humans were created as mortal beings. The reasoning for God’s intention to create mortal creatures is found in the fact that humans are fashioned as physical beings, differentiated as male and female. But regardless of being created mortal, they need to be tested so that their discernment is put into action.23 The consequences of this theological reasoning are far-reaching since, according to Narsai, nothing significantly changed in God’s initial plan for humanity. Humans were created mortal, and after the transgression they remained mortal. They did not lose their primordial perfection since they were not created perfect. On the contrary, according to Narsai, their perfection is to be found in the future, beyond the Garden of Eden and past the course of history, and after a long period of education. What changed in creation after the transgression of the first humans is that the bond of love in creation was broken. With transgression, humanity was brought closer to evil and became inclined towards sin. This affair had consequences for the

See Lucas Van Rompay, ‘Narsai’, in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition, ed. Sebastian P. Brock, Aaron M. Butts, George A. Kiraz, and Lucas Van Rompay (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2011), https://gedsh​.bethmardutho​.org​/Narsai. 21 See Judith Frishman, ‘Themes on Genesis 1–5 in Early Eastern-Syrian Exegesis’, in The Book of Genesis in Jewish and Oriental Christian Interpretation, ed. Judith Frishman and Lucas Van Rompay (Louvain: Peeters, 1997), 172. 22 See Fredrick G. McLeod, ‘Man as the Image of God: Its Meaning and Theological Significance in Narsai’, Theological Studies 42, no. 3 (1981): 458–67. 23 See Lucas Van Rompay, ‘Humanity’s Sin in Paradise: Ephrem, Jacob of Serug and Narsai in Conversation’, in Jacob of Serugh and His Time, ed. George A. Kiraz (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2010), 210. 20

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entire created world. As Narsai portrays it, after Adam sinned, the entirety of creation was saddened, while the angels wept, waiting to be comforted. That comfort came first with Enoch and then with Elijah, who were taken by God and did not experience death, thus prefiguring the ascension of Christ. Subsequently, humanity was perfectly comforted by the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, who completely removed the curse associated with the exodus from Paradise and was the first to enter the heavens.24 For Narsai and his followers, the history of salvation was not related to restoring the initial perfection of the first humans in the Garden of Eden but rather to gradual perfection through learning. Thus, educational wisdom represents the most important theological and anthropological principle in subsequent readings of the Paradise narrative among East Syriac Christians.25 Jacob of Serugh (c. 451–521) The School of Edessa was also the place of the theological and spiritual formation of Narsai’s younger contemporary, Jacob of Serugh, who lived in what Sidney Griffith termed ‘theologically exciting times’.26 The decrees of Chalcedon were pronounced in the year in which Jacob of Serugh was probably born. As a mature man and ordained cleric, and probably iḥidāyā – ‘the solitary one’ and a ‘son of the covenant’ in the style of Syriac monasticism – Jacob witnessed the divisions that struck Syriac-speaking Christians. He was about thirty-eight years old when the supporters of the theology of Theodore of Mopsuestia, led by Narsai, established the School of the Persians in 489 in the Sasanian city of Nisibis.27 Jacob took on the task of searching for Christ in the scriptures – for he who was for him ‘more frequent and openly present’.28 In his approach to the biblical text, Jacob is more at home with what Brock defined as the ‘Semitic pole’, using typological exegesis and refusing to express the mysteries of faith in narrow dogmatic pronouncements.29 In Jacob’s vast theological treatises, the doctrine of creation has a pivotal place, and he is credited for introducing the hexaemeral genre into the Syriac tradition. Before him, around 370, Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–379) was the first to produce a series of homilies on creation, initiating this genre in patristic literature. Jacob of Serugh does not mention Basil’s work in his writings and, contrary to the great Cappadocian, does not, in his Hexaemeron, engage himself extensively with Greek philosophical ideas. Unlike Narsai, who followed Theodore and his interpretation of Genesis 1, Jacob followed Ephrem and his emphasis on God’s mercy towards humans in Paradise. God’s economy of salvation is an oft-repeated theme in Jacob’s work, and he detects God’s mercy at all levels of the divine economy – in the creation of the world, in the Incarnation (where God’s divine

See Frishman, ‘Themes on Genesis 1–5’, 177. See Van Rompay, ‘Humanity’s Sin in Paradise’, 213. 26 Sidney H. Griffith, ‘Mar Jacob of Serugh on Monks and Monasticism: Reading in His Metrical Homilies “On the Singles”’, in Jacob of Serugh and His Times, Studies in Six-Century Syriac Christianity, ed. George A. Kiraz (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2010), 71. 27 See Griffith, ‘Mar Jacob of Serugh on Monks and Monasticism’, 71–4. 28 Van Rompay, ‘The Christian Syriac Tradition of Interpretation’, 638. 29 See Brock, ‘From Antagonism to Assimilation’, 17–34; Brock, ‘The Two Poles of Syriac Tradition’, 59. 24 25

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mercy is fully revealed), and in the resurrection. For Jacob, creation and the Incarnation are soteriological acts essentially related to each other, where creation, as the first kenotic act of God, foreshadowed God’s future Incarnation and the coming of Christ, who is the true Son of creation. According to Jacob of Serugh, before creation proper, God created the elements from which the universe would be created (Hex. I, 365–68).30 From these elements, the universe was designed – the great abyss, the not-yet formed earth, and the darkness; and the wind blew over the darkness (Hex. I, 427–30).31 Describing God’s activities during the second day of creation, Jacob, identifying a distinction between the verbs brʾ – to create (Gen. 1.1) and ʿbd – to make (Gen. 1.7), concludes that God ‘when he was creating the heaven and the earth, He was a Creator, and when he was forming creatures one by one, He was a Workman’ (Hex. II, 15–16):32 ‘For He is a Maker when He makes something out of something else, but a Creator when He creates things out of nothing’ (Hex. II, 25–26).33 Behind this distinction stands the idea that the first day of creation is separated from the other days since, in the beginning, God ex nihilo created the primordial material and the elements that he later used in his creative activity. This first day represents yet another level of God’s kenosis, which led to the following one, the creation of humans (Hex. VI, 247–48).34 At that moment, God revealed the future kenotic act of the Son of God who would humble himself to save fallen humanity. Thus, in Jacob’s typological ‘suprahistorical’ mode of thinking, every kenotic act of God before God’s Incarnation foreshadows the Incarnation of the Lord.35 In the vision of Jacob of Serugh, the entire universe is created for the sake of humans; it is designed as their home. The creation of Adam and Eve in the image of God represents the climax of all the beautiful things created in the universe (Hex. VI, 213–29).36 The first humans were created in the image of the Father and the likeness of the Son, and through humans, the mystery of God is revealed (Hex. VI, 315–16).37 The first humans also represent a microcosm of the universe. First, they are created from the same elements as the universe – soil, water, fire, and air (Hex. VI, 327–29).38 Second, the physical composition of humans, in their beauty and perfection, reflects the created universe. Third, the gigantic body of the universe was completed with the creation of Adam, who represents the soul of the universe.39 Finally, the creation of Eve, and the abundance of blessings bestowed on the first couple, produced jealousy in ‘the captain who guards the air’, who then incites these

Jacob of Serugh, Jacob of Serugh’s Hexaemeron, trans. and ed. Takamitsu Muraoka (Leuven: Peeters, 2018), 37. Jacob of Serugh, Jacob of Serugh’s Hexaemeron, 41. 32 Jacob of Serugh, Jacob of Serugh’s Hexaemeron, 50. 33 Jacob of Serugh, Jacob of Serugh’s Hexaemeron, 51. 34 Jacob of Serugh, Jacob of Serugh’s Hexaemeron, 169. 35 See Sebastian P. Brock, ‘Baptismal Themes in the Writings of Jacob of Serugh’, in Symposium Syriacum 1976, célébré du 13 au 17 Septembre 1976 au Centre Culturel ‘Les Fontaines’ de Chantilly, ed. Centre culturel des Fontaines, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 205 (Roma: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1978), 325–47. 36 Jacob of Serugh, Jacob of Serugh’s Hexaemeron, 167. 37 Jacob of Serugh, Jacob of Serugh’s Hexaemeron, 173. 38 Jacob of Serugh, Jacob of Serugh’s Hexaemeron, 175. 39 See Thomas Kollamparampil, Salvation in Christ According to Jacob of Serugh: An Exegetico-Theological Study on the Homilies of Jacob of Serugh on the Feast of Our Lord (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2010), 261. 30 31

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first humans to rebel against their creator. Thus, the sixth day of creation represents at the same time the fall of Satan and his angelic hosts (Hex. VI, 581–622).40 In his Hexaemeron, Jacob introduced themes further elaborated in his hymns.41 In these writings, he explores the idea of a second creation that represents the completion of the first one. The moment of the new creation began when the Holy Spirit entered Mary through her ear. Here, he proposes, the Virgin Mary represents a second heaven where the Annunciation concluded the old creation and initiated a new one. For Jacob, the Annunciation parallels the garden narrative, but instead of the virgin Eve, there is the virgin Mary, and instead of Satan talking through a snake, there is a Watcher, the archangel Gabriel (Homily I, 627).42

The later East-Syrian exegetical tradition Starting with the sixth century, the East-Syrian exegetical tradition favoured the question– answers genre of biblical exegesis. The earliest surviving example of this genre is the Book of Scholion, written by Theodore bar Koni (fl. late eighth century).43 This period was also characterized by the extensive exegetical activity of bar Koni’s younger contemporaries, Ishoʿ bar Nun (d. 828), and Ishō’dadh of Merv (fl. c. 850), who also produced their own commentaries on the scriptures, utilizing the same genre. These extensive compilations share the same characteristic: they assemble the previous exegetical traditions, relying heavily on the ideas of Theodore of Mopsuestia, adding little new or original material. Among the Eastern Syrians, Theodore of Mopsuestia is known as the Interpreter, and a large part of the exegetical effort among Eastern Syrians in the eighth and ninth centuries involved simplifying his ideas. In a sense, this was the period when his influence began to wane. The Selected Questions of Ishoʿ bar Nun on the Pentateuch, probably written for theology students, serves as an example of how the doctrine of creation cultivated among the Eastern Syriac biblical interpreters used the Genesis narrative to promote a spiritual vision, a theoria of God’s creative activity. At the same time, it demonstrates how the theological ideas of Theodore of Mopsuestia were adopted by writers belonging to the Eastern Syriac tradition. Using terminology corresponding to the exegetical tradition of the School of Antioch (and here, the concept of theoria [contemplation] is used in a way the Antiochene school of exegesis would call allegory), bar Nun assumes that the act of God’s creation serves as a typus and reveals the deeper truths about human and angelic natures, the purpose of this world, and its

Jacob of Serugh, Jacob of Serugh’s Hexaemeron, 185–95. See Sebastian P. Brock, ‘Homily “On the Three Baptisms”’, in Early Christian Baptism and the Catechumenate: West and East Syria, ed. Thomas M. Finn (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1992), 189–97; Sebastian P. Brock, ‘The Mysteries Hidden in the Side of Christ’, Sobornost 7, no. 6 (1978): 462–72; Jacob of Serugh, On the Mother of God, trans. Mary Hansbury (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998). 42 Jacob of Serugh, On the Mother of God, 29. 43 See Ernest G. Clark, The Selected Questions of Ishō bar Nūn on the Pentateuch, edited and translated from MS Cambridge Add. 2017, With a Study of the Relationship of Ishō’dadh of Merv, Theodore bar Kon̄ ī and Ishō bar Nūn on Genesis (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1962), 10–13; Bas ter Haar Romeny, ‘Question-and-Answer Collections in Syriac Literature’, in Erotapokriseis: Early Christian Question-and-Answer Literature in Context, ed. Annelie Volgers and Claudio Zamagni (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 154–60. 40 41

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final goal.44 For example, in the first question of his commentary, he asks: ‘Why did creation begin when darkness, which causes the night, and thereafter light, which causes the day, came into existence?’ And, building his argument on Theodore of Mopsuestia’s concept of two states, or catastasis, he answers: ‘In the first place, because in the night which serves the darkness, there is contained a theoria of this world in which mortality rules over us, while in the day, the time of light’s service, there is a theoria of the world to come in which we shall be immortal’ (Ishoʿ bar Nun, Selected Questions I).45

The later West Syrian exegetical tradition Jacob of Edessa (c. 640–708) In the early days of Islam, Jacob of Edessa represented one of the most important figures of Western Syriac Christianity, and his enormous oeuvre was used as a source for the development of Miaphysite theology. Jacob of Edessa was a polymath, active in the fields of historiography, canon law, text and interpretation of the Bible, language and translation, liturgy, Christian doctrine, philosophy, and the sciences.46 He produced his own Syriac version of the Old Testament, combining the Peshitta and Greek textual traditions of the biblical text. Jacob of Edessa wrote the Hexaemeron at the end of his life, and it was his friend George, Bishop of Arabs (d. 724), who completed the last part of the work after Jacob’s death in 708.47 This work represents the final expression of his vast learning, and his love of the wisdom of the Greeks is evident in his doctrine of creation, where he combines Christian and classical sources. Jacob of Edessa appears as a harmonizer trying to reconcile the biblical narrative with the scientific knowledge of the Greek thinkers.48 The cosmological system of Jacob represents the development of ideas already evident in the Hexaemeron of Basil the Great, which he used as a model for his work.49 Among other sources, he also drew on Gregory of Nazianzus’ Carmina Arcana, John Philoponus’ De Opificio Mundi, and Pseudo-Dionysius’ Celestial Hierarchies.50 The scientific part of Jacob’s Hexaemeron is based on the Aristotelian theory of the four elements, according to which earth, water, air, and fire are arranged in spheres according to their weight and give structure to the entire universe. This theory stands at the very centre of Jacob’s cosmology, and it helps him to use the science of his time to explain the position of the firmament and the upper waters mentioned in the biblical account of the creation and to prove

See Romeny, ‘Question-and-Answer Collections in Syriac Literature’, 158; cf. Clark, The Selected Questions of Ishō bar Nūn on the Pentateuch, 54n1. 45 Clark, The Selected Questions of Ishō bar Nūn on the Pentateuch, 19. 46 See Bas ter Haar Romeny, ed., Jacob of Edessa and the Syriac Culture of His Day (Leiden: Brill, 2008), vi. 47 See Alison Salvesen, ‘The Authorial Spirit?: Biblical Citations in Jacob of Edessa’s Hexaemeron’, Aramaic Studies 6, no. 2 (2008): 207–11. 48 See Alison Salvesen, ‘Jacob of Edessa’s Life and Work: A Biographical Sketch’, in Jacob of Edessa and the Syriac Culture of His Day, ed. Bas ter Haar Romeny (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 4. 49 See Marina Wilks, ‘Jacob of Edessa’s use of Greek Philosophy in His Hexaemeron’, in Jacob of Edessa and the Syriac Culture of His Day, ed. Bas ter Haar Romeny (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 224. 50 See Salvesen, ‘Jacob of Edessa’s Life and Work’, 224, 228–9. 44

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at the same time that Moses and the Greeks are in harmony.51 Aristotelian theory further helps him to explain the nature of angels and humans, using the symbolism of the luminaries and their elemental composition. Thus, the sun, which is simple, pure, the great luminary, elevated, life-giving and illuminating, corresponds to God, and the stars correspond to the angels. In contrast, the moon, which is a compound of earth, corresponds to human nature. It faces God as its prototype and receives enlightenment. For him, the moon, as the lowest luminary, symbolically represents humans and is composed of the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. In the composite nature of humanity, fire, as the noblest element, stands for the human soul or mind and represents the God-like part of human nature, while the earth parallels its lowest parts. At the same time, espousing the theories of Plato and Ptolemy, Jacob places earth in the centre of the universe, positioning the sun at its most remote corner. As he perceives it, this system helps him refute astrologers’ assumptions. According to Jacob’s system, the stars are placed at a point lower than the sun (which stands for God), and therefore they cannot exhibit any influence on the lives of humans. It is the sun, that is God, that moves and controls the universe and all its inhabitants. God stands at the beginning of creation and sustains it. With this final remark, Jacob of Edessa can be likened to Ephrem and his refutations of Bardaiṣan, or to Jacob of Serugh’s interest in refuting the assumptions of the astrologers and magicians who assumed that the zodiac possesses a force of its own, capable of influencing human life. Bar Hebraeus (1225/26–86) In the history of Syriac Christianity, the period between the eighth and thirteenth centuries is described as a period of consolidation. The biblical commentaries produced during this period are detailed and complex, intending to assemble and preserve previous traditions. Among the Western Syrians, the peak of this period is reached in the encyclopaedic opus of Bar Hebraeus, who is also described as the most important representative of the period of Syriac literature known as the Syriac Renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.52 Storehouse of Mysteries is Bar Hebraeus’ most important work wherein he gives a critical, mostly philological, commentary on the scriptures that is overloaded with critical references to different textual traditions and recensions of the biblical text.53 Although a prelate of the Syrian Orthodox Church, in his writings Bar Hebraeus was open towards the influence of Arabo-Persian Islamic sources and other Christian denominations. In his study of the biblical narrative of creation, he quotes Basil’s Hexaemeron, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Ephrem the Syrian, Jacob of Serugh, Jacob of Edessa, Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, Athanasius of Alexandria, Cyril of Alexandria, Severus, Philoxenus, and pagans (secular scientists). Essentially, there is little originality in Bar Hebraeus’ exploration of the Syriac doctrine of creation. Instead, his writings are a compilation and attempt to revive Syriac theology by reflecting on his time’s most prominent scholarly sources.

See Wilks, ‘Jacob of Edessa’s use of Greek Philosophy in His Hexaemeron’, 223. See Jonathan Loopstra, ‘The Syriac Bible and its Interpretation’, in The Syriac World, ed. Daniel King (New York: Routledge, 2018), 301; Hidemi Takahashi, ‘Barhebraeus’, in The Encyclopedia of Islam, 3rd edn, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 40. 53 See Sprengling and Graham, Barhebraeus’ Scholia on the Old Testament. 51 52

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Conclusion Speculations about creation in Syriac Christian literature are strongly influenced by the language and theology of the Syriac Bible and share common elements with Greek Christian texts. Syriac hexaemeral literature is, for the most part, polemical, refuting ideas ranging from astral determinism to Gnostic dualisms. It strongly emphasizes that humans are created in God’s image and that a strong bond exists between them and the created world. Nature is portrayed as a great pedagógus (teacher) and a mirror of the human condition, something that resonates strongly with modern ecological sensibilities. At the same time, the Syriac biblical creation narrative is perceived as a figura, an allegoria, or typus, and is interpreted in the light of the Incarnation. For biblical exegetes of the twenty-first century navigating between Scylla’s liberal criticism and Charybdis’ fundamentalist reading of the biblical text, the poetic and figurative approach to the biblical creation narrative, as found particularly among Syriac writers, might offer an appealing alternative.

Further reading Anderson, Gary A. ‘The Cosmic Mountain: Eden and Its Early Interpreters in Syriac Christianity’. In Genesis 1–3 in the History of Exegesis: Intrigue in the Garden, edited by Gregory A. Robbins, 187–224. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988. Beggiani, Seely J. Early Syriac Theology: With Special Reference to the Maronite Tradition. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014. Jansma, Taeke. ‘Investigations into the Early Syrian Fathers on Genesis: An Approach to the Exegesis of the Nestorian Church and to the Comparison of Nestorian and Jewish Exegesis’. Oudtestamentische Studiën 12 (1958): 69–181. Kronholm, Tryggve. Motifs from Genesis 1–11 in the Genuine Hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, with Particular Reference to the Influence of Jewish Exegetical Traditions. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1978. Napel, Erik Ten. ‘Some Remarks on the Hexaemeral Literature in Syriac’. In IV Symposium Syriacum, 1984: Literary Genres in Syriac Literature (Groningen – Oosterhesselen 10–12 September), edited by Hendrik J. W. Drijvers, René Lavenant, Corrie Molenberg, and Gerrit J. Reinink, 57–69. Roma: Pontificium Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1987.

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CHAPTER 13 ON THE SIX DAYS OF CREATION THE HEXÆMERAL TRADITION Giles Gasper

If sometimes on a bright night, whilst gazing with watchful eyes on the inexpressible beauty of the stars, you have thought of the Creator of all things; if you have asked yourself who it is that has dotted the heaven with such flowers, and why visible things are even more useful than beautiful; if sometimes in the day you have studied the marvels of light, if you have raised yourself by visible things to the invisible being, then you are a well prepared auditor, and you can take your place in this august and blessed amphitheatre.1 In this way, Basil the Great (330–79) opened his sixth homily on the hexaemeron, the six days of creation of Genesis 1, and specifically the discourse on the luminaries: sun, moon, and stars. Composed, probably in the final year of Basil’s life (377/78), the Hexaemeron homilies were to become one of the most influential examples of an exegetical genre that inspired continued interest from the early church to the early modern period.2 Basil’s invitation to his auditors asked for their active engagement in the process and stood as a reminder of the centrality of scripture to the daily life of the Christian and of the relatively straightforward tenor of his discourse. In the course, Basil both uses and decries non-Christian thinkers, that is, the inheritance of ancient Greek teaching or paideia. This tension over the use of ‘pagan’ authorities and the need to assert the truth-claims of Christian thinking and its authoritative sources (scripture and revelation) is a particular instantiation of wider transformations of learning that shaped Christian teaching. The challenges of how to reconcile, or to assimilate, and to use non-Christian authorities in the fourth century have thought-provoking analogues to the experience of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin scholars, grappling with new translations of Aristotle (384–22 bce), Ptolemy (c. 100–c. 170 ce), and Islamicate thinkers. The hexaemeron is a particularly good example of this tension because of its subject matter. To think about creation is to engage with how the natural world is to be conceived, described, and understood. All authors writing in this genre consider, to a greater or a lesser extent, the implications of natural philosophy, as it might be termed most conveniently, or science with its modern English valence. The use of contemporary science as additional support for the work of exegesis is a prominent theme across patristic and medieval examples of the genre, so much so that the tendency to make the creation account in Genesis concordant with whatever scientific

St Basil the Great, 'Hexaemeron', in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series. Volume 8. St Basil: Letters and Select Works, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Edinburgh/Grand Rapids: T&T Clark/Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1983), 82 (6.1). Also Saint Basil, Exegetic Homilies, trans. Agnes C. Way (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1963), 84. 2 See Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caeserea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 360–3. 1

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orthodoxy happens to be at the time can be detected. Concordism is especially associated with commentators of the later nineteenth century and the pressures to make religious inspiration concordant with the fast-growing and threatening alternative of scientific observation. Stanley Jaki’s assertion that this theological danger is one into which most, if not all, commentators on Genesis have fallen deserves to be taken seriously.3 Whether, however, this is quite the most helpful way to interpret pre-modern thought is open to question. While at first glance, the high and later medieval attempt to accommodate the Aristotelian physics and cosmology (for instance, the four elements) into accounts of creation might appear similar to concordism, the conceptual framework is, in fact, the opposite. Interest in nature in this period is driven by, and fitted to, scripture. Nature, as divinely created, is inherently rational and patient of rational investigation; it is also encompassed completely, although mysteriously, in scripture. Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170–1253) states this succinctly in the first book of his Hexaemeron, compiled around 1235: Therefore, Scripture contains everything that nature contains, since after the creation of the world, there are no new natures or species to be added. It also contains the whole of the supernatural, that is to say, our restoration and future glorification. It also contains the whole of morality and the whole of rational knowledge. This is because the archetypal world is the reason, the art, the rule, and the rational knowledge of every single thing. In it is every single cause of existence, every reason of understanding and every ordering of life. . . . And while anything valuable which is taught elsewhere can be found in Scripture, in yet more abundance are found things that are never taught anywhere else, but which are learned from Scripture along, in marvellous sublimity and marvellous lowliness.4 In different ways, then, the connexions between creation exegesis and what contemporaries held as the authoritative matrix for knowledge of natural phenomena, in whatever period, are intriguing. In what follows, a long arc will be tracked across the development of the hexaemeral commentary from its earliest origins to the seventeenth century. This longer contextualization allows the insights of individual authors to be highlighted, both in terms of faithfulness to the tradition and also in their development of more radical directions of thought. For the most part, the present discussion will trace the hexaemeron within the early church, in Greek and Latin traditions, and the world of medieval Latin Christendom. Nevertheless, the wider appeal of the genre should not be overlooked. The earliest surviving manuscripts of Basil’s Hexaemeron are from a translation into Syriac, and later translations into Georgian and Old Church Slavonic speak to and track a diverse and widely chronologically spaced interest in the text.5

See Stanley L. Jaki, Genesis 1 Through the Ages (London: Thomas More Press, 1992); Andrew J. Brown, The Days of Creation: A History of Christian Interpretation of Genesis 1:1–2:3–4 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 254–77. 4 Robert Grosseteste, Hexaemeron, ed. Richard C. Dales and Servus Gieben (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1.IV.1. English translation from Robert Grosseteste, On the Six Days of Creation: A Translation of the Hexaëmeron, trans. Christopher F. J. Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 5 See Basil of Caeserea, The Syriac Version of the Hexaemeron by Basil of Caeserea, trans. and ed. Robert W. Thomson (Louvain: Aedibus Peeters, 1995); Robert W. Thomson, Saint Basil of Caesarea and Armenian Cosmology: A Study of the Armenian Version of Saint Basil’s Hexaemeron and its Influence on Medieval Armenian Views about the Cosmos 3

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For similar reasons, to illustrate continuities and differences, a principal thematic arc focusing especially on the place of light and its treatment within the tradition will also be pursued. Within the Genesis creation narrative, light has a central part to play. It is integral to the claim that God alone creates and is without peer, asserts the law, and that the world reflects its creator and that humanity forms the apex of creation. The appearance of light before the creation of the luminaries marks another individual accent. As Luis Stadelmann explains: [I]t is clear that light, created prior to and independent of the heavenly luminaries, serves a further purpose: light manifests most adequately the divine operation in a world which, without it, is darkness and chaos. Probably this was the reason why the biblical author preferred this idea to the very familiar expression among the peoples of the ancient Near East that the deities were clothed in star-strewn robes.6 Again, in contrast to the astrological religions of Babylon and Sumeria, the sun, moon, and stars in Genesis are created rather than deities. The interpretation of the distinction between first created light and the luminaries provoked much debate among Christian commentators, not least in its implications for another question that dominates the hexaemeron, namely, the notion of ‘days’ and how these are to be understood.

Commentary on the six days of creation, Genesis, and creation The first Genesis creation story was in no respect the singular locus for medieval creation theology, but it does hold a position of structural integrity as the principal biblical account of creation from nothing, ex nihilo. This importance is reflected in the evolution of the hexaemeron, a commentary confined to the six days.7 The hexaemeral commentary emerged, however, from broader thinking about Genesis and about creation more generally. In identifying the hexaemeron and tracing its development, three distinctions need to be borne in mind: a commentary on the six days is a deliberate authorial choice; commentary on Genesis as a whole or in part naturally involves interpretation of the six days; thinking about creation and its cardinal importance to theological understanding naturally involves the same.

(Leuven: Peeters, 2012); Lara Sels, ‘Manuscripts and Margins: The Case of the Late Mediaeval Slavonic Hexaemeron Collection or Šestodnevnik and Its Greek Source Text’, in Caught in Translation: Studies on Versions of Late-Antique Christian Literature, ed. Madalina Toca and Dan Batovici (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 160–79. 6 Lius I. J. Stadelmann, The Hebrew Conception of the World: A Philological and Literary Survey (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1970), 49. Light is far more dominant in Genesis than, for example, in the Babylonian creation stories. Marduk is described in Enûma Eliš Tablet 1 as: ‘The Son, the Sun-god of the gods’. / He was clothed with the aura of the Ten Gods, so exalted was his strength, / The Fifty Dreads were loaded upon him’ (ll.103–4). Wilfred G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (Winona Lake/University Park: Eisenbrauns/The Penn State University Press, 2013), 57. Nothing of this approaches the conception of light in Genesis, nor its poetic, hymnal, and resonant quality. For wider-ranging comparisons and commonalties in genre across ancient Greece and Mesopotamia, see Johannes Haubold, Greece and Mesopotamia: Dialogues in Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 7 The classic, still influential, and to date the only dedicated general account of the hexaemeron is Frank E. Robbins, The Hexaemeral Literature: A Study of the Greek and Latin Commentaries on Genesis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1912). For a more general recent survey, see Brown, The Days of Creation.

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Interpretation of the hexaemeron has to consider the wider penumbra of hexaemeral writing, as well as the particularities of those works distinguished as commentaries on the six days alone. The overlapping nature of these categories is evident in the origins of the hexaemeron. While it is possible to look to the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Colossians as the beginning of Christian reflection on creation, and the work of the Word in particular, and while the first hexaemeron proper is that of Basil the Great, the word emerges first in On the Creation of the World by the Jewish author Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 bce–c. 50 ce). It was also used by Theophilus of Antioch (d. c. 183) in an exposition of Genesis, with criticism of non-Christian philosophy, in the second part of To Autolycus, written in the late second century.8 Basil’s genre-defining work was translated into Latin at the end of the fourth century by Eustathius (c. 1115–95/6), which alongside Ambrose of Milan’s (c. 340–97) Exameron, a work closely, though not blindly, based on Basil’s, proved the foundation for later commentary in the Latin tradition.9 In medieval Latin Christendom, exponents of the hexaemeron proper – a self-designated work on the six days of creation – include Latin and vernacular versions from Aelfric (c. 955–c. 1010), Abbot of Eynsham’s Old English contribution, to those in Latin by Peter Abelard (c. 1079–1142), Thierry of Chartres (d. c. 1150), and Grosseteste, among many others, often with noticeable inspiration from, and respect for, Basil and Ambrose’s models. However, commentary on the creation story was often part of broader enterprises; sometimes, exegesis of the whole of Genesis. Works of this compass look past the first creation narrative. They include the second, simpler, creation narrative (Gen. 2.4-25), paradise and the events leading to the fall of humanity, and then the promises made to the patriarchs, the fulfilment of which is played out in the rest of the Torah and other Old Testament books. Different authors took different approaches. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 395) supplemented his brother Basil’s Hexaemeron Homilies in a treatment of the creation of human beings, which enjoyed significant circulation in its Latin translation by Dionysius Exiguus (c. 470–c. 544) in the sixth century.10 Ambrose provided a discrete discussion of the six days, the expulsion from paradise, and Cain and Abel. Augustine (354–430) found in Genesis 1–3 an area of repeated inspiration, with at least five major discussions of the creation narrative. Three of these are in contexts explicitly connected to Genesis, with two broader treatments in Confessions and On

Paul was executed probably in the early 60s. See John M. G. Barclay, Paul: A Very Brief History (London: SPCK, 2017), 8–12. On Colossians and creation, see N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (London: T&T Clark, 1991), 100–13. On the early emergence of the hexaemeron and semantic issues, see Robbins, The Hexaemeral Literature, 1n2, 27, 36–7. On Philo, see Jennifer Otto, Philo of Alexandria and the Construction of Jewishness in Early Christian Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). On Theophilus, see Kathleen E. McVey, ‘The Use of Stoic Cosmogony in Theophilus of Antioch’s Hexaemeron’, in Biblical Hermeneutics in Historical Perspective: Studies in Honor of Karlfried Froehlich on His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Mark S. Burrows and Paul Rorem (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991), 32–58. 9 See Emmanuel A. de Mendieta and Stig Y. Rudberg, eds, Eustathius: Ancienne version latine des neuf homélies sur l’Hexaéméron de Basile de Césarée (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1958); Sever J. Voicu, ‘Latin Translations of Greek Homilies’, in Preaching in the Patristic Era, ed. Anthony Dupont, Shari Boodts, Gert Partoens, and Johan Leemans (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 294–326. 10 See Helen B. Wicher, ‘Gregorius Nyssenus’, in Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, ed. F. Edward Cranz and Paul O. Kristeller (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1984), 5:119–34. 8

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the City of God.11 Although not in the form of a hexaemeron, these expositions would exercise considerable influence over the medieval evolution of the genre. As Augustine’s experience shows, the implications of Genesis creation theology were explored far beyond formal exegesis. His treatment of creation in Confessions might be compared to John of Damascus’ (c. 675–749) discussion in the third part of his Fount of Knowledge, On the Orthodox Faith, popular in two Latin translations made in the twelfth century by Burgundio of Pisa (c. 1110–93) and in the thirteenth by Grosseteste.12 John considers, in a more systematic form, the different aspects of creation and the importance that it be ex nihilo, and he addresses angels, the heavens, light, the luminaries, elements, the earth and its progeny, paradise, and humanity. John’s mode and purpose have analogues with the twelfth-century Sentences of Peter Lombard (c. 1100–60), and indeed the division of the Latin translation of On the Orthodox Faith into four books may have been made to correspond with that of the Sentences.13 Creation is covered in Book Two in both works, neither of which involves a hexaemeron per se; Lombard frames his discussion by days but by way of questions, resolvable or not, that emerge from consideration of the biblical text. A further example of a discussion of the six days within a comprehensive investigation of creation is the Periphyseon of John Scottus Eriugena (c. 800–c. 877). Here, the six days feature in Book Three, in a Neoplatonic interpretation that draws heavily on PseudoDionysius (fl. 500) and Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662), allowing Eriugena to adopt radically the notion of instantaneous creation.14 Hexaemeron can also be extended to cover a wider range of other discussions of the subject. As Robert Crouse observed: [T]he rich tradition of hexaemeral literature, which forms the context of medieval interpretations of the creation narrative of Genesis, is not readily amenable to summary presentation. The range of interests embraced by such a literature is so broad, the quantity of it so vast, and the theological significance of it so decisive, that an adequate account of its history would constitute a history of Christian thought and culture.15 At wider reaches, engagement with the Genesis stories of creation, especially in the Latin Middle Ages, could include world chronicles and encyclopaedic texts in Latin and, as the period went

See Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos, ed. Dorothea Weber (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1998); Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim; eiusdem libri capitula. De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber. Locutionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, ed. Joseph Zycha (Vienna: Bibliopola Academiae Litterarum Caesareae, 1894); Augustine, Confessiones, ed. Luc Verheijen (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981); Augustine, De civitate Dei, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alfons Kalb (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955). 12 See John of Damascus, Expositio fidei, ed. Bonifatius Kotter (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973); John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa: Versions of Burgundio and Cerbanus, ed. Eloi M. Buytaert (New York: The Franciscan Institute, 1955). There is no critical edition of the Grosseteste translation. 13 See Andrew Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Philipp W. Rosemann, Peter Lombard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, ed. Ignatius Brady, 2 vols (Grottaferrata: Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1971–81). 14 See Johannes Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon, ed. Édouard Jeauneau (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999); Bernard McGinn, ‘The Periphyseon as Hexaemeral Commentary’, in A Companion to John Scottus Eriugena, ed. Adrian Guiu (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 154–88. 15 Robert D. Crouse, ‘Intentio Moysi: Bede, Augustine, Eriugena and Plato in the Hexaemeron of Honorius Augustodunensis’, Dionysius 2 (1978): 137. 11

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on, in the vernacular. Creation scenes feature widely in sculptural schemes on the entrance tympani to churches, great and small, and in mosaic and painted sequences within. A rich tradition of literature was complemented by an equally rich tradition of visual imagery. Within the arena of the text, the range of reference for the hexaemeron extends from the retelling of Genesis in Old English to shorter treatments in monastic sermons, for example, that by the twelfth-century Cistercian monk, Ailred of Rievaulx (1110–67), or the much longer collations of Bonaventure (1221–74) of a hundred years or so later.16 Similar themes are also identified in allegorical literature of nature and creation; for example, the high medieval combinations of prose and poetry – prosimetra – of Bernard Sylvester (c. 1085–1178), the Cosmographia, or Alan of Lille’s The Plaint of Nature.17 Wider definitions of the genre would include the dramatic and liturgical. While the twelfth-century play Le Jeu d’Adam, a product of a church setting and largely in Old French, does not address creation, the York mystery play cycles do.18 Well into the seventeenth century, John Milton’s (1608–74) Paradise Lost might, in some respects, carry some claim to be the last heir of the patristic and medieval tradition of the hexaemeron. Light from the Fathers Patristic interpretations of Genesis cast a long shadow over the medieval centuries. Taking the warning from Crouse against attempts to summarize, what will be traced below are some of the more striking structural aspects of the hexaemeron, with particular attention to light. Philo of Alexandria’s positions provided recurring themes for the later tradition. He described creation as first of ‘an incorporeal heaven and an invisible earth’.19 The incorporeal light which came into being ‘was the intelligible model of the sun’; the invisible light the ‘all brightness’. This schema follows an important sequence from Genesis, discussing corporeal, physical creation second to intelligible creation. In noting that light proceeded to make its rival darkness withdraw and that God separated them lest confusion result, Philo distinguishes between God and his Logos and the intelligible light created here.20 Created on the fourth day, physical light was the most excellent of all created things and that which inspired, through sight, human intellectual interest and pursuit. The emphasis on two levels of creation, an intelligible and a corporeal, is striking in Philo, as is the connexion of light with human intellectual activity. Different emphases emerge in Origen (c. 185–c. 253) in his homilies on Genesis as translated by Rufinus of Aquileia (c. 344–411) in the late fourth and early fifth centuries in an attempt to defend Origen’s orthodoxy; Origen’s preference was for allegorical interpretation.21 His

See Daniel Anlezark, trans. and ed., Old Testament Narratives (London: Harvard University Press, 2011); Ailred of Rievaulx, ‘Sermon 41’, in Sermones I–XLVI, ed. Gaetano Raciti (Turnhout: Brepols, 1989), 324–30; Bonaventure, ‘Hexaemeron’, in Opera omnia (Quaracchi: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1891), 5:327–454. 17 See Bernardus Silvestris, Poetic Works, trans. and ed. Winthrop Wetherbee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Nikolaus M. Häring, ‘Allan of Lille, De planctu naturae’, Studi Medievali 19 (1978): 806–79. 18 See Christophe Chaguinian, trans. and ed., Le Jeu d’Adam (Orléans: Paradigme, 2014); Christophe Chaguinian, ed., The Jeu d’Adam: MS Tours 927 and the Provenance of the Play (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 2017); Richard Beadle, ed., The York Plays, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 2013). 19 See Philo, On the Creation of the Cosmos According to Moses, trans. David T. Runia (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 53. 20 See Philo, On the Creation of the Cosmos, 53–4. 21 On the different modes of biblical exegesis, see Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, les quatre sens de l’écriture, 4 vols (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64). 16

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commentary on light focused not on the first creation of light but on the luminaries of day four. The division of night and day was illustrative of the light made available to humankind in Christ; as the moon receives the light of the sun, so the church from the light of Christ. And, as the moon illuminates the night, so does the church illuminate those who live in the darkness of ignorance, though individual enlightenment is not uniform, just as there are greater and lesser lights.22 These are, again, themes that would endure. Origen’s works were influential, particularly on the Cappadocians, and in medieval Christendom, especially from the twelfth century onwards.23 Basil’s Hexaemeron homilies gave form and shape to the commentary on the six days. Expanding on Origin’s work, Basil insisted on the capacity of the wonders and mysteries of creation to reveal the creator. To this end, the sections on the creation of plants, aquatic and avian creatures, and those that walk on dry land are compendia of botanic, geographic, and zoological information. Thematic treatment of light includes emphasis on darkness, light, and the heresy of the Manichees that made the former an evil power; the heavenly light in which the angels existed was not to be identified with the created light of Gen. 1.3, but rather with the cause of darkness. The shadow of the lucent heaven, its light inaccessible and unrevealed, is the world’s darkness.24 On the relationship between the first light and that of the luminaires, Basil encounters a problem he bequeathed to his successors. How, he asked, would night and day be accounted for without the sun and moon? The solution was a continual movement of the first light by God’s command.25 When the luminaries appear, Basil reiterates that they are only vehicles for the first light and that the moon only reflects the sun’s light.26 A similar analogy to Origen is drawn between the sun’s light and the world’s true light. A theme characteristic of Basil’s consideration of light was its identification as a divine gift without which the beauty of the universe would remain unperceived.27 The physical properties of light are stressed here, the fineness of its essence and its capacity to spread itself instantaneously, lighting up the universe in a single moment.28 This was an interpretation adopted in both Greek and Latin contexts. John of Damascus followed Basil in this respect, speaking of the creation of light by God as ‘to adorn and enhance all visible creation. For, remove light and everything will be indistinguishable and incapable of displaying its inherent comeliness’.29 Ambrose of Milan expressed himself similarly, stressing, in addition, the usefulness of light.30 Both Ambrose and Basil focus their interpretations of light on the material world, and it is the world of creation that acts as the prism for their theological observations. Augustine adopted a somewhat different approach in his various attempts to analyse the opening passages of Genesis. As noted earlier, Augustine wrestled with the problems it threw up in five works

See Origen, Homiliae in Genesim I, 2.5–7. See Jean Leclercq, ‘Origène au XIIe siècle’, Irénikon 24 (1951): 425–39; De Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, 1:221–30. 24 See St Basil the Great, ‘Hexaemeron’, 58–9, 61–2 (2.1, 2.5). 25 St Basil the Great, ‘Hexaemeron’, 64–5 (2.8). 26 St Basil the Great, ‘Hexaemeron’, 82–3 (6.2). 27 St Basil the Great, ‘Hexaemeron’, 63–4 (2.7). 28 St Basil the Great, ‘Hexaemeron’, 63–4 (2.7). 29 John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa, 2.7. 30 Ambrose, Six Days of Creation, 1.9. 22 23

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and across practically the whole span of his Christian career. Time, language, signs, and the processes of human understanding, are among the themes found in his study of Genesis. His concern about the interpretation of Genesis 1, especially by the Manichees, was magnified, presumably, by his own Manichean past. As Basil and Ambrose had pointed out in passing, the light and darkness in the biblical account were susceptible to a strongly Manichaean gloss. This Augustine confronted in far greater detail than did his predecessors. In dealing with the ‘darkness over the abyss’, Augustine fields the question as to whether God was in darkness before God made light. He does so by distinguishing between physical light and incorporeal light, tying in the opening of John’s Gospel in which Christ and the creative word of Genesis are identified as the same, the former described as the ‘light of the world’.31 Augustine was arguably more interested in spiritual creation and the realm of the invisible than he was in the physical creation focused on by Basil and Ambrose. Light for Augustine was more connected to the creation hidden from human eyes. In Confessions, addressing God, he states that ‘Let there be light’ can mean the spiritual creation since there already was a kind of light available for God to illuminate. This drew Augustine’s interest to angels. In his first and incomplete attempt at a literal interpretation, he dwelt, with an admission of confusion, on the notion that the first created light perhaps signifies angels.32 It was a topic he returned to with more certainty in later works. The City of God echoed discussion in his full literal commentary on Genesis, in its treatment of the first light. According to Augustine, this light was either material light or a symbol for the dwelling place of angels.33 Noting that angels are not mentioned in the creation narrative, he proceeds to state that there is an obvious conclusion.34 This was, namely, that ‘if the angels are among the works of God of those days, they are that light which received the name “day”’. When God said, ‘Let there be light’, the angels, if Augustine is right, ‘immediately became partakers of the eternal light, which is the unchanging Wisdom of God, the agent of God’s whole creation; and this Wisdom we call the only begotten Son of God’.35 Angels are illuminated by light, the Wisdom of God, and become light, not in themselves but in God. Augustine then sees the division of darkness and light as corresponding to the distinction between holy and fallen angels.36 These are themes that would be revisited many times in the Middle Ages.

Early medieval voices After Augustine, hexaemeral composition in the Latin world was continued to a limited extent by Gregory the Great and, in a more specific form, by Bede (c. 673–735), whose commentary on Genesis utilized Basil, Ambrose, and Augustine. Bede’s treatment, written either as early as 703–9 or as late as 717–18, highlighted some of the more problematic inheritances from

Augustine, On Genesis against the Manichaeans, 3.6. Augustine, On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis: An Unfinished Book, 5.21. 33 Augustine, The City of God, 11.7. 34 Augustine, The City of God, 11.9. 35 Augustine, The City of God, 11.9. 36 Augustine, The City of God, 11.19. 31 32

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the church fathers, notably in areas of divergent opinion.37 The nature and behaviour of the first light were such areas. Related to this, but at a more fundamental level, was the question of whether to exposit the six days of creation literally, as six days, or as a simultaneous act described sequentially. Augustine was most associated with the second interpretation, taking Gen. 2.4 as the controlling passage for the hexaemeron account: ‘These are the generations of the heaven and the earth, when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the heaven and the earth.’ Bede did not regard the passage similarly, holding that ‘day’ stood for the whole time creation was formed – the six days.38 Laying out differences in interpretation became an important element in medieval biblical commentary. This activity received more extensive and programmatic treatment during the period of Carolingian rule from the late eighth to the mid-ninth century.39 Genesis commentary was very much a part of this, although no specific commentaries on the Hexaemeron alone were produced. The interplay of sources can be seen, for example, in Alcuin’s (c. 735–804) greater reliance on Bede and in Wigbod’s (fl. 795) preference for Augustine.40 Alcuin was responsible, as Abbot of St Martin, Tours, for revising the text of the single-volume Vulgate Bible. The monastery continued to produce these pandects, including a number with illustrated sequences of the six days of creation, as represented by the Moutier-Grandval Bible (now British Library Add. MS 10546). Augustinian influence remained high in the compendious commentary by Rabanus Maurus (c. 780–856) in a second phase of exegetical activity from 810 onwards. Claudius of Turin (fl. 810–27), a near-contemporary, was the first Carolingian author to use Ambrose extensively.41 A final phase of Carolingian exegesis involved Genesis commentary from Angelomus of Luxeuil (d. c. 895) and Haimo of Auxerre (d. c. 865). In contrast to the predominantly Augustinian/Bedan strain, John Scottus Eriugena marked a very different approach, drawing distinctly on Greek patristic and Byzantine mystical theology. High and later medieval voices Hexaemeronic writing flourished particularly in the period of the High Middle Ages, from about 1000 to about 1300, as part of the general expansion of learning that characterized this period. Commentary on Genesis took many forms, forming part of one of the principal technologies for biblical learning, teaching, and preaching, the Glossa ordinaria, which drew on a rich array of sources, including the Carolingian exegetes from two centuries before.42 The importance of

On the dating arguments, see Bede, On Genesis, trans. Calvin B. Kendall (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 40–53. 38 Bede, In Genesim, Bedae Venerabilis Opera, Pars II Opera Exegetica, 1, Libri quatuor in principium Genesis (Turnhoult: Brepols, 1967), 1.2.4a–5b. 39 See Celia M. Chazelle and Burton Van Name Edwards, eds, The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003). 40 See Michael Fox, ‘Alcuin the Exegete: The Evidence of the Quaestiones in Genesim’, in The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era, ed. Celia M. Chazelle and Burton van Name Edwards (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 39–60; Michael Gorman, ‘Wigbod and Biblical Studies under Charlemagne’, Revue Bénédictine 107, nos. 1–2 (1997): 40–76. 41 See Michael Gorman, ‘The Commentary on Genesis of Claudius of Turin and Biblical Studies under Louis the Pious’, Speculum 72, no. 2 (1997): 279–329. 42 On Genesis and the gloss, see Alice H. Sharp, ‘In Principio: The Origins of the Glossa ordinaria on Genesis 1–3’ (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2015). 37

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the gloss, more or less standardized by the later twelfth century as one of the most common modes of encountering and mediating the Bible for the rest of the Middle Ages, should not be underestimated. The resurgent interests in the hexaemeron should be seen in this context and the broader context of changes it implied in the shifting patterns of biblical study and the emergence of theology as a separate area from biblical exegesis. These shifts were formed by, and in turn informed, the development of the medieval university, the dominant institution of higher learning from the thirteenth century onwards.43 Biblical study was not confined to the scholars of Paris, Oxford, Palencia, or Cambridge, but was more widely practised, including by the laity (although not, on occasion, without anxiety from clerical authorities). At one social extreme, lay engagement with biblical interpretation is shown in the Bibles Moralisées, Bible extracts with commentary and lavish illustration emphasizing morality, produced for royalty, a famous example being Codex Vindobonensis 2554 from 1220s Paris. At the other extreme are frescos and painted sequences in parish churches. The composition of the hexaemeron proper – texts devoted to the six days of creation specifically – was a particular feature of the high medieval period. Works in the genre include, in the later years of the tenth century, the Old English treatment by Aelfric of Eynsham, which draws on both Basil and Bede, and the discussion of Genesis 1 about a century later by Honorius Augustodinensis (c. 1080–c. 1140) whose identity remains uncertain, although with a probable association with Canterbury.44 Thierry of Chartres, Peter Abelard, and Grosseteste all wrote expositions of the Hexaemeron, and analysis of the six days is to be found in a wide variety of other texts, especially those such as Hugh of St Victor’s (d. c. 1140) On the Sacraments and Peter Lombard’s Sentences formative in the emergence of theology. A poetic version of the Hexaemeron was composed by the Danish scholar Anders Sunesen (c. 1167–1228), Archbishop of Lund, probably towards the end of the twelfth century.45 Interest arose from various impulses, including the general interest in biblical exegesis. The seriousness with which nature could be analysed and laid alongside biblical interpretation is another part of the story.46 This approach can be seen openly in On the Work of the Six Days by Thierry of Chartres, who married together, in the second quarter of the twelfth century, an interpretation of Genesis with that of the appearance of the elements, the activity of fire and heat central to the physical unfolding of creation.47 The activity of the Trinity is also described in Aristotelian terms – the efficient cause is the Father, the formal cause the Son, and the final cause the Holy Spirit, with matter as the material cause.48 For Peter Abelard, whose Expositio

See Giles E. M. Gasper, ‘Scripture and the Changing Culture of Theology in the High Middle Ages’, in Producing Christian Culture: Medieval Exegesis and Its Interpretative Genres, ed. Giles E. M. Gasper, Francis Watson, and Matthew R. Crawford (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 117–44. 44 See Michael A. E. Fox, ‘Augustinian Hexaemeral Exegesis in Anglo-Saxon England: Bede, Alcuin, Aelfric and Old English Biblical Verse’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1997); Wanda Cizewski, ‘Interpreting the Hexaemeron: Honorius Augustodinensis De Neocosmo’, Florilegium 7, no. 1 (1985): 84–108. 45 See Anders Sunesen, Hexameron, ed. Sten Ebbesen and Laurence B. Mortensen, 2 vols (Copenhagen: Hauniae, 1985–8). 46 See Marie-Dominique Chenu, La Théologie au douzième siècle (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1957), 19–51. 47 See Thierry of Chartres, ‘Tractus de sex dierum operibus’, in Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and His School, ed. Nikolaus M. Häring (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1971), 553–75. 48 See Thierry of Chartres, ‘Tractus de sex dierum operibus’, 555. 43

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in Hexameron is a mature work of the 1130s, the impulse came from questions from Heloise (c. 1100–c. 1163), his former wife, and the community at the Abbey of the Paraclete, which he founded. Abelard wrote to explain Augustine’s literal commentary that holds a considerable presence in the work. Following Augustine, Abelard identifies a twofold creation, the intelligible and the sensible, and points to the division of light from darkness as evidence that the creator not only creates matter but forms it. The division of light is the case in point; the forming light is the harbinger of cosmic order.49 The creation of light represents the rational creation, as opposed to the material one, and is, therefore, how angels receive knowledge of God’s work.50 As a radical Augustinian, Abelard assumed that creation occurred in one day, the subsequent days of the first Genesis account being descriptions and differentiations of the same act.51 In this, he was in company with a leading figure of the previous generation, Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109).52 Other long-running questions reappear in the twelfth century; for instance, the nature of the waters above the firmament, with William of Conches (c. 1080– c. 1154), before 1130, noting that to take Genesis literally here would rely on an impossible natural phenomenon since frozen waters would not remain as such for very long in a celestial region of fire and aether.53 Thierry of Chartres described the firmament as the product of water forced upwards in a cloud-like vapour; Abelard decided that it consisted of aether and air and suggested, following Basil and Ambrose, that the purpose of the upper waters was to cool the heat of the firmament.54 Hugh of St Victor brought some measure of closure to the debate by declaring that this was not a particularly productive subject, where both authority and reason were insufficient to provide a firm conclusion.55 Hugh’s discussion of the six days of creation forms part of his larger scheme in his On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, the purpose of which was the identification of sacraments and sacramental examples from scripture. The discussion is explicitly concerned with allegory rather than a literal interpretation. For Hugh, scripture is concerned essentially with the work of humanity’s restoration, the topic on which he spends the more significant proportion of his time. For the work of restoration to have meaning, however, the work of creation must be given a central role in Christian teaching.56 It is necessary to show the fall of humanity before discussing humanity’s restoration, and it is necessary to show this in the context of the whole world since it was made for the sake of human beings.57 Therefore, Hugh’s treatise begins with a hexaemeron. Compared with the rest of his work, it occupies a small part of the volume. On its own terms, it has a cardinal function, and it is striking that most of the discussion centres on light.

See Peter Abelard, Expositio in Hexameron, ed. Mary Romig and David E. Luscombe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 18. See Abelard, Expositio in Hexameron, 21. 51 See Abelard, Expositio in Hexameron, 67–75. 52 See Anselm, Cur Deus Homo? (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1909), 1.18. 53 See Helen R. Lemay, ‘Science and Theology at Chartres: The Case of the Supracelestial Waters’, British Journal for the History of Science 10, no. 3 (1977): 229. 54 See Lemay, ‘Science and Theology’, 229; Abelard, Expositio in Hexameron, 80–127. 55 See Hugh of St Victor, ‘De sacramentis Christianae fidei’, in Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: Garnier, 1880), 176:173–618. 56 See Hugh of St Victor, ‘De sacramentis Christianae fidei’, Prologue 2. 57 See Hugh of St Victor, ‘De sacramentis Christianae fidei’, Prologue 3. 49 50

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Hugh placed a high premium on the opinions of the fathers who, despite writing in a period so remote from Hugh’s own, did not make their opinions lightly or carelessly in such difficult and obscure matters of interpretation.58 Other traditional hexaemeral topics are raised: angels, the question of the darkness lying over the abyss, and the nothingness of darkness and sin.59 A difference of emphasis to the patristic authorities is Hugh’s insistence that in the order of creation, things were formed out of matter rather than created out of nothing, matter having first been created ex nihilo.60 This includes light, formed out of matter, to be light, and to have the power and property of lighting.61 On the question of visible and invisible creation, Hugh uncompromisingly stated that they happened simultaneously.62 Corporeal and incorporeal creation came into being at the same time. In this connection, light has an essential function.63 Light, Hugh decided, is corporeal, since it seems only fitting (a mode of thought derived from Anselm of Canterbury) that to illumine corporeity, it should equally be corporeal.64 The stress on light as the means by which God’s works might be seen is reminiscent of the Basilian/ Ambrosian emphasis on the beauty of light and its role in manifesting the beauty of creation. However, Hugh’s point moves more towards virtue, human and divine, and concern with discerning good and evil. Hugh argued from a doctrine of harmony that this finds expression simultaneously in visible and invisible creations. When light was separated from darkness in the visible world, a similar division occurred in the invisible. Following Augustine, this invisible division is conceived as having involved the separation of good angels from evil; the former was drawn to the light of justice, the latter to the darkness of sin.65 Division in the visible world Hugh connects to his larger concern with sacraments. In the appearance and illumination of light, he sees a great sacrament commended: the gradual identity of sin through illumination and the consequent ability to do something about it. Just as light illumines the confusion of creation, so it can be seen that the soul, immersed in sin and darkness, cannot emerge unless first illumined – to allow evils to be seen and to distinguish evil from good.66 Light is created in the rational world of the human heart; its confusion is shown, and so reduced to order. A slow process of distinction draws the sinner from light to light, and given that the evil angel can disguise himself as an angel of light, even light itself has to be tested and considered. This process in humankind finds its reflection and end in the divine light of God. Hugh’s On the Sacraments was an attempt to distil and order Christian thinking from a biblical basis and was an important moment in the establishment of theology. His nearcontemporary Peter Lombard took this further in his Four Books of Sentences, organized around doctrinal questions – the Trinity, creation, the Incarnation, and the doctrine of signs. While the organizational qualities of Lombard’s work can be overestimated, and his intention to

See Hugh of St Victor, ‘De sacramentis Christianae fidei’, 1.1.2. See Hugh of St Victor, ‘De sacramentis Christianae fidei’, 1.1.10. 60 See Hugh of St Victor, ‘De sacramentis Christianae fidei’, 1.1.1–2. 61 See Hugh of St Victor, ‘De sacramentis Christianae fidei’, 1.1.9. 62 See Hugh of St Victor, ‘De sacramentis Christianae fidei’, 1.1.5. 63 See Hugh of St Victor, ‘De sacramentis Christianae fidei’, 1.1.9. 64 See Hugh of St Victor, ‘De sacramentis Christianae fidei’, 1.1.8. 65 See Hugh of St Victor, ‘De sacramentis Christianae fidei’, 1.1.10. 66 See Hugh of St Victor, ‘De sacramentis Christianae fidei’, 1.1.12. 58 59

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advance challenging topics for discussion should not be forgotten (the Sentences are not a basic theological guide), commentating on Lombard had become, by the mid-thirteenth century, one of the fundamental elements in theological training. Aquinas wrote two commentaries on the Sentences; one of the last medieval commentaries was by Martin Luther (1483–1546). Within Book Two, On Creation, Lombard considers the six days of creation after a lengthy discussion on the nature of angels. Questions, where patristic authority was divided, are raised, not least the issue of simultaneous or sequential creation. On this issue, Lombard sided with Bede and against Augustine and the authors of the first half of the twelfth century. God created the heaven and the earth (i.e. the matter of the four elements) in the beginning and then proceeded to give distinction and form to individual things, not simultaneously but over six days as separate intervals of time.67 One of the most significant and longest of hexaemerons, that by Grosseteste, emerged about seventy years after the first appearance of the Lombard’s Sentences.68 Grosseteste’s Hexaemeron dates to about 1235 when he was appointed Bishop of Lincoln, resigning his position as a lector to the Oxford Franciscans. His treatment of the six days is both traditional and independent. Each day is discussed in terms of the senses of scripture, from the literal, allegorical, moral, and spiritual. The range of authorities is wide: Basil, Ambrose, Bede, Jerome (c. 347–420), John of Damascus, Augustine, and many others. Familiar topics are considered, and again light plays an important role, from the nature of the darkness over the abyss to the question of night and day before the luminaries (on which Grosseteste criticizes Basil’s thinking).69 Every form, according to Grosseteste, is some kind of light.70 Without light, there would be no forms, and no understanding, since to be formless is to be invisible to the understanding. Light is the agent of order, of beauty, of reason, and, for Grosseteste, as for Basil and Ambrose, it is useful.71 Grosseteste also includes reflection on the natural phenomena discussed from a scientific point of view, including, for example, in his discussion of the physical qualities of light, material from his treatise on the subject. A strikingly independent note is struck in the opening sections of the Hexaemeron with a discussion on what constitutes a science – a single subject for scrutiny. Grosseteste concludes that since the singular object for theology is the Christus integer – that is, the whole Christ, incarnate and eternal – and that this is both the subject and the means by which study is possible, theology is better described as a wisdom. Taken with the notion proposed in his On the Cessation of the Laws, composed at a similar point, that Christ would have been made human even without original sin, Grosseteste’s approach to the six days of creation transformed the human-centred doctrines of Incarnation of the twelfth century to a majestic vision of the unity of creation and creator. In terms of hexaemeral writing, it seems to be the case that Grosseteste represents a culmination, and something of an end point, for the style of speculation that piles high patristic references, creating in their midst room for independent speculation. Not for Grosseteste, the

See Peter Lombard, The Sentences, Book 2: On Creation, trans. Giulio Silano (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2008), 12.1.2. 68 See Grosseteste, Hexaemeron. 69 See Grosseteste, Hexaemeron, 1.18.1; 1.23.1–2; 2.1; 5.1–6. 70 See Grosseteste, Hexaemeron, 1.38.2. 71 See Grosseteste, Hexaemeron, 2.10.1. 67

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structure of the summa through which Albert the Great (c. 1200–1280) and Thomas Aquinas would explore the implications of Genesis creation. A key issue for both Dominican thinkers was Augustine’s position on simultaneous creation over the six days, supported by Albert but not by Thomas.72 In this context, Thomas’ determination that form and matter must have been created together was distinctive.73 The Franciscan Bonaventure used the six days rather differently for his Hexaemeron, which takes particular aspects of the six days as a starting point for an extended reading programme of contemplative reflection. The collations invite the Franciscan community to practise contemplation and so move from worldly to Christian wisdom, as opposed to a work like Grosseteste’s, which belongs to a more obviously exegetical tradition.74 Later medieval biblical commentators such as Nicholas of Lyra (c. 1270–1349) and Denis the Carthusian (1402–71) continued emphasizing literal interpretation, supporting sequential rather than simultaneous creation, revealing Augustine’s arguments to be influential still, at the close of the fifteenth century.75

Reflections The patristic and medieval hexaemeron presents a rich series of works illustrative of both the changing priorities of the various authors in their various periods as well as the continuities, at least in reference to and engagement with authoritative sources. A particular characteristic of the genre is the tension between literal interpretation and the other senses of scripture. So too, the extent to which thinking about natural phenomena is allowed to inform biblical exegesis. The themes of creation obviously run throughout the biblical canon, but Genesis attracted specific attention from the fathers and their medieval heirs. Its themes spill over from one commentary to another, as, for example, in Hildegard of Bingen’s (1098–1179) visionary writing. In her Vision Four, John the Baptist is discussed in an exposition of Jn 1.7, as he who was ‘to bear witness to the light, that is to say, to the God from whom all light is enkindled so that all who are inflamed by the Holy Spirit might believe in God’ (Jn 1.9). The vision of light for Hildegard was both a powerful experience and a stimulating spur to exegesis. Light is discussed within the context of creation and the relationship between the created light of the universe and the uncreated, ever-present light of the Godhead. Light as an agency of order – indeed, as the very definition of order – is a theme common to hexaemeral writers of all periods. Perhaps the last echo of the medieval Hexaemeron can be found in John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost, in Book Seven of which the angel Raphael relates, at Adam’s request, the story of the world’s creation.76 Milton’s evocation of the Genesis creation account, which very probably draws on the Anglo-Saxon poem Genesis B which re-imagines Satan and the fall, also

See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), I, QQ. 65–74; Albert the Great, ‘Summa Theologiae’, in Opera Omnia: Ex Editione Lugdunensi Religiose Castigata, ed. Auguste Borgnet (Paris: L. Vivès, 1895), 32:2.11.46. 73 See Brown, Days of Creation, 93. 74 Bonaventure, ‘Hexaemeron’, in Opera omnia (Quarracchi: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1891), 5:327–454. 75 Brown, Days of Creation, 92–5. 76 See John Milton, Paradise Lost (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1817), Bk. 7, lines 80–97. 72

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introduces the question of knowledge of the natural world, and that in a complex fashion.77 Although writing in the 1660s, the decade in which the Royal Society was founded, Milton’s cosmological vision is ambivalent. Galileo’s telescope is referred to in Book Five, but in Book Eight, Raphael offers no sure answer to Adam’s question on the celestial movements. ‘What if the sun / Be centre to the world’ (lines 122–23) is posed in an interrogatory rather than an innately confident fashion. In evoking the scientific knowledge of his day, shared with an allegorical and literal interpretation, Milton travels a path typical for commentaries on the creation story.

Further reading Brown, Andrew J. The Days of Creation: A History of Christian Interpretation of Genesis 1:1–2:3–4. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Chazelle, Celia M. and Burton Van Name Edwards, eds. The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. Crouse, Robert D. ‘Intentio Moysi: Bede, Augustine, Eriugena and Plato in the Hexaemeron of Honorius Augustodunensis’. Dionysius 2 (1978): 137–57. Gasper, Giles E. M. ‘Scripture and the Changing Culture of Theology in the High Middle Ages’. In Producing Christian Culture: Medieval Exegesis and Its Interpretative Genres, edited by Giles E. M. Gasper, Francis Watson, and Matthew R. Crawford, 117–44. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. Jaki, Stanley L. Genesis 1 Through the Ages. London: Thomas More Press, 1992. Robbins, Frank E. The Hexaemeral Literature: A Study of the Greek and Latin Commentaries on Genesis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1912.

See E. Ramazzina, ‘The Old English Genesis and Milton’s Paradise Lost: The Characterisation of Satan’, L’analisi linguistica e letteraria 24, no. 1 (2016): 89–117. 77

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CHAPTER 14 AVICENNA, MAIMONIDES, AND AQUINAS ON CREATION

William E. Carroll

Discussions about what it means for there to be an omnipotent creator of all, in the light of philosophical and scientific traditions inherited from the ancient world, were central features of reflection in medieval Muslim, Jewish, and Christian thought.1 This chapter highlights a principal representative from each tradition: Avicenna (980–1037), Maimonides (1135–1204), and Thomas Aquinas (1224–74). Most scholars deny that there is an explicit teaching of creation out of nothing in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament, or the Qur’an.2 Indeed, unlike the Hebrew Bible, the Qur’an does not contain a complete creation story.3 The idea of God’s creating all that is ‘out of nothing’ has its source in scriptural texts, but it is ultimately a theological conclusion about what ought to be believed: a decision reached as believers came to terms with the content of their faith. The development of the understanding of what it means for God to create is part of the broader story of the reception of Greek science and philosophy, and in particular of the texts of Neoplatonism and of Aristotle, in Muslim, Jewish, and Christian intellectual communities. In the Middle Ages, in each of these communities, there was a wide-ranging discussion about the relationship among theology, philosophy, and the natural sciences: between what reason and faith tell about nature, human nature, and God. The philosophical and scientific heritage of antiquity, especially as that heritage was mediated first through intellectual developments

See Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Roger Arnaldez, À la croisée des trois monothéismes: Une communauté de pensée au Moyen Âge (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993); David B. Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992); David B. Burrell, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993); David B. Burrell, ‘Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers’, in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 60–84; Massimo Campanini, Introduzione alla Filosofia Islamica (Roma: Editori Laterza, 2004); Cristina D’Ancona, ed. Storia della Filosofia nell’Islam Medievale, 2 vols (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 2005); Herbert A. Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, Creation and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Étienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (London: Sheed and Ward, 1955); Oliver Leaman, An Introduction to Medieval Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); T. M. Rudavsky, Time Matters: Time, Creation, and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 2 See Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994); Thomas J. O’Shaughnessy, Creation and the Teaching of the Qur’ān (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1985). 3 There are passages which refer to God as the One ‘who created the heavens and the earth, and what is between them, in six days’, as well as references to the fact that ‘God creates whatever He wills’ (Qur’an 25.59 and 24.45). Also important is Qur’an 36.82: ‘When He wants anything He only has to say “Be” and it is.’ 1

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in the Hellenistic world (particularly in Alexandria) and eventually through the widespread translations of texts into Syriac and Arabic, and later into Latin, helped to create a kind of common intellectual space occupied by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers. Although scholars in these communities came to different judgements about that heritage and its relevance to what they believed about God and the world, they shared enough in common to influence one another in important ways. In particular, the intellectual heritage of the ancient world brought with it the view that the universe is eternal. An eternal world was generally thought to be the antithesis of a created world; it would not depend on God as cause. So, also, the world must be seen as created out of nothing, for if God were to fashion the world out of some pre-existent matter, there would be something – that very matter – that was not dependent upon God. To defend a view of God as absolutely free and sovereign, it seemed that one must affirm that the world is temporally finite. If the universe has an absolute beginning, then its coming into existence would require a divine agent. Nevertheless, a crucial question which occupied the attention of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars in the Middle Ages was: if the world is created by God, must it have a temporal beginning; that is, must it be temporally finite? An eternal universe was, in the view of many, a necessary universe, either in the sense of not needing a cause or in the sense of not being the result of God’s free choice. Divine sovereignty and the radical contingency of the created order must be protected, so it seemed to some, from the encroachments of Greek logic and an Aristotelian science that sought to discover the necessary nexus between cause and effect. For Aristotle, true knowledge meant the discovery of necessary truths – of what must be so and could not be otherwise. But, any necessity posited in the created order seemed to threaten divine omnipotence – that somehow God was required or necessitated to act in a certain way – and, accordingly, some theologians embraced a radical occasionalism that saw events in the world as only the occasions for divine action. In this tradition, God alone is the true cause of all that happens.

Avicenna Undoubtedly the most influential philosopher in the Islamic world, especially concerning discussions about creation, was Avicenna. For him, the view of God as the absolutely necessary being, and the created order of things as only possible, is the key to understanding creation.4 Anything other than God is, in itself, only possible, and its existence, therefore, requires God’s causing it to be: Things that are included in existence are subject to a rational division into two kinds. One of them is that which, when considered by itself, is not necessary in its existence.

See Rahim Acar, ‘Creation: Avicenna’s Metaphysical Account’, in Creation and the God of Abraham, ed. David B. Burrell, Carlo Cogliati, Janet M. Soskice, and William R. Stoeger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 77– 90; Jon McGinnis, Avicenna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Robert Wisnovsky, ‘Avicenna and the Avicennan Tradition’, in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 92–136; Théerèse-anne Druart, ‘Metaphysics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 327–48. 4

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It is evident that its existence is also not impossible, otherwise it would not have been included in existence. This [kind of] thing is in the sphere of possibility. The other kind is that which, when it is considered by itself, necessarily exists. So we say: The necessary existent by itself has no cause, while the possible existent by itself has a cause.5 In explaining the kind of agent causality that creation involves, Avicenna notes that there is an important difference between how metaphysicians and natural scientists discuss agent-cause: [T]he metaphysical philosophers do not mean by ‘agent’ only the principle of motion, as the naturalists [philosophers of nature] mean, but the principle and giver of existence, as in the case of God with respect to the world.6 Thus, there is a broader sense of cause than that which concerns the natural sciences. He observes that a reflection on what it means for something to be reveals that what something is, its essence, is different from whether a thing exists. Based on the ontological distinction between essence and existence, Avicenna argues that all beings other than God (in whom this distinction disappears) require a cause to exist. Since existence is not part of the essence of things, it needs to be explained by a cause extrinsic to the thing and, ultimately, there must be an uncaused cause. Avicenna points out that the created ‘effect needs that which bestows existence on it always, permanently, as long as [the effect] exists’.7 One feature of Avicenna’s explanation of all creatures flowing from a primal source of being and intelligibility was that since the source of all that is is eternal, that which flows from this source must also be eternal. But, as has been seen, an eternal world was often seen as a necessary world that had to come forth from God – a world, thus, which was not the result of the free creative act of God. Avicenna sought to be faithful to Greek metaphysics (especially in the Neoplatonic tradition) and also affirm the created order’s contingency. Although the world proceeds from God by necessity and is eternal, it differs fundamentally from God in that, in itself, it is only possible and requires a cause to exist. God, on the other hand, is necessary in Himself and thus requires no cause. Contingent existence, although not necessary in itself, is necessary through or by another. According to Avicenna, ‘real existence’ emerges as a new attribute for the contingent being of the created world (which was originally present as an essence or ‘possibility’ in the divine mind); it is ‘a kind of added benefit bestowed by God upon possible being in the act of creation’.8 Creation, so understood, is ‘out of nothing’ in the sense of not out of anything existing. The act of creating causes what is possible in itself to be necessary as a result of its being caused to exist.9

Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, trans. Michael E. Marmura (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), 30. 6 Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, 195. 7 Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, 200. 8 Charles H. Kahn, ‘Why Existence Does Not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek Philosophy’, in Philosophies of Existence: Ancient and Medieval, ed. Parviz Morewedge (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 8. See also Lenn E. Goodman, Avicenna (London: Routledge, 1992), 74. 9 See McGinnis, Avicenna, 187. 5

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A world without necessary relationships is an unintelligible world. Yet, at the same time, the fear was that a necessary world is a self-sufficient world, a world that cannot not be: the opposite, so it seemed, of a world created by God. At best, a necessary world would only be a world which must surge forth from a primal source of being. However, central to Islamic belief (and to Jewish and Christian belief) is that God’s creative act in causing the world to be is a free act. It is unclear whether Avicenna’s emanationist scheme is compatible with the idea of divine freedom. Avicenna thought of God, the Necessary Existent, as the ultimate agent-cause of the world, yet he denied that God has the ‘intention’ to create the world. Nevertheless, he thought it proper to say that God ‘wills’ the universe to be. Such willing is a necessary feature of divine intellection. God knows that the universe emanates from Himself, and, having such knowledge, God consents to what occurs.10 It is in giving consent to what God knows that God can be said to will what occurs. Avicenna’s project was to show how the multiplicity of things in the world has its source in the One in which there is no multiplicity whatsoever, how material things can have their source in an immaterial principle, and how the Necessary Existent can know the world of changeable things without itself being changed.11 The explanation Avicenna offered of the absolute origin of the world in terms of a necessary emanationist schema was attractive since it seemed to do justice to both necessity and dependence. Necessity is demanded by Greek science to protect the intelligibility of the world since science discovers the necessary nexus between cause and effect. Dependence is demanded by theology to safeguard the ‘originatedness’ of the world. Creation for Avicenna was an ontological relationship – a relationship in the order of being – with no reference to temporality. Avicenna accepted the established Greek view that the universe is eternal. His view of the emanation of existing things from a primal source only made sense in an eternal universe. The question was – and is – whether an emanationist metaphysics can do justice to creation. Is it consistent with the God revealed in Scripture? The eternity of the world and the paradoxical understanding of divine agency were sources of deep suspicion for opponents of Avicenna and others who accepted some version of emanationist metaphysics. It was precisely such questions which led many in what came to be called kalām to react negatively to those in the tradition of falsafa. As Jon McGinnis puts it: ‘The proponents of falsafa saw themselves as adopting, adapting, and generally extending the Graeco-Arabic philosophical and scientific tradition, while the advocates of kalām envisioned themselves as promoting a way of thought intimately linked with the Arabic language and the Islamic religion.’12 Here a brief reference to the work of Averroes (c. 1126–98) helps to highlight the debate. In The Incoherence of the Incoherence [Tahafut al-Tahafut], Averroes defended the Greek philosophical tradition against al-Ghazali (1058–1111) and various kalam thinkers. He argued that eternal creation is not only intelligible but is also the most appropriate way to characterize the universe. Al-Ghazali had thought that for God to be the cause of the world (i.e. for God

See McGinnis, Avicenna, 206–7. See Ghassan Finianos, De L’existence à La nécessaire existence chez Avicenne (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2007), 202. 12 McGinnis, Avicenna, 14. 10 11

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to be the agent who brings about the world’s existence), such causality required a temporal beginning. In other words, the world cannot be both eternal and the result of God’s action since whatever is the result of an act of another must come into existence after the initiation of the action of the other. Thus, what exists eternally cannot have another, not even a divine other, as its originating source. In reply, Averroes distinguished two different senses of an eternal world: eternal in the sense of being unlimited in duration and eternal in the sense of being eternally self-sufficient, without a cause. Thus, an eternal world, understood in terms of duration without beginning or end, does not conflict with God’s eternity, understood in the sense of complete and total self-sufficiency. Averroes noted that an eternal world, only in the sense of being unlimited in duration, would still require an external agent that makes it what it is. Thus, what makes the world eternal – in this sense of eternal – could be identified with what causes it to be. On the other hand, a world which is eternal not only in the sense of unlimited duration but also in the sense of being completely self-sufficient would be entirely independent of any external cause. Its eternal existence would be rooted simply in what it is: it would exist necessarily, without cause. Averroes contends that philosophers, such as Aristotle, are committed to the eternity of the world only in the sense of unlimited duration and not in the sense of the world’s being wholly self-sufficient. The distinction he draws, thus, is between a world which is eternally existent in itself and a world which is eternally existent by being made so.13 Even though Averroes claimed that an eternal created universe was indeed probable, he rejected the idea of creation out of nothing in its strict sense. Instead, he thought creation consisted of God’s eternally converting potentialities into existing things. For Averroes, the doctrine of creation out of nothing contradicted the existence of a true natural causality in the universe.14 If it were possible to produce something from absolutely nothing, there would be no guarantee that particular effects required particular causes. In a universe without real natural causation, ‘specific potentialities to act and to be acted upon are reduced to shambles’ and causal relations ‘to mere happen-stance’.15 Thus, for Averroes, there could be no science of nature if the universe were created out of nothing.16 Averroes also defended the integrity of natural philosophy against what he considered an unwarranted emphasis on metaphysics in the thought of some philosophers of the time, for example, Avicenna. For Avicenna, the changes that resulted in the coming into existence of new species members required the agency of a created intelligence, a Giver of Forms. Material beings could produce only limited changes in the world – preparatory to the reception of a substantial form.17

See Barry S. Kogan, Averroes and the Metaphysics of Causation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985). See Averroes, Averroes’ Tahafut Al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence), Volumes 1 and 2, trans. Simon van den Bergh (Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust, 1954), 78. 15 Kogan, Averroes and the Metaphysics of Causation, 218. 16 See Idoia M. Ozcoidi, La concepción de la filosofía en Averroes: Análisis crítico del Tahāfut al-tahāfut (Madrid: Trotta, 2001), 109–285. 17 See McGinnis, Avicenna, 193: ‘[N]atural efficient causes play the role of preparatory causes that dispose and prepare the matter by either moving it to some suitable place or altering certain qualitative features of the matter, rendering it receptive to the influence of a metaphysical efficient cause, which in its turn bestows the species form by which the substance is the kind that it is.’ 13 14

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Maimonides In understanding what it means for God to create the world, Jewish thinkers began their reflection by interpreting the opening verse of Genesis. What did ‘in the beginning’ (be-re’šit) and create (bara’) mean? In the beginning, yes, but what sense of beginning? Some authors concluded that the beginning spoken of in Genesis was preceded by other beginnings: that God created other worlds before this one. Some were attracted to Plato’s account in the Timaeus. Questions about the nature of time and whether there was time before the beginning of this world were common themes.18 As with Muslim and Christian authors, Jewish commentators were influenced by philosophical traditions from antiquity, not only by Plato and Plotinus but also Aristotle. Undoubtedly the most significant Jewish thinker in the Middle Ages was Moses Maimonides, and his analysis of creation and science is an important part of the medieval heritage on this subject. The ‘perplexed’ in the title of his most famous work, The Guide for the Perplexed, are those who do not understand how philosophical and scientific reflections can be compatible with both the revelation of the Hebrew Bible and the traditions of Jewish law. In the introduction to the Guide, Maimonides says that he seeks to explain the meaning of key terms in the Bible, especially those predicated on God, to help ‘a religious [person] for whom the validity of the Law has been established in [their] soul’ and made manifest in their life. Such a person may become perplexed as to whether they should follow their intellect because, in so doing, they may seem to have to renounce the foundations of the law. The righteous person may be perplexed about whether philosophy and science are compatible with religious belief.19 When discussing the doctrine of creation, Maimonides observes: ‘There is no doubt that there are things that are common to all three of us, I mean the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims: namely, the affirmation of the temporal creation of the world, the validity of which entails the validity of miracles, and other things of that kind.’20 He thought that belief in the Trinity excluded Christianity from being a monotheistic religion. In the Guide, Maimonides offers a kind of dialectical discussion of creation in which he identifies three positions: (i) that of Moses and the law, which affirms creation out of nothing and a temporal beginning; (ii) that of Plato and others who reject as absurd the view that something can come from nothing; and (iii) the position of Aristotle and his followers who also reject the idea of something’s coming from nothing, and who endorse an eternally existing world.21 Maimonides does not think that Aristotle claimed to demonstrate the eternity of the world, despite what some of his followers maintain. Aristotle, according to Maimonides, thought that arguments for the world’s eternity were only probable.22

See Rudavsky, Time Matters, 4–15. See Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), 1:5. 20 Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 1:178. 21 See Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 2:281–5; Daniel Davies, Method and Metaphysics in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 28–32. 22 See Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 2:290; Kenneth Seeskin, Maimonides on the Origin of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 60–95. 18 19

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It is clear that for Maimonides, creation means something temporal, in the sense that existence comes after non-existence: [T]he great controversy is over this point [the question of the temporal creation or the eternity of the world], and this is the very point that Abraham our Father discerned. . . . It is the root of the Torah that the Deity alone is primordial and that He has created the whole out of nothing; whoever does not acknowledge this is guilty of radical unbelief and of heresy.23 Maimonides thought that whether the universe is eternal or ‘temporally created’ cannot, in principle, be known by reason with certainty. The most a believer can do is refute the proofs of the philosophers bearing on the eternity of the world. Therefore, he was critical of any claims to demonstrate that the world is not eternal and therefore created out of nothing. In a discussion of the reading of the opening of Genesis in the Jewish tradition, Maimonides notes that some Jewish sages thought that the Bible affirms the eternity of time, but he argues that such a view is inconsistent with the whole thrust of Scripture, which reveals that God acts through purpose. Purposeful action is the opposite of the kind of necessitarian view which follows from an eternal universe. To account for the great diversity of things, each existing in its own particular way, the creator must freely choose to produce things in their very particularity. ‘For us’, he says, ‘the matter is clear . . . namely, that all things exist in virtue of a purpose and not of necessity’.24 That God acts through purpose rather than necessity means, in turn, that the Bible teaches a first moment in time, although it does not do so openly. This is so because for the Bible to be taken literally in its general teaching that God acts through purpose and freedom, the opening of Genesis needs to be interpreted in a way different from the literal sense, which appears to teach that there was a time before the existence of the sun. A literal interpretation of Genesis (which Maimonides is arguing against) implies that God does not act through will and purpose because the text seems to proclaim that there was a time before the creation described in Genesis.25 Maimonides was particularly alert to what he considered the dangers of Neoplatonic emanationism, in which the doctrine of creation and the eternity of the world are combined to deny God’s free activity. Maimonides distinguishes his position from that of Avicenna and Averroes, who concluded that the world is eternal, and also from the position of al-Ghazali and the kalām, who, although affirming a temporal beginning, thought that reason could reach this same conclusion: that the world is not eternal. Maimonides criticizes the methods of the kalām theologians, who, he says, claim first to demonstrate the temporal creation of the world out of nothing and then to argue from such a creation to the existence of God. He suggests that the better method is to prove that God exists, is One, and is incorporeal, on the assumption that the universe is eternal.26

Moses Maimonides, ‘Letter on Astrology’, in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, ed. Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi, trans. Ralph Lerner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 231. 24 Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 2:303. 25 See Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 2:327–30; Davies, Method and Metaphysics, 41. 26 See Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 1:181–2. 23

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Maimonides was critical of those Muslim theologians who assigned all causal agency to God. Without the necessary nexus between cause and effect, discoverable in the natural order, the world would be unintelligible, and a science of nature would be impossible: My purpose is to explain to you, by means of arguments that come close to being a demonstration, that what exists indicates to us of necessity that it exists in virtue of the purpose of One who purposed; and to do this without having to take upon myself what the Mutakallimun have undertaken – to abolish the nature of that which exists and to adopt atomism, the opinion according to which accidents are perpetually being created [which they adopt in order to maintain their position of divine causation].27

Thomas Aquinas Early Christian thinkers in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries had already distinguished the Christian doctrine of creation from Hellenistic thought by affirming that the world is not eternal and that it is created out of nothing.28 By the thirteenth century, however, Christian theologians were working within a richer intellectual tradition that included the thought of Muslim and Jewish thinkers as well as that of the Greeks, such as Aristotle, whose works had only recently been translated into Latin. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council officially declared the doctrine of creation out of nothing and the temporal beginning of the world to be dogmas of the Catholic Church. It would be Thomas Aquinas, later in the thirteenth century, who develops this doctrine more fully, and Thomas uses the insights of Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides extensively as he forges an account of creation that seeks to do justice to the demands both of reason and of Christian faith. There were three general positions on creation and an eternal world that were defended by different Christian thinkers in the 1260s and 1270s. First, there was the claim of scholars such as Thomas, Boethius of Dacia, and Siger of Brabant, all of whom followed the lead of Maimonides and argued that neither the eternity of the world nor its temporal finitude could be demonstrated by reason. As a matter of faith, all three believed that the world has a temporal beginning. Second, there was the claim of scholars such as Matthew of Aquasparta that, based on the contradictions that would follow, were one to posit that the world is eternal, one can know for sure, using reason alone, that the world had a temporal beginning.29 There is a third general position, affirmed by Bonaventure, Henry of Ghent, and John Peckham. It is also a

Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 2:303; Marvin Fox, Interpreting Maimonides: Studies in Methodology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 282. 28 See Steven E. Baldner and William E. Carroll, Aquinas on Creation (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1997), Chap. 1; Janet M. Soskice, ‘Creatio Ex Nihilo: Its Jewish and Christian Foundations’, in Creation and the God of Abraham, ed. David B. Burrell, Carlo Cogliati, Janet M. Soskice, and William R. Stoeger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 24–39. 29 At times, John Peckham appears to accept this argument, but it seems more likely that he did not think that it was strictly demonstrable that the world was temporally finite. Rather, his position is that it is true that the world is not eternal and ‘a Christian who believes this can understand, with the help of reason, why it is true’. Richard C. Dales, Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 127. 27

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view that is found in the early works of Albert the Great. This is the view that creation out of nothing necessarily requires a temporal beginning to the world. This is not the same as the position that claims that the world cannot be eternal and, therefore, must be created because it had to have a beginning. This third position follows from what it means to be created, and the conclusion is that an eternal, created world is impossible. A created world, because it is created, must be a world that has a temporal beginning. Bonaventure, for example, thought that ‘out of nothing’ had to mean, in some sense, ‘after nothing’, otherwise one would be arguing that ‘nothing’ was a constituent of things (in the manner, for example, of a table’s being made ‘out of wood’). Since such a construal of ‘out of nothing’ made no sense, out of nothing must mean ‘after nothing’.30 Bonaventure and Albert followed the analysis from Anselm’s Monologion (chapter 8). According to Anselm, if the expression ex nihilo is to have any positive meaning, if it is to mean anything more than a mere denial of material causality, then it must indicate a temporal beginning. It was the genius of Thomas, who acknowledged a considerable debt to Avicenna on this point, to see that the positive meaning of ex nihilo is that the creature is of itself really nothing – its non-being is naturally prior to its being – and that, therefore, the creature is entirely dependent upon the creator for its being. There are important nuances in the arguments of those who fall into each of these broad categories, but with this general schema in mind, this chapter turns to the position of Thomas Aquinas. From his earliest to his last writings on the subject, Thomas maintains that it is possible for there to be an eternal, created universe.31 On the basis of faith, Thomas holds that the universe is not eternal. But he thinks that God could have created an eternal universe. Although reason affirms the intelligibility of an eternal, created universe, Aquinas thought that reason alone leaves unresolved the question of whether the universe is eternal. On this point, he follows Maimonides and differs from Avicenna since the latter thought that the universe must be eternal. Near the end of his career, Thomas, in De aeternitate mundi, his most sophisticated treatise on the subject, takes up the intelligibility of an eternal, created universe. He writes: ‘to say that something has been made by God and that it has always existed, is not logically inconsistent’.32 An eternal universe does not have to mean, as Maimonides, al-Ghazali, and others argued, a necessary universe – a universe which is not the result of the free creative act of God. An eternal, created universe would have no first moment of its existence, but – as Avicenna had noted – it still would have a cause for its existence. Nevertheless, Thomas did not think there were compelling arguments for the world’s eternity. Contrary to the views of those who defended an eternal universe because were the universe to have a temporal beginning, there would have to be a change in God – God would have to change from not creating to creating – Thomas argued that God eternally wills that the world (His effect) have a temporal beginning. Thus, there is no change in God.33

See Baldner and Carroll, Aquinas on Creation; Paul Clavier, Ex Nihilo, 2 vols (Paris: Hermann, 2011). Thomas addresses the doctrine of creation in a magisterial way four times: In II Sent., dist. 1, q. 1 (early to mid1250s); Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles II, cc. 6–38 (1259–64); Aquinas, Questiones disputatae de potentia Dei q. 3 (1265–6) and Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 44–6 (1266–8). Available online: Corpus Thomisticum, accessed 8 August 2020, http://www​.corpusthomisticum​.org​/iopera​.html. 32 Baldner and Carroll, Aquinas on Creation, 119. 33 Divine immutability was something that for Avicenna, Maimonides, and Thomas was non-negotiable. Indeed, a commitment to it led Avicenna to argue that the universe must be eternal since he thought a temporal beginning would mean that God changed from not creating to creating. 30 31

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Indeed, Thomas thought that, leaving aside the question of whether the universe is eternal, reason alone can demonstrate that the universe is created. As he contends in his first magisterial treatment of creation in Writings on the ‘Sentences’ of Peter Lombard: ‘not only does faith hold that there is creation, but reason also demonstrates it’.34 Such a view sets Thomas apart from his teacher, Albert the Great, and his colleague at the University of Paris, Bonaventure. Albert, for example, as with many others, considered creation to be exclusively a theological notion: It ought to be said that creation is properly a divine work. To us, moreover, it seems astounding in that we cannot conclude to it because it is not subject to a demonstration of reason. And so not even the philosophers have known it, unless perchance some [should have known something] from the sayings of the Prophets. But no one ever investigated it through demonstration. Some, to be sure, have found certain probable reasons, but they do not prove [creation] sufficiently.35 Thomas’ metaphysical argument for God as the cause of existence involves a combination of themes taken from an extension of Aristotle’s claims for an unmoved mover to include divine efficient causality as a cause of being as such and a recognition that there is a hierarchy of being in which each kind of being participates in an ultimate source of being: a source which is Being itself (ipsum esse subsistens).36 In a novel way, Thomas employs the distinction Avicenna drew between existence and essence in creatures to argue for God, the creator, in whom this distinction disappears. Whereas for Avicenna, existence is something that comes to an essence, in a way analogous to an accident’s coming to a substance, Thomas thinks that existence is that which brings essence into actuality. Thomas’ insight on this matter goes to the heart of what he thinks it means for God to create.37 A key to Thomas’ analysis is the distinction he draws between creation and change; or, as he often said: creatio non est mutatio (creation is not a change). The natural sciences have as their subject the world of changing things. Whenever there is a change, there must be something that changes. It is true that from nothing, nothing comes; that is if the verb ‘to come’ means a change. All change requires something that changes. To create, on the other hand, is to be the radical cause of the reality of whatever exists. To cause completely something to exist is not to produce a change in something; to create, thus, is not to work on or with some already existing material. If a prior something were used

Aquinas, In II Sent., dist. 1, q. 1, a. 2. Cited in Baldner and Carroll, Aquinas on Creation, 74. Available online: Corpus Thomisticum, accessed 8 August 2020, http://www​.corpusthomisticum​.org​/iopera​.html. 35 Albert the Great, Super Sententiarum libros 1.8. Cited in Baldner and Carroll, Aquinas on Creation, 27. 36 The full argument can be found in Aquinas, De potentia Dei, q. 3, a. 5. Available online: Corpus Thomisticum, accessed 8 August 2020, http://www​.corpusthomisticum​.org​/iopera​.html. 37 See David B. Burrell, ‘Aquinas and Jewish and Islamic Authors’, in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 67–8; Burrell, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions, 32–3; David B. Burrell, ‘The Act of Creation with its Theological Consequences’, in Creation and the God of Abraham, ed. David B. Burrell, Carlo Cogliati, Janet M. Soskice, and William R. Stoeger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 40–52. 34

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in producing a new thing, then the agent doing the producing would not be the complete cause of the new thing. But such a complete causing is precisely what the act of creation is. As Thomas writes in one of his later works, On Separate Substances: ‘Over and above the mode of becoming by which something comes to be through change or motion, there must be a mode of becoming or origin of things without any mutation or motion through the influx of being [per influentiam essendi].’38 To create is to give existence, and all things depend upon God for the fact that they are. God does not take nothing and make something out of ‘it’. Instead, anything left entirely to itself, separated from the cause of its existence, would be absolutely nothing. Creation is not exclusively some distant event; it is the continual, complete causing of the existence of whatever is. In a fundamental sense, creation is not really an event at all. Contrary to the claims of Averroes, Aquinas thought that a world created ex nihilo (whether that world be eternal or temporally finite) was susceptible to scientific understanding. Creation, so understood, does not destroy the autonomy of that which is created. Created beings can and do function as real secondary causes, causes which can be discovered in the natural sciences. God as cause so transcends the created order that He can cause creatures to be causes. Thomas’ understanding of analogical predication served him well in distinguishing between what it means for creatures to be causes and God to be a cause. A univocal sense of ‘cause’ results in a fundamental conflict between God’s causing things to be and creatures as causes. God is not a competing cause in the world such that to attribute causal agency to Him requires a diminution of causal agency to creatures, or vice versa. Creatures are what they are (including those that are free) precisely because God is present to them as cause. Were God to withdraw, all that exists would cease to be. Creaturely agency and the integrity of nature, in general, are guaranteed by God’s creative causality.39 Unlike Avicenna, who required an immaterial Giver of Forms to effect substantial change, Thomas thought that natural entities themselves were sufficient to account for these changes. Thomas distinguishes between creation understood philosophically – as the complete dependence of all that is on God as cause – and creation understood theologically, which includes all that philosophy says and adds, among other things, that there is an absolute beginning to time. Thomas thinks, as does Avicenna, that metaphysics can prove that all things depend on God as cause of their existence. And, with Avicenna, Thomas argues that there is no conflict between creation and any of the claims of the natural sciences since the natural sciences have as their subject the world of changing things, and creation is not a change. Creation accounts for the existence of things, not for changes in things. God causes changes to be what they are, but such causing is not itself a change. Furthermore, Thomas

Aquinas, De substantiis separatis, c. 9, n. 49. Available online: Corpus Thomisticum, accessed 8 August 2020, http:// www​.corpusthomisticum​.org​/iopera​.html. 39 Thomas expresses this view in Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 105, Art. 1: ‘Some have understood God to work in every agent in such a way that no created power has any effect in things, but that God alone is the ultimate cause of everything wrought; for instance, that it is not fire that gives heat, but God in the fire, and so forth. But this is impossible. First, because the order of cause and effect would be taken away from created things, and this would imply lack of power in the Creator, for it is due to the power of the cause, that it bestows active power on its effect. Secondly, because the active powers which are seen to exist in things, would be bestowed on things to no purpose, if these wrought nothing through them. Indeed, all things created would seem, in a way, to be purposeless, if they lacked an operation proper to them, since the purpose of everything is its operation. . . . We must therefore understand that God works in things in such a manner that things have their proper operation.’ 38

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thinks that God’s absolute sovereignty, expressed, for example, in the doctrine of creation out of nothing, does not require that one deny that there are real causes in nature. With Averroes, Thomas insists that the world is susceptible to scientific analysis in terms of causes in the world. But, as already noted, Thomas does not think one must reject creation out of nothing to defend the possibility of a science of nature. Nor, according to Thomas, would an eternal universe have to mean a necessary universe that is not the result of God’s free choice. With Maimonides, Thomas thinks that reason alone cannot know whether or not the universe is eternal. It is, he thinks, an error to try to reason for creation ex nihilo by attempting to show scientifically that the world has a temporal beginning. Nevertheless, for Thomas, reason can show, in the discipline of metaphysics, that the world has an origin: that it is created ex nihilo. The affirmation in faith that the universe has a temporal beginning perfects what reason knows about creation. Thomas’ theological analysis of creation is much richer than simply recognizing that the world has a beginning. He sees all things coming from and returning to God. Furthermore, the entire universe of creatures, spiritual and material, possesses a dynamic character analogous to the internal dynamism of the Divine Persons of the Trinity. With the eyes of faith, one sees the whole created order as the ‘footsteps’ of the Trinity. Throughout, Thomas’ theological understanding of creation is informed by his philosophical analysis; after all, Thomas is a philosopher because he is a theologian. We find in Thomas’ analysis of creation and its relation to the philosophical and scientific traditions that he inherits a confluence of the various questions and themes which informed (albeit in different ways) the thought of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars. It is tempting to see a kind of progression over time which reaches its summit, as it were, in Thomas. It needs to be remembered, however, that Thomas’ position was not the only one in the Latin Middle Ages; nor, in important respects, was it the most widely accepted in Christian circles. The idea of creation out of nothing was not the result of an obvious reading of Jewish, Christian, or Muslim scriptures. In all three religious communities, the idea develops as philosophers and theologians consider what it means for God to create in the context not only of scriptural revelation but also of various philosophical traditions (most notably Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism). By the late thirteenth century, there existed a profound series of reflections – in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity – concerning the relationship between creation and the philosophical and scientific heritage of antiquity. Thinkers in all three traditions sought to understand what it means for God to be the cause of all that is, in the context of what science and philosophy tell about the world. In wrestling with key topics concerning time and creation, divine freedom and emanation, and the like, these thinkers had to examine the relationship among the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology. The sophistication with which they engaged such topics is striking.

Further reading Adamson, Peter and Richard C. Taylor, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Baldner, Steven E. and William E. Carroll. Aquinas on Creation. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1997. 202

Avicenna, Maimonides, Aquinas on Creation Burrell, David B. Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. Burrell, David B., Carlo Cogliati, Janet M. Soskice, and William R. Stoeger. Creation and the God of Abraham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Rudavsky, T. M. Time Matters: Time, Creation, and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Salucci, Alessandro. ‘In principio . . .’. Variazioni sul tema della Creazione. Roma: IF Press, 2011.

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CHAPTER 15 CREATION IN REFORMATION THEOLOGY

Randall C. Zachman

The theological consideration of creation may appear to be a surprising theme to consider during the Reformation. The theological topics usually associated with this period involve justification by faith, understanding the sacraments, and the authority of scripture and tradition. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 makes only passing reference to creation in its first article when it mentions ‘one creator and preserver of all things visible and invisible’.1 In the Smalcald Articles of 1537, Martin Luther (1483–1546) states that the confession of God the creator is not a matter of dispute or contention.2 However, when turning to Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) and John Calvin (1509–64), it is found that the knowledge of God the creator and the status of the whole of creation become central topics of theological investigation, as such topics undergird their criticism of Roman sacraments and images, and also directly inform their piety. Thus, the first article of Zwingli’s Exposition of the Faith of 1531 insists that since ‘all being is either created or uncreated, . . . only the eternal and infinite and uncreated God is the basis of faith’.3 Moreover, the Roman Catholic world appears to contribute the most dramatic developments to the understanding of creation in the Reformation era, beginning with Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and concluding with the discoveries and reflections of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). This chapter will trace the status of creation in the Lutheran, Reformed, and Roman Catholic traditions to better understand the role that the creation and governance of the universe played in the theology of the early modern world.

Creation in the theology of Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon As already noted, the doctrine of creation was not of central concern to Martin Luther. In his summaries of the main articles of the Christian faith, Luther begins with the law of God, which reveals one’s sin, followed by the gospel, which announces the forgiveness of one’s sin. The works of self-discipline and the love of neighbour follow, followed by the use of the law to constrain sin.4 The focal point of Luther’s theology is the forgiveness of sin won by the blood of Christ and proclaimed to all in the gospel: ‘On this article rests all that we teach and practice

Theodore G. Tappert, ed. and trans., The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), 28. 2 See Tappert, The Book of Concord, 292. 3 Geoffrey W. Bromiley, ed. and trans., Zwingli and Bullinger (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), 246–7. 4 See Martin Luther, ‘Eight Sermons at Wittenberg, 1522’, in Luther’s Works, Vol. 51: Sermons I, ed. and trans. John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), 70–1; Martin Luther, ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments, 1525’, in Luther’s Works, Vol. 40: Church and Ministry II, ed. Conrad Bergebdoff, trans. Bernhard Erling (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1958), 82–3. 1

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against the pope, the devil, and the world.’5 When Luther turns to the confession of God the creator in his Small Catechism, he interprets this article of the Creed in a profoundly personal way and concentrates on the way it should reinforce one’s faith in the goodness, love, and mercy of God. Luther claims that God creates, sustains, and defends ‘me’ out of God’s ‘pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness on my part’.6 This trust in God the creator re-emerges when believers pray for their daily bread in the Lord’s Prayer, for they thereby ask God to satisfy all bodily needs with the gifts of creation.7 In his suggested grace before and after every meal, Luther includes the thought that God satisfies the desires of ‘all creatures’, as God ‘gives to the beasts their food, and to the young ravens which cry’.8 Luther develops his understanding of creation more fully in his Lectures on Genesis of 1535. He focuses on the themes in the creation narrative which reinforce faith in God’s goodness, love, and mercy, for such topics are properly ‘theological, and they have power to instil confidence in our hearts’.9 Luther warns the reader not to seek to know the creator apart from creation, for God is only known in God’s Word or covering, such as baptism or absolution.10 Luther focuses in particular on the role of the Word of God in creation, for it creates and sustains all things: ‘What else is the entire creation than the Word of God uttered by God?’11 Thus, when Aristotle claims that mice come into existence when the sun heats decay, Luther doubts that this is a satisfactory explanation: ‘The sun warms, but it would bring nothing into being unless God said by His divine power: “Let a mouse come out of the decay”.’12 More wondrous still, every spring, God brings birds back to life by the Word of God spoken to the ocean waters, in which Luther thought that the birds lie dead over the winter rather than migrating south. ‘If the Word is spoken, all things are possible.’13 As in the Small Catechism, the goal of one’s understanding of creation is strengthening one’s faith in the mercy of God, for one is thereby fully assured that when God makes a promise, God has the power to fulfil it.14 The knowledge of creation by the Word of God gives one greater certainty than do the ruminations of the natural philosophers, for ‘human reason is far too inadequate to be able to gain a perfect knowledge of these matters’.15 Facts revealed by the Word of God are certain, whereas ideas supported by reason and experience are not as certain ‘because experience can be deceiving’.16 However, Luther does not thereby reject the role of natural philosophy in giving one a greater understanding of the world. He distinguishes between the language the Holy Spirit uses in scripture and the technical language used in other sciences, such as astronomy,

Tappert, The Book of Concord, 292. Tappert, The Book of Concord, 345. 7 See Tappert, The Book of Concord, 347. 8 Tappert, The Book of Concord, 353–4. 9 Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 1: Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 1–5, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, trans. George V. Schick (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1958), 41. 10 Luther, LW 1:11. 11 Luther, LW 1:22. 12 Luther, LW 1:52. 13 Luther, LW 1:49. 14 Luther, LW 1:49. 15 Luther, LW 1:42. 16 Luther, LW 1:44. 5 6

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which includes terms not found in scripture, such as ‘epicycles’ and ‘spheres’. This should not lead to conflict, however, for ‘no science should stand in the way of another science, but each should continue to have its own mode of procedure and its own terms’.17 Indeed, Luther insists that mathematical disciplines were divinely revealed and demonstrate that humanity’s destiny is eternal life, as no other creatures know mathematics.18 Luther also endorses the usefulness of Aristotle’s five elements of earth, water, air, fire, and ether, for they are the foundation of the arts and ‘are in agreement with experience’.19 However, as useful as philosophy is for understanding creation, theology is far more reliable and certain, for it knows that God does all things through the power of the Word, including those things which go against the nature of the five elements.20 Thus, when the Word of God says something that seems impossible to reason and experience, as when it says that water lies above the firmament, Luther says: ‘Here I, therefore, take my reason captive and subscribe to the Word even though I do not understand it.’21 Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) also, like Luther, demonstrates an initial lack of interest in creation, followed by a growing appreciation of its importance. In his Loci Communes of 1521, Melanchthon acknowledges that scholastic treatises consider topics such as ‘God’ and ‘The Mystery of Creation’, but he claims that the vain disputations of the scholastics ‘covered up for us the gospel and the benefits of Christ’.22 Hence Melanchthon, like Luther, focuses instead on sin, the law, and grace. However, in subsequent writings, Melanchthon devotes much more attention to creation, especially in relation to the self-revelation of God on the one hand and prayer on the other. In his Commentary on Romans of 1540, Melanchthon claims that God created the universe to be known by humanity.23 In particular, the human mind was created in the image of the eternal Mind of God so that it could discern the ‘footprints of the Deity in nature’, revealing that this world could not be the result of chance but must have been created by God. After the fall into sin, human beings cannot rightly discern these footprints of God without the Word of God but should attend to them in any case because they reveal that God is the founder and preserver of all things.24 Melanchthon insists that the footprints of God can be better recognized with the help of the arts, such as mathematics, architecture, and astronomy, as these arts are God’s gifts: ‘For the arts are divinely revealed; they are God’s gifts, and should be recognized as such.’25 Even though philosophy errs when it tries to understand the will of God, ‘those people also err, who reject the capacity of philosophy to form opinion about natural reality’.26 Hence, far from condemning the arts, ‘we ought the more to foster and

Luther, LW 1:47. See Luther, LW 1:46. 19 Luther, LW 1:27. 20 See Luther, LW 1:42. 21 Luther, LW 1:26. 22 Wilhelm Pauck, ed. and trans., Melanchthon and Bucer (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 21. 23 See Philip Melanchthon, Commentary on Romans, trans. Fred Kramer (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1992), 76. 24 Melanchthon, Commentary on Romans, 77. 25 Philip Melanchthon, Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, trans. D. C. Parker (Decatur: The Almond Press, 1989), 47. 26 Melanchthon, Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, 55. 17 18

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cultivate them’, for they are great supports for life on earth and are given by God to be used for that purpose.27 Melanchthon reiterates these themes in his Loci Communes of 1543. God created the universe with great artistry to be known and recognized by human beings, for all things reveal the presence of an eternal Mind that creates and watches over all things. Melanchthon is especially concerned with distinguishing the knowledge of God the creator from the Stoics, who bind God to the order of nature, and from the Epicureans, who claim that all things happen by chance. God is present with all creatures, preserving, governing, and sustaining them, but God is not bound to the causality of the world, for God remains free of the order God sustains. This should inspire the godly to pray to God, for they are convinced that God is present to them, and God is free to answer their prayer in ways that seem impossible to their understanding, as in the exodus from Egypt. Human beings need to be strengthened by the testimonies of scripture to the way God answers prayer against all expectations, for ‘this kind of testimony should strengthen our desire to pray’.28

The status of creation in the theology of Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin The knowledge of God the creator lies at the heart of the theology of Ulrich Zwingli, for it directly informs his distinction between true and false religion: ‘Almighty God, grant that we may all recognize our blindness, and that we who have thus far clung to creatures may henceforth cleave to the Creator, that He may be our only treasure and that our heart abide with Him [cf. Mt. 6.21].’29 The knowledge of God the creator is, therefore, essential to true piety and religion. Unlike Luther, who begins his order of teaching with the knowledge of sin through the law, Zwingli claims that one must first know God the creator before coming to know God in Christ ‘because knowledge of God in the nature of the case precedes knowledge of Christ’.30 Moreover, knowledge of God the creator does not come from scripture or the Apostles’ Creed but from the self-revelation of God through the Spirit: ‘It is of God alone, therefore, that you believe that God exists and that you have faith in Him.’31 Through the experience of piety, which comes from the freely given Spirit of God, one learns that God is the fountain of free, selfgiving goodness, who created all things to have creatures to whom to impart God’s goodness. ‘He, however, freely supplies all with all things, asking nothing in return except that we shall take with gladness and gratefulness the gifts of His bounty.’32 Zwingli makes it clear that the self-giving goodness of God is not limited to humanity but extends to all creatures, for God ‘by His nature loves not only man but all His creatures. For unless He loved them, He would not

Melanchthon, Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, 47. Philip Melanchthon, Loci Communes 1543, trans. Jacob A. O. Preus (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1992), 33–4. 29 Ulrich Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, trans. Samuel M. Jackson (Durham: The Labyrinth Press, 1981), 156. 30 Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 99. 31 Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 61. 32 Ulrich Zwingli, ‘On the Providence of God’, in On Providence and Other Essays, ed. Samuel M. Jackson (Durham: The Labyrinth Press, 1983), 136. 27 28

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create them, sustain them, live and work in them’.33 Thus, the scope of God’s goodness and love is as wide as the universe: ‘Hence, I define Providence thus, “Providence is the enduring and unchangeable rule and direction of all things in the universe”.’34 Zwingli is therefore directly interested in the relationship of God to all living creatures, for ‘as God is the being and existence to all things, so He is the life and motion of all things that live and move’.35 Thus, even the sharp sting and musical hum of the mosquito reveal the nature of God’s wisdom, and as do the flea, the gadfly, the wasp, and the hornet, for God’s wisdom vastly transcends the limitations of the human mind.36 The same may be said of rodents, hedgehogs, and marmots: ‘What word, what speech, pray can proclaim the divine wisdom as well as these creatures which are among almost the humblest of living things?’37 Zwingli makes the same point with regard to the earth, streams, dew, and mountains: ‘In all these things, not less than that of man, we discover the presence of the divine power by which they have their being, and live and move.’38 Indeed, the providence of God should be contemplated in the entire universe, in ‘all substances, all bodies, stars, earth, and seas’, for the presence of God alone sustains all things in existence.39 This includes all the ways God provides sustenance to all creatures by means of the instruments of grain, fruit, and water: ‘It is the kindly power of the Deity that giveth all things: the earth, the tree, the sun, and the rest are the stalk and branches which hold that bounty and supply it to us.’40 Thus, Zwingli encourages the faithful person to ‘everywhere contemplate the Deity, and in all things and in himself still more closely perceive God existing, living, and working’.41 The contemplation of the beauty of the wisdom and goodness of God in the universe should lead the pious to rise up in admiration to God, the architect of the structure of the universe.42 This is why Zwingli highly commends the science of astronomy for all preachers.43 However, even the contemplation of a grape leaf will reveal ‘such complexity as you will find when you consider man as a whole or the entire universe’.44 In light of the consideration of the wisdom of God in all of creation, one’s human wisdom will appear to be nothing. Like Zwingli, Calvin claims that the knowledge of God the creator precedes the knowledge of God the Redeemer. ‘Nevertheless, it is one thing to feel that God as our Maker supports us by his power, governs us by his providence, nourishes us by his goodness, and attends to us with all sorts of blessings – and another thing to embrace the grace of reconciliation offered to us in Christ.’45 Like Melanchthon, Calvin sees the universe as the self-revelation of God.

Zwingli, ‘On the Providence of God’, 168. Zwingli, ‘On the Providence of God’, 136. 35 Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 66. 36 See Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 66–7. 37 Zwingli, ‘On the Providence of God’, 150. 38 Zwingli, ‘On the Providence of God’, 150. 39 Zwingli, ‘On the Providence of God’, 147. 40 Zwingli, ‘On the Providence of God’, 157. 41 Zwingli, ‘On the Providence of God’, 156. 42 See Zwingli, ‘On the Providence of God’, 220. 43 See Zwingli, ‘On the Providence of God’, 212. 44 Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 68. 45 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford L. Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), I.ii.1. 33 34

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Indeed, in the original creation, the universe was to be the school in which human beings were to learn piety and, from it, ascend to eternal life.46 Even after the fall into sin, God is continuously revealed in the works that God does in the universe, which portray the powers or perfections of God as in a painting.47 These powers, in turn, reveal the nature of God, for they set forth God’s goodness, wisdom, and power, as well as God’s mercy and justice. One must learn piety from one’s contemplation of these works and from one’s awareness and enjoyment of the powers they portray so that one might be drawn from the depths of one’s heart to God as the source of these powers.48 Thus, piety for Calvin is the awareness and experience of God as the author and fountain of every good thing. However, given the blindness and dullness of the human heart and mind after the fall of Adam into sin, human beings can no longer learn piety from their contemplation of God in the universe. Human beings see the works of God but misjudge them and do not see, experience, and enjoy the powers of God in them. Human beings need spectacles to correct their blurry vision, and God gives them these spectacles in scripture: ‘We must come, I say, to the Word, where God is truly and vividly described to us from his works, while these very works are appraised not by our depraved judgement but by the rule of eternal truth.’49 God also heals the eyes of the pious by giving them the Holy Spirit. Once the vision of the godly has been corrected by the spectacles of scripture and the eyes of faith, they should devote every day, or at least every sabbath, to the contemplation of the works of God in the universe.50 ‘Believers, to whom he has given eyes to see, discern the sparks of his glory as it were shining out in every individual creature. The world was founded for this purpose, that it should be the theatre of divine glory.’51 Calvin develops an increasingly rich set of visual metaphors to describe the universe as the object of contemplation by the godly. According to Calvin, the universe may be described as a ‘mirror or representation of invisible things’ (Heb. 11.3).52 The world may be described as the theatre of God’s glory, which, when human beings behold it, should lead them to the knowledge of the God who created it.53 The universe is the living image of God, in which God represents Godself to us.54 The world is the clothing that the invisible God wears so that human beings might behold God therein.55 Because the invisible God appears to human creatures in the fabric of God’s works, the world is also the school where human persons should be taught to know the God who created them.56 Finally, the universe is the speechless proclamation or

Calvin, Inst. II​.vi​​.1. Calvin, Inst. I.v.10. 48 See John Calvin, Comm. Psalm 19.1, The Commentaries of John Calvin on the Old Testament (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1843–8), 8:309. Hereafter CTS. 49 Calvin, Inst. I.vi.3. 50 See John Calvin, ‘Catechism of the Church of Geneva’, in Calvin: Theological Treatises, trans. J. K. S. Reid (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 112. 51 John Calvin, Comm. Hebrews 11.3, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1959–72), 12:160. Hereafter CNTC. 52 Calvin, Comm. Romans 1.20; CNTC 8:31. 53 See Calvin, Comm. Genesis Argumentum, CTS 1:64. 54 See Calvin, Comm. Genesis Argumentum, CTS 1:60. 55 See Calvin, Comm. Psalm 104.1, CTS 11:145. 56 See Calvin, Comm. Genesis Argumentum, CTS 1:60. 46 47

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the mute teaching that should instruct human beings in the true knowledge of God, who is the author of all things.57 Calvin instructs the pious in the method they should follow in their contemplation of the universe. He teaches them to begin with the heavens, descend from there to the atmosphere, then to the earth, and finally descend within themselves, following the pattern he finds in Psalm 19.58 God would have humans begin their contemplation of the universe with the heavens because the powers of God are more clearly portrayed in the heavens than on the earth. The contemplation of the heavens assists the healing of one’s sight that begins with the spectacles of the Word, for it provides persons with the clearest image of the powers of God so that they might see the same powers on earth, down to the smallest creatures.59 The goal of such contemplation is to be ravished with admiration by the beauty, glory, and majesty of creation, for ‘were one to apply his mind to the meditation of God’s wisdom in the abundance of all fruits, in the wealth of the whole world, in the sea (which is included in the world), it could not, doubtless, be, but that he must be a thousand times filled with wonder and admiration’.60 The heavens provide the clearest image of the powers of God because they are also the closest to God of all creation.61 Contemplation of the heavens, therefore, should not only train one to see the same powers on earth that can be beheld in the heavens but should also elevate one’s mind to God, who is the author and governor of the heavens.62 This elevating effect of the contemplation of heaven is one of the best ways to come to an awareness of the transcendence of God, for it frees human beings from confining the powers and nature of God to their carnal conceptions of them, ‘for the mere sight of heaven ought to carry us higher, and transport us into admiration’.63 Thus, the contemplation of heaven not only leads human beings to descend to the contemplation of the world and themselves, but it is also the last step of their ascent to God.64 For this reason, Calvin always has the highest praise for the study of the heavens, even when practised by the ungodly, and he makes it a close companion to the study of theology proper: ‘And, indeed, astrology may justly be called the alphabet of theology; for no one can with a right mind come to the contemplation of the celestial framework, without being enraptured with admiration at the display of God’s wisdom, as well as power and goodness.’65 Calvin is aware that astronomy, like the other liberal arts, comes to the church from the unbelieving nations of the world, especially Egypt, Babylon, and Greece. Like Melanchthon, Calvin claims that these liberal arts are gifts of God, which have been revealed by the Holy Spirit.66 Since God revealed the arts and sciences to human beings by the Holy Spirit, it would be the height of ingratitude to neglect to study and use them for the benefit of piety: ‘[I]f we neglect God’s gift freely offered in these arts, we ought to suffer just punishments for our

See Calvin, Comm. Psalm 19.1, CTS 8:309. See Calvin, Comm. Psalm 19.1, CTS 8:307. 59 See Calvin, Comm. Psalm 19.1, CTS 8:308–9. 60 Calvin, Comm. Jeremiah 51.15-16, CTS 21:220. 61 See Calvin, Comm. Ezekiel 1.22, CTS 22:90. 62 See Calvin, Comm. Psalm 19.1, CTS 8:309. 63 Calvin, Comm. Isaiah 66.1, CTS 16:409–10. 64 See Calvin, Comm. Ezekiel 1.22, CTS 22:90. 65 Calvin, Comm. Jeremiah 10.1-2, CTS 18:8. 66 See Calvin, Inst. II​.ii​.​15. 57 58

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sloths.’67 However, Calvin is aware that the way natural philosophers and scientists describe the universe is at odds with how the world is described in scripture. For instance, Genesis describes the moon as the second largest heavenly body, but astronomers convincingly show Calvin that Saturn is larger than the moon. What should be done in such a conflict? Calvin’s solution is to point out that scripture is written for the unlearned and so is accommodated to their capacities, whereas astronomy is written for the learned. Hence, human beings should not read scripture to attain a scientific understanding of the universe: ‘He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. Here the Spirit of God would teach all men without exception; and therefore what Gregory [the Great] declares falsely and in vain respecting statues and pictures is truly applicable to the history of the creation, namely, that it is the book of the unlearned.’68 Hence, when scripture says that there is water above the firmament, Calvin does not accept this by faith, as Luther did, since that was not the design of Moses, as he was writing for the unlearned.69 However, the goal of the contemplation of the heavens is the same for the learned and the unlearned: ‘for the more carefully we attend to the consideration of God’s works, we ourselves vanish into nothing; the miracles which present themselves on every side, before our eyes, overwhelm us’.70

The understanding of creation in the thought of Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei Calvin’s interest in the relationship of astronomy to scripture and theology is intensified in the Roman Catholic tradition, especially in the thought of Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei. Like Calvin, Copernicus claims that the investigation of the heavens is the highest discipline that human beings can pursue: ‘Such studies are those which deal with the godlike circular movements of the world and the course of the stars, their magnitudes, distances, risings and settings, and the causes of the other appearances in the heavens; and which finally explicate the whole form. For what could be more beautiful than the heavens which contain all beautiful things?’71 Like Calvin, Copernicus appeals to the Psalms to show that the contemplation of the heavens is like a chariot carrying humans up to God: ‘For who, after applying himself to things which he sees established in the best order and directed by divine ruling, would not through diligent contemplation of them and through a certain habituation be awakened to that which is best and would not wonder at the Artificer of all things, in Whom is all happiness and every good?’72 Copernicus appeals to Plato’s Timaeus to argue that only those who contemplate the motions of the heavens are made to become like God. However, unlike Calvin, who thought of astronomy as the alphabet of theology, Copernicus considers astronomy to be ‘the

Calvin, Inst. II​.ii​.​16. Calvin, Comm. Genesis 1.6, CTS 1:79–80. 69 See Calvin, Comm. Genesis 1.6, CTS 1:80. 70 Calvin, Comm. Jeremiah 51.15-16, CTS 21:220. 71 Nicolaus Copernicus, ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’, in Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 16: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, trans. Charles G. Wallis, ed. Robert M. Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1923), 510. 72 Copernicus, ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’, 510. 67 68

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consummation of mathematics. . . . This art which is as it were the head of all the liberal arts and the one most worthy of a free man leans upon nearly all the other branches of mathematics. Arithmetic, geometry, optics, geodesy, mechanics, and whatever others, all offer themselves in its service’.73 As will be seen, this transition from theology to mathematics will have profound consequences for understanding creation in the early modern world. Copernicus is well aware that his claim that the sun is stationary and that the earth and other planets orbit around the sun will strike his readers as worthy of repudiation. This realization initially kept him from publishing his findings: ‘Those who know that the consensus of many centuries has sanctioned the conception that the earth remains at rest in the middle of the heaven as its centre would, I reflected, regard it as an insane pronouncement if I made the opposite assertion that the earth moves.’74 Copernicus is well aware of Ptolemy’s reputation in the science of astronomy. However, he points out that Ptolemy’s description of the regions of the earth has already been seriously challenged by the discovery of China in a region that Ptolemy thought to be uninhabited, and especially by the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus. Thus, it is not surprising that with regard to Ptolemy’s description of the movement of the heavenly bodies, ‘very many things are not in accord with the movements which should follow from his doctrine but rather with movements which were discovered later and were unknown to him’.75 For these reasons, Copernicus is confident that he should publish his findings despite his awareness of their novelty: ‘Therefore we are not ashamed to maintain that this totality – which the moon embraces – and the centre of the Earth too traverse that great orbital circle among the other wandering stars in an annual revolution around the sun.’76 Not only does the earth orbit around the sun, but the distance between the sun and the earth is minuscule compared to the immensity of the rest of the universe: ‘although the distance from the sun to the Earth in relation to whatsoever planetary sphere you please possesses magnitude which is sufficiently manifest in proportion to these dimensions, this distance, as compared with the sphere of the fixed stars, is imperceptible’.77 As for those who challenge his new description of the universe because it appears to contradict the plain teaching of scripture that the sun revolves around the earth, Copernicus echoes a thought already described in Calvin: Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur, best translated as ‘Astronomy is written for astronomers.’78 The implication is that one should not read scripture to understand astronomy. This insight will be much more thoroughly developed by Galileo Galilei. Galileo built on the mathematical model of the universe developed by Copernicus by means of his empirical observations through the newly developed telescope. Just as Columbus and others ‘discovered’ continents not imagined by Ptolemy, the telescope allowed Galileo to discover heavenly phenomena not previously observed, including the mountains on the moon, the stars making up the Milky Way, and the four planets or moons orbiting

Copernicus, ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’, 510. Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions, ed. Jerzy Dobrzycki, trans. Edward Rosen (London: Macmillan Press, 1978), 3. 75 Copernicus, ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’, 511. 76 Copernicus, ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’, 525. 77 Copernicus, ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’, 525–6. 78 Copernicus, On the Revolutions, 5. 73 74

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around Jupiter.79 Galileo claims that these discoveries, and the geometric demonstrations he developed based on these observations, plainly refute Ptolemy’s system and prove the truth of Copernicus’ description of the universe.80 However, as Copernicus had anticipated, many objected to Galileo’s refutation of Ptolemy and Aristotle by appealing to the inerrant authority of the Bible: ‘The reason produced for condemning the opinion that the earth moves and the sun stands still is that in many places in the Bible one may read that the sun moves and the earth stands still.’81 Galileo, in turn, objects to using the authority of scripture to refute observation and demonstration because this does ‘impious and inconsiderate injury not only to that doctrine and its followers but to all mathematics and mathematicians in general’.82 But how, then, does one account for the different descriptions of the universe in the Bible and in astronomical observation? Galileo claims that the Word of God is revealed both in scripture and in the phenomena of nature. Like Calvin, Galileo argues that the Holy Spirit accommodates the teaching of scripture to the capacities of the unlearned, whereas the investigation of the self-revelation of God in the universe is left to the explorations of the learned: ‘For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words.’83 After all, scripture itself proclaims that God is revealed in the works God does in the universe; hence, one cannot use the Bible to prohibit the science of astronomy. However, it becomes clear that Galileo goes beyond Calvin when he claims that the understanding of the universe by observation and mathematical demonstration gives human beings more certainty than they find in scripture: ‘For the Bible is not chained in every expression to conditions as strict as those which govern all physical effects; nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature’s actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible.’84 For Calvin, the spectacles of scripture are needed to correct human misapprehensions of the works of God, for he is convinced that these works set forth the powers or perfections of God. Without scripture, human beings cannot rightly read the volume set before them in God’s works. For Galileo, on the other hand, the volume of the universe is written in the language of mathematics, without which human beings cannot understand what they are seeing: Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures

See Galileo Galilei, ‘The Starry Messenger, 1610’, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake (New York: Anchor Books, 1957), 21–58. 80 See Galileo Galilei, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615’, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake (New York: Anchor Books, 1957), 173–216. 81 Galileo, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615’, 181. 82 Galileo, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615’, 177. 83 Galileo, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615’, 182–3. 84 Galileo, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615’, 183. 79

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without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.85 For this reason, citing scripture to refute geometric demonstrations based on empirical observations would be ‘a bald denial of truth’.86 Therefore, whenever there appears to be a contradiction between the ways scripture and astronomy describe the universe, human beings must accommodate the more indeterminate teaching of scripture to the certain conclusions of empirical observation and geometrical demonstrations: ‘This granted, and it being true that two truths cannot contradict one another, it is the function of wise expositors to seek out the true senses of scriptural texts. These will unquestionably accord with the physical conclusions which manifest sense and necessary demonstrations have previously made certain to us.’87 Galileo claims that the church fathers interpreted scripture in this way: ‘And in St Augustine we read: “If anyone shall set the authority of Holy Writ against clear and manifest reason, he who does this knows not what he has undertaken”.’88 The location of certainty in observation and demonstration, warranted by the claim that the Word of God revealed in the universe is written in the language of mathematics, is a reversal of Luther’s insistence that the Word of God in scripture is more certain than observation and reason, which can be deceived. Cardinal Bellarmine, SJ, unknowingly echoes Luther when he asserts that the Word of God is certain, given that its author is God, whereas the findings of mathematics can only be hypothetical. This was also the position taken by the Nuremberg Lutheran Andreas Osiander in his Foreword to On the Revolutions: ‘So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it.’89 Hence in Bellarmine’s view, astronomical observation and mathematical demonstration cannot demonstrate what is real. Only scripture can do that with certainty: For there is no danger in saying that, by assuming the earth moves and the sun stands still, one saves all the appearances better than by postulating eccentrics and epicycles; and that is sufficient for the mathematician. However, it is different to want to affirm that in reality the sun is at the centre of the world and only turns on itself [i.e. turns upon its axis] without moving from east to west, and the earth is in the third heaven and revolves with great speed around the sun; this is a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also to harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false.90 The transition from Calvin to Galileo is subtle but transformative. Both claim that scripture is accommodated to the unlearned, so if one wants to learn astronomy, one should turn to the

Galileo Galilei, ‘Excerpts from The Assayer, 1623’, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake (New York: Anchor Books, 1957), 237–8. 86 Galileo, ‘Excerpts from The Assayer, 1623’, 232. 87 Galileo, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615’, 186. 88 Galileo, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615’, 186. 89 Andreas Osiander, foreword to On the Revolutions, ed. Jerzy Dobrzycki, trans. Edward Rosen (London: Macmillan Press, 1978), xvi. 90 ‘Cardinal Bellarmine to Foscarini, 12 April, 1615’, in The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, trans. and ed. Maurice A. Finocchiaro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 67. 85

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investigations of the learned. But by claiming that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics and not in the language of the powers of God, Galileo moves the locus of the certain knowledge of creation from scripture to empirical observation and geometrical demonstration, for ‘in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages but from sense-experiences and necessary demonstrations’.91 In his view, the uncertain meaning of scripture regarding creation must always be interpreted in light of the certain and true discoveries of reason and the senses: ‘Hence I should think it would be the part of prudence not to permit anyone to usurp scriptural texts and force them in some way to maintain any physical conclusion to be true, when at some future time the senses and demonstrative or necessary reasons may show the contrary.’92 This shift of the locus of certainty from scripture to empirical observation and mathematical demonstration accelerates in post-Reformation Europe and comes to dominate the way human beings understand the created world.

Further reading Dillenberger, John. Protestant Thought and Natural Science: A Historical Interpretation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Harrison, Peter. The Territories of Science and Religion. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Kusukawa, Sachiko. The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pitt, Joseph C. Galileo, Human Knowledge, and the Book of Nature: Method Replaces Metaphysics. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992. Schreiner, Susan E. The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001. Schwanke, Johannes. ‘Martin Luther’s Theology of Creation’. International Journal of Systematic Theology 18, no. 4 (2016): 399–413. Zachman, Randall C. Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.

Galileo, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615’, 182. Galileo, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615’, 187.

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CHAPTER 16 ESCHATOLOGY AND RESURRECTION

David W. Congdon

The aim of this chapter is not to develop an introduction to eschatology and resurrection as such but strictly in relation to creation. While this constraint severely limits the scope of the analysis, it also addresses an often-overlooked question. Theological discussions of creation and eschatology frequently take place in hyperspecialized cul-de-sacs, each so concerned with the myriad controversies in their own spheres of doctrine – for example, cosmic origins and environmental ethics with the one, political prognostication and afterlife speculation with the other – that there often remains little time for inquiries into the relationship between them. Not that there has been much felt need for such inquiry. For most of Christian history, the relationship between creation and eschatology was relatively uncontroversial: creation is the beginning that flows from God, while eschatology is the conclusion in which creation returns to its source, and the cosmos moves inexorably from one to the other by God’s gracious providence. According to Origen, ‘the end is always like the beginning’, and just as ‘there was one beginning’, so too ‘there is one end to all things’.1 The tidiness of this classical, rather Neoplatonic picture has fractured over the past century as talk of creation and eschatology has been tethered to various theological disputes whose conceptual frameworks and presuppositions are often in tension with each other. More recent talk of eschatology, in particular, has emphasized narratival categories and natural presuppositions about what makes consummation new with respect to creation. The task of this chapter is, therefore: first, to clarify by way of historical inquiry the problem of continuity that bedevils theological reflection on the relationship between creation and eschatology; and second, to venture a theological alternative that avoids this problem altogether by demythologizing some natural assumptions about eschatology, thereby providing a more credible and liberating way forward.

The creation–eschatology relation and the problem of continuity Προσδοκοῦμεν ἀνάστασιν νεκρῶν, καὶ ζωὴν τοῦ μέλλοντος αἰῶνος. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come. So concludes the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. The reference to the ‘age to come’ – often mistranslated as ‘world to come’ and too often reduced to a simple eternity – raises the question of the relationship between the present and future ages, between creation and consummation. This question became more pressing with the rediscovery of apocalyptic ideas in the early twentieth century and the subsequent rise of cosmic and political eschatologies. These approaches forced a reckoning with eschatological

Origen, First Principles, 1.6.2.

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hope as more than the Christianization of the world2 and challenged classical theologies that assumed not only a dualist anthropology but also an account of eschatological perfection consisting of a beatific vision on a spiritual plane no longer connected to the physical limitations of embodied existence. Much of the literature about the creation–eschatology relationship (hereafter CER) has focused on the question of timing; namely, whether the coming age was originally expected in an imminent future that never arrived and so forced the church to adapt to its surroundings or instead was always understood as something already inaugurated but not yet fully realized. Embedded in this debate, however, is the more basic question regarding the continuity, or discontinuity, between the old and new ages. Is the age to come a wholly new reality, either material or immaterial, that replaces the present cosmos, doomed as it is to an eventual conflagration? Or is the new age progressively being unveiled within the creation, perhaps as the church grows through evangelization or as Christians engage in sociocultural transformation and production? Or, finally, is the eschatological age already fully present even though it is invisible to every eye except the eye of faith? Insofar as the relationship between death and resurrection is paradigmatic for the relationship between the old and new ages, the conundrum of continuity in the CER raises the question of the continuity between the fleshly body and the sōma pneumatikos of the resurrected Jesus (1 Cor. 15.44), and thereby also the relationship between our present existence and whatever is awaiting, if anything. As these questions already indicate, the problem of continuity is a veritable thicket of problems – a thicket that has grown especially unruly in recent decades – thus necessitating a more nuanced set of categories in order to discern precisely which continuity is at issue in debates about the CER. The continuities can be differentiated into the following nine categories: i. Resurrectional continuity views the CER as the relationship between the fleshly body before death and the spiritual body after resurrection – primarily with respect to Jesus and secondarily with respect to humans. Here the question is how christology and theological anthropology make sense of human identity between mortal and eternal life. ii. Cosmological continuity views the CER as the relationship between the old and new cosmos. The term cosmos ‘refers to the entire universe of physical, spiritual, terrestrial, and celestial reality’ – that is, to the whole of reality in its fullest sense.3 Here the question is soteriology on the cosmic level; namely, how God’s act of creation relates to the eschatological hope for all things. iii. Anthropological continuity views the CER as the relationship between the old and new person. Here the question is soteriology on the individual level, in which creation and eschatology are ways of speaking about sin and faith.

Regarding the Christianization of the world, Friedrich Schleiermacher frames this doctrine in terms of the ‘consummation of the church’ rather than that of the world, in which the eschatological hope consists in the ‘spread of Christianity over the mass of humanity’. See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Faith: A New Translation and Critical Edition, ed. Catherine L. Kelsey and Terrence N. Tice, trans. Terrence N. Tice, Catherine L. Kelsey, and Edwina G. Lawler (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), 965. 3 David Bentley Hart, ‘Different Idioms, Different Worlds: Various Notes on Translating the New Testament’, in Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 366. 2

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iv. Epistemological continuity views the CER as the relationship between nature and grace. Here the question is whether the knowledge of God has any continuity with the knowledge of nature that is ostensibly available to all people. v. Scientific continuity views the CER as the relationship between the beginning and end of the visible, material universe, especially earth. Here the question is how theology’s claims about eschatology relate to scientific claims about the future end of life on earth and the end of the universe, including all possibility of life, as a whole. vi. Historical continuity views the CER as the qualitative relationship between the historical and the eschatological – between time and eternity – and the quantitative relationship between the past and the future. Here there is a twofold question about Christian origins (how the early Christian community understood the eschaton) and Christian identity (how the individual Christian understands the relationship between one’s present existence and the eschatological future). vii. Sociopolitical continuity views the CER as the relationship between the present social order and the chiliastic ideal of an earthly kingdom. Here the question is whether and how Christianity’s eschatological expectations relate to the social and political situation. viii. Narratival continuity views the CER as the relationship between the literary beginning and end of the Christian biblical canon and, more broadly, the beginning and end of the Christian story or ‘salvation history’. Here the question is about the narratival coherence, aesthetic plenitude, and pulchritude of the total story. ix. Covenantal continuity views the CER as the relationship between the two modes of God’s covenant community – Israel and the church. Here the question is whether God remains faithful to God’s promises to Israel or whether the church supersedes and supplants Israel. Many of the conflicts in theology stem from tensions between the different frameworks within which theologians explore the relationship between creation and eschatology. When theologians establish one of these as the norm, it forces the other frameworks to conform to the theological presuppositions embedded in the first. For instance, the ‘nature and grace’ dispute in the early twentieth century arose from a tension between epistemological and anthropological frameworks. The science and theology debate stems from the notion that ‘nature’ in the epistemological frame is the same as nature in the scientific frame. For some, discontinuity in one category may not conflict with continuity in another; for others, continuity in one category demands continuity in every other. Virtually every theologian accepts the need for continuity and discontinuity in some capacity; however, the overarching question is: Where are the continuity and discontinuity located? A brief historical survey demonstrates the diversity and complexity of the options within Christian thought. Some CER categories did not arise until relatively recently, such as the historical (since historical research is a modern development) and the covenantal (since most of Christian history was anti-Jewish and supersessionist). The sociopolitical category was a minority position throughout Christian history, as millenarian movements and apocalyptic ideas arose repeatedly, often enjoying widespread popularity, particularly in response to social crises and institutional hegemonies. In what follows, of particular interest is how the 221

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cosmological and anthropological categories reflect the theological and cultural conditions of different periods, both because these categories remain central throughout the various stages in theological history and because they highlight the problem of continuity in a profound way. The ancient Mediterranean world of Second Temple Judaism and the earliest Christian communities emphasized cosmological and anthropological discontinuity amid covenantal continuity. In addition to the apocalyptic expectation of the imminent End that characterized Jewish communities during the time of Jesus and Paul, there was the understanding of the resurrection and afterlife common to this period. As Matthew Thiessen observes, numerous passages in the Jewish scriptures (e.g. Judg. 5.20; Pss. 8.3-7; 148.1-3; Job 38.4-7), as well as Second Temple texts such as the Animal Apocalypse, Joseph and Asenath, and Qumran’s Thanksgiving Scroll, identify stars as divine or angelic beings, or at least as images of the divine. The stars or angels were understood to be made of pneuma, which in the cosmology of the time was a material substance – not the immaterial ‘spirit’ of modern parlance. Resurrection within this context was understood as a ‘process of astralization’, in which the wise will shine ‘like the stars forever and ever’ (Dan. 12.3) and the righteous will be ‘like the angels’ and ‘made equal to the stars’ (2 Bar. 51.10).4 This process of becoming star-like fulfils the original Abrahamic promise that his seed will be like the stars (Gen. 15.5), which Thiessen convincingly argues should be understood in qualitative rather than numerical terms, and finds support for this reading in Philo, Irenaeus, and Origen.5 The gospel of Paul to the early communities of gentile Christ followers was that, through faith, they receive Christ’s pneuma – that is, they are infused with the risen Christ’s angelic-astral matter – and thereby share in the seed and promise of Abraham; they begin the astralization process now, which their later resurrection will fully realize when they join the righteous ‘up in the shining aether beyond the moon’.6 While the apocalyptic texts from this period describe the eschatological hope in terrestrial terms as universal peace and a renewed and glorious temple, the astral nature of resurrected bodies suggests that ancient Mediterranean cosmology expected a celestial afterlife, which, as Paula Fredriksen points out, fits with Paul’s claim that the redeemed have their ‘citizenship’ (politeuma) in the heavens (Phil. 3.20).7 Amid the material discontinuity between terrestrial and celestial existence – ‘the form of the cosmos is passing away’ (1 Cor. 7.31) – there is the continuity of God’s promise to Abraham. If there is a material continuity, it consists in the fact that God’s people are already, in some mysterious way, a pneumatic community; pneuma is the substance that unites the resurrectional, cosmological, anthropological, and covenantal categories within the early communities of Christ believers. As the apocalyptic cosmology faded from view, the Christian community adapted to the world and brought about the era of ecclesiastical empire, a church-directed culture defined by the exercise of sacerdotal authority within a divinely willed hierarchical order. According to the structure of the Ptolemaic cosmos, everything had its ordained place and function: the human person was the microcosm that reflected the macrocosm, and the macrocosm existed

Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 140–3. See Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem, 137–9. 6 David Bentley Hart, ‘Postscript to the Paperback Edition’, in The New Testament: A Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 593. 7 See Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 244n49. 4 5

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for the sake of the fulfilment of the microcosm. In this context, there was a far greater emphasis on eschatological continuity – especially material continuity. Gregory of Nyssa’s dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection repeatedly stresses that ‘the resurrection is nothing other than the restoration of our nature to its original state’, and for this reason the very same elements must be used or else the result would be a new creation rather than a resurrection.8 The form will be different, just as the seed is formally different from the tree, but the material elements will be identical so that the same body gathers around the same soul in paradise. Thomas Aquinas is often associated with eschatological discontinuity since his concept of heavenly bliss – in which humans spend eternity intellectually contemplating God within a static, timeless cosmos on the grounds that bodily corruption derives, he claims, from the movement of the heavens – seems so foreign to creaturely experience.9 But this formal discontinuity coincides with material continuity, specifically with respect to the cosmological and resurrectional categories. When Aquinas asks whether the world will be renewed (innovabitur), his key argument in support of the affirmative is that all corporeal things have been made for the sake of humanity, and since human beings – whom he calls a ‘little world’ (minor mundus) – will be renewed in the sense of being freed from mortality and corruption, it follows that the universe will be renewed as well.10 The rationale for this renewal is simply that while the mind’s eye will be able to comprehend God’s essence, one’s fleshly eyes, whose elements will be restored in resurrection, will have to settle for seeing God’s divinity in its corporeal effects. The newness in question, Aquinas clarifies, will be neither natural nor contrary to nature, but instead will be above nature (supra naturam), ‘just as grace and glory are above the nature of the soul’.11 Resurrection is nature without the tendency towards corruption, which, for Aquinas, requires static timelessness. John Calvin briefly takes up this topic in the context of addressing what he considers superfluous questions, which are pursued by those hungry for ‘empty learning’.12 Nevertheless, he says the renewal of creation will serve the purpose of granting the redeemed the pinnacle of happiness. Even though people will no longer need creation for their sustenance and survival, the knowledge of the new creation and the sight of it – unencumbered by the limitations of time, weariness, and sin – will fill the pious with unsurpassed pleasure. In most of the accounts of eschatology from late antiquity to early modernity, discontinuity is largely swallowed up by continuity. Within a church-directed culture, with its all-encompassing cosmic structure of nature and supernature ordained from the beginning by God, it is understandable why the accent would fall on cosmological and resurrectional continuity. The CER is the return of creation to its source, the restoration of the cosmos to its original and perfect form. For Aquinas, the renewed world is merely the amelioration of the universe by way of the addition of glory. Indeed, he goes on to say, nothing wholly new can be created, for

Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993), 118. 9 See Thomas Aquinas, On the Truth of the Catholic Faith, Summa Contra Gentiles. Book Four: Salvation, trans. Charles J. O’Neil (Garden City: Image Books, 1957), chap. 97. 10 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), III (Suppl.), Q. 91, Art. 1. 11 Aquinas, ST, III (Suppl.), Q. 91, Art. 1. 12 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford L. Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1977), III​.xxv​.​11. 8

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that would violate the biblical claim that God ceased creating on the seventh day, and thus everything God does in the consummation has to be prefigured in some way in the original creation.13 The consummated creation for Calvin seems to be largely identical to the present world and what has changed is primarily humanity’s freedom from vice and illness, which distort and inhibit the ability to fully enjoy the world. For Calvin and Protestant orthodoxy, cosmic eschatology was of little to no interest; indeed, special preoccupation with this subject, as with Thomas Müntzer or the Anabaptists at Münster, was likely a sign of something sinister and perverse. The ecclesiastical culture of this period rendered eschatological speculations pointless. When the metaphysics of the classical tradition became unbelievable for many in the wake of the scientific and historical revolutions, it was easy for liberal theology to let eschatology simply merge into ecclesiology. For all intents and purposes, that had already happened centuries earlier. Early modernity extended, even deepened, the continuity that characterized Christendom’s church culture. While the Protestant Reformations, particularly the Lutheran tradition, instigated a fresh wave of apocalyptic prophecies and astrological prognostications, the confessional Protestant traditions largely contained discontinuity within the anthropological category.14 When post-Reformation apocalyptic eschatology, and the Ptolemaic cosmology that supported it, faded in the mid-seventeenth century, the emphasis on anthropology to the neglect of other categories made the transition to a Copernican cosmology and the modern disbelief in eschatology relatively painless. If liberal theology was largely a theology of continuity, the rediscovery of New Testament apocalyptic ideas in late modernity reignited talk of eschatological discontinuity, even though – now on the other side of Kant, Lessing, and Hegel – cosmological discontinuity had been replaced by historical and epistemological discontinuity. Karl Barth thus declared: ‘There is no continuity, no harmony, no peace between the death of the old person and the life of the new.’15 Barth here expanded on the sixteenth-century Lutherans, who confessed that ‘in spiritual and divine matters . . . the human being is like a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife, indeed like a block of wood or a stone, like a lifeless statue’.16 Elaborating on this, Barth wrote that fallen human beings ‘are surely dead’, like ‘human corpses’.17 In these and other statements, Barth extended the anthropological discontinuity of the Reformation into the epistemological, historical, and even cosmological realms (by way of christology), thus turning the soteriological principle of justification by grace alone into the starting point for thinking about the CER more broadly. The result, naturally, was the emphatic denial of natural theology. To emphasize continuity would be to deny the need for and dependence upon God’s grace. Barth, of course, does not contest that, viewed empirically, the human person appears

See Aquinas, ST, III (Suppl.), Q. 91, Art. 1. See Robin B. Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Robin B. Barnes, Astrology and Reformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 15 Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik: Die Lehre von der Versöhnung 2 (Zollikon-Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1955), 448; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 399. 16 Formula of Concord, ‘The Solid Declaration’, in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, trans. Charles Arand et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 548 (II.20). The passage in question is culled from several of Martin Luther’s own writings and is attributed to him as a quote. 17 Barth, KD IV.1, 535; Barth, CD IV.1, 481. 13 14

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the same before and after the event of faith, just as the world appears the same before and after Christ. Barth merely denies that this fact has any theological significance since theology is not concerned with the empirical but with the ontological – the true being of the person and the world. For Barth, as for the dialectical and apocalyptic theologians who followed him, the eschatological consummation of humanity, its discontinuous death and resurrection, has already occurred in Jesus Christ, and it only remains for faith to acknowledge what is always already true. As a Lutheran theologian, Rudolf Bultmann shared Barth’s soteriological convictions, but to avoid metaphysical speculation he distinguished instead between the ontological and the ontic: the ontological self is the visible, empirical person, while the ontic self is the hidden, existential dimension – what the Apostle Paul, drawing on Hellenic thought, calls the ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ person (2 Cor. 4.16).18 For Bultmann, anthropological discontinuity does not entail ‘a magical transformation of the human person that removes the believer from Dasein’. One’s existence is ontically ‘sublated’ and ‘overcome’, he says, but not ontologically ‘destroyed’.19 Such a person is now ‘deworlded’ (entweltlicht) even though they exist ‘within the world’, a paradox that he explicitly connects to the christological paradox of ‘the Word made flesh’ and the soteriological paradox of simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously justified and a sinner).20 For Bultmann, then, the eschatological discontinuity of the moment of decision – in which one is removed from the world – coincides with a person’s worldly, ontological continuity. The discontinuity (of eschatological existence) always involves a simultaneous continuity (of worldly existence), and continuity finds its true meaning and significance in discontinuity. The nuanced, paradoxical relationship between continuity and discontinuity in the work of the dialectical theologians has been lost in the criticism levelled against them and their apocalyptic heirs by biblical scholars who have embraced the literary and postliberal developments of the late twentieth century and have deployed a narratival framework specifically to expound the CER. These scholars, influenced especially by N. T. Wright, adopted modern historicism but then stripped it of its critical dimension, leaving them with an inflated category of narrative, which they elevated to the level of a master concept that then determines all other categories for thinking about creation and eschatology. The biblical canon becomes a single coherent macronarrative whose plot begins with creation and concludes with new creation, and in which Jesus is one agent among others – alongside judges, kings, and prophets – within the story of salvation history.21 For Wright, any critique of this narratival construct is taken as a denial of creation, covenant, history, and even Israel, and thus the dialectical and apocalyptic theologians are guilty of ‘deJudaizing’ the New Testament, denying history

See Rudolf Bultmann, Der zweite Brief an die Korinther, ed. Erich Dinkler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976), 127. 19 Rudolf Bultmann, ‘Die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins und der Glaube: Antwort an Gerhardt Kuhlmann [1930]’, in Neues Testament und christliche Existenz: Theologische Aufsätze, ed. Andreas Lindemann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 65–6. 20 See Rudolf Bultmann, ‘Das Befremdliche des christlichen Glaubens’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 55, no. 2 (1958): 191–2; Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology: The Gifford Lectures 1955 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), 154. 21 See J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 57–60. 18

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(since history, he says, ‘implies continuity’), and rejecting the goodness of creation.22 By confining creation and eschatology within this narratival box, Wright and other postliberals can criticize modern theologians for having different cultural and theoretical presuppositions from the early Christians while simultaneously ignoring the actual cultural presuppositions of Mediterranean antiquity. The singular macronarrative binds both past and present to a fictive construct. Much like the hermeneutical Swiss army knife of the ‘already but not yet’ formula so beloved by this school, the salvation–historical story is a malleable tool capable of avoiding any real historical or exegetical problem. Wright ultimately argues that continuity between creation and eschatology is ‘established in the final consummation’ and thereby guarantees the possibility and promise of natural theology.23 For Wright, the CER applies to a whole host of continuities – between creation and new creation, death and resurrection, nature and grace, Israel and the church, and between the church and the coming kingdom – the loss of any implying the loss of all. Finally, and most recently, theologians engaged in the dialogue with the natural sciences have conflated cosmological continuity with scientific continuity on the assumption that ‘creation’ refers to the origin of the observable universe and thus ‘new creation’ must refer to the universe’s final end. The work of Robert John Russell is particularly notable in this regard. He argues that clues to the new creation can be gleaned ‘from the themes of continuity and discontinuity found in the Gospel accounts of the resurrection’.24 Specifically, he claims that ‘a literal understanding of the bodily resurrection of Jesus’ is ‘the first instance of a general, regular phenomenon’ and so provides an analogy for the future of the cosmos, one that requires rejecting the predictive value of Big Bang cosmology. Russell speaks of ‘elements of continuity’ and ‘elements of discontinuity’ between pre- and post-resurrection Jesus and between creation and consummation. The elements of continuity in Jesus include ‘at least a minimal element of physical/material being’ in addition to personal and interpersonal characteristics. He claims that science can assist in understanding which conditions and characteristics of the universe are essential and, thus, are elements of continuity.25 Like the narratival biblical scholars, Russell gives little attention to the historical–cultural gap between the ancient Mediterranean world of the Gospels and modern science; he assumes, for instance, that the eschatological future pertains to this world and so already rejects the astral afterlife presupposed by Second Temple Jews. More importantly, he assumes that the ancient apocalyptic and eschatological expectations of resurrection have timeless validity as factual propositions to which all Christians are confessionally bound, and if they conflict with scientific expectations regarding cosmic entropy and the collapse of the universe, so much the worse for science. The foregoing brief survey demonstrates that across the different periods of church history, the understanding of the CER has fluctuated dramatically – with an emphasis on discontinuity in one period giving way to continuity in another. More importantly, there was often significant disagreement about where to locate the continuity and discontinuity, as changing cosmologies

See N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 457, 461, 807; N. T. Wright, History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2019), xiii, 80. 23 Wright, History and Eschatology, 254. 24 Robert J. Russell, ‘Resurrection, Eschatology, and the Challenge of Big Bang Cosmology’, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 70, no. 1 (2016): 54. 25 See Russell, ‘Resurrection, Eschatology’, 52, 55. 22

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and cultural presuppositions produced conflicting accounts of the relationship between creation and new creation. Every age has conceptualized the CER – including what counts as eschatological newness – in light of the cosmologies and anthropologies that made sense to them at the time; this historical adaptability is a feature, not a problem, of Christian theology. But this means it makes little sense to repristinate a previous era’s account of creation and eschatology. As Klaus Nürnberger points out, ‘it is a typical feature of the biblical tradition that it abandoned, transformed, or replaced outdated images and metaphors on a regular basis’, and thus there is no reason why ‘theology should feel obliged to claim timeless validity for any one of the biblical future expectations, including those taken up into Christian doctrinal formulations’.26 Of course, not every new conceptual framework is inherently helpful. For example, the scientific category conflates divine creation with the natural world accessible to empirical investigation, thereby forcing theology into a concordist corner that places it on the defensive against scientific discovery.27 What unites most of the categories and accounts of the CER identified above is the common-sense assumption that ‘creation’ and ‘eschatology’ refer to two distinct objects in human experience – the world as it is (creation) and the world as it ought to be or will be one day (eschatology). This experiential gap between creation and new creation forms the underlying basis for all talk of (dis)continuity, but it also traps theology in a bind since it is forever trying – and failing – to discover a bridge across this divide. The assumption that there is a gap between creation and eschatology mirrors other perceived gaps in Christian experience. The doctrine of double predestination stems from the attempt to explain the gap between why some believe, and others do not – that is, in Calvin’s words, why the gospel ‘does not gain the same acceptance either constantly or in equal degree’.28 Instead of thinking about redemption psychologically ‘from below’, the alternative is to think theologically ‘from above’, in terms of what must be true about redemption in light of who God is and what God has done and revealed, of which Barth’s universal election is a well-known example.29 Much like psychological approaches to soteriology, the problem with most CER accounts, especially those that emphasize the narratival framework, is that they force theology into an anthropocentric straitjacket. The perception that creation lies in the past while eschatology lies ahead in the future is a finite perspective, conditioned by the experience of temporal progress from birth to death, as well as the natural propensity to structure reality in terms of a beginning, middle, and end. But the fact that reality is experienced in this way is not a sufficient reason to conform theology to this narratival structure. Indeed, it is all the more reason to be wary of it. The final part of this chapter proposes rethinking the CER to move beyond the continuity problem altogether – or at least beyond any sequential account that views creation and consummation as two distinct moments and realities. Doing so requires shifting from a

Klaus Nürnberger, ‘Eschatology and Entropy: An Alternative to Robert John Russell’s Proposal’, Zygon 47, no. 4 (2012): 980–1. While he helpfully emphasizes the historical development of eschatology, Nürnberger assumes ancient mythical, eschatological accounts were merely metaphorical and not viewed as actual expectations about the material cosmos, which does not fully take into consideration the ancient cosmology presupposed by these apocalyptic texts. 27 On the concept of concordism and its varieties (scientific, historical, and theological), see Denis O. Lamoureux, Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2008), 14–16. 28 Calvin, Inst., III​.xxi​​.1. 29 See Barth, KD II.2, 367–72; Barth, CD II.2, 333–8. 26

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psychological or empirical perspective on the CER to a genuinely theological perspective, which also means jettisoning the narratival and scientific categories for thinking about creation and eschatology.

Beyond the continuity problem: The paradoxical identity of creation and eschatology Towards the end of his Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas observes that each person naturally desires the last end – an end that brings a fitting conclusion to their existence. Borrowing from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Aquinas says that ‘the way someone is determines how the end appears to them’ (qualis unusquisque est talis et finis videtur ei).30 Those who desire happiness imagine the ultimate end as a place of perpetual bliss. Those who pursue justice imagine the end as a cosmic setting to rights. Confronted by the cacophony of finite existence, humans long for a final consonance, an intelligible ending that will bring order to the whole. Humans live and die, as the literary critic Frank Kermode observed, in mediis rebus (in the middle of things), and ‘to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems’.31 Humans are socially formed, in other words, to expect, even demand, coherent and tidy endings, not only for themselves but also for the world in its totality. They conceive the eschatological End as the cosmic projection of individual ends – as the ultimate that will bring the needed resolution to the penultimate. Ludwig Feuerbach was more insightful than most theologians in recognizing that ‘heaven is the true god of human beings. As a person conceives their heaven, so a person conceives their god’.32 As natural as it is to conceive of creation’s consummation as the projection of one’s deepest desires and unconscious habits, a Christian theological account of the CER cannot settle for interpreting eschatology in psychological terms, as if a person’s birth and death reflect, on the individual level, ‘the two great acts of God at the beginning and end of all things: the creation and the consummation’.33 The challenge here is to rethink what makes the new creation actually new. Responding to Paul Griffiths’ notion of the novissimum as the last thing that has no future novelty, Joshua Wise argues that the question of eschatological newness has been hampered by a ‘natural’ concept of newness that defines the new as the most recent state of affairs. Griffiths’ novissimum absolutizes this natural account of novelty so that the last thing of any creature is a state of affairs that cannot be superseded by something newer and more recent.34 Wise argues instead for an account of divine novelty: newness in this theological sense is not the most recent occurrence in a linear sequence, but rather God is eternally new and anything that participates in God thereby shares in this divine newness. While Wise ends up arguing for a mythical account of eschatology that retains too much anthropological and cosmological continuity on the grounds that ‘grace crowns nature’ – even imagining an afterlife that involves

Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 4.95.2–3; cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3.1114a.17. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7. 32 Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, 2nd edn (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1843), 260. 33 Barth, KD III.3, 260; Barth, CD III.3, 230. 34 See Paul J. Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), 7. 30 31

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the experience of temporal progress – his argument for a divine, rather than natural, account of newness remains apt.35 The first step is to see creation and consummation as concepts referring not to objects of human experience but to divine acts, and thus to let the being of God, and not one’s natural prior understandings, determine their meaning. A ‘natural’ reading of these terms assumes they have a meaning in theology roughly equivalent to their use in everyday language. For instance, one might speak about one’s creation of a book manuscript, and – if sufficiently productive – a year or two later, one might speak about one’s consummation of the book. This natural interpretation is the underlying assumption behind the narratival framework, in which creation marks the temporal and ontological origin, while consummation or eschatology marks the temporal and ontological end. The analogous (or, as it often is, borderline univocal) application of this natural understanding of creation and consummation to theological talk of divine creation and consummation implies an anthropomorphic deity who relates to the cosmos the way an author relates to a book: a discrete entity who volitionally chooses to create and sovereignly determines the creation the way a potter determines the clay – a mythological metaphor used in scripture (see Isa. 64.8; Jer. 18.6; Sir. 33.13) that has worked its way into liturgy and theology. Using such language univocally leads directly to what Tink Tinker identifies as the ‘up-down cognitive image schema’ that characterizes how Euro-colonial people in North America frequently understood the relationship between creator and creation.36 According to this colonial imaginary, ‘God’ is the hierarchically highest being that rules over those lower on the ontological order. Eurocolonial eschatology at the ultimate, cosmic level thus reflects Euro-colonial eschatology at the penultimate, political level: just as Indigenous persons were placed in re-educating boarding schools under the eschatological motto of ‘kill the Indian and save the man’, so too God is conceived as a cosmic colonizer who re-educates humanity through the church under the motto of ‘kill the sinner and save the soul’.37 So much God-talk, especially with respect to the CER, implies a being endowed with supreme authority who chooses among options and rules over creation at a remove – a god who, as both Aquinas and Paul Tillich observe, is merely ‘a being’ instead of ‘being itself ’.38 If God is so qualitatively other and absolutely transcendent as to be the power of being as such, then it makes little sense to speak of creation and consummation as discrete acts; God does not will this or that option, because God is pure willing itself. One can only speak of these as divine acts if one recognizes that, in truth, God does only one act – the singular act that determines both the divine being and creaturely existence. As Meister Eckhart points out in his commentary on Genesis, the eternal now in which God created heaven and earth is ‘the very same now in which God exists from eternity, in which also the emanation of the divine Persons eternally is, was, and will be’. God ‘did not exist before the world did. . . . It is false to picture

See Joshua Wise, ‘The Concept of Newness in Eschatology’, Pro Ecclesia 27, no. 3 (2018): 326–9, 334. George E. Tinker, ‘Why I Do Not Believe in a Creator’, in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice, and Life Together, ed. Steve Heinrichs (Waterloo: Herald Press, 2013), 169. 37 On the boarding schools, see David W. Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928, 2nd edn (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020). 38 See Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 13, Art.11; Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), 1:156–7, 235–41. 35 36

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God as if he were waiting around for some future moment in which to create the world’.39 But if it is false to imagine God waiting around to create the cosmos, it is equally false to imagine God waiting around to consummate the cosmos. Indeed, it is false to imagine eschatological consummation as a second act at all. Divine transcendence means, as Nicholas of Cusa held, that God is the coincidence of opposites, including the ‘coincidence of the beginning and the end’. As the ‘Absolute Same’, God is ‘the Beginning, the Middle, and the End of every form’.40 Eschatology is no more in the future than creation is in the past; from the vantage point of God’s eternal now, both are equally present and coterminous. To borrow a term from the dialectical theologians, the relationship between creation and eschatology should be spoken about as a paradoxical relationship. In his later work, Bultmann set out to address a problem with talk of divine action; namely, that so much of this talk is rooted in ‘natural’ assumptions. Traditional mythological talk views God’s action as taking place alongside other occurrences in the world. Divine action within this model is discrete, miraculous, and competitive with other causal agents. Liberal pantheism (or even narrative providentialism), on the other hand, views God’s action as identical to worldly occurrences, typically described in terms of history. Either way, divine action is directly identified with visible, objectifiable occurrences. Both approaches thus objectify God by locating divine action on the same level as nature and history; divinity is here only quantitatively, rather than qualitatively, distinct from the world. Bultmann’s solution was to apply Kierkegaard’s language of paradox to the problem of divine action. Faith, he says, asserts the ‘paradoxical identity’ of divine action with worldly occurrences.41 The act of God does not appear in the world as something to which one can point and say, ‘There it is’. Instead, because of God’s utter transcendence, ‘God’s action is hidden for every eye other than the eye of faith.’42 The permanent invisibility of such action is precisely what protects God’s genuine deity. Applied to the CER, the point is that consummation does not take place alongside or subsequent to creation; both are eternal and thus simultaneous. Creation and consummation are paradoxically identical – paradoxical only because the identity is not visible apart from faith. The doctrine of creation is ‘an eschatological claim about the world’s relation to God’, and thus ‘protology and eschatology are a single science, a single revelation’.43 The eternal act of creation is always the eschatological power of the future drawing creation into its consummation (creatio ex resurrectione),44 just as the eternal act of consummation is always the creative power of being

Comm. Gen. 7, translated in Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, ed. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 84–5. 40 De Genesi, 142, 147, translated in Jasper Hopkins, A Miscellany on Nicholas of Cusa (Minneapolis: A. J. Banning Press, 1994), 393, 396. 41 Rudolf Bultmann, ‘Zum Problem der Entmythologisierung’, in Kerygma und Mythos, Band II: Diskussion und Stimmen zum Problem der Entmythologisierung, ed. Hans-Werner Bartsch (Hamburg-Volksdorf: H. Reich, 1952), 197. For more on Bultmann’s use of Kierkegaard’s concept of paradox, see Cora Bartels, Kierkegaard Receptus: Die Theologiegeschichtliche Bedeutung der Kierkegaard-Rezeption Rudolf Bultmanns (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2008), 1:353–428, 2:283–6. 42 Bultmann, ‘Zum Problem der Entmythologisierung’, 196. 43 David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 68. 44 See Mark Butchers, ‘Creatio Ex Resurrectione?’ (PhD diss., King’s College, London, 2006). 39

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itself. Both creation and consummation point people to their existential insecurity, to the truth that their being lies outside themselves: creation refers one to the insecurity within oneself, while eschatological consummation refers one to the ground of this insecurity in the eternally interrupting and consummating God. Considered with respect to the world as experienced now, the discontinuity between the singular divine act of consummative creation (or creational consummation) and the objectifiable world of one’s finite existence is so absolute that they – the divine act and the finite world – become perfectly and paradoxically continuous. There is no continuity problem because there is no gap to cross that is not always and already crossed by the eternality of God. As true as this may be for God, perhaps at the level of human participation the continuity problem still needs to be retained since humans remain finite even if God is infinite. Here, too, however, Bultmann argues that natural ideas have been allowed to seep into understandings of creation and eschatology. Bultmann observes that the New Testament understands the eschatological act of salvation and revelation as ‘the gift of life that overcomes death’. Revelation ‘is an event that abolishes death, not a doctrine that says it does not exist’.45 Because humans continue to suffer and die despite the revelation of faith, one’s native assumption is that revelation must be a possibility now that only becomes an actuality in the future, at the end of one’s life or at the end of history – what some are fond of describing as ‘already but not yet’. As attractive as this may be as a flexible solution to the continuity problem, this approach to eschatology misconstrues eternal life as the mere ‘prolongation of what is called “life” now’. Such an understanding of resurrection and eschatological existence sees consummation as ‘the fulfilment of the natural longing in which a person wants to remain what they are’.46 In other words, any understanding of eternal life as a form of existence that necessarily competes with and is subsequent to mortal life assumes a merely quantitative, rather than qualitative, distinction between finite and eternal existence. It is not genuinely new – a truly new life, just like a truly transcendent divine act, would not compete with humanity’s worldly, historical existence now. Support for this has already been shown in the Apostle Paul’s notion that Christ is resurrected in mortal human bodies (Gal. 2.19-20; 2 Cor. 4.10-11) and in the Johannine notion that one passes into eternal life in the moment of faith (Jn 5.24; 1 Jn 3.14). Translated out of its ancient cosmological context, the New Testament emphasis on the radical discontinuity between flesh and pneuma becomes a metaphor for describing the paradoxical identity of flesh and pneuma: in faith, a person is both a finite, fleshly person and a pneumatic, eschatological person. A paradoxical, realized eschatology, therefore, honours both the Godness of God and the newness of new life. A conception of eschatology as a future phenomenon is just as much a psychological projection as the conception of God as the all-sovereign author who provides the tidy conclusion to our story. To view the CER in such a natural and mythological way not only imagines divine agency on the level of creaturely agency but also imagines eternal life on the level of creaturely existence. For this reason, Bultmann’s lead should be followed when he says that God’s work as creator takes place in God’s work in the crucified Christ, so that faith

Rudolf Bultmann, ‘Der Begriff der Offenbarung im Neuen Testament [1929]’, in Glauben und Verstehen: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Tübingen: Mohr, 1933–65), 3:15. 46 Bultmann, ‘Der Begriff der Offenbarung im Neuen Testament’, 16. 45

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in God is simultaneously faith in God’s act of creation and consummation: ‘To have faith in the cross of Christ means to be prepared to let God work as the Creator. God creates out of nothing, and whoever becomes nothing before God is made alive.’47

Conclusion Theological reflection on eschatology and resurrection has historically been both constrained by the parameters of orthodoxy and given to flights of speculation – often with little attention to the changing cosmologies and world pictures underpinning the various conceptions of the eschatological End. Moreover, the recent interest in salvation–historical narratives only reifies traditional mythical discourse and reads one’s natural assumptions into scripture. One way out of the conundrums surrounding eschatology involves following both medieval mystical theology and modern dialectical theology by emphasizing the otherness and eternality of God and applying the language of paradox to the CER. While this approach comes at the price of certain long-held commitments and expectations, it avoids psychological projections upon both God and the afterlife. In place of a ‘natural’ account of eschatology and resurrection, this approach brings creation and eschatology together: creation is always already eschatological, and the eschaton is always already present and creative.

Further reading Bultmann, Rudolf. ‘Faith in God the Creator [1934]’. In Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, edited by Schubert M. Ogden, 171–82. New York: Meridian Books, 1960. Eckhart, Meister. Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense. Edited by Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn. New York: Paulist Press, 1981. Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection. Translated by Catharine P. Roth. Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993. Hart, David Bentley. That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Christian Faith: A New Translation and Critical Edition. Edited by Catherine L. Kelsey and Terrence N. Tice. Translated by Terrence N. Tice, Catherine L. Kelsey, and Edwina G. Lawler. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016. Tinker, George E. ‘Why I Do Not Believe in a Creator’. In Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice, and Life Together, edited by Steve Heinrichs, 167–79. Waterloo: Herald Press, 2013.

Rudolf Bultmann, Das verkündigte Wort: Predigten, Andachten, Ansprachen 1906–1941, ed. Erich Grässer and Martin Evang (Tübingen: Mohr, 1984), 271–2; Rudolf Bultmann, ‘Faith in God the Creator [1934]’, in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, ed. Schubert M. Ogden (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), 181. 47

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CHAPTER 17 GOD, MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH

Gregor Etzelmüller

The Bible begins with the statement: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ (Gen. 1.1). When reciting the Apostles’ Creed, believers start with the confession: ‘I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.’ Since the confession of God the creator occupies such a prominent position in Christianity, laypeople and professional theologians have often believed that the confession regarding the creator is the most decisive tenet in Christianity. ‘The fundamental article of the Christian faith is this, that God is the Creator’, the theologian Emil Brunner argues.1 However, the New Testament revolves around the idea of the redeemer rather than that of creation. The Gospels recall Jesus already in his ministry before Easter as placing not creation but rather the coming kingdom of God at the centre of his proclamation: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news!’ (Mk 1.15). In keeping with this, the Apostle Paul does not preach creation, but rather new creation: ‘So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!’ (2 Cor. 5.17).

Only in the light of the promise can the world be recognized as creation Whether the world as humans know it – or as the idea of the totality of all there is – refers back to an ultimate reality in which it is grounded is a contentious matter. The famous physicist Steven Weinberg writes: ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.’2 To this, his colleague and friend, the physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne responds: ‘I believe that the rational beauty of the cosmos indeed reflects the Mind that holds it in being. The “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” (to use Eugene Wigner’s pregnant phrase) is a hint of the presence of the Creator, given to us creatures who are made in the divine image.’3 There will never be an impartial, clear answer to whether the universe is pointless or a reflection of a creator’s mind. Immanuel Kant pointed out that reason may raise the question of an ultimate ground of being, yet in trying to answer it, one will get stuck in speculation, failing by one’s own rational standards. ‘Reason’, he wrote, ‘would not be able to justify to itself an attempt to pass over from a causality with which it is acquainted to obscure and unprovable grounds of explanation, with which it is not acquainted’.4

Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology, trans. Olive Wyon (London: Lutterworth Press, 1939), 70. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 154. 3 John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 4. 4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 581 (B654). 1 2

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For the Christian faith, it is not primarily the world that discloses the creator, but rather the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the event that changes everything. ‘If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain’ (1 Cor. 15.14), writes Paul. Notably, Paul does not write that the faith of the Corinthians has been in vain if they do not believe in the resurrection of Christ, but if Christ has not been raised in fact. Without the resurrection of Christ, faith in the creator would be in vain as well. For the resurrection of Christ vouches for and promises the resurrection of all,5 and if Christ had remained dead, the world would not be a unity of life and death working in favour of life, but rather a mere episode in cosmic history bound to vanish and be forgotten. The faithfulness of the creator in whom faith trusts would ultimately succumb to the laws of entropy, the power of death. Christian faith does not learn that the world is God’s creation from examining the universe, but rather from hearing the promise of the risen one: ‘because I live, you also will live’ (Jn 14.19). The world can be understood as creation only when it is seen in the light of the promise given with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To recognize the world as creation, one needs to look at it in the light of the new creation God promised. The relation between experience, creation, and God’s future can also be seen in Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God. For Jesus of Nazareth, apparently: the agrarian world of Galilee was remarkably transparent for God’s love – the sun that rises for all, the rain that pours down on everything (Mt. 5.45, see 10.29–31 par. [Q]). . . . The obvious experiences to the contrary are not ignored, however: Jesus affirms the nearness of God precisely in the face of the grass that is burned already tomorrow and the sparrows that are sold off (see Lk. 12.6f. par. [Q]). Nature only becomes a mirror of God’s grace in the light of the kingdom of God that has come near.6 Jesus’ parables help recognize the presence of the future in the world, rendering it legible as God’s creation. To speak of the world as God’s creation means to place God’s promise at the beginning. All of God’s action and work – past, present, or future – moves forward from the promise of new creation as the starting point: ‘because I live, you also will live’ (Jn 14.19). Not only God’s reconciling and redeeming action but also God’s creative action in the past and the present have their origin in this promise. The New Testament expresses this notion by calling the redeemer, Jesus Christ, the mediator of creation.7 The creator of heaven and earth is none other than the one who is revealed in Jesus Christ. God’s promise, embodied in Jesus Christ, stands at the beginning of the creation of heaven and earth. The confession of faith in God, the creator of heaven and earth, is an expression of hope, then, that in the world as it is known, new things that promote life are possible. Faith in the creator expects the miracle of life: drawing on cosmic, terrestrial, animal, and human forces,

See 1 Cor. 15.22. Samuel Vollenweider, ‘Wahrnehmungen der Schöpfung im Neuen Testament’, Zeitschrift für Pädagogik und Theologie 55 (2003): 248–9. 7 See Jn 1.3; 1 Cor. 8.6; Col. 1.15-20; Heb. 1.2-3; Nadine Hamilton, ‘Von der Schöpfungsmittlerschaft Christi: Terrainerkundung einer noch wartenden Metapher’, Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 58, no. 3 (2016): 285–308. 5 6

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God tenaciously tames and restricts chaos again and again, which would otherwise increase with the predictable rise of entropy. As a result, ‘a structured cosmos takes shape, a “house of life” hospitable to animals and humans’.8

The life-enhancing difference between heaven and earth The Bible and the church’s creeds do not call God merely the world’s creator, but instead they are more differentiated, speaking of the creator of heaven and earth. Those who trust in God’s creativity not only at the beginning but also within history need to look at the world as differentiated into heaven and earth. For the world is shaped not only by familiar causal regularities but also – thank God! – by surprising twists and events of beneficial inspiration. The world is not only the ‘earth’, that is, the universe that is relatively familiar, based on the laws of nature; rather, this earth is open for new beginnings and inspiration from heaven (in distinction from the sky), which is part of the universe. Because of this openness of the earth, individuals can have hope. However, surprises and flashes of inspiration are not always the kind that promote life. For this reason, the biblical traditions emphasize that God dwells in ‘the heavens’. This means that familiar spheres of life are not open to all sorts of random surprises and flashes of inspiration. Instead, they are shaped by the presence of God’s good acts of inspiration for the earth. Since in this world more is possible than those things one can expect, and because God dwells within creation’s realm of possibility, the biblical witnesses give reason for hope for the earth: From the word ‘Go’, ‘creation’ has in view the association of heaven and earth as interdependent realms, which are themselves internally differentiated. In this way the realm of heaven is seen not only as the place from which natural forces – light, warmth, water, wind, and storm – determine life on this earth. Heaven is also seen as a place from which proceed strong forces that shape and determine culture. In Genesis 1 we find this clearly expressed in the statement that the lights are ‘to be signs and to serve the determination of festivals, of days, and of years’ (Gen. 1:14). . . . ‘Creation’ is the construction of associations of interdependent relations between creaturely realms that are relatively accessible to us and those which are relatively inaccessible to us. The expression ‘heaven’ synthesizes the natural and cultural realms over which we cannot exert direct influence. The realms that are more accessible to us, integrated by means of the expression ‘earth’, are likewise grasped not only as natural but also as cultural associations of interdependent relations. In both creation accounts we find texts that point to the interdependence of that which we call nature and culture. For example, there is in both creation accounts the charge to human beings to cultivate the earth. There is the centering of creation upon the day of rest, which is blessed and in its own way fruitful. There is the giving of names to the animals. . . . A merely naturalistic understanding of creation does not attain the level of the classical creation texts.9

Christoph Hardmeier and Konrad Ott, Naturethik und biblische Schöpfungserzählung: Ein diskurstheoretischer und narrativ-hermeneutischer Brückenschlag (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2015), 235. 9 Michael Welker, Creation and Reality, trans. John F. Hoffmeyer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 15–16. 8

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A simple equation of ‘nature’ with ‘creation’ would not hit the mark theologically. To begin with, distinguishing clearly between nature and culture cannot be achieved. Rather, the biblical traditions draw attention to the fact that natural phenomena have a determining influence on cultural processes: the sun and the moon are decisive for the calendar, including the times of festivals. Further, cultural processes also contribute to natural ones: people are to shape the world, thus becoming niche constructors in continuity with other living organisms. The creator of heaven and earth is not merely the creator of nature; rather, through the creator’s activity, natural and cultural processes, differentiated in themselves, are attuned to each other; as a result, their fruitful interrelation hems in chaos. The concept of the creation of heaven and earth brings to mind how many natural and cultural processes are required to function, even in concert with each other, so that every person’s life can flourish. Moreover, the confession of God the creator of heaven and earth points to a more nuanced perception of the world. The world does not merely consist of the earth, which is relatively familiar, but also encompasses heaven as a sphere of possibilities. Hoping for God’s creativity, the Christian faith denies that those things that cannot be prognosticated mathematically and scientifically define the possibilities of the realms of life in which humans live. The concept of the creation of heaven and earth liberates and encourages one to perceive the earth together with heaven.10 Here heaven is a metaphor for God’s immanent transcendence. In its symbolic connection with heaven, the visible sky serves as the origin of God’s immanent transcendence since the phenomena in the sky – for example, meteorological phenomena – are not understandable even in the present day, and yet they shape life today. In all of this, it needs to be kept in mind that heaven and the natural sky are ambivalent. That is why most biblical traditions distinguish them clearly from God. God’s immanent transcendence, by contrast, counts as a sphere of possibilities that clearly – or at least ultimately – promotes life, according to biblical traditions. Some biblical traditions then make the metaphor of heaven more tractable by speaking of heaven as God’s dwelling place.11 This brings out more clearly that the earth depends not only on familiar causalities, along with the surprising possibilities of heaven, but also both heaven and earth ultimately depend on God’s good intentions for God’s creation. And yet these good intentions are not absolutely separate from and inaccessible to the world – totaliter aliter, entirely different – but they are present in God’s creation (i.e. in heaven) and effective – making a difference on earth while residing in heaven. In prayer, Christians ask that God’s sphere of possibilities – located in heaven and unavailable – will come to influence earth so that God’s will will be done on earth as well.

‘On Earth as in Heaven’ The Our Father, which Jesus taught his disciples to pray, includes a profound warning against a misunderstanding of the expression from the creed, ‘creator of heaven and earth’. Contrary

See Günter Thomas, Gottes Lebendigkeit: Beiträge zur Systematischen Theologie (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2019), 274–8. 11 See Pss. 103.19; 115.2-3; Christoph Koch, Gottes himmlische Wohnstatt: Transformationen im Verhältnis von Gott und Himmel in tempeltheologischen Entwürfen des Alten Testaments in der Exilszeit (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018). 10

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to all attempts to substantiate or assert that God’s will is active in anything that happens, even if indirectly, the one Christian prayer par excellence, which connects all Christian confessions, insists on the distinction between those things that should take place on earth according to God’s will and those things that do take place. That God is the creator of heaven and earth does not at all mean that God makes everything happen that takes place outside of heaven, on earth. The Priestly creation account already makes the point that God created neither chaos nor darkness. According to Gen. 1.2, heaven and earth are not created out of nothing but from tohu vabohu, the ‘formless void’. ‘Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness’ (Gen. 1.3-4). Note well: God only calls light into being; only light is called good, but not the darkness.12 With the darkness, an element of chaos from before creation, as it were, is present in God’s good creation: The night is . . . a remnant of the darkness of chaos, as it were; now, however, it is encompassed in a salvific creative order. That is indeed a primeval human experience: in every night, something of the absolute darkness, of the dark chaos irrupts into the earth; every night dissolves the contours of creatures into an amorphous state. And every morning is a kind of new creation, as the morning light lifts creation out of the formless darkness. In simpler, primal experiences, the night brings out dread in people; it can even be experienced as a threat to creation and to one’s personal existence.13 The opposite view that God is the all-determining reality, which assumes that every occurrence finds meaning in God’s order, has shaped modern theology and religious practice. Proponents of this view can point only to one biblical scripture – Isa. 45.7: ‘I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things.’ The contrasting pairs of light and darkness, weal and woe, could each denote the totality of events. Accordingly, God would be the creator who truly brings forth everything. Yet this statement would be unique in the Hebrew Bible.14 Claus Westermann comments: The Cyrus oracle represents the farthest that Deutero-Isaiah goes in his proclamation. The same is true of the predications with which it concludes. . . . To push the word ‘all’ [in v. 7] to its full logical conclusion is to land ourselves in difficulties from which there is no way out. The creation story in Gen. 1 shows the utmost care to preserve the limit. Though he is lord over the darkness, God is certainly not its creator. He took it into creation and set bounds to it, but he did not bring it into being. Precisely the same is true of the world of events, as J’s version of the creation story makes clear. Evil irrupts into God’s creation, but it does so through a creature. And there it is left, without explanation:

See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 123: ‘But darkness and the chaos which it represents are not the creation of God.’ 13 Gerhard von Rad, ‘Die biblische Schöpfungsgeschichte’, in Gottes Wirken in Israel: Vorträge zum Alten Testament, ed. O. H. Steck (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1974), 112–13. 14 Walter Groß and Karl-Josef Kuschel speak of ‘a statement that is unique in the Old Testament’. Walter Groß and KarlJosef Kuschel, ‘Ich schaffe Finsternis und Unheil!’ Ist Gott verantwortlich für das Übel? (Mainz: Grunewald, 1992), 44. 12

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the limit has once more been reached. In contrast, this oracle of Deutero-Isaiah says, for the one and only time in the Bible and in direct opposition to Gen. 1 and 3, that God created the darkness as he did the light. God brings about woe . . . just as he brings about salvation.15 Should the Priestly source be younger than Deutero-Isaiah, the impression is inescapable ‘that the Priestly source intentionally adopts Deutero-Isaiah’s innovative concepts, just as it tones down their radical content by a notch’.16 Darkness is an element within that world which, in the light of God’s promise, can be perceived as God’s creation, but God neither created it nor called it good. In this sense, it can be said: God is not the first cause of everything that happens, but God is still asserting God’s will in creation. This view finds support in the Bible: notably, the narratives of Jesus’ healings in the New Testament demonstrate that people are exposed to processes, powers, and principalities that do not represent God’s will. Karl Barth put it pointedly: ‘As Jesus acts in [God’s] commission and power, it is clear that God does not will that which troubles and torments and disturbs and destroys [humans].’17 This insight that has shaped twentieth-century theology invites a relinquishing of some previously held commitments and also many forms of personal piety – the understanding of God as the all-determining reality. By contrast, Jesus’ healing of those who are ill signals that not everything encountered in this world corresponds to God’s will. The question results as to how the sheer destructive force that is witnessed in disease, as well as in natural disasters, can arise in God’s good creation in the first place. In my view, diseases and natural disasters are a consequence of the fact that when God created the world, God also gave it the freedom to develop on its own. ‘In his great act of creation I believe that God allows the physical world to be itself, not in Manichaean opposition to him, but in that independence which is Love’s gift of freedom to the one beloved.’18 This view agrees with the biblical traditions insofar as they do not see creation as a ready-made product. Instead, the creator initiates and preserves processes that promote life, giving creatures themselves a share in creative activity. God is not alone in ‘separating’, ‘ruling’, and ‘bringing forth’ life. In Genesis 1, the dome of the sky separates the waters, and the lights in the sky separate day and night; the sun and moon rule day and night, and the waters and the earth both bring forth living creatures. ‘And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind”. And it was so’ (Gen. 1.24). The earth itself is active and creative – and creaturely life develops and reproduces on its own as well.19 Such a view makes good sense today, notably in the light of evolutionary biology. Giving creatures – notably, not only humans – a share in God’s creative power, God exposes creation simultaneously to the various dangers that creatures themselves pose, even the threat

Claus Westermann, Isaiah 40–66, trans. David M. Stalker (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 161–2. Martin Leuenberger, ‘Ich bin JHWH und keiner sonst’: Der exklusive Monotheismus des Kyros-Orakels (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2010), 75. 17 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 225. 18 John Polkinghorne, Science and Providence: God’s Interaction with the World, 4th edn (London: SPCK, 1994), 66. 19 See Welker, Creation and Reality, 10–13. 15 16

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of creation’s self-destruction. Creation is threatened not only by human action but also by the powers inherent in non-human creatures.20 So Polkinghorne: ‘The same biochemical processes that have driven evolution by allowing some cells to mutate and so produce new forms of life must, necessarily, in a non-magic universe, allow other cells to mutate and become malignant.’21 For precisely that reason, the possibility that life is afflicted by disease is part of the world conceived as creation. Yet Jesus’ healing activity demonstrates that the realization of this possibility is not God’s will. This raises the question of why the creator of heaven and earth brings forth a world in which evil can develop and thrive. Why does God create a world endangered by its internal forces of destruction? A first attempt at an answer must say that God does not affirm these forces of destruction themselves. Instead, God’s good will aims at the new creation of all things. God desires a world in which illness and natural disasters, processes of ostracism, and harmful ideologies have been overcome. However, God does not want such a world without God’s own people. God wants a new creation in which creatures participate in overcoming the results of illness and natural disasters, in which they take an active part in surmounting social ostracism and harmful ideologies. Since God wants such creatures, God has entered into the venture of creating humans – fully aware that, for these humans, saying ‘No’ to sin is not simply a foregone conclusion as it is for God. Yet since God did not merely wish to reduplicate Godself but wanted covenant partners who were truly different from God, God entered into the risk of creation. God creates people to let them participate in God’s conflict with the power of sin. With such resolve, God accepts the risk that these humans will fall under the spell of sin when they encounter it. The archetypal narrative of this event is not that of Adam and Eve but rather that of Cain and Abel. Here sin crouches at Cain’s door – and God invites Cain into a dialogue so that he would not be lured into sin. Cain is supposed to do as God does and place Abel, the second-born, at the centre. Abel is the weaker of the two brothers; his name means nothing. However, Cain succumbs to sin and strikes Abel dead. In creating humanity, God does not simply place a ready-made human person into creation. Rather, creation is meant to bring forth this human person as a free being in the first place. For that reason, God gives creation the freedom ‘to explore and realise, in its own way, its own inherent fruitfulness’.22 Creation should not be conceived of as ‘the puppet theatre of a Cosmic Tyrant’23 if, indeed, it should produce beings who are not puppets. That is why God did not merely endow humanity, but rather creation on the whole, with the freedom to explore its own possibilities and ‘make itself ’.24

See Michael Welker, ‘Der erhaltende, rettende und erhebende Gott: Zu einer biblisch orientierten Trinitätslehre’, in Der lebendige Gott als Trinität: Festschrift J. Moltmann, ed. Michael Welker und Miroslav Volf (Gütersloh: Kaiser, 2006), 47. 21 John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker, Faith in the Living God: A Dialogue (London: SPCK, 2001), 22. 22 Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science, 14. 23 Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science, 14. See also Polkinghorne, Science and Providence, 69–79. 24 Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science, 14. See also Elisabeth A. Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 191: ‘In its free working evolution brought forth the kind of life that always entails death and, in its later development, pain and suffering. Without giving creation’s affliction ultimate meaning, 20

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This does not answer one important question, however: Does God’s wish to let humans, in all their freedom, share in the overcoming of sin justify all the suffering, the manifold natural, social, and cultural destruction that God has tolerated in creating? In brief: Is the price not too high? This question cannot be answered from an external observer’s perspective. A participant must respond personally, must be involved in the answer. Thus, the question takes on an existential character: Do I experience my life as so meaningful that gratitude for my life outweighs my lament over untold suffering? Alternatively, faced with the suffering that an evolutionary universe involves, would I wish to ‘return the ticket’ that has given me entry into this world? However, it is not simply myself who is the purpose of this universe; instead, new creation is its purpose. From this, the theological view ensues that God can only be justified in the face of this world’s natural, social, and cultural evil if, in fact, new creation does come to pass. This means that, ultimately, only God can justify God. God can only be justified in the face of God’s creation if God takes responsibility for creation and its ills. However, this perspective, which is the only possible justification of God, God’s self-justification, cannot be understood solely as taking place merely in some undisclosed future. New creation can and ought to take place here and now as well. Yet, God’s self-justification must not only redeem one period of time but rather all periods. Christian faith hopes that God will justify God’s self, then, by saving those times and those creatures who have not benefited from new creation in history. Fundamentally, the creation of light on the first day shows both what creation is and what is meant to take place in God’s creating again and again: ‘As a principle of created nature the light which shines in darkness and overcomes the darkness is as such the promise that nature is not left to itself, but that it moves toward an encounter with the grace of God.’25 The created light is the natural analogy for God’s activity in creation and new creation, which frees people from the powers of darkness – both the darkness that befalls people and the darkness to which people contribute with their own activities. Christians take the created light as the token that, in the end, there will be no more darkness and no more night.26 Sustained by God’s promise, the created light that overcomes darkness can be understood as an analogy, and the promise with which natural–cultural processes are endowed can be recognized. Only where this happens can the world be understood as God’s creation. Moreover, once the world is seen as God’s creation, individuals will also have keener eyes for those kinds of darkness that obscure God’s presence in creation up to this day, which cannot be attributed to God’s action, but which are destined to be overcome in God’s activity in creation and new creation.

The earth as the mother of all that lives Those who see God as the creator of heaven and earth will also gain a new perspective on the miraculous or ‘wonder-ful’ nature of those processes that are familiar, which are part of ‘the

without rooting it in the eternal will of a good and gracious God’, we acknowledge ‘its existence as part of the finite character of the natural world and respect its role in the evolutionary process’. 25 Barth, CD III.1, 119. 26 See Rev. 21.5; 22.5.

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earth’ in the biblical sense. God assists events on earth not only with God’s powers of new creation from heaven, but God also endows the earth with creative power: Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it’. And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. . . . And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind’. And it was so. (Gen. 1.11-12, 24) Earth is given a share in God’s creative work; it becomes a creature that is active and creative. Dietrich Bonhoeffer recognized earlier than others that humans also depend on the creative power of the earth: ‘Humankind is derived from a piece of earth. Its bond with the earth belongs to its essential being. The “earth is its mother”; it comes out of her womb.’27 The earth ‘bears me, nurtures me, holds me’.28 Late traditions in the Hebrew Bible, both the Priestly source and the wisdom tradition, adopt the ancient Near Eastern notion of the earth as the mother of all that lives.29 The more people recognized God as the creator of heaven and earth, the freer they were to appreciate insights from the wider ancient Near East and to acknowledge the remarkable fruitfulness of the earth. As biblical authors distinguish heaven from God and understand the sun and the moon as creatures, they also distinguish the earth from God, rather than considering it a goddess. Further, as the Priestly source notices and appreciates the powers of the heavens – of the sun and the moon – to shape natural and cultural processes, it also appreciates the life-giving power of the earth. When the wisdom literature speaks of humans coming from the womb of their mother, to which they also return (Job 1.21; Eccl. 5.15), it uses the same verb as does the Priestly source when it speaks of the coming forth of plants and animals (Gen. 1.12, 24). Beyond the Priestly source, wisdom literature also associates humans with the life-giving powers of the earth. Psalm 139 offers a particularly fascinating example. This text names the mother’s womb as the place in which humans take shape (v. 13b), but, notably, also the depths of the earth (v. 15). For Psalm 139, humans are made both in the mother’s womb and in the earth. Similarly, for the Priestly source, ‘the bringing forth of terrestrial animals from the earth does not exclude processes of begetting by the terrestrial animals themselves’.30 Such multi-perspectival notions have become foreign to many people in North-Atlantic culture, yet they can be encountered in documents of people who have grown up in other cultures. For example, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú recounts in her autobiography that in Guatemala, ‘the child is told that . . . he is already made of maize because his mother ate it while he was forming in her stomach. He must respect the maize; even the

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Douglas S. Bax (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 76. 28 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 66. 29 See Othmar Keel and Silvia Schroer, Eva – Mutter alles Lebendigen: Frauen- und Göttinnenidole aus dem Alten Orient (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2004). 30 Odil H. Steck, Der Schöpfungsbericht der Priesterschrift. Studien zur literarkritischen und überlieferungsgeschichtlichen Problematik von Genesis 1, 1–2, 4a, 2nd edn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981), 121. 27

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grain of maize which has been thrown away, he must pick up’.31 Psalm 139 shows that such traditions are encountered not only outside the Jewish–Christian heritage but within it as well. Those who recognize themselves as creatures brought forth from the depths of the earth will share the insight with Indigenous cultures that the earth ‘is like a mother which multiplies life’.32 When Ps. 139.15 confesses, ‘my frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth’, the creator of heaven and earth appears in a peculiar role in creating the individual person. Since God has blessed the earth with creative power, God’s activity in the creation of individuals is limited to the part that a father has during pregnancy, which is that of an engaged observer. The view that God only stood by and watched during creation was widespread in the ancient Near East.33 This is one aspect of the Psalm’s dual perspective. According to verse 13, God ‘weaves’ the person in the mother’s womb. In antiquity, such textile work was typically a female activity.34 In verse 15, moreover, God observes how the person is wrought in the depths of the earth. It could be said that Psalm 139 uses gynomorphic language to express God’s activity in the forces of nature, while it brings out creation’s autonomous activity with andromorphic language. Recognizing the earth’s fertility as God’s good gift in creation helps one appreciate the many ways in which life succeeds again and again in overcoming various dangers: in waking up every morning, in processes of regeneration and healing, and so on. God’s action encompasses the familiar processes that can be observed on earth: If we do not conceive of miracles as events defying what is possible from a scientific perspective, but rather as something that is surprising in its greatness, yet which takes place repeatedly, in a contingent way, then we are living in a world of miracles every day, based on cosmic parameters in which Old Testament wisdom has already discerned God’s miraculous work.35 The confession of faith in God the creator of heaven and earth implies the hope that, again and again, the miracle of life will overcome the tendency towards chaos that is in the world. This confession is confronted with abiding challenges, given the power of darkness and death. Due to the resurrection of Jesus Christ – the fact that changes everything – Christians dispute that death and darkness have ultimate power. In the light of the promise given with Christ’s resurrection, Christians discern more than just fleeting episodes in those processes of this world that are fruitful for life, more than an insurrection of life doomed to fail. Instead, in these processes, they recognize analogies to the coming life and the kingdom of God. For that reason, they dare to speak of this world as God’s creation and to confess God as the creator of heaven and earth.

Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, 2nd edn, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, trans. Ann Wright (London: Verso, 2009), 14. 32 Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú, 16; see also pp. 65–6. 33 Jan van Dijk, ‘Une incantation accompagnant la naissance de l’homme’, Orientalia 42 (1973): 502–7. 34 See Judg. 16.13-14; Prov. 13.10-31. 35 Hardmeier and Ott, Naturethik und biblische Schöpfungserzählung, 242. 31

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Further reading Moltmann, Jürgen. God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. Polkinghorne, John and Michael Welker. Faith in the Living God: A Dialogue. London: SPCK, 2001. Thomas, Günter. Neue Schöpfung: Systematisch-theologische Untersuchungen zur Hoffnung auf das ‘Leben in der zukünftigen Welt’. Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 2009. Welker, Michael. Creation and Reality. Translated by John F. Hoffmeyer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999.

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CHAPTER 18 CREATION AND MONOTHEISM

Janet Soskice

In common understanding, monotheism is the belief that there is only one God, that the ancient Israelites were monotheists and that Christianity inherited its monotheism from its Jewish roots. However, the matter is not quite so seamless and clear. What kind of monotheism is Christian monotheism? What kind of ‘oneness’ is at play when one speaks of belief in ‘one’ God? In the Abrahamic faiths, ‘monotheism’ is not the belief that, as it happens, there is only one god but there might have been six or seven, but rather that there could be only one god. It is here that the doctrine of creation is important. It is no slight thing that the Nicene Creed begins with the confession of belief in one God, the Father, creator of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, begotten, not made. Creation is to the fore in this confession of Christian monotheism, and especially the teaching of creatio ex nihilo. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo arises from the belief in a free creator – that is, a God who creates ‘all that is’, including space and time, from nothing (not even a vacuum) and does so freely and from no compulsion. It is the only teaching that Moses Maimonides (1138–1204 ce) thought Judaism, Christianity, and Islam shared. Within Christianity, it is an emergent teaching, rather like the doctrine of the Trinity, resulting from meditation on other core beliefs about the nature of God and God’s relation to the created order. To clarify, while those who composed the book of Genesis and the Psalms did not, one assumes, have an explicit metaphysic of creation in mind, inevitably it would be asked whether, ‘if God made truly everything, would that include not only planets and angels but also space and time?’ Did God, that is, create truly everything and do so without compulsion, as the book of Genesis suggests? While having antecedents in Second Temple Judaism, creatio ex nihilo becomes foundational to Christian orthodoxy by the fourth century ce. It is not surprising that the teaching should become important in the years when the Christian teaching about Christ and the Trinity was being hammered out, for a key to these debates is the Christian claim to worship only one God, a point to which this chapter will return. The term ‘monotheism’ was first used in the seventeenth century by the Cambridge Platonist Henry Moore as part of an Enlightenment project to classify religions. ‘Monotheism’ is in this way contrasted with ‘polytheism’ and, less frequently, with ‘henotheism’ – the allegiance to one god out of a possible range of others.1 The Psalms, some of which are among the earliest writings of the Hebrew Bible, seem at times to attest to a henotheism where YHWH, Israel’s God, is the greatest among the gods. While it is natural to read monotheistic understandings into the creation narratives of the book of Genesis, these could be read as henotheistic. Whatever terms one chooses, Jews, Christians, and Muslims reject henotheism and confess to

See Nathan Macdonald, ‘The Origin of “Monotheism”’, in Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism, ed. Loren T. Stuckenbruck and Wendy E. S. North (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 204–15. 1

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belief in one God, the sole creator. Arabic indeed has a separate word to indicate the ‘One’ that is Allah from the ‘one’ in a cardinal series. Various sophisticated philosophical schemes in antiquity were monotheistic. Aristotle (and arguably Plato) were both philosophical monotheists, but neither had a creator God. Plato’s demiurge moulds a pre-existent matter. Aristotle’s God (or perhaps one should say ‘god’) is the cause of motion but not Being Itself. Aristotle’s god is like the functioning DNA of the universe. In Aristotle’s scheme, one could not have the world without god, but neither could one have god without the world. The two imply one another and are both, in his terms, eternal. Aristotle’s god has no knowledge of particulars; it is not provident; it is not ‘capable’ of selfdisclosure – all sine qua non for the Christian God. Aristotle’s monotheism presumes the validity and self-positing of the existent order, with no possibility of divine in-breaking and no need to ask questions about ultimate origin. Neither Aristotle’s scheme nor Plato’s allowed for what one would call a ‘personal’ God, which is a foundational conviction of Jews and Christians who pray the Psalms and address God in prayer. Aristotle considered the notion of creatio ex nihilo to be absurd, as do many secular astrophysicists today, on the grounds that if there was ever ‘entirely nothing’, not even space and time, then there would be nothing now. Not so the religions of radical monotheism that were made possible by the revolution in classical metaphysics effected by creatio ex nihilo.2 This teaching holds not only that God freely makes all things but that God is intimately present to all the created order at all times. God truly ‘is’. All creatures have their existence, at every moment, as gift. The God of Augustine’s Confessions, the God who can be with him at all times and in all places, is the God who creates ‘all that is’ and is thus intimately present to all time and all space.3 Turning to the emergence of the Christian doctrine of creation, it is important to see that the biblical texts to which early Christians looked were not simply the early chapters of Genesis but also the abundant mention of God as ‘creator’ in the Psalms and the book of Isaiah. These link God’s faithfulness and power to create and to save: By the word of the Lord the heavens were made and all their host by the breath of his mouth. He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle; he put the deeps in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him, for he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm. (Ps. 33.6-9)

2 On this, see Janet Soskice, Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). 3 For the biblical roots of creatio ex nihilo, see Gary A. Anderson, ‘Creatio ex nihilo and the Bible’, in Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges, ed. Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 15–36. On the significance for contemporary Christian theology, see Janet Soskice, ‘Why Creatio ex nihilo for Theology Today?’, in Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges, ed. Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 37–54; Kathyrn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

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Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. (Ps. 124.8) Listen to me, O Jacob, and Israel, whom I called: I am he; I am the first, and I am the last. My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I summon them, they stand at attention. (Isa. 48.12-13) Second Temple Judaism, the period which saw the emergence of Christianity, was a time of foreign occupation and distress. For a people who debated the coming of the messiah and the faithfulness of God, the Psalms and Isaiah were works of solace. It is perhaps not surprising that one finds in a text of this period what seems to be an anticipation of creatio ex nihilo, and one which suggestively links this to the resurrection of the dead. In 2 Maccabees, a mother who has seen six of her sons martyred for refusing to eat pork encourages the youngest in this way: I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, in his mercy gives life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws. (2 Macc. 7.22-23) What then of Jesus and of Christian monotheism? The recognition that Second Temple Judaism saw a flowering of intermediary figures, angels, and exalted humans has prompted considerable scholarly debate as to whether the Judaism of the period was strictly monotheistic, a debate that bleeds into that concerning the status of Jesus in the New Testament.4 If the Judaism of the period knew various exalted figures and thus was not strictly monotheistic, then might the Jesus of the New Testament be one such exalted figure or semi-divine agent? William Horbury suggests a contrast, in the Judaism of the Herodian age, between a ‘rigorous’ and ‘exclusive’ monotheism that denies other supernatural beings besides God and an ‘inclusive’ monotheism where the supreme deity is in association with other spirits and powers.5 But, as Richard Bauckham points out, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths have never had a problem with angels and such spiritual beings. What is at issue, and what affects monotheism, is whether these angels, powers, and demons were to be considered creatures and not agents of creation.6

On this, see Brittany E. Wilson, The Embodied God: Seeing the Divine in Luke–Acts and the Early Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). Wilson gives a survey of the debate but takes a different view of creatio ex nihilo than the one proposed in this chapter. 5 See the discussion in Wilson, The Embodied God, 103–4. 6 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: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), chap. 1. 4

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Bauckham encourages a referencing of the language of ‘divine identity’ rather than of ‘monotheism’ when speaking of the Judaism of the Second Temple. He then identifies ‘key features of the one God’ which distinguish this God from any angels or other exalted figures. Among those Bauckham lists are that: ● ●

●

●

●

God is the sole creator, whereas all other beings are created by him. God is the sovereign ruler of all, subject to none, whereas all other beings are subject to his rule. . . . Frequently God is said to be the only eternal one, ‘the first and the last’ in the classic monotheistic assertions of Deutero–Isaiah (Isa. 41.1; 42.8; 48.11), the one who precedes all things as their creator and will achieve his rule over all things for ever. . . . God has a personal name, the tetragrammaton (YHWH), which names his unique identity. God alone may be worshipped, and God should be worshipped because worship, in the Jewish understanding, is precisely recognition of the unique divine identity.7

But if only the one God can be worshipped, and only God can create, then who is Christ? This question agitated the early church, with various options canvased. Adoptionists presented Christ as a normal human elevated to divinity, which would seem to exclude a role in creation. Forms of subordinationism canvassed Jesus as divine, but a lesser god. This would, of course, have compromised any claim Christianity made that Christians worshipped only one God, as would Gnostic suggestions that an additional ‘lesser’ God created the material order. It might seem that the doctrine of creation would be a final blow to those who argue for the divinity of Christ and trinitarian monotheism, but the opposite is the case. With creatio ex nihilo in place, there is no room for a binary of spiritual and material, with God, the soul, and angelic beings on one side and animals, plants, and trees on the other. The only distinction is between God and creation: God the creator and everything else – earthworms, angels, meteorites, sun, and moon, all things visible and invisible. The question then becomes, and it was a pressing question in the first Christian centuries, what to do with Christ? If Christ is not to be one of the creatures, albeit an exalted one, then Christ must be one with the creator. If prayer to Jesus was not to be ‘idol worshipping’ in a Jewish context, then Jesus must be one with God, the sole creator.8 The early Christian theologians readily identified Jesus with the ‘I AM’ who spoke to Moses from the burning bush (Exod. 3.15) and with the ‘first and the last’ (Alpha and Omega) of Deutero–Isaiah, and in doing so with the one God, the sole creator. They did so with biblical precedents. The Prologue of John’s Gospel, with its strong echoes of the creation narratives of Genesis, identifies the Word Incarnate with the Word through whom all things came into

Richard Bauckham, ‘Monotheism and Christology in Hebrews 1’, in Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism, ed. Loren T. Stuckenbruck and Wendy E. S. North (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 167–8. 8 Khaled Anatolios sees a growing sense of the centrality of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo across the two parts of Athanasius’ early work, Against the Greeks–On the Incarnation. See Khaled Anatolios, ‘Creatio ex nihilo in Athanasius of Alexandria’s Against the Greeks–On the Incarnation’, in Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges, ed. Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 119–50. 7

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being. Jesus himself makes the identification in the various ‘I am’ sayings of John’s Gospel: ‘Before Abraham was, I am’, says Jesus in Jn 8.58, a self-identification with the one God, the creator and redeemer. On the lips of the Johannine Jesus, the ‘I am’ takes one back to Exodus 3, but also to the ‘I am’ sayings of Deutero–Isaiah where, in a striking sequence of divine selfdesignations, YHWH declares that he alone is God and creator: For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it a chaos; he formed it to be inhabited!): I am the Lord, and there is no other. (Isa. 45.18) The Pauline literature frequently alludes to Christ’s role in creation, identifying him with Word or Wisdom. This is famously so in 1 Corinthians: for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. (1 Cor. 8.6) And in Colossians: He [i.e. God’s ‘beloved Son’] 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 – all things have been created through him and for him. (Col. 1.15-16) Outside the Pauline writings, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews begins by saying: in these last days [God] has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. (Heb. 1.2-3) As in John’s Prologue, this is all the language of creation. The book of Revelation, in its opening theophany, references back to the exclusive monotheism of Deutero–Isaiah: ‘“I am the Alpha and the Omega”, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty’ (Rev. 1.8). In the text that follows, God and Christ are both named as ‘Alpha and Omega’, ‘First and the Last’, names that themselves are glosses of YHWH – the personal name of Israel’s God whose only full interpretation in the Old Testament is in Exodus 3 where a sequence of wordplays expand the name’s similarity to the Hebrew verb ‘to be’.9

Ehyeh asher ehyeh, ‘I am and I will be’ and ‘He who is’.

9

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This is not to say that trinitarian monotheism is the only or necessarily obvious reading of the books of the New Testament. The theological controversies of the early church demonstrate this not to be the case. However, the doctrine of creation became critical in understanding Christian monotheism. With creatio ex nihilo in place, there is only one distinction – that to be made between God and creatures. Christ must be one with the creator lest worship of Christ is idolatrous. Christ must be, as John’s Gospel rather suggests, the ‘I am’, the creator and redeemer.10

Further reading Anderson, Gary A. and Markus Bockmuehl, eds. Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008. Burrell, David B., Carlo Cogliati, Janet M. Soskice, and William R. Stoeger, eds. Creation and the God of Abraham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. McFarland, Ian A. From Nothing: A Theology of Creation. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014. Soskice, Janet. Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Tanner, Kathryn. God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Williams, Rowan. Christ the Heart of Creation. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

See David B. Burrell, ‘The Act of Creation with its Theological Consequences’, in Creation and the God of Abraham, ed. David B. Burrell et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 40–52; Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 10

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CHAPTER 19 CHRIST AND CREATION

Ian A. McFarland

The Gospels record Jesus referring explicitly to the work of creation only a few times during his ministry, and none suggests he viewed himself as having any role in the matter.1 Yet very soon after his death, Christians spoke of him as intimately involved in both the origin and preservation of the created order, confessing that ‘in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him . . . and in him all things hold together’.2 In light of this conviction, it falls to Christians to explain what it means to ascribe such cosmic significance to this human being, who, to all appearances (and whatever his gifts as a teacher and healer), seems to have struck his contemporaries as ontologically indistinguishable from other people of his time and place.3

Creation, christology, and the logic of salvation Before directly addressing the conceptual difficulties surrounding the claim that a human being might be confessed as the creator, it is important to recognize the theological concerns common to the development of the Christian doctrine of creation (specifically, the doctrine of creation from nothing, creatio ex nihilo) on the one hand, and the emergence of christological orthodoxy (specifically, the confession of Jesus’ divinity) on the other. This connection is not at first glance self-evident since creation from nothing and the divinity of Jesus are logically independent claims: one could coherently affirm either one while denying the other. Indeed, though both claims eventually came to be received as biblical, neither is so straightforwardly taught in scripture as to have precluded early Christians from holding views that differ from those of later orthodoxy. Thus, it was not until the end of the second century that creation from nothing emerged as a clearly formulated Christian teaching; and while Christians from the earliest years of the church spoke of Jesus as divine, the claim that he was properly identified as God in the same degree as the one he called ‘Father’ (i.e. such that the two could properly be confessed as homoousios, or ‘of one substance’) was not settled until the First Council of Constantinople in the year 381 ce.4 While a detailed history of these two developments is far beyond the scope of this chapter, in both cases soteriological considerations played a crucial role. In other words, claims about

See Mk 10.6; 13.19, and pars. Col. 1.16-17; cf. Col. 3.10; Heb. 1.2; Rev. 1.17; 2.8; 22.13. 3 See Mt. 13.55-56 and pars. 4 Even this resolution was in the first instance restricted to the boundaries of the Roman Empire, with anti-Nicene (‘Arian’) positions persisting among Christian Gothic peoples outside the empire for some time. 1 2

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the character of creation and the ontology of Jesus Christ were both decisively affected by Christian convictions about the meaning of salvation. Concerning creation, Christians (in line with their Jewish heritage) ascribed salvation to God – and God alone. Indeed, the fact that God’s demand for exclusive worship from Israel followed immediately upon God’s deliverance of the people from bondage5 suggests that the people’s ongoing trust in God is justified on the grounds of God’s ability to overcome every threat to their well-being.6 It is thus no surprise that biblical references to creation also emphasize God’s sovereignty over all things.7 Nevertheless, it was only as an expanding Christianity encountered philosophical cosmogonies that explicitly taught the co-eternity of matter alongside God that Christians found themselves forced to reckon more precisely with the soteriological implications of the doctrine of creation. For if the work of creation were understood as consisting of God’s ordering of pre-existent matter (as described, for example, in Plato’s highly influential Timaeus), then it would follow that the properties of matter constitute a constraint on the freedom of God’s creative activity, and thereby also a limit on God’s ability to effect salvation. But if God is to be confessed as saviour without qualification, then everything that is not God must depend on God for its existence without qualification. On these grounds, Christians came to affirm that God creates from nothing; that is, God does not create the world from anything that has existence prior to or independently of God’s creative activity but brings into being even the very stuff out of which the world is made.8 The question of Jesus’ divinity would appear less complicated, given the seemingly straightforward identification of Jesus with God in certain New Testament texts.9 Alongside these (relatively few) proof texts, however, stand many more where the writer seemingly takes pains to distinguish Jesus from God,10 a distinction that Jesus himself seems at various points to endorse11 and which would seem to be implicit in his practice of praying to God in contexts where he is obviously not talking to himself.12 Against a cultural background that easily accommodated the idea of intermediate levels of divinity, this mix of evidence made it easy for early Christians to speak of the relationship between Jesus and God in terms suggesting a mild subordinationism, according to which Jesus, though readily confessed as divine, was not understood to be God in the same sense as the one he called ‘Father’. As was the case with the doctrine of creation, however, the proper historical stimulus (in this case, the explicit affirmation by Arius of Alexandria that the Word who became flesh was a creature) demanded clarification of the church’s teaching. And here, too, soteriological considerations proved decisive: if Jesus were in any sense less than fully God, then he could not coherently be confessed as saviour since there would be an external factor (i.e. the very God who was greater

See Exod. 20.2-3; cf. Deut. 5.6-7. See, for example, Num. 10.9; 1 Sam. 10.19; Ps. 69.35; Isa. 45.22; Jer. 32:17; Ezek. 37.23. 7 See, in addition to the opening chapters of Genesis, Pss. 33.6-9; 89.8-11; Job 26.6-13. 8 ‘And what great thing is it if God made the world out of existing materials? For even a human artist, when he [or she] gets material from some one [sic], makes of it what he [or she] pleases. But the power of God is manifested in this, that out of things that are not He makes whatever He pleases.’ Theophilus, To Autolycus, 2.4; cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 2.10.4. 9 For example, Jn 1.1; 10.30; 20.28; cf. Mt. 1.23. 10 For example, Acts 3.13; Rom. 1.7; 1 Cor. 1.3; 8.6; Gal. 1.1, 3; Heb. 13.20; 1 Pet. 1.3. 11 For example, Mk 10.18; Jn 14.28. 12 See Mt. 27.46 and par. 5 6

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than he) who would qualify his capacity to save. But, on the other hand, if Jesus is truly saviour and thus worthy of the faith demanded of Christians, then he cannot be other than God.13 Soteriological convictions thus led Christians to affirm a clear ontological distinction between God and the world, and between creator and creature, which differed from a more typical view common to both Greek and Ancient Near Eastern cosmologies, according to which there was no clear line separating the divine and the worldly, which were understood to be linked through a more or less extended series of intermediate ontological levels. In insisting on creation from nothing, Christians countered that only the one God was eternal and, as such, distinct from all that is other than God; and, having secured this point, they went on to insist that Christian confession of Jesus as Saviour – and thus as able to deliver from every threat – demanded that he be located on the divine side of that fundamental ontological divide, and thus as ‘of one substance with the Father’. In short, a God who is to be trusted to save must be confessed to having created the world from nothing, and a Jesus who is confessed as saviour must be identified with this God – and thus as creator.14

The problem of narrating the incarnation So far, so good. But granted that the logic of Christian belief demands that Jesus be confessed as creator, how is it possible to make narrative sense of this claim? It is one thing to link creation with God’s eternal Word considered apart from the doctrine of the incarnation: because the Word (or Son) is understood to be the eternal expression of the Father’s love within the Trinity,15 it seems appropriate that the Word should also be the one through whom the Father’s love comes to be expressed outside the Godhead in creation.16 Insofar as the Word, as one of the Trinity and thus eternal, was ‘in the beginning with God’ (Jn 1.2), there is nothing surprising in the claim that ‘All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being’ (Jn 1.3). By contrast, the fact that Jesus was born during the reign of Augustus, and thus only long after the world came to be, would seem to pose an insuperable obstacle to his being identified with the creator. One way of solving this problem is to distinguish between the life of the eternal Word, the Second Person of the Trinity, before taking flesh (the Logos asarkos) on the one hand and after he was born of Mary (the Logos ensarkos) on the other. According to this line of interpretation,

Along the same lines, Athanasius also argued (in Four Discourses against the Arians 1.8, 34) that if Jesus were less than God, then the Christian practices of praying to him and baptizing in his name would amount to idolatry. See Athanasius, ‘Four Discourses against the Arians’, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Volume IV: St. Athanasius: Select Works and Letters, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Edinburgh/ Grand Rapids: T&T Clark/Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1891), 310, 326. 14 ‘It is, then, proper for us to begin the treatment of this subject [of the incarnation] by speaking of the creation of the universe, and of God its Artificer, that it may be duly perceived that the renewal of creation has been the work of the selfsame Word that made it at the beginning.’ Athanasius, ‘On the Incarnation of the Word’, in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Edward R. Hardy, trans. Archibald Robertson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 56. 15 See Lk. 10.22; Jn 3.35. 16 The extent to which John was drawing on pagan philosophical (especially Platonic or Stoic) speculations about the Logos in writing his Gospel’s prologue is impossible to know for certain and therefore cannot be decisive for theological evaluations of the term’s significance. 13

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Jesus is not the creator, strictly speaking, since Jesus (i.e. the Logos ensarkos or incarnatus) did not yet exist at the moment of creation. It was instead the Word not yet enfleshed (asarkos) – though, to be sure, destined one day to be enfleshed (incarnandus) – who was ‘in the beginning with God’ and thus the agent of creation. This solution appears to fit well with the opening chapter of John’s Gospel, which seemingly describes a temporal sequence according to which the Word who was ‘in the beginning with God’ only later ‘became flesh and lived among us’ (Jn 1.2, 14). Moreover, Paul seems to have a similar sequence in mind when he quotes a primitive Christian hymn that speaks of one who ‘was in the form of God’ and then subsequently ‘emptied himself . . . being born in human likeness’ (Phil. 2.6-7). Both passages seem to support the view that we may identify Jesus with the creator because he is the incarnation of God’s Word, but only loosely – in the way that one might point to someone dressed in a vampire costume and say, ‘Dracula is the fireman who saved my uncle’s life last year.’ Yet further consideration renders this way of understanding the confession of Jesus as creator untenable. Most obviously, in Philippians 2 it is not a disincarnate being but specifically ‘Christ Jesus’ who is said to be ‘in the form of God’. Nor, on more careful consideration, do the opening verses of John seem best interpreted as charting a narrative sequence, according to which we are first introduced to the unenfleshed Word, who only later became flesh as Jesus. Because the point of the Gospel is to exalt Jesus as Lord, its opening verses seem more plausibly read not as telling the story of the Word who (among other things) became Jesus, but rather as making use of ‘Word’ alongside other predicates (e.g. ‘son of Joseph’) to tell who Jesus is.17 This perspective is substantiated by the passage from Colossians cited at the beginning of this chapter, where the ‘beloved Son’ who ‘is before all things’ (Col. 1.13, 17) is identified as none other than the Jesus through whom ‘God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things . . . by making peace through the blood of his cross’ (Col. 1.19-20).18 These exegetical facts point to a deeper problem with the idea of viewing the incarnation as a stage or episode in the longer career of the Word, in the way that putting on a vampire costume might be an episode in the life of a firefighter or assuming the role of a beggar might be an episode in the life of a king.19 The problem is this: in these cases, the episodic character of the role assumed precludes it from fully revealing the identity of the agent who assumes it. This is fairly obvious in the case of the vampire costume or the beggarly disguise, where the whole point of the agent’s assuming the role is to conceal – whether in fun or in earnest – rather than to reveal one’s identity. But the problem persists when the model is applied to the incarnation, even if it is assumed that the point of the Word’s taking flesh was to make visible that which would otherwise be invisible. For if taking flesh is analogized to (for example) a king taking on a beggar’s appearance, then it is manifestly not true that in

Cf. Rev. 19.13. As Karl Barth put it, the Fourth Evangelist ‘had no intention of honouring Jesus by investing him with the title of Logos, but rather . . . he honoured the title itself by applying it a few lines later as a predicate of Jesus’. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.2, ed. Geoffrey. W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 97. 18 Cf. 1 Cor. 8.6; Heb. 1.2. 19 For the latter, see Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 26–8. 17

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Jesus ‘all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell’ (Col. 1.19) since the content of the Word’s life prior to taking flesh is necessarily excluded from what is seen and known in the flesh, in the same way that my life as a married person cannot disclose who I was when single.20 If the incarnation is conceived as a stage, however significant, in a more extended divine career, it must be judged incapable of revealing God in a definitive or final way because there remains a further and more fundamental identity hidden ‘behind’ (or ‘before’) the one who has appeared in space and time. Thus, whatever may be revealed in Jesus’ flesh cannot finally be relied upon to overcome every possible threat to salvation since there remains a gap between what is made known in Jesus and the fullness of the creator God, who is the only possible guarantor of that salvation. In short, if the incarnation is treated as an episode in the life of the Word, then Jesus can no longer be confessed as fully divine and thus as saviour. For on such a reading, Jesus can be no more than an avatar of divinity, with the result that his capacity to save (and thus the viability of placing faith in him as saviour) is limited by the more fundamental divine reality to which he may well point, but which he cannot be said to embody fully. Thus, if the Christian confession of Jesus as fully God is to be maintained, a different way of accounting for his participation in the work of creation must be found. The incarnation and narrative The outline of this alternative approach can be stated fairly succinctly: rather than understanding the incarnation as referring to a transition of the Word from an incorporeal (asarkos) to an enfleshed (ensarkos) state, a Christian account should instead understand the incarnation as referring to the whole of Jesus’ earthly-historical (ensarkos) existence, from birth through death, and abstain from any discussion of a temporally prior Logos asarkos. In short, to be consistent with the biblical claim that in Jesus ‘the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily’ (Col. 2.9), Christians will speak of the entirety of Jesus’ lifespan as the comprehensive revelation of the Word. ‘Taking flesh’ is not to be understood as something that happens to the Word; rather, the Word is to be confessed as identical with the enfleshed life of Jesus of Nazareth, extending from his birth from Mary to his death under Pilate. Crucial to this perspective is the recognition that the transcendence of God precludes any narrative scheme that places the eternal Word and the earthly-historical Jesus as consecutive stages on a single timeline. To do so (by viewing the Word’s taking flesh on analogy with a human person’s assuming a new status) falsely assimilates the eternity of the divine life to time, as though God’s taking flesh were a sort of physical displacement from life in heaven above to existence on earth below. But the confession of God as eternal means that God’s existence cannot rightly be talked about in terms of temporal sequence. As Yves Congar observed: ‘It is possible to speak of the Word without Jesus’ assumption of humanity, although it is not

As a married person I can, of course, provide information about my life when single, but (even leaving aside the fact that such accounts will invariably be incomplete) the fact remains that insofar as I am married, my married state simply cannot disclose the fullness of my life, which includes (among other things) a prior but no longer accessible reality of myself as single. 20

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possible to speak of the Word before the incarnation.’21 Only as enfleshed can the Word be described using sentences with temporal markers.22 This point can also be viewed as a corollary of the traditional christological conviction (enshrined in the doctrine of the ‘communication of attributes’, or communicatio idiomatum) that ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘Word of God’ are fully convertible terms. That is, in any sentence where either designation is rightly used, the other can be substituted without altering the sentence’s truth value. It is, of course, just this principle that leads to the claim, ‘Jesus Christ is the creator’ (as well as, for example, ‘The Word of God died on a cross during the reign of Tiberius’); where it is not affirmed, the logic of Christian confession of Jesus as Saviour breaks down, because a gap is opened up between the divine Word on the one hand and Jesus of Nazareth on the other.23 If Jesus is Saviour, then it must be the case that his enfleshed existence is not simply a temporary episode in the life of the Word, but rather that it is the Word’s life: a spatiotemporal projection of the eternal Word that (in the language of Colossians) so encapsulates the Word’s ‘fullness’ that this human life perfectly represents the identity of the divine Word.24 For Christians, there is, therefore, no way to talk about the Word except by talking about Jesus, so to say that the Word was ‘in the beginning with God’ is futile except insofar as the Word is identified with Jesus. But securing this just comes back to the fundamental question of what sense it can possibly make to speak of Jesus as with God ‘in the beginning’. How can one born into the created world be named as its cause?

Beginning with Jesus In seeking to answer this question, it is necessary to again keep in mind the impossibility of arranging eternity and time in a single narrative sequence. It is only when this rule is violated and Jesus is viewed as a stage in the divine biography that affirming Jesus’ presence as creator ‘in the beginning’ entails claiming that Jesus somehow existed before he was born. Although the fact that humans are inexorably located in time and space means that they lack the eternal

Yves Congar, The Word and the Spirit, trans. David Smith (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1986), 95. As Congar’s language implies, this does not mean that it is illegitimate to speak of the Logos asarkos, but only that the phrase cannot be used to describe a narrative sequence. 22 ‘Moses could certainly have said, “It is true now that the Son of God exists” but he could not have said truly, “The Son of God exists now”. That proposition, which attributes temporal existence (“now”) to the Son of God, is the one that became true when Jesus was conceived in the womb of Mary.’ Herbert McCabe, God Matters (New York: Continuum, 2010), 50. 23 It was in response to this threat that Nestorius was condemned at the Council of Ephesus, and the same worry prompts the Lutheran rejection of the so-called extra Calvinisticum – though whether such judgements are fair remains a fiercely contested question. 24 Two points need to be noted here. The first is that the claim that Jesus exhausts the identity of the Word without remainder is not to argue that it is possible to give an exhaustive account of the Word, for the simple reason that it is not possible to give an exhaustive account of Jesus (see Jn 21.25). The second is it remains necessary to speak of the ‘pre-existence’ of the Word with respect to the incarnation (albeit as a logical rather than a temporal priority) in order to secure the point that the incarnation is a matter of divine grace. Here there remains a place for talk of the Logos asarkos; but arguably even this point is implicit in the account of Jesus’ earthly life, insofar as the latter is described precisely as the incarnation of the Word, and thus has as its narrative presupposition that the Word is not inherently enfleshed, but only because ‘God so loved the world’ (Jn 3.16). 21

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perspective that would allow them to avoid using spatiotemporal language to speak of God’s life and work, it is not hard to see that the ‘beginning’ of which John speaks does not refer to a location in time, but rather to the eternity that is the logical presupposition of time’s coming to be. Time may (and, indeed, according to much contemporary scientific thinking as well as Genesis, does) have a beginning (t=0 in contemporary cosmological terms), but ‘the beginning’ where God dwells is not that first instant. Nor can it be said to be ‘before’ that first instant since such a claim would simply undermine the assertion that this instant is indeed the first. One might perhaps speak of John’s ‘beginning’ as being ‘above’ t=0, if only to avoid the implicit narrative sequencing of ‘first . . . then’ that tends to follow from any talk of priority; but, of course, spatial metaphors are no more accurately descriptive of God’s relation to the world than temporal ones are. It follows that the solution to the challenge posed by the claim that Jesus was ‘in the beginning’ as creator does not lie in attempting to show how Jesus could be his own cause (let alone the cause of all those things that preceded him in time) in terms of the kind of temporal sequence of cause and effect by which states of affairs (the emission of light from the sun, the rise of Napoleon, etc.) are generally explained within the created order. Instead, the task is to explain what it could mean to speak of Jesus as logically prior to creation – as the condition of the possibility of the coming to be of the whole of the created order, including its temporal series of causes and effects. Here it seems that Karl Barth was right to reason that insofar as Jesus is rightly confessed as both truly God and truly human, Jesus must be regarded as both the subject and principal object of creation. That is, the whole of creation can be said to depend on Jesus for its existence because he is both the creator and the one for whose sake the world is created.25 As a first step in this process, consider that if Christians confess that Jesus is nothing less than God incarnate, then all Christian claims about creation (as about any other matter of doctrine) must take their cue from Jesus. Now, insofar as Jesus, as the Word made flesh, is rightly named Emmanuel, or ‘God with us’ (Mt. 1.23), it follows that God’s purpose in creating was not only to grant the blessing of existence to entities that are other than God but also to live in communion with them.26 This aim is realized in Jesus, since in taking flesh (and thereby coming among us as one of us), the eternal Son binds his life to ours, thereby enabling us to share in his eternal relationship with the Father as children of God.27 On that basis, Christians have long argued that the Word ‘was made a human being that we might be made God’.28

Because Barth writes as a Reformed theologian with particular interest in addressing shortcomings he finds in the traditional Reformed account of election and predestination, he characteristically speaks of Jesus as electing and elected rather than as creator and created (see, for example, Barth, CD II.2, 103); but for the purposes of this chapter, the two pairs may be taken as functionally equivalent. 26 As David Kelsey has pointed out, the second goal is logically distinct from the first: even if it is granted (as Christians will want to do) that God always intended to live in communion with creatures, creation (i.e. the act by which God brings creatures into being and sustains them in being) does not entail a divine commitment to address creatures in such a way as to invite their response (though, of course, the divine decision to live in communion with creatures does logically presuppose their having been created). See David H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 2:897–9. 27 Rom. 8.14-16; cf. Jn 20.17. 28 Athanasius, ‘On the Incarnation of the Word’, 107. 25

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But God’s will to live with creatures is also realized in Jesus in a more fundamental sense that speaks directly to Jesus’ unique status as both the creator who was ‘in the beginning with God’ (Jn 1.2) and the creature who is ‘the firstborn of all creation’ (Col. 1.15). For the aim of God living with creatures is realized not only by virtue of Jesus giving us the ‘power to become the children of God’ (Jn 1.12) – though it is certainly also realized in this way – but, more fundamentally, it is realized in Jesus himself, in the very act of God living a creaturely life, taking on the creature’s mode of existence as God’s own and thereby electing not to be God without also being a creature, too. And it is when the incarnation is viewed from this perspective that Jesus’ priority as both creator and creature can be seen most clearly. With respect to Jesus’ status as creator, insofar as God has determined to be God in just this way, as the One whose own life of blessing suffers no lack and is incapable of any augmentation, but who out of pure love graciously shares the blessing of existence with that which is not divine, Jesus is rightly confessed as the one who was with God in the beginning, since it is as Jesus that God in the beginning (i.e. from all eternity) is God. Who is the creator? God. But who is God? That is, who is to be understood by that term, which humans have applied to any number of putative entities over the centuries? The Christian answer is Jesus, by which is meant that this historical person is the one against whom all claims about God are to be measured. And since Jesus is and can be known to humans only in his humanity, that means that it is by reference to this one created reality, and it alone, that God-talk is to be assessed. As Martin Luther put it, ‘whoever wishes to deliberate or speculate soundly about God should disregard absolutely everything except the humanity of Christ’.29 And that means that Jesus is the measure of our talk about God’s work of creation no less than God’s work of redemption. And Jesus enjoys no less priority as a creature. Once again, it is vital not to think of this priority in temporal terms, for from the perspective of time, Jesus can only be seen as the effect of a whole series of earlier causes. For before there can be Jesus of Nazareth, there needs to be first a created order in which matter and energy are organized in certain highly determinate ways; then a stellar system of sufficient longevity to allow intelligent life to evolve, along with a planet in that system with physical characteristics necessary for supporting such evolution; then a particular history of biological evolution on that planet leading eventually to the emergence of modern humans; then very specific lines of human cultural development that result in complex social realities like ‘Judaism’ and ‘the Roman Empire’; and finally, of course, the particular Jewish lineage from which Jesus was born under Roman hegemony. But to understand Jesus as the one who was ‘in the beginning with God’ is to recognize that this temporal sequence, according to which Jesus’ life is the effect of a preceding causal chain, while undoubtedly real, is secondary. For what does it mean for Jesus to be the one ‘in the beginning’, if not that before all else, God chose to be just this creature – that is, a first-century Galilean Jewish man? But if Jesus is to be just this sort of creature, then there need to be other human beings that not only serve as his more-or-less immediate biological ancestors but that also provide the cultural framework within which categories like ‘Galilee’ and ‘Jewish’ have meaning. And since human beings can only exist within the context of an environment that provides the air, water, and food necessary for their metabolism to function, the creation of

‘Ideo repeto iterumque monebo: quicunque velit salubriter de Deo cogitare aut speculari, prorsus omnia postponat praeter humanitatem Christi.’ Martin Luther, ‘Letter to Spalatin (12 February, 1519)’, in WA 1:226. 29

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Jesus’ humanity requires the creation of the whole earthly ecosystem within which human life can arise and flourish. And this, in turn, requires the creation of a universe that not only gives rise to second-generation stars like our sun, with planetary systems stocked with the heavier elements needed for life to develop, but also the whole cosmic order within which the physical laws that govern stellar evolution obtain. In short, because God did not will to be ‘a’ creature in general, but just this creature – Jesus of Nazareth – in particular, God simultaneously assumed the task of willing the whole of the created order within which this creature exists. As the creature who is also the creator, Jesus is first, not because he comes first in the sequence of temporal events that make up the history of the world, but because he is the cause and end of the existence of all other creatures.

Conclusion The Christian faith is defined by the most counter-intuitive of claims: that God, the creator of all that is, both can and must be identified with a human being who bears all the marks of finitude and particularity characteristic of creaturely existence. This human being, moreover, is not an ‘everyman’, but quite definitely Jewish rather than Gentile, male rather than female, free rather than a slave, from Galilee rather than Judea or Tierra del Fuego, of the first rather than the fifteenth or twenty-first century, a carpenter rather than a baker or a prostitute, and so on with an indefinite number of other qualities that mark him as Jesus rather than anyone (let alone everyone) else. That Christians should confess him as creator is bound up with their conviction that he is saviour, since only the one who is Lord over all without qualification can coherently be trusted as able to save all without qualification. At first glance, the ascription of such power to a creature seems a clear case of idolatry. For as a creature, Jesus is conditioned: subject to hunger, thirst, fatigue, weakness, injury, and death. Surely, one so conditioned cannot be the object of unconditional trust. Nevertheless, the Christian response is to claim that Jesus’ creaturely form does not prevent him from being identified with God (or, more properly, with the Son or Word of God, the Second Person of the Trinity) because God – precisely as creator and thus the sole ground of all created being – does not stand in a relation of contrast or opposition to created reality and so is free to assume a creaturely life and claim it as God’s own. The creator can be a creature, too. But, for Christians, that the creator should – without for a moment ceasing to be creator – actually have determined to be a creature is not simply an arbitrary manifestation of divine power, but rather is good news because it is a mark of divine commitment: commitment to the existence and, indeed, to the flourishing of that which is not God. God need not have taken on a creaturely form, for God (who is fully and unsurpassably blessed in God’s own triune life) has nothing to gain from it. But the confession that God has, in fact, done so carries with it a host of implications. Two, in particular, stand out. First, because God has become the creature Jesus of Nazareth, then Jesus is rightly called God; and this means that God is rightly understood as a God who is so committed to the life of creatures as to have made creatures’ lives inseparable from God’s own, such that for God to deny the creation would be for God to deny God’s own self. Second, God has not chosen to be a creature in such a way that the created life assumed by God is the only creature there is. It might have been otherwise. God might have assumed a form of creaturely existence that was singular and self-contained, one that did not entail the 258

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creation of any further creaturely substance beyond that which God directly assumed.30 But instead, God chose to live the sort of creaturely life that brought in its train innumerable other creatures with it: human brothers and sisters alongside the human Jesus, but also many, many other creaturely forms, most of which doubtless remain unknown to us. In choosing to take flesh as Jesus, God chose fellowship with a creation of unimaginable diversity and richness. That is what it means to confess Christ as creator.

Further reading Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics II.2. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, J. C. Campbell, Iain Wilson, J. Strathearn, Harold Knight, and R. A. Stewart. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957 (esp. §§32–33). Kelsey, David H. Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology. 2 vols. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. McFarland, Ian A. From Nothing: A Theology of Creation. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014. McFarland, Ian A. The Word Made Flesh: A Theology of the Incarnation. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019. Tanner, Kathryn. Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001. Webster, John. ‘Non ex Aequo: God’s Relation to Creatures’. In God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology. Volume I: God and the Works of God, 115–26. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016.

On certain Christian accounts of angels, the divine assumption of an angelic nature would have had this character.

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CHAPTER 20 BEAUTY AS PERSON CHRIST’S PRESENCE TO THE WORLD Stephen John Wright

The Christian church has no doctrine of beauty. Theologians who wish to speak on behalf of the church on this matter can only affix themselves to doctrines firmly established and sew their patchwork arguments to the great quilt of the church’s teaching. Such is what this chapter essays. The theology of beauty is a lesson in how faith injures reason. Though not a doctrinal locus in itself, beauty has functioned as a motif of theological reflection in each successive generation. In the absence of any doctrine of beauty, theology has necessarily borrowed from the toolshed of philosophy to discuss the aesthetic. The concepts of the philosopher, however, regularly prove to be underwritten by covert commitments incommensurable with the gospel of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As a result, neither the Platonic kalos (beauty) nor the Kantian sublime has proven to be wholly suitable accounts of the Christian apprehension of divine and creaturely beauty. Christian scripture offers no clear metaphysical account of beauty or aesthetic reality, nor should one expect it to. While there is no immediate demand within Christianity to account for beauty as an abstract concept, there is a need to consider the aesthetic realities of the Christian life: the desire for God; the use of word, music, and image in worship; and, most significantly for this chapter, the centrality of Christ as the icon of God (Col. 1.15). This chapter explores the contours of a Christian theological account of beauty impacted by the incarnation of the divine Son. It first traces a selective outline of beauty in the history of Christian thought and follows with some commentary on the modern turn and the attempt of analogy to secure a place for beauty. After these preliminary remarks, the chapter argues via the neo-Chalcedonians that beauty can instead be thought of personally through the unity of the Son with creation in the hypostasis (person) of Jesus Christ.

The aesthetics of form and proportion The history of western thinking about beauty offers a narrative of contracting interests. Whereas the beautiful was treated in close connection to the deep questions of the moral structure of reality in ancient Greek thought,1 the aestheticization of beauty and human creative endeavour

The eastern traditions have their own emphases on the relation between artistic creation and right living, but theological engagements with these ideas have been few. For relevant works in English, see Li Zehou, The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition, trans. Maija B. Samei (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010); Michele F. Marra, ed., Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999). 1

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in the wake of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten has led to the reduction of beauty almost entirely to appearance – either objectively embedded in form or subjectively evoked in the apprehender – so as to risk dwindling down to the merely ornamental. The emergence of the overwhelming tumult of the Kantian sublime swept beauty to the outer shores of concern. The question of beauty no longer strikes one as the question of the moral purpose of life or the revelation of the deepest truths of reality but as a somewhat felicitous response to the variety and immensity of experienced life. To speak of beauty is to speak of responsiveness to the world and to God. Although few cultures have followed Greek thought into the abstract consideration of the beautiful, many have reflected on the sense of wonder that accompanies life in the world. Beauty tells of something buried in the world or in human lives that never fully comes into view. Of the visual, one sees the mingling of the visible with the invisible; attempts to isolate beauty’s allure in specific formal characteristics that might be shared among various beings all end in failure. The failure of this task leads many to suggest that beauty must therefore be transcendent of categories, together with unity, goodness, and truth. These transcendentals coinhere in being and are convertible with one another, distinguishable only in thought. To speak of beauty as the absence of defining features, transcendent of categories, indiscernible both in isolation from its instantiations and within the objects found to be beautiful, is to speak of beauty as invisible. In this line of thinking, beauty appears as the formless within form. Such ineffable invisibility can be seen only by attending to the world in which beauty is found. For those who witness beauty embedded within the objective structures of the world, the emphasis has tended to fall upon form. Here, beauty has been identified with being itself. The earliest offerings in the western consideration of beauty found the ground of the beautiful in composition and proportion. From Pythagoras and Hesiod to Plato and Plotinus, a strong tradition of thought, not without particular variations, emerged in the west. For this tradition, the pleasure aroused by beauty could be located in the proportionate ordering of forms. For Plato, beauty calls. Many Greek authors made good use of the likeness between kalos (beauty) and kaleo (to call). Beauty’s voice sings from the various beautiful forms of the world, which were measured by their distance from the fundamental Form; all beauties must be manifestations of the one beauty. Since, for Aristotle, the beautiful has its reality within its historical instantiations and not in a manner primal to them, the proportions are found in the interplay of objects themselves. Plotinus combines these to find that beauty cannot be found only in complex forms but must also be found in the simple, lest one be unable to account for the beauty of colour and other simple realities. The early theologians found much to work with in this tradition and set to evangelizing it by bringing it into concert with the central items of Christian conviction: the appearance of God in Christ and the simplicity and transcendence of God. There are here the examples of Gregory of Nyssa and Pseudo-Dionysius, among others.2 Plotinus proved a helpful ally in thinking about the beauty not only of creation but also of God. Christianity confesses that a triune God – there being no other transcendent invisibility that might be witnessed in the beautiful

See Gregory of Nyssa, ‘On Perfection’, in Ascetical Works, trans. Virginia W. Callahan (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1967), 106–7; Pseudo-Dionysius, ‘The Divine Names’, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 65–6 (648C), 73–81 (697A–709D). 2

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– who must be the source of creation’s beauties must be beauty itself. Nyssen, Augustine, and Dionysius each, in their own way, make this identification.3 Proportion will not suffice to make sense of such beauty. As the God of Christianity is neither divisible in nature nor composite in being, such theological endeavours identified the beauty of God with divine perfection. The evangelization of these Neoplatonic concepts was less than total, and Plotinus’ hierarchical structure of being became, for them, an account of spiritual ascent. As the beauties of the created world all have a transcendent origin in simple divinity, one must abstract from the particular in order to know and understand beauty. Creaturely beauties are mutable and mortal. The tree that dazzles one day withers the next. For creatures, Dionysius argues, one must maintain a distinction between the beautiful and the beauty which is its cause. For God, by contrast, the beautiful and beauty coincide. Thomas Aquinas later describes this as the identity of essence and existence in God. According to Dionysius, such a being is called ‘beautiful since it is the all-beautiful and the beautiful beyond all. It is forever so, unvaryingly so, unchangeably so, beautiful but not as something coming to birth and death, to growth or decay, not lovely in one respect while ugly in some other way’.4 The varied and particular beauties of finite being cannot themselves be perfect, and so one must make the negative ascent, moving from the non-divine to the divine, reading the signs as negative indications of the divine. Beauty functions transcendentally, predicated of all being in its non-identity with finite being. Beauty causes beauties; the relation, for Dionysius, is causal. Beautiful realities obtain in the world of creatures precisely because they share the beautiful and the good that transcends them.5 To consider the beautiful is to reflect upon this arrangement of reality in its objective externality from the subject. Proportionality remains key, but Dionysius shows how it might be located not merely within form itself but in the relation between form and the formless, the visible and the invisible, the immanent and the transcendent. Thomas treats the good and the beautiful in parallel, distinguished in concept. Both are found in the proportion of ‘form’.6 The good belongs to the appetitive faculty, while beauty is proper to the cognitive. Transcendental of being – a predicate transcendent precisely in its inability to succumb to categorization – the good is extensive with being itself and adds nothing to being. Beauty’s identification with the good grants it similar status to that of a transcendental, if it is not itself a transcendental alongside the good. Thomas develops the tradition of proportion and form by naming three ingredients of beauty: integritas (integrity), proportio (proportion), and claritas (clarity, brightness).7 Integrity and clarity expand the tradition’s thinking of beauty’s achievements. The good strikes one as beautiful because it shines forth as a unified whole. One delights in the right formal proportion found in this

See Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 114–15; Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 41 (III​.vi​​.10); Pseudo-Dionysius, ‘The Divine Names’, 55 (596A), 59 (637B). 4 Pseudo-Dionysius, ‘The Divine Names’, 76–7 (701D). 5 See Pseudo-Dionysius, ‘The Divine Names’, 77 (704B). 6 Thomas here reflects on Dionysius’ view that the good and the beautiful are to be identified. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), Ia, Q. 5, Art. 4. 7 Aquinas, ST, Ia, Q. 39, Art. 8. 3

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bright unity. Thomas’ beauty sounds a note of wholeness, concretely found in the object of one’s pleasure. Beauty is id quod visum placet, that which pleases when seen.8

Aesthetics in modernity These classical accounts of beauty all locate beauty with the pleasing arrangement of form in relation to the invisible transcendence of the divine nature. The integrities of creation which evoke delight and desire are upheld by their origin in the triune God of faith. The legibility of the world, even in its excess of human comprehension, secured a place for the beautiful. Culturally, such assurance has become unstuck in the west, with two considerable alterations for the theology of beauty: (i) the relocation of beauty from the objective structures of the world to the apprehension and judgement of the subject, and (ii) the positioning of the sublime not as a species of beauty, but as an overwhelming alternative to it. The natural consequence of the second of these features of modern aesthetics has been that the discussion of art now eclipses the consideration of beauty. The particularity of beauty has been supplanted by interest in the aesthetic in general. The subjective turn makes observation of beauty within external structures – immanent or transcendent – simply impossible, these structures as they are in themselves being beyond human reasoning. However alluring the classical account might be, from humanity’s present position in history one cannot avoid thinking of beauty in light of the aesthetic contraction. One cannot go back before Francis Hutcheson, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and the rest to dodge the question of the subject. The question is what form a modern theology of beauty might take. To deal with the beautiful is to treat the aesthetic and, therefore, to risk dabbling in the superficial. In such a state, to equate God with beauty or to name God as the author of the beautiful appears at best trite, if not an embarrassing grasping for a final foothold for religion in a largely secularized west. Can one dabble so freely in the discussion of essences? Thomas has anticipated a path forward. One way to understand Thomas’ engagement with Aristotelian thought, according to Étienne Gilson, can be found in Thomas’ interpretation of hashem in terms of self-existence. The unity of ens (being) and esse (the act of being) refuses the reduction of existence to essence. God existentially subsists; ‘being is that which is’.9 With this insight, one discovers the existentiality of all being. Beauty can be rethought – ‘rediscovered’, in Karl Barth’s terms10 – in the particularities and instabilities of existence. Beauty’s elusiveness, so well documented, may be due to the priority of existence. This priority sharpens the questions that arise in the modern world of the cultural entanglements of beauty. Gilson proceeds: ‘Human reason feels at home in a world of things, whose essences and laws it can grasp and define in terms of concepts; but shy and ill at ease in a world of existences, because to exist is an act, not a thing.’11 Moving

For Thomas, beauty also appears to function as a divine name, and this phrase should not overdetermine one’s understanding of his aesthetics. 9 Étienne Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), 63. 10 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. T. H. L. Parker et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 656. 11 Gilson, God and Philosophy, 67. 8

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forward on these terms must be tentative, but Christian theology already has an existential object – a life – which can be one’s point of departure.

Analogy Hans Urs von Balthasar made the aesthetic reflection upon Christ as form normative for what is now called theological aesthetics.12 His debt to Barth is clear. Barth’s minor foray into the theology of beauty treats the Dionysian account warily. The concept of beauty, taken abstractly as with Dionysius, lacks theological specificity, being more interested in thinking of being and its necessary predicates than the concrete existence of the God of the Christian gospel. Not wanting philosophy to function as a metaphysical norm for theology, Barth rejects any account of the primacy of beauty. The beautiful functions more humbly, in his thought, as an accompaniment to the theology of glory. Nevertheless, theology finds beauty to be an indispensable feature of glory and revelation. Glory includes beauty, but one cannot think one’s way from beauty to glory. The beauty of God speaks to the joy of glory, which reigns over creation not through power but through attraction.13 Where Barth thought of a capacious glory enfolding beauty, Balthasar correlates beauty and glory, locating them in the incarnation. His thought proves highly geometrical: the vertical axis of glory intersects with the horizontal plane of beauty in the form of Jesus Christ. As such, ‘we ought never to speak of God’s beauty without reference to the form and manner of appearing which he exhibits in salvation-history’.14 All reflection upon God’s glory must remain tethered to this anchor point. Beauty, too, finds its locus in Christ, and so the wonders of creation are to be interpreted through this form. An underlying ambivalence of Balthasar’s theology appears here. Christ’s centrality must be conditioned and regulated. ‘The beauty and glory which are proper to God may be inferred and “read” off from God’s epiphany to its incomprehensible glory which is worthy of God himself. But in trying to perceive God’s own beauty and glory from the beauty of his manner of appearing, we must neither simply equate the two.’15 One observes here a movement common in Balthasar, the advancing identification of Jesus Christ with God, the appearance of divine beauty in this one singular historical form, followed immediately by a retreat. The discussion advanced here has already observed in Balthasar a pattern of abstraction from existence that identifies Christ with the intersection of formless glory and formed beauty. These terms, along with ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’, Balthasar employs as surrogates to refer obtusely to the two natures of Christ. But they also serve to generalize what in Christ is particular. Understanding the incarnation in light of the joining of two apparently incommensurate terms requires mediation, which Balthasar finds in the analogia entis (analogy of being). Made

Though Balthasar treated beauty centrally – dedicating seven hefty volumes to it – the arts have largely supplanted theological reflection on beauty itself. Within philosophy, one might observe this shift with Hegel, who was more interested in form and art than in beauty itself. 13 See Barth, CD II.1, 655. 14 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Volume 1: Seeing the Form, ed. Joseph Fessio and John Riches, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), 124. 15 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, 124. 12

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famous by his teacher, Erich Przywara, the analogy of being expands Thomas’ reflections on analogy in religious language into an encompassing metaphysical principle designed to avoid metaphysical equivocity on the one hand and metaphysical univocity on the other, deism and monism in turn. Analogy cannot but be aesthetic. It establishes within creatures a particular fit for divine encounter. Applied to aesthetics, analogy allows one to identify God’s glory with the beauties of the world without collapsing the distinction between the two. Borrowing from the language of the Fourth Lateran Council, the likeness achieved in the analogy is always embraced and transcended by an ever-greater dissimilitude. Indeed, for Balthasar, following Przywara, analogy serves as the only metaphysical basis for a Christian account of beauty and as the heart of Catholic theology in general. This last qualification is significant, as Balthasar considers Protestants unable to adopt the analogy of being as such and notes his view of the limits of Lutheran theology for aesthetics. Whatever is meant to be signified by the analogia entis – whether a normative ontological principle or a regulative grammar – Balthasar appears to be clear that it cannot be an ecumenical principle.16 The analogia entis is a species of natural theology and, in this setting, attempts to ground thinking of beauty within the structures of creation. However, as Balthasar makes clear, analogy does not function as an ecumenical doctrine. Indeed, one finds few Protestants making use of it, and rarely does it appear within Orthodox theology.17 Where it functions, analogy orders all relations. Its comprehensive scope subsumes all near identities within its maior dissimiltudo (greater dissimilarity). Balthasar’s views on analogy appear to shift over time, but one finds that he regularly subjects Christ’s person to analogy, as one instance among many. Christ holds all things together because this is what analogy does anyway. Analogy is needed when one thinks of natures. If beauty and glory are mapped onto natures, as Balthasar does, then one requires the remedy that analogy offers. The remainder of this chapter argues for an alternative understanding – that one thinks of beauty not as primarily predicable of nature, but of person; specifically, the particular hypostasis of Jesus Christ.

Christ troubling beauty In turning to Christ, one finds the precise manner in which faith injures reason. Augustine can be the example. Few were better positioned than he simply to adopt Neoplatonic tropes regarding the beautiful, emanation, and a hierarchical order of being. When turning to Augustine’s routine commentary upon beauty, one might expect a rehearsal of these treatments. Instead of a beauty that radiates out from supereminent being, Augustine’s theology centres on

See his discussion of Protestantism in The Glory of the Lord, 57–70. David Bentley Hart is the notable exception here. See David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003). Also, Oleg Davydov, ‘Reception of Analogy of Being in Contemporary Eastern Orthodox Theology’, Dialog 56, no. 3 (2017): 290–7. Protestant engagements in aesthetics have tended towards commentary upon the arts rather than prolonged engagements with the theology of beauty. Protestants have other tools which might fund a natural theology of beauty: the neo-Calvinist view of common grace, or, cousin to this, the Wesleyan–Augustinian notion of prevenient grace. Others may borrow from Paul Tillich’s reflections on the arts and semiotics, or from phenomenology or the new materialism to develop a natural theology. 16 17

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the incarnation. In his person, Christ holds together the beautiful and the not-beautiful, the formed and the deformed. Like two notes sounding from the one Spirit, Augustine reckons with scripture, one hears Christ as ‘splendid in form’ and simultaneously with ‘neither splendor nor comeliness’.18 This harmony Augustine learns from Paul, for whom Christ is in both the form of God and the form of a slave (see Phil. 2.6-7). Augustine enlists Platonic ideas only to reforge them on the anvil of the incarnation. The beauty of creatures does not arise from a causal relation to the divine act of creation but from the fact that God enters into the world as one of its creatures. Because of this, Augustine describes Christ’s beauty in sometimes surprising terms: Beautiful as God, as the Word who is with God, he is beautiful in the Virgin’s womb, where he did not lose his godhead but assumed our humanity. Beautiful he is as a baby, as the Word unable to speak, because while he was still without speech, still a baby in arms and nourished at his mother’s breast, the heavens spoke for him, a star guided the magi, and he was adored in the manger as food for the humble. He was beautiful in heaven, then, and beautiful on earth: beautiful in the womb, and beautiful in his parents’ arms. He was beautiful in his miracles but just as beautiful under the scourges, beautiful as he invited us to life, but beautiful too in not shrinking from death, beautiful in laying down his life and beautiful in taking it up again, beautiful on the cross, beautiful in the tomb, and beautiful in heaven.19 Augustine dissociates beauty from pleasure and enjoyment by his willingness to describe as beautiful the more distressing and repulsive moments of the Gospel events. The best ideas of beauty proffered by reason come under strain as they encounter the Christian testimony to Christ, who holds together both divine beauty and the beauty of the created world. There is an unexpected agreement with Plotinus here: whatever beauty might be, spatial proportion alone cannot explain it. Just as the beauty of God must be revealed, and is revealed in Christ, the beauty of creatures lies in their being brought to beauty. Beauty happens. Augustine offers an aesthetic commercium admirabile – an exchange of human and divine form. Gregory of Nazianzus writes that Christ ‘assumed what is worse that he might give what is better’;20 a common theotic idea that Augustine here reshapes into an explanation of beauty: ‘The deformity of Christ forms you. . . . He hung deformed upon the cross, but his deformity was our beauty.’21 Augustine imagines no ideal Christ but only Christ as he is for humanity in his specific existence. Where Platonism supplies thought with a perfect form partially instantiated in all beauties, Augustine’s ideal form of beauty carries deformity in divine humility. Like Balthasar, Augustine wants no beauty that leaves behind the form of Christ. ‘Late have I loved

Augustine, Homilies on the First Epistle of John (Tractatus in Epistolam Joannis ad Parthos), ed. Daniel E. Doyle and Thomas Martin, trans. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2008), 142 (9.9). 19 Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, 33–50, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2000), 283 (44.3). 20 Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘Oration 1: On Pascha and on His Slowness’, in Festal Orations, trans. Nonna V. Harrison (Yonkers: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 59 (1.5). 21 Augustine, cited in Carol Harrison, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 234. 18

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you, beauty so old and so new’ – here is a beauty not as a mere predicate of being or as a feature in the organization of reality, but a beauty to whom one can address oneself.

Person exceeds nature Augustine’s contemporary, Cyril of Alexandria, gave the church the arguments that would decide the outcomes of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 ce. The entailments of these christological disputes are significant for the future of thinking about beauty. In the uproar caused by Nestorius’ rejection of the veneration of Mary as theotokos (God-bearer), the question was put as to how the Christian faith should understand the incarnation of its Lord. Nestorius’ ministry and teaching prioritized the natures and policed the boundaries between them. While much is made of Cyril’s henosis (union) of the natures, the decisive feature of his theology of union (which itself is more apophatic than not) is the absolute priority of the singular hypostasis of Christ. Nestorius portioned out operations within the economy according to the natures. Cyril responds that all the events ‘in the gospels are to be referred to one person, the one enfleshed hypostasis of the Word. For there is one Lord Jesus Christ, according to the Scriptures’.22 Cyril’s theology marks a shift of focus from Nicaea, whose christological discussions focused on ousia (substance). Nestorius, a good Nicene believer, followed this logic to attempt to coordinate the natures in a conjunction through which each could sound in its uniqueness. Chalcedon made dogma the decision of the Council of Ephesus regarding the unity of the natures in the hypostasis of Christ, but the priority of the hypostasis was not fully worked out until the renewed disputes of the years following the Council. It was the work of neoChalcedonian teachers such as Maximus the Confessor and Leontius of Jerusalem who demonstrated that christology inquires not after how two terms can be joined in a third – however asymmetrical those terms might be qua nature – but after the Lord Jesus Christ, the hypostasis of the incarnate Logos. Hypostasis names not a new nature but a new thing in which the natures are united; it is a mode of existence. In the hypostasis, Christ is who God is. Maximus goes so far as to say that Jesus stands ‘beyond nature’, being the hypostasis of these two natures.23 The person exceeds nature. One sees similar contours in Balthasar’s analogy and Nestorius’ conjunction, each of which attempts to describe the coming together of two discrete terms, one infinite and the other finite. The ‘person’ of Christ functions as a third term allowing incompatible natures to touch, the horizontal to intersect with the vertical. The asymmetry of the natures becomes the model for thinking of creation as causally derivative from God. For this precise reason, Balthasar continues to invoke analogy to regulate the coordination of the natures, protecting divine glory from admixture with human beauty. The logic driving analogy runs so deeply that Balthasar requires it to be an undisclosed assumption running through the history of Christian thought.

Cyril of Alexandria, ‘Third Letter of Cyril to Nestorius’, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Volume 1: Nicaea I to Lateran V, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 56. 23 Maximus the Confessor, ‘Difficulty 5’, in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996), 172 (1052B). 22

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Analogy need not be inherently Nestorian, but it can accommodate Nestorius, and this gives one reason to pause in employing it as a normative rule for aesthetics. Following Cyril and Maximus, one can now instead say that Jesus exceeds analogy. Hypostasis does what nature cannot: unite divinity and humanity. Maximus goes further than this: the hypostasis does not unite two pre-existing terms but performs what he calls the ‘coming to be of opposites’.24 Were the hypostasis to assume what already existed, one would be in the hinterland of adoptionism. The hypostatic union is not an analogy that resolves difference; it generates difference. The assumption of the human nature of Christ in the incarnation brings into being that same nature. The descent of divine nature into the difference of that which is not divine is the basis of the differentiation of the divine and the non-divine. What Maximus calls the ‘logos’ of each nature, the principle of its being, remains unchanged by this union. The identity occurs within the hypostasis rather than within the nature. God and creation are hypostatically identical in Jesus. Without qualifying the natures, Maximus allows a symmetry between them alien to analogy. The beauties of Christ lauded by Augustine are not merely the negative images of an unseen transcendent glory but are the unity of glory and beauty in the hypostasis of the Lord Jesus Christ. The imprecise rendering of hypostasis into English is fortuitous: beauty goes beyond nature; it is personal.

The personal beauty of persons and images In Christ, modernity’s previously contracted aesthetic interests expand to encompass all life. But where the pre-moderns saw beauty in the order and architecture of creation, or a beauty placed in the world by divine causation, Christ stands as beautiful creation and beautifying creator, troubling the subject/object distinctions and pulling all things into identity with God. Turning again to the modern question, one sees that beauty is subjective because one rightly thinks of beauty when one knows it as a particular subject; creatures are the direct objects of its action. In this latter regard, beauty also proves to be objective. Beauty leaves nothing untouched. In the idiom of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Christ plays in ten thousand places / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.’25 The hypostasis transmits its excess so that Mary conceives otherwise than by nature. Nestorius opposed the title of theotokos for Mary precisely because of the kind of hypostatic identity that Maximus assumed. Christian faith owes her this title because she truly bears God by virtue of the hypostatic union. Whereas nature would stipulate that a human woman cannot be a mother to God because the one she contains contains her, she lives beyond nature. Mary’s title, theotokos, discloses the unnatural relations of all people to God in Christ. Maximus speaks of how all creation is swept up into this differentiating union of the incarnation: ‘For the Word of God and God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of

Maximus the Confessor, ‘Difficulty 5’, 173 (1053C). Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Dráw Fláme’, in Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953), 51. 24 25

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his embodiment.’26 Maximus differentiates himself from modern pantheists and panentheists by adhering to strictly Chalcedonian lines of reasoning. Christ’s Logos may be the logos of creatures, incarnate in their being, but this identity between natures occurs without confusion, change, division or separation. By the Incarnation, God unites the logoi – or principles – of creation hypostatically with the divine Logos. For the churches of the east, all religious images rely on such a christological maximalism. John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite both argue their case for the creation and veneration of icons from christology. Because the hypostasis makes the flesh ‘equal’ to the Word, one may boldly make images of God made visible in Christ.27 The icon cannot depict nature, but it can show God as person. And what it shows truly is the person of Christ, and so the one composed of a divine and a human nature. Were icons underwritten by an account of imitation, the images would be judged by their distance from the prototype, as in Plato’s aesthetics, disqualifying them from veneration. Theodore explicitly denies the Platonic declension of the icon: ‘the prototype [Christ] is in the image by the similarity of hypostasis, which does not have a different principle of definition for the prototype and for the image’.28 Hypostatically, the image and the prototype are identical. Christ truly is present in the image, not by nature but as person. Only on this basis is it right for the image to be venerated, not because of what it is – its nature is that of wood and paint – but because of who it is. For this reason, the restoration of the veneration of icons in 843 ce continues to be celebrated in the eastern churches not as a victory for images but rather as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The iconodule arguments can be taken as a warrant for all religious images. The neoChalcedonians provide identity between the divine and human natures in the person of Jesus Christ; now the Damascene and the Studite have shown that Christ’s hypostasis can be present not only in humans but also in non-human images. Icons are a verification of Maximus’ observation that the Logos looks always and everywhere to become incarnate. Here is a basis to speak of the identity of God with creation. Western and modern dabbling in theosis sometimes attempts to soften the claims of the tradition, but theosis truly speaks of creation becoming divine. Gregory of Nazianzus offers divine–human parity through theosis: humans are to ‘be made God to the same extent that [God] was made [human]’.29 The true humanity of the Word provides the seal of promise for the true divinization of humanity. Such thought also gives new content to Augustine’s adulation of the beauty of the martyrs, which distresses even further the western canons of form and proportion. Beauty calls not to the eye or the ear but to love: [W]e perceive with the eyes of the heart, and love, and kindle to, a beauty which people have dearly loved in the martyrs, even when their limbs were being torn by wild beasts.

Maximus the Confessor, ‘Ambiguum 7: On the Beginning and End of Rational Creatures’, in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St Maximus the Confessor, trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert L. Wilken (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 60 (1084D). For an excellent treatment of this theme in Maximus, see Jordan D. Wood, ‘Creation Is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor’, Modern Theology 34, no. 1 (2018): 82–102. 27 John of Damascus, ‘Treatise I’, in Three Treatises on the Divine Images, trans. Andrew Louth (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 22 (4). 28 Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981), 103. 29 Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘The Third Theological Oration (Oration 29): On the Son’, in On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, trans. Lionel Wickham (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 86 (19). 26

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Surely we might have supposed that when people were covered with reeking blood, when brutal bites were tearing out their entrails, the eyes of onlookers would see nothing but horror? What was there to attract them in such a scene, except the untarnished beauty of righteousness, which shone out amid the foulness of lacerated limbs?30 Righteous beauty, in Augustine’s view, stands not in contrast with death, deformity, and the decomposition of bodies but can be seen exactly in the heart of such sorrows. What Augustine describes here goes beyond the vestigial beauty of nature brought into being by a beautiful creator. He evokes a beauty not given in the structures of creation but found in Christ’s righteousness.31 One thinks of Ignatius of Antioch’s pleas to the churches not to pray that he might be spared from the tortures of martyrdom, his quiet determination to attain to Christ in his death. The martyrs sought unity with Christ in their suffering, and in this Augustine witnessed a righteous beauty.

Perishing beauty Dionysius sought a higher beauty not touched by change and death. Sensitive to this concern, Balthasar nevertheless sees the problem in leaving behind immanent forms to ascend to a transcendent beauty. However the aesthetic dialectics work, the immanent terms must be carried forward. Christ’s hypostatic presence to creation makes possible, theologically, the free examination of immanent forms of creation as sites of beauty. One finds beauty not only in the officially designated forms of the arts and religion but also in the political, the socially marginal, in the quest for justice. Beauty as person does not offer a thorough phenomenology of beauty and so stipulates no single method in the theological investigation of beauty. What this view of beauty as person does allow is thematic commentary upon God, Christ, and the world. Rather than the coordination of the invisible with the visible, it identifies the beautiful in particularity. The acts of existence are beautiful precisely as what they are and not otherwise, for unity with Christ does not negate the nature of the creature. To view this from another angle, one might argue, with Kathryn Tanner, that creatures on their own terms can only be incomplete, and become what they are when enclosed by grace.32 But care must be taken for this observation not to abstract from the particular and light play of forms. Moreover, as existences, the beauties of the world are not inactive, passively awaiting apprehension by the cultured observer. They work upon us. Here one finds the agreement of Augustine and Dionysius: kalos calls and beauty can be addressed in response. Beauty as person sounds in the world otherwise than by the perdurance of nature. Following the lead of Augustine, one can say that the beautiful may be found exactly where the integrity of the creature comes undone. One breaks here from the western canons. Christ’s personal beauty speaks not only in comfort or pleasure but also in sorrow and decline, much like the

Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, 51–72, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2001), 275–6 (64.8). 31 For the distinction between ‘the given’ and ‘the found’, see Ben Quash, Found Theology: History, Imagination and the Holy Spirit (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 32 See Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 58–139. 30

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pathos-laden aware of Japanese aesthetics. Sweeping up the sludge of decomposing organic matter from a back garden teaches one that there is nothing inherently beautiful about dead leaves. But as they fall, in their autumnal flight from life, one can be captivated by their freedom in passing away. Someone calls to us here, whispering of death and resurrection. The Christian faith must hold that God is not removed from this ongoing drama of death and life but can be found right in the midst of it, having taken it on as God’s own.33 The beauties that perish are entrusted to the care of the God found in them, which is to say that they are beautiful in their redemption – because the Spirit speaks to humans here of Christ, because Christ speaks to humans here of grace, because the Father speaks to humans here of love (1 Cor. 13.13-14). The trinitarian thematics sound here, and one can follow Augustine’s maxim – opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt (the outward works of the Trinity are indivisible) – to state that the hypostatic unity of the Son with creation occurs in the mutual willing and energy of the Father, Son, and Spirit, who share and are by nature one will and energy. In the priority of existence, one finds beauty’s delicacy and variability. One returns here to the question of the sublime, which Burke located within the experience of terror in the absence of danger, its chief affect being astonishment. Divine nature, Burke sees, elicits just such a response, as in scripture ‘wherever God is represented as appearing or speaking, everything terrible in nature is called up to heighten the awe and solemnity of the divine presence’.34 One sees the subjective turn signalled by Burke picked up and developed by Kant, who locates the sublime wholly within human representation of nature rather than in nature itself. It is instructive that neither Kant nor Burke look to God’s appearing or speaking in Christ, who holds the form of humanity in identity with the form of God. In his transfiguration, Christ is the speaking glory of God, who calls the disciples to the mountain and strikes them to the ground in fear. The terror of the sublime sounds only in its abstraction from this excessive identification found in Christ, which goes beyond nature. Sublime trembling appears where the world is at its most impersonal; the Kantian sublime is what you get when nature has no hypostasis. The polarity between the subjective and the objective hinders one here. If beauty can be thought of as person, then encounters with the beautiful are not parsed according to strict subject/ object distinctions, with each term occupying one side of the relation only; a meeting with the beautiful is intersubjective. Christ brings frail human life, which cowers in the towering presence of a world that ever exceeds it, to peace by beauty’s calm address. Time’s threats become promises in Christ, and beauty’s home is found in the world of change and changeability.

Conclusion The Christian faith has held that God’s transcendence does not stand in contrast with divine presence to the world. This chapter proposes that union of natures in Christ is itself the holding

A thought wonderfully captured in the work of Indigenous Australian artist Shirley Purdie in her painting Ngambuny Ascends, in which Christ ascends back into the land. Shirley Purdie, Ngambuny Ascends, 2013. Natural ochre on canvas, 60 × 80 cm. Private collection. 34 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Paul Guyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 57. 33

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together of transcendence and immanence rather than an instantiation of a general principle. Since hypostasis does not negate nature, one can find here a grammar for speaking of the beauties of the world both as the beauty of God in Christ and as the particular beauties they are as creatures. The tradition of image-making in Christianity has been built on such arguments, and one would do well to take christology seriously enough to find Christ in the world of sensuous experience. Left alone, western reason desires to build a world of neat beauties ordered to pleasure. This was a labour of love in antiquity and of disdain in modernity. Such aesthetic tidiness has been unsustainable under the strain of Christian faith. When looking for beauty in the world, the Christian gestures towards the man dying on the cross; here, one sees God’s beauty and humanity’s beauty, not as a something, but as a gasping and loathed someone.

Further reading Carnes, Natalie. Beauty: A Theological Engagement with Gregory of Nyssa. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2014. García-Rivera, Alejandro. The Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1999. Harrison, Carol. Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Hart, David Bentley. The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003. Jenson, Robert W. ‘Deus Est Ipsa Pulchritudo (God is Beauty Itself) (2007)’. In Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation, edited by Stephen John Wright, 207–16. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2014. Jüngel, Eberhard. ‘“Auch das Schöne muß sterben” – Schönheit im Lichte der Wahrheit: Theologische Bemerkungen zum ästhetischen Verhältnis’. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 81, no. 1 (1984): 106–26. Maritain, Jacques. Art and Scholasticism, with Other Essays. Translated by James F. Scanlan. London: Sheed and Ward, 1930. Mattes, Mark C. Martin Luther’s Theology of Beauty: A Reappraisal. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017.

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CHAPTER 21 HOLY SPIRIT A COSMIC CREATIONAL PNEUMATOLOGY Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen

Introduction: What does the divine Spirit have to do with the cosmos and the earth? What on earth (no pun intended!) does the Spirit of God have to do with the coming into existence and maintenance of this almost infinitely vast universe – and our little planet in one corner of our galaxy?1 God the Father as the creator – Yes, he has much to do with creation! God the Son, as the mediator of creation – Yes, likewise! But the Spirit? The famed American theologian-philosopher Philip Clayton responds boldly and accurately to this question: ‘Suppose for a moment that, as theists believe, an eternal divine Spirit really did create this cosmos.’2 Wouldn’t that be an invitation for a theological reflection on the role and work of the Spirit with regard to everything having to do with creation? This is what this chapter is all about. It seeks to discern the creative work of the triune God through the lens of pneumatology, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Its main thesis is that Christian theology considers the coming into existence (creation), maintenance (providence/ divine action), and perfection (eschatological consummation) of the cosmos as the joint and undivided work of Father, Son, and Spirit, in which all trinitarian members have their own particular function, namely, the Father the source of creation, the Son the Mediator, and the Spirit the energy of life and perfection.

In search of an authentic trinitarian account of creation A brief statement on a trinitarian pneumatology or a pneumatological account of the Trinity suffices here. In his exposition of the creation narrative in Genesis (1.2), Martin Luther paints this most delightful and poetic trinitarian picture of the Spirit at work in creation: The Father creates heaven and earth out of nothing through the Son. . . . Over these [created things] the Holy Spirit broods. As a hen broods her eggs, keeping them warm in order to hatch her chicks, and, as it were, to bring them to life through heat, so

This chapter gleans from Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Spirit and Salvation (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2016), 43–75 and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Creation and Humanity (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015). 2 Philip C. Clayton, ‘The Spirit in Evolution and in Nature’, in Interdisciplinary and Religio-Cultural Discourses on a Spirit-Filled World: Loosing the Spirits, ed. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Kirsteen Kim, and Amos Yong (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 187. 1

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Scripture says that the Holy Spirit brooded, as it were, on the waters to bring to life those substances which were to be quickened and adorned. For it is the office of the Holy Spirit to make alive.3 This delightful account affirms the classic rule of the trinitarian doctrine: God’s ‘outward’ works, including creation, are the united work of Father, Son, and Spirit. The divine works ad extra are indivisible though appropriately distinct, as is evident in the celebrated formula of the Cappadocian Father, Saint Basil: ‘And in the creation bethink thee first, I pray thee, of the original cause of all things that are made, the Father; of the creative cause, the Son; of the perfecting cause, the Spirit.’4 According to biblical intuitions, the world comes into being as a result of overflowing divine love. God is love, and love, pure divine love, by its very nature, wishes to commune and share with the Other. Theologically put, with the same love that the Father loves the Son in the Spirit, the world is ‘loved’ into being and sustained until it finds its consummation in its return to the creator. If the Father is the ‘source’ of this joint trinitarian action, the Son’s and Spirit’s tasks are distinct and complementary. The Son, as the agent of creation, mediates the Father’s creative work through the energy of the Holy Spirit; his self-distinction (though not separation), culminating in incarnation and in his glorious death and resurrection, represents the principle of distinction (though not separation) between God and everything that is not God – that is, the created order. As the Reformed theologian Colin Gunton puts it, ‘to create in the Son means to create by the mediation of the one who is the way of God out into that which is not himself ’.5 The Spirit’s work, in turn, is to ensure the unity between the creator and creation and among the creatures, as well as to serve as the energy and principle of life and vitality. The ruach Elohim, God’s Spirit, ‘was moving over the face of the waters’ (Gen. 1.2, RSV). The same Spirit of God that participated in creation over the chaotic primal waters is also the principle of human life (Gen. 2.7). This same divine energy also sustains all life in the cosmos (Ps. 104.2930). The energy and vitality of the divine Spirit are not limited to the initial act of creation ex nihilo; it continues and has as its final goal the perfection of creation in its eschatological consummation.6 As the ecofeminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson reminds us: Of all the activities that theology attributes to the Spirit, the most significant is this: the Spirit is the creative origin of all life. In the words of the Nicene Creed, the Spirit is vivificantem, vivifier or life-giver. This designation refers to creation not just at the beginning of time but continuously: the Spirit is the unceasing, dynamic flow of divine power that sustains the universe, bringing forth life.7

Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Volume 1: Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 1–5, trans. George V. Schick (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1958), 9. 4 St Basil the Great, ‘De Spiritu Sancto’, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series. Volume 8: St Basil: Letters and Select Works, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Edinburgh/Grand Rapids: T&T Clark/Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1983), 23. 5 Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 143. 6 These two paragraphs reflect and are indebted to Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), 2:20–35. 7 Elizabeth Johnson, Women, Earth, and Creator Spirit (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993), 42. 3

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With this trinitarian framework and control as a guide, I will now delve into the task of developing a robust creational pneumatology, which, to account for the vastness of God’s creation, has to be cosmic in its ramifications.

The conditions and profile of a cosmic creational pneumatology In his acclaimed The Spirit of Life (ET 1992), the German Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann is in search of a new paradigm of pneumatology that is a truly ‘holistic doctrine of the Holy Spirit’: ‘On the one hand, it must comprehend human beings in their total being, soul and body, consciousness and the unconscious, person and sociality, society and social institutions. On the other hand, it must also embrace the wholeness of the community of creation, which is shared by human beings, the earth, and all other created beings and things.’8 This kind of holistic and comprehensive account of the Holy Spirit is needed for theology to provide a robust trinitarian-pneumatological account of creation. Unfortunately, this has not been at the forefront of the Christian tradition. Why is that? A shorthand response is simply this: in Christian traditions, pneumatology has tended to be quite restricted and limited. Although one must resist the temptation to describe the pneumatological tradition in terms that are too uniform and homogenous – for the simple reason that there are already in the history of the doctrine of the Spirit dramatic differences, divergences, and surprises – it is also the case that by and large pneumatology was too often bound within certain theological, ecclesiastical, and cultural strictures. In the past, the doctrine of the Spirit was mainly – but not exclusively – connected with topics such as the doctrine of salvation, the inspiration of scripture, some issues of ecclesiology, and individual piety. In other words, the Spirit’s role was mainly reserved for the private and ‘spiritual’ rather than the public and ‘secular’, including the Spirit’s work in creation and the cosmos at large. Going back to the beginnings of the Christian tradition, there was a further difficulty that seemed to block the way to speaking robustly of the Spirit of God as the spirit of life and as the life-giving principle of creation. According to ancient Stoic understandings, the ‘spirit’, even the divine spirit (pneuma), was a very fine substance – ‘stuff ’. If so, understanding God as spirit would lead to the reprehensible idea of associating God with something material – with absurd notions of divisibility, composition, extensions, and locality. Hence, the turn to defining ‘spirit’ in terms of ‘reason’ and ‘will’ seemed both a necessary and useful tactic, thereby thwarting any association with the material/physical.9 While understandable against the world view of the times, the price paid was high and detrimental to theology. The conception of the Spirit in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, has to do with the principle, energy, and vitality of life. It comprises not only reason or will but also the bodily, the earthly, and the ‘animal’; everything created and living owes its existence to the divine Spirit.

Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 37. 9 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991), 1:372–74. 8

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Nowadays, there is no need to deal with the fears based on an ancient cultural milieu, and the holistic and integrated biblical account of the ruach Yahweh as the life principle can be safely returned to, not detached from but rather energizing and supporting all the life of the cosmos, including physical/material life. Just think of the psalmist’s account of creation: By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath [ruach] of his mouth. (Ps. 33.6) When you [Yahweh] hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground. (Ps. 104.29-30) The rediscovery of the divine Spirit as the spirit of life (without in any way undermining the New Testament-based idea of the same Spirit as also the third ‘person’ of the Trinity) helps correct the liability of the tradition’s limited pneumatology. While not leaving behind the important aspects of traditional pneumatologies, this ‘holistic’ approach to pneumatology seeks to discern the Spirit’s ministry everywhere in the cosmos the triune God has created. An important part of this exploration is to establish continuity (though not equation) between various facets of the Spirit’s work, from creation to personal salvation to the church to eschatological consummation. The following programmatic statement from Wolfhart Pannenberg says it all: God’s Spirit is not only active in human redemption as he teaches us to know the eternal Son of the Father in Jesus of Nazareth. . . . The Spirit is at work already in creation as God’s breath, the origin of all movement and all life, and only against this background of his activity as the Creator of all life can we rightly understand . . . [also] his role in the bringing forth of the new life in the resurrection of the dead.10 Not only the Christian tradition but also modern theology has been slow to grasp the significance of the cosmic presence and work of the creative divine Spirit. Thankfully, the last decades have seen a resurgence of interest in this vital topic. The Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich’s profound discussion on ‘Life and Spirit’11 contributed significantly to a rediscovery and reformulation of a life-affirming cosmic pneumatology. The Spirit of Life is at work at all levels of the ‘hierarchy’ of creation, from the inorganic to ‘the spiritual presence’ in the human spirit, religion, culture, and morality. Notwithstanding its strong modalistic tendencies, Tillich’s groundbreaking achievement should be duly noted. Significantly, Tillich’s Dutch Reformed contemporary Hendrikus Berkhof envisioned the Spirit as the ‘vitality’ of God: ‘God’s inspiring

Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 3:1. 11 See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), 3:11–294. 10

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breath by which he grants life in creation and re-creation’.12 With reference to several key Old Testament passages from Gen. 1.2 to Job 33.4, Berkhof states: ‘We understand that the same God in action, the same ruach working in the deeds of salvation, is also the secret of the entire created world. . . . God’s Spirit creates and sustains the life of nature.’13 Similarly to Tillich, though, Berkhof suffers from a modalistic unitarian bias. Alongside Pannenberg, whose focus on the continuity of the Spirit’s work at various levels of life was briefly noted above, no one else has sought to work out the details of a cosmic pneumatology as much as has Moltmann. Moltmann rightly notes that the meaning of the word spirit needs to be clarified. Unlike the usage in contemporary western languages, in the Old Testament, ‘spirit’ in no way involves any dualism of ‘material/bodily/earthly’ versus ‘spiritual’.14 The same point was made during the nineteenth century by another Reformed theologian, Johann Christoph Blumhardt, from whose theology, among others, Moltmann draws. Under the telling heading ‘The Redemption of the Body’, Blumhardt states: ‘The Spirit must embody itself. It must enter into our earthly life; it must happen that deity be born in flesh so that it can overcome this earthly world. God is active Spirit only when he gets something of our material underfoot; before that, he is mere idea. The Spirit would govern life.’15 A cosmic pneumatology that seeks to ‘discover God in all the beings he has created and to find his life-giving Spirit in the community of creation that they share’16 leans towards panentheism: a negotiation of the God–world relationship in a way that preserves distinction while affirming an intimate, mutual relationship. As Berkhof puts it: ‘So intimate is the Spirit to [humanity’s] life that we sometimes feel ourselves on the brink of pantheism.’17 Whereas some forms of panentheism in contemporary theology blur the distinction between the creator and creation, what has elsewhere been named ‘classical panentheism’18 can avoid that fallacy and, at the same time, embrace the intimate presence of the creator in the Spirit in creation. So far, the focus has been on theological resources given to discern the pneumatological aspects of the triune God’s creative work. Before continuing that work, a brief investigation of the potential of relating creational pneumatology to natural sciences’ explanation of the world’s coming into existence is warranted. No theology of creation worthwhile for the third millennium can afford to ignore this urgent task. Divine Spirit and natural sciences Unknown to many, the return to the biblical account of the ruach Yahweh as the life principle – not detached from but rather energizing and supporting all the life of the cosmos – has helped

Hendrikus Berkhof, The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1964), 14. Berkhof, The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, 95. Emphasis in original. 14 Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 40. 15 Johann C. Blumhardt, Thy Kingdom Come: A Blumhardt Reader, ed. and trans. Vernard Eller (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1980), 18. Emphasis in original. 16 Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), xi. Emphasis in original. 17 Berkhof, The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, 95. 18 See Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Trinity and Revelation (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014), 226–49. 12 13

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theology build a bridge with the scientific account of evolution and life. Indeed, much has happened in the twentieth century in terms of radical shifts in the scientific paradigm itself that, while challenging to theology, also offers new ways to consider the role of the Spirit in the cosmos. The German Pentecostal theologian Wolfgang Vondey observes: ‘Post-Newtonian physics speaks of the physical universe in terms of such concepts as energy, radiation, magnetism, waves, and field theories. Recent theological investigations speak of the Holy Spirit in surprisingly similar terms, among them the notions of energy, radiation, space, force, field, and light.’19 But how would an attempt to correlate scientific and pneumatological accounts be executed? These two discourses are radically different, including in their ways of explanation and methodology. For decades, Pannenberg tried one approach that, although not without liabilities, serves as a helpful template. He sought to correlate the theological concept of the Spirit and the notion in physics of force field(s). He argued that the biblical notion of ‘God as spirit’ might have consonance with the current scientific view of life as the function of ‘spirit/ energy/movement’ expressed with the concept of (force) field:20 ‘The presence of God’s Spirit in his creation can be described as a field of creative presence, a comprehensive field of force that releases event after event into finite existence.’21 Pannenberg, of course, knows that for biology, ‘life is a function of the living cell or of the living creature as a self-sustaining (above all self-nourishing) and reproducing system, not the effect of a transcendent force that gives life’.22 That said, he notes that the concept of force (or energy or field) is used in physics to describe movement and change. Although Michael Faraday’s nineteenth-century field theory has been revised dramatically in the wake of relativity theories and quantum physics, Pannenberg believes that from a theological viewpoint, the basic idea regarding ‘bodies themselves as forms of forces that for their part are no longer qualities of bodies but independent realities that are “givens” for bodily phenomena’ – in other words, ‘force fields’ – may still be useful when metaphorically conceived.23 While contemporary physics sees no need to resort to any divine Spirit to explain the fields, for theologians, it may provide an opening. Particularly important in this respect is the metaphysical origin of the field concept in Greek philosophy. Therein, as noted earlier, pneuma was considered to be a very fine stuff that permeated all the cosmos and held together everything in the cosmos.24 That Pannenberg’s attempt has been seriously challenged and critiqued, particularly by scholars with degrees in both natural sciences and theology, in no way disqualifies his efforts.25

Wolfgang Vondey, ‘The Holy Spirit and the Physical Universe: The Impact of Scientific Paradigm Shifts on Contemporary Pneumatology’, Theological Studies 70, no. 1 (2009): 4. 20 Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 2:79–84. 21 Wolfhart Pannenberg, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991), 49. 22 Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 2:77. 23 Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 2:80. 24 Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 2:81. 25 The typical concerns among scientists and theologians have to do with the wisdom of using the pre-Einsteinian and pre-quantum theory of Faraday rather than any of the contemporary ones; the failure to identify which of the many existing field theories Pannenberg invokes; and, most importantly, the ambiguity about whether he uses them analogically or as a way of (virtual) identification of field and Spirit of God (as it seems at least in his pneumatologically driven theology of angels). See, for example, John Polkinghorne, ‘Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Engagement with the Natural Sciences’, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 34, no. 1 (1999): 151–8. 19

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By calling the Spirit ‘field’, we are using a metaphor or analogy. This metaphor’s justification has to be assessed for its general appropriateness rather than on whether it exactly fits all aspects of the scientific explanation. It seems to me that the metaphorical correlation of the divine Spirit in terms of field(s) corresponds well with what Tillich hinted at with his evolutionary-driven dynamic account of the Spirit of Life, and of which Moltmann similarly makes a whole-scale pneumatological programme.

The Spirit’s continuing creation and divine acts in the world We turn now to focus on the Spirit’s continuing creative and sustaining work of creation and of creatures. Recall the psalmist’s reminder that the moment the divine Spirit leaves the creature, death and decay result. Again, it suffices to provide a fairly short statement from a pneumatological perspective, as providence at large is a theme of another chapter in this volume. As a preface to a pneumatological account of the triune God’s continuing creative work and providence, there is an obvious yet often-neglected fact: One of the most significant challenges to contemporary (philosophical) theology is how to continue affirming the conditions and possibility of divine acts. The dilemma can be simply put: on the one hand, there is no way for Christian theism to get around the belief in continuing divine acts of the triune God in history. A glance at the scriptures confirms it: Who can count all the references and testimonies to God’s acts? On the other hand, the evolutionary theory, with its focus on chance and the explanations in physics based on determinism and causal closure (i.e. all events have ultimately only physical causes), seems to block any ‘non-natural’ divine acts or God’s ‘intervention’. So how has modern theology responded? There are not too many options. One either dismisses the sciences and affirms continuing divine action (a path typically taken by theological conservatives),26 or one reduces such action to a subjective interpretation (a path typically taken by theological liberals),27 thereby avoiding the conflict with the sciences but at the same time losing any meaningful account of divine acts. Thankfully, these two do not exhaust all available options. A highly promising way out of this difficulty is the project of Non-Interventionist Objective Divine Action (NIODA), constructed over decades by a collaborative group of Catholic and Protestant scientists, philosophers, and theologians.28 The NIODA project argues for real, continuing, and ubiquitous divine acts in the world, including special acts such as responses to prayer, but in a non-interventionist manner. In other words, this new paradigm believes itself able to speak of divine acts without the dangers of intervention. The NIODA project is made possible by the shift from the ironclad

Typical theologians in this camp are Charles Hodge, Donald Bloesch, and Millard Erickson. For details and original sources, see Nancey Murphy, Beyond Liberalism & Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1996), 68–71. 27 Typical theologians in this camp are Friedrich Schleiermacher, Shailer Mathews, and Gordon Kaufman. For details and original sources, see Murphy, Beyond Liberalism & Fundamentalism, 71–4. 28 See Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and William R. Stoeger, eds, Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action: Twenty Years of Challenge and Progress (Vatican City/Berkeley: Vatican Observatory Publications/The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 2008). 26

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determinism of the Newtonian world view with its causal closure to quantum physics, which (according to the main Copenhagen interpretation of Werner Heisenberg’s work) envisions orderly but to some extent indeterminate processes of the world at various levels. The establishment of divine action with the help of quantum theory highlights the divine presence in the smallest processes of nature, in the subatomic, whose effects also proliferate to larger processes and events. Now enter the Spirit. The NIODA paradigm needs to be linked with a robust trinitarianpneumatological account in which the omnipresent and omnipotent God, through his Spirit, permeates every inch of the cosmos. This is to avoid the God-of-the-gaps fallacy and an understanding of divine action as something contrary to the workings of the cosmos following the laws of nature set up by the same creator of the world. So Luther: God ‘himself must be present in every single creature in its innermost and outermost being, on all sides, through and through, below and above, before and behind, so that nothing can be more truly present and within all creatures than God himself with his power’.29 It is clear without saying that only through and in the Spirit is God able to imbue creation in such an intimate manner – a claim upheld by the testimony of biblical passages such as Ps. 139.7-12. With these considerations in mind, I agree with Gunton that, notwithstanding the challenges mentioned above, there is some benefit to interpreting the Spirit of God in terms of force field. The reason is simply this: the idea of the Spirit’s work ‘as interacting fields of force rather than billiard-ball-like entities bumping into one another, is of extreme importance in showing that the world is open to God’s continuing interaction with it’.30 This means, in Gunton’s words, that: [T]he creator’s love – his energy at work through the mediating action of the Son and the Spirit – not only made the universe, consisting of diverse and interacting fields of force organised in different ways, but also shows itself in the day to day upholding and directing of what has been made. . . . It is important to stress that according to such a conception no distinction in principle is to be drawn between the ordinary and the extraordinary. God’s action, as energy giving rise to energy variously organised, may be conceived to shape the day to day life of the world, even sometimes miraculously –in anticipation of its eschatological destiny – without violating that which is ‘natural’, because what is natural is that which enables the creation to achieve its promised destiny.31 Although I would speak less of energy and more of information, Gunton’s profound trinitarian statement makes the point. The panentheism of Moltmann, a robust trinitarian (classical), funds a dynamic, multifaceted divine action and providence: If the Creator is himself present in his creation by virtue of the Spirit, then his relationship to creation must rather be viewed as an intricate web of unilateral, reciprocal and many-

Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Volume 37: Word and Sacrament III, trans. Robert H. Fischer (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961), 58. 30 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 175. 31 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 176. 29

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sided relationships. In this network of relationships, ‘making’, ‘preserving’, ‘maintaining’ and ‘perfecting’ are certainly the great one-sided relationships; but ‘indwelling’, ‘sympathizing’, ‘participating’, ‘accompanying’, ‘enduring’, ‘delighting’ and ‘glorifying’ are relationships of mutuality which describe a cosmic community of living between God and all his created beings.32 An essential aspect of the triune God’s providence in creation is its flourishing and sustenance against threats, so evident particularly in our times. The ‘earthly’ and ‘embodied’ creator Spirit A subset of a cosmic creational pneumatology envisions an ‘earthly’ and ‘embodied’ creative Spirit. Alongside the tradition’s difficulties in connecting the Spirit with creation (difficulties made concrete through its efforts to combat the ancient Stoic understanding of pneuma as fine stuff), there was also a concern to protect the absolute transcendence of God. One result of these twin concerns was that the association between pneumatology, ‘the earth’, and the physical was largely pressed out of the frame. These well-meaning tactics led to the separation of the divine Spirit from the earthly, the fleshly, and the created in Christian thought. An unfortunate implication of this move was that spirit(uality) was elevated above the physical, and, at times, the two were even placed in opposition to one another. In the witty expression of the American theologian Eugene F. Rogers Jr.: ‘The Spirit, who in classical Christian discourse “pours out on all flesh”, had, in modern discourse, floated free of bodies altogether.’33 As a result, ‘the Spirit has grown dull because [it is] unembodied’.34 However, removing the S/spirit from the ‘earthly’ is neither necessary nor useful. The most profound theological statement against divorcing the divine Spirit from creation and the physical is the Incarnation, an event of embodiment. Even in the Old Testament, the refusal to separate the two can be seen. As Moltmann shows, the meaning of the term ‘spirit’ needs to be forgotten in western culture and language as it refers to something non-material and thus juxtaposes the spirit(ual) with the material. In biblical testimonies, ruach means ‘strong tempest, storm, a force in body and soul, humanity and nature’.35 This echoes what Rogers means by saying, ‘the Spirit befriends matter’.36 The classical doctrine of divine omnipresence also teaches that God exists in everything. God is never really distant from creation, but neither can the transcendent God be equated with the creaturely. The distinction lies in this: God is being, but all created things only have being. Creatures have their being by virtue of participation in God’s being.37 Consider what

Moltmann, God in Creation, 14. Emphasis in original. Eugene F. Rogers Jr., After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 1. 34 Rogers, After the Spirit, 3. 35 Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 40. 36 Rogers, After the Spirit, 55. 37 See Anne M. Clifford, ‘Creation’, in Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives, ed. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza and John P. Galvin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 1:218. 32 33

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Athanasius said: ‘For no part of Creation is left void of Him: He has filled all things everywhere, remaining present with His own Father.’38 The biblical metaphors of the Spirit taken from nature gain a new meaning in this regard. Just consider breath, wind, water, fire, and so forth.39 To speak of the ‘earthen spirit’40 is not to undermine the divine uniqueness of the Spirit but rather to speak of the divine infinity in which finite and infinite are both transcended and embraced simultaneously. In other words, grounding creation in God is not to subsume the divine life in the immanent but rather to give meaning and ‘ground’ to creation itself. In the words of the postcolonialist theologian Mayra Rivera: ‘God is irreducibly Other, always beyond our grasp. But not beyond our touch.’41 Helpful in this respect is the feminist theologian Kathryn Tanner’s distinction between ‘contrastive’ and ‘noncontrastive’ accounts of divine transcendence. Whereas the former contrasts transcendence and immanence inversely, meaning that the more focus on one, the less focus on the other, the latter ‘suggests an extreme of divine involvement with the world – a divine involvement in the form of a productive agency extending to everything that is in equally direct manner’. In other words, the ‘noncontrastive’ approach saves God from becoming one being among others and supports divine transcendence simultaneously with robust presence and activity everywhere.42 An important benefit of affirming the panentheistic immanence of the transcendent creator Spirit in the world relates to one of the most urgent tasks for contemporary theology: preserving the earth in the face of impending natural catastrophe. Green pneumatologists such as Mark Wallace capture this urgency rhetorically by speaking of the Holy Spirit in terms of the ‘Wounded Spirit’.43 While this metaphor should be handled with great care – lest the omnipotent, omniscient, and transcendent Spirit of God be made a prisoner to happenings in a tiny planet among billions of other planets in one galaxy of a universe of tens of billions of other galaxies – the rhetorical force should be heard as a much-welcome reminder. The task of a properly conceived green pneumatology as part of a cosmic creational vision of the Spirit is to facilitate the imagining of metaphors of flourishing, thriving, blossoming, and greening. A counterpart to that task is the cultivation of sensibilities concerned with the endangerment of nature and its diverse species. Both aspects help cultivate pneumatological sensibilities in the service of nature care.

Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 8.1. See Mark I. Wallace, Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation (New York: Continuum, 1996), 4–5. 40 See Mark I. Wallace, ‘Christian Animism, Green Spirit Theology, and the Global Crisis Today’, in Interdisciplinary and Religio-Cultural Discourses on a Spirit-Filled World: Loosing the Spirits, ed. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Kirsteen Kim, and Amos Yong (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 197–212. 41 Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 2. Italics in the original. 42 Kathryn E. Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988), 46. 43 Mark I. Wallace, ‘The Wounded Spirit as the Basis for Hope in an Age of Radical Ecology’, in Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans, ed. Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary Radford Ruether (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 51–72. 38 39

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Conclusion: The perfecting work of the Spirit in eschatological consummation Having briefly sought to construct a viable cosmic creational pneumatology and to envision the manifold work of the Spirit of God in the joint trinitarian process, we turn now in conclusion to consider the future consummation of creation. The divine Spirit is not only the source and agency of creation and sustenance. The Spirit’s mission is also to complete the divine economy, to bring about final perfection. The creator Spirit is also the power of eschatological renewal and consummation, the power of new creation (2 Cor. 5.17). Already in the Old Testament, particularly in Second Isaiah, the promise of ‘new creation’ becomes a key theological theme (see Isa. 43.19). One task of contemporary constructive theology is to help shift the tradition’s one-sided interest in ‘protological creation’, the past, to ‘eschatological creation’, the future. Christian eschatological hope is not only for personal salvation, nor even only for the whole church. The hope embraces the whole of God’s creation, the cosmos. This holistic and ‘earthly’ eschatological vision is masterfully expressed by the American Anabaptist theologian Thomas Finger: ‘Since the new creation arrives through God’s Spirit, and since it reshapes the physical world, every theological locus is informed by the Spirit’s transformation of matter-energy’.44 The pneumatologically loaded eschatological openness of creation points to a final consummation in which matter and physicality are not so much ‘deleted’ as they are transformed and made transcendent.

Further reading Gunton, Colin E. The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998. Johnson, Elizabeth. Women, Earth, and Creator Spirit. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993. Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. Creation and Humanity. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015. Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. Spirit and Salvation. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2016. Moltmann, Jürgen. God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. Moltmann, Jürgen. The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 3 vols. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991–7. Wallace, Mark I. Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation. New York: Continuum, 1996.

Thomas N. Finger, A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology: Biblical, Historical, Constructive (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 563. 44

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CHAPTER 22 NATURE AND GRACE THE SPIRITUALITY OF EXISTENCE Nicholas Ansell

Introduction The nuns taught us that there are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you will follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself; accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked; accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself, get others to please it too; likes to lord it over them, to have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy, when all the world is shining around it and love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. I will be true to you, whatever comes.1 There are several reasons why an ostensibly theological discussion of ‘nature and grace’ might begin with this opening monologue to Terrence Malick’s celebrated film, The Tree of Life. One might be that this introduces the claim (arguably borne out by the film itself) that while ‘nature’ may oppose ‘grace’, this need not mean that ‘grace opposes nature’, as this latter inference results from looking at (and thus inadvertently mirroring) the relationship from the point of nature alone; whereas grace, despite being opposed (forgotten, insulted), may, in fact, love and eventually ‘elevate’ nature out of its fixation on itself. Another possibility is that these reflections on a Catholic upbringing, which culminate in a woman’s promise, assume that nature and grace are two ways of living rather than two orders (or realms) of being, thereby giving voice to a spirituality that quietly undermines a dualistic feature of traditional theology. Finally, this opening might serve to highlight how choosing between the two paths, or life directions, is a problematic notion as that (power of) choice would appear to be located prior to, and thus outside, both grace and nature, thereby presupposing a primordial neutrality that love may shine upon but be powerless to shine through. The unsettling presence of the will’s (apparent) neutrality is also a theme in the following narrative. Consequently, many who have pondered the film’s most pivotal of prehistoric flashbacks will have asked themselves whether the curious ‘live and let live’ impulse of the bird-like dinosaur that may have introduced altruism into the world was merely arbitrary. Even in the closer-to-home story that takes place in the United States of America of the 1950s, it is often unclear whether the two paths present the viewer with a potentially humane, yet humanistic, decision (‘when they go low, we go high’) that is – one way or the other – utterly

T h e Tree of Life, written and directed by Terrence Malick (Los Angeles/Santa Monica: Fox Searchlight Pictures/ Summit Entertainment, 2011), DVD. Cited in Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston, ‘Preface’, in Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick, ed. Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), xx. 1

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dependent on human beings. If so, one may wonder whether a libertarian understanding of human free will parallels the inscrutability of the divine will that haunts the film’s central characters. Then again, given that the opening words shift from choosing the way of grace to loving the way of grace, and then from our being true to this path to the words: ‘I will be true to you’, the possibility remains that, in embracing this higher way, ‘we [choose to] love’ grace ‘because she first loved us’.2 Observations and probings such as these are all relevant to the present discussion, even if they may not represent key entry points for all participants. Taken together, however, what they do indicate is that ‘nature and grace’ is not the special provenance of academic theology; rather, the nature–grace relationship, which may be experienced in and through life in all its dimensions, concerns what one might call ‘the spirituality of existence’.3 In that light, it is intriguing that The Tree of Life does not relate the world that is shining to ‘nature’ but to ‘grace’. Whether this is a category mistake or an important insight will be explored below. In what follows, this chapter begins with a heuristic approach to defining some key terms. Then, after looking at the problem of dualism, the nature of faith, and the provocations of some key theologians, it explores the promise of an ‘original blessing’ approach, in part via a typology that may help anyone interested in a revitalized doctrine of creation to appreciate, and perhaps move beyond, the main ways in which the nature–grace relationship has been understood.

Some provisional definitions One initial way of distinguishing between nature and grace is to point out that ‘nature’ typically signifies anything that might fall within one’s power, while ‘grace’ refers to something that all human beings need though this lies beyond our (natural) ability (and perhaps capacity too), such that were this to be made available, it would come from outside the self. With this initial characterization, there is nothing to prevent one from understanding the ‘natural’ as given to human beings by God, the creator of all that is good. But one can probably see how something ‘within one’s power’ might be construed as an invitation to autonomy, to doing things ‘in one’s own strength’, and thus to the posture of self-enclosure, alienation, and sin. Consequently, while ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’ – quite apart from the distinctions that are routinely made between nature–culture, nature–nurture, and/or nature–freedom – can be seen to have at least some connection to the goodness of creation, one may also appreciate how connotations of human autonomy have led to ‘nature’ being associated with a ‘fallen’ world in need of redemption. As for ‘grace’, this initial focus on what lies ‘beyond’ one’s ability to secure what one needs may almost immediately prompt an awareness of God as the redeemer and perfector of one’s life, given that ‘salvation’ is such an obvious and crucial example of what comes to human beings from God and not from themselves. While virtually all Christian theologies will readily

1 Jn 4.19, adapted to the gender inflection of the film. See Nicholas Ansell, ‘For the Love of Wisdom: Scripture, Philosophy, and the Relativisation of Order’, in The Future of Creation Order: Vol. 1, Philosophical, Scientific, and Religious Perspectives on Order and Emergence, ed. Gerrit Glas and Jeroen de Ridder (Cham: Springer, 2018), 257–87. 2 3

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admit this, differences can quickly surface concerning how one responds to salvific grace, as there are many competing claims about whether one’s natural capacities are expanded, honed, overcome, augmented, healed, and so forth, in the process of liberation and transformation. Given the different positions that Christians have adopted, the vocabulary of grace has become strikingly differentiated, with theologians carefully distinguishing between ‘cooperating’, ‘efficacious’, ‘irresistible’, and ‘prevenient’ grace, among other forms – all of which imply a corresponding evaluation of the role of ‘nature’ (even though its vocabulary remains relatively underdeveloped). One other advantage to seeing the nature–grace relationship as resting on the distinction made between what one can do in one’s own strength and what can only be achieved in God’s strength (or between what is rightly our responsibility and what we should leave to God) is that it sheds light on why this relationship has often been dualistically conceived as a split between the natural and supernatural – even though the biblical witness is so emphatic about the seamless unity that characterizes the covenant between God and humanity. On this point, Saint Paul’s words in Phil. 2.12b-13 – ‘work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure’ – is a classic example.

The problem of dualism and the virtue of faith To gain a better sense of how a nature–grace dualism might operate, one might take the tradition of the ‘seven virtues’ that has come down in the Christian west as a case in point. Here the number seven is made up of those four virtues, dispositions, or habitual expressions of character that early Christian writers appreciated in pre-Christian thought – prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice – to which have been added the three ‘supernatural virtues’ of faith, hope, and love (drawn from 1 Cor. 13.1-13). While much could be said about the history of this tradition, the focus here is on how this ‘4+3’ structure appears to operate within a classic ‘nature plus grace’ framework, such that the four ‘pagan’ virtues are seen as ‘good as far as they go’ while the biblically revealed ones that supplement them to the point (and number) of perfection exceed any such limitations, thus enabling the pre-Christian four to travel far beyond their ‘natural nature’, so to speak, to their true end beyond even humanity’s most laudable (and no doubt God-given) qualities and achievements. For historians of theology who are acquainted with the ‘gratia non tollit naturum, sed perficit’ (grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it) formulation and who appreciate how the four ‘cardinal’ virtues were taken up into the ‘seven heavenly virtues’, this may qualify as a classic instance of that principle. As for those less than enamoured with the ‘nature– supernature’ construction that gives rise to this kind of heavenward trajectory, if one translates this ‘Christianized’ view of the virtues into the claim that ‘everything that one does must be animated by faith, hope, and love if it is to have lasting value in the kingdom of God’ – which arguably captures the intent of the Christian virtue tradition at its best – then perhaps those who are wary of (or wearied by) Christian dualistic thinking might feel somewhat reassured. Be that as it may, none of this precludes the legitimacy of probing the potentially unstable and problematic nature of this ‘4+3’ – ‘grace supplements/perfects nature’ – paradigm. Here the issue is not necessarily the nature–grace distinction per se, but rather the dualism that 286

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would separate the virtues (or life itself) into two categories even as it subsequently invests considerable energy into bringing them back together. To put things sharply, if faith (a supernatural, beyond our natural ability, virtue) is seen as a gift and promise that comes to human beings from beyond themselves, why would one not also see a so-called natural virtue such as prudence (or wisdom) in the same light? From a biblical perspective, is there really such a fundamental difference between the faith, hope, and love of 1 Corinthians 13 and the wisdom of 1 Corinthians 1–2? How can the ‘4+3’ distinction be maintained? After all, if someone were to defend its underlying structure by claiming that there is a natural and now a supernatural form of prudence/wisdom, with the latter being understood as a perfected form of the former thanks to the supernatural (or graced) influence of faith, hope, and love,4 there is nothing to prevent applying the same twofold distinction to faith in the opposite direction! In other words, why not entertain the idea that faith as a gift of God, and as something one is called to by God, is also – or better: is thereby and therefore – a ‘bona fide’ human capacity and responsibility? Behind this suggestion, especially in its non-dualistic ‘thereby/therefore’ articulation and in its tacit appeal to the authentically human (rather than to the pejoratively all-too-human), lies what may be a more foundational question: Why are Christian thinkers typically so quick to consider the role of faith, hope, and love in salvation and sanctification but so slow to explore their place within a theological anthropology attentive to the divine affirmations of Genesis 1–2 that precede the story of redemption that begins in Genesis 3? This shift in focus need not represent a minimizing of either the fall or of humanity’s need for salvation so much as an attempt to re-contextualize such concerns. Arguably, when reevaluated from a more creational vantage point, important, God-given capacities that have become closed down through being misdirected – such that ‘love’ has become denatured as agenda-driven desire or attachment, while ‘faith’ in what is truly trustworthy has been exchanged for fear-based surrender to idols that displace humans as imagers of God – now appear misconstrued within the dualistic super/natural virtues paradigm as so lost or alien to humans that human life needs to be (a) structurally supplemented by supernatural endowments rather than (b) radically redirected and thus set free, healed, and brought to eschatological fulfilment. In position (a), faith is not seen as the trust (fiducia) that involves the core of one’s being or as the setting of one’s heart on what one loves that orients one’s life; rather, in the classic version of the Christian virtue tradition, faith is defined as a mental assent (assensus) to a truth.5 In line with (what one might call) the ‘structural supplement’ understanding and its correspondingly passive view of nature’s initial point of contact with grace, supernatural faith is seen as fides

See Craig A. Boyd and Kevin Timpe, The Virtues: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 79. As the authors nowhere state that wisdom receives the ‘infusion’ of grace in its own right, this chastened dualism may still be present in Boyd and Timpe, The Virtues, 88. 5 Position (a) finds influential expression in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), I–II, Q. 109–14; II–II, Q. 1–7. Position (b) is exemplified by Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1957) and Emil Brunner, Faith, Hope, and Love (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956). For an excellent overview, including a link between the first view of faith and the virtues, see Van A. Harvey, A Handbook of Theological Terms (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 95–8, 248–9. 4

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infusa (infused faith) by virtue of which the human intellect becomes disposed to assent to that saving truth that it cannot arrive at for itself.6 Rather than representing a fundamental heart reorientation that will change who one is when it is lived out, this faith or belief is seen as the entry point (no more and no less) into a new life that must be further transformed by the equally supernatural virtues of hope and, most importantly, love. In position (b), by contrast, faith in a fallen world is typically not only an ongoing structural– anthropological feature (even if closed down and misguided) but is also far more ‘receptive’ than ‘passive’ in the initial dynamics of salvation. Often described as ‘voluntaristic’ rather than ‘intellectualistic’, this faith can also be seen as a spiritual yearning that is readily appreciated in the ‘transcendental anthropology’ (or structurally open view of [human] nature) associated with Karl Rahner, the most influential theologian of grace in the Roman Catholic tradition since Vatican II. Both positions (the one more classic, the other more contemporary7) can be articulated in compelling ways. At stake here is whether one might find a way to integrate a proper recognition of humanity’s natural (i.e. creational) yearning for the divine, in which humanity’s natural (God-given) capacity for faith plays a central role – this being an emphasis that comes to the fore in position (b) – with a sharp appreciation for the thoroughgoing newness that coming to faith represents and affords – as maintained most clearly in position (a). Such a ‘third way’, if successfully developed, would honour the irreducibility of grace to nature (a fundamental concern of the first position) as well as nature’s yearning for (or predisposition towards) nature– grace unity (a more central motif in the second position).

Barth–Brunner and Moltmann–Rahner On a historical note, the first position, shorn of both its intellectualistic view of assent and nuanced (Thomistic) qualifiers concerning the role of nature, has important affinities with the main emphases in Karl Barth’s uncompromising ‘Nein’ to Emil Brunner in their justly famous nature–grace interchange of the mid-1930s, not least with respect to Barth’s insistence that it is grace that establishes the Anknüpfungspunkt (or ‘point of contact’) with nature and not vice versa. Brunner’s measured articulation of the second position is expressed via a two-realm framework that, despite its appeal to several traditional distinctions, clearly expresses the (pre-modern) breakdown of the fundamental correlation (rather than ‘both–and’ connection) between nature and grace that characterized much of medieval theology!

So Harvey, A Handbook of Theological Terms, 96: ‘Although [in Thomas’ paradigm] the will moves the intellect . . . , the element of trust or confidence (fiducia) is directed to the divine authority [behind the revealed truth], and, therefore, is not said to constitute the act of F[aith] itself but, rather, is a motive anterior to it.’ This parallels Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 1, Art 8: ‘Since grace does not supplant nature but perfects it, reason ought to be the servant of faith in the same way as the natural inclination of the will is the servant of charity.’ These ‘qualifiers’ allow his position to posit (i) a passive view of nature regarding the ‘operative’ infusion of sanctifying grace, (ii) receptive attendant-subsidiary elements in one’s coming to faith, and (iii) an increasingly ‘co-operative’ receptive–active role for nature in the process of sanctification. Yet in all of this, the human being’s natural desire for the beatific vision is both instilled, and brought to perfection, by God, who is the sole cause of grace. 7 By ‘contemporary’, I allude (in part) to a shift in (b) from the virtue of love (in medieval theology), via faith (a focus since the Reformation), towards hope. 6

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For Brunner, the fact that the formal (unlike the material) image of God survives in fallen history along with the fundamentally human, albeit more or less automatic, response to what he calls ‘natural revelation’ provides an indispensable connection point for the message and efficacy of God’s grace, even as this in no way constitutes a saving knowledge of God or of the human condition. In response, Barth’s attention to inconsistencies in this formal–material, creation–redemption dualism hones in on what this ‘natural’ revelation amounts to by asking: ‘[H]ow can Brunner maintain that a real knowledge of the true God, however imperfect it may be (and what knowledge of God is not imperfect?) does not bring salvation?’8 For Barth, Brunner’s a priori framework is not only alarmingly naïve about connections between the ‘natural’ and the ideological; it also assumes a view of grace that is enervatingly boxed-in! If put in contemporary terms, the flip side to Barth’s question might be: ‘How can the theologians of today claim that the “common grace” that is on display to the whole world is actually grace for that world if it – by definition (!) – has nothing to do with redemption?’ This is a topic to which this chapter shall return. If the value of Barth’s provocations lies in their ability to jolt theological discourse out of the repetitions of the past, the same may be said of Jürgen Moltmann, whose creative eschatologizing of a still recognizably Barthian approach leads him to express an appreciative though decisive ‘No’ to Karl Rahner.9 While Moltmann would probably concede that Rahner articulated the ‘gratia non tollit naturum, sed perficit’ paradigm in as compelling a form as anyone, his own proposal is that the ‘dual structure’ of the nature–grace conception – which he formulates as: ‘gratia non destruit, sed praesupponit et perfecit naturum’ (grace does not destroy, but presupposes and perfects nature) – should be transformed into what he calls a ‘three-term dialectic’ as follows: gratia non perfecit, sed praeparat naturam ad gloriam aeternam; gratia non est perfectio naturae, sed praeparatio messianica mundi ad regnum Dei. (grace does not perfect, but prepares nature for eternal glory; grace is not the perfection of nature, but the messianic preparation of the world for the kingdom of God.)10 With this turn to eschatological glory, Moltmann can emphasize the theme of newness associated with position (a) while shifting the locus of irreducibility away from nature and grace, whether conceived as two realms or even as two principles, by instead developing the idea of time as composed of two historically opposed yet eschatologically correlated directions, in which the characteristically western, teleological emphasis on the future as futurum (the projected future that lies on a trajectory), together with its would-be denial of the reality of transience, is countered, but also redemptively embraced, by the eschatological future that is presently experienced as adventus (or anticipated as an arrival). By introducing the glory of the age to come and the newness that it represents into the nature–grace discussion, Moltmann clearly intends to do more than remind his readers that

Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, Natural Theology: Comprising ‘Nature and Grace’ by Emil Brunner and the reply ‘No!’ by Karl Barth, trans. Peter Fraenkel (London: Geoffrey Bles, The Centenary Press, 1946), 82. 9 On Rahner’s project and Moltmann’s challenge, see George Vandervelde, ‘The Grammar of Grace: Karl Rahner as a Watershed in Contemporary Theology’, Theological Studies 49, no. 3 (1988): 445–59. 10 Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1985), 8. 8

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the eschaton entails the fulfilment of redemption. One can also be sure that claiming God always intended a creational theosis, or eschatological divinization of reality, regardless of the fall, also fails to capture his intended paradigm shift as this is already a central characteristic of Rahner’s position. What does lie close to the heart of Moltmann’s approach, however, is the equally supralapsarian conviction that the incarnation was intended from the very beginning, in the sense of prior to/apart from the divine response to human sin. This suggests that the meaning of the incarnation goes beyond grace (as normally understood), while grace itself is more than a salvific category. This is not to deny that the incarnation is profoundly redemptive as Christ’s descent into the Godforsakenness of hell between the cross and the resurrection is not only pivotal for God becoming ‘all in all’, on which the eschaton depends, but also extends backwards in its impact to before the act of creation itself. In the extension of the incarnation into death, the divine presence, led by the suffering love of the Son, redemptively enters into – thereby filling and overcoming – the Godforsaken space that opened up within the divine presence when God made (way for) the world. In distinction from Rahner, this understanding of redemption – which holds for God as well as for the cosmos – does not lead to theosis in the sense of a (grace perfects nature) divinization of reality so much as to a mutual indwelling of God and the world characterized by what Moltmann calls ‘the new creation of all things’.11 In this light, one may see how grace neither destroys nor supplements nor perfects nature but instead prepares it for its glorification – its eschatological perfection. By seeing grace as the point of contact between nature and glory or between the present age and the age to come, the themes of divine promise and mission – including the integration of promissio and missio that constitutes who human beings are (to become) – must now play a key role. The coming of the kingdom, founded on the cross, descent, and resurrection, awakens and expands the human capacity for hope – a position (b) theme – which, in turn, increases both human suffering and joy in the present age. Meanwhile, grace, though distinct from glory, has become eschatologically charged.12

Original blessing? If Moltmann opens up the possibility that grace is not only salvific but also eschatological, this raises the question of whether grace might also be creationally inflected. For those who theologize within the Protestant traditions, this could sound strange at best.13 But this may be largely a matter of terminology. According to Justo González, for example, ‘grace’, like the message of the gospel, is ‘the unmerited love of God, which both forgives and transforms the sinner’.14 From this,

Moltmann, God in Creation, 79. For further discussion, see Nicholas Ansell, The Annihilation of Hell: Universal Salvation and the Redemption of Time in the Eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2013), especially 4.2 and chap. 6. 13 Or it could be misidentified with the ‘original grace’ notion attributed to Pelagius. According to Justo L. González, this ‘grace of creation’ was ‘bestowed by God on all . . . making it possible for sinners, out of their own free will, to repent and seek to undo [their] evil’. Essential Theological Terms (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 70. This could then be supplemented by the saving ‘grace of pardon’. 14 González, Essential Theological Terms, 69–70. Italics added. 11 12

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it follows that even if creation as a whole is part of the transformation, grace is not a creational term as such. On this point, however, it is instructive to compare González’s succinct Protestant definition with the similar-sounding claim made by Roman Catholic theologian Zachary Hayes. After drawing attention to a parallel between (i) ‘the creative power of God’s love that brought forth the . . . created universe’, (ii) ‘the same mystery of God’s creative love that brings the potential of created being to fulfillment in eschatological completion’, and (iii) ‘that merciful forgiving love that reaches [out] to us through the historical mediation of Jesus Christ’, Hayes points out that ‘for Roman Catholic theology, this has long meant that the language of grace does not begin with the doctrine of redemption. It begins already, at least in an analogous way, with the doctrine of creation. For existence itself is a free and unmerited gift from the creative love of God’.15 Hayes’ judgement rings true when applied to Catholic thinkers who see existence as witnessing to ‘the mystery of God’s limitless love’ (rather than to the hubris-thwarting inscrutability of God’s greatness).16 While Rahner is a striking example here, several other thinkers also associated with the neo-Thomism of the nouvelle théologie tradition deserve mention, not least Marie-Dominique Chenu, who was a significant influence on Matthew Fox. While a ‘creational grace’ motif may be present in various traditions via different terminology (‘gift’ is a good example of this; ‘favour’ [Lt. gratis] is another), it is thanks to the provocative creativity of Fox that the phrase ‘Original Blessing’ came into being.17 So what might a viable notion of ‘creational grace’ look like? The proposal offered here will take as its starting point a typology suggested by James Olthuis18 that parallels H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic study, Christ and Culture. In that work, Niebuhr analysed five paradigmatic stances, which may be enumerated as: (1) ‘The Christ of Culture’, (2) ‘Christ Above Culture’, (3) ‘Christ and Culture in Paradox’, (4) ‘Christ Against Culture’, and (5) ‘Christ the Transformer of Culture’.19 In the course of teasing out the nature–grace dynamics, Olthuis suggests that the first four positions are exemplified by: (1) Paul Tillich, (2) Thomism and neo-Thomism (here Karl Rahner can also be situated), (3) Emil Brunner and the Lutheran ‘Two Kingdoms’ tradition, and (4) Karl Barth (in his earlier and later phases). Like Niebuhr (and myself), Olthuis favours the ‘Transformation’ position and situates it at the centre of a (culture–positive to culture– negative) continuum. Consequently, the characteristics to which this position aspires have been placed at the midpoint in the figure below. If one translates the dynamics of the Christ–culture relationship into a grace–nature setting, one may speak of the positions listed above in terms of: ‘grace’ (i) judiciously affirming, (ii) elevating, (iii) complementing, (iv) contradicting, and (v) systematically transforming ‘nature’.20

Zachary Hayes, ‘The Purgatorial View’, in Four Views of Hell, ed. William Crockett (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 114. Italics added. 16 Here one might contrast Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christian Faith, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 44–89, with Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, trans. Richard Arnandez (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1980), 55–80. 17 Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (Santa Fe: Bear and Co., 1983). 18 See James H. Olthuis, ‘Must the Church Become Secular?’, in Out of Concern for the Church (Toronto: Wedge, 1970), 105–25. 19 See H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951). 20 For more on (v), see Jan Veenhof, Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck, trans. Albert M. Wolters (Sioux Centre: Dordt College Press, 2006). 15

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Bearing all of the above in mind, one may appreciate how Olthuis’ nuanced typology below allows the various tensions between and within the first four paradigms to come into view. Beginning with nature as a theological category that refers to both creation and fall (as previously noted), Olthuis points out that there is a correlation between distorted emphases here and a failure to perceive true integration between divine and human action in the dynamics of grace. In looking to address this, he offers the following schematization (which accords with the various enumerations above): I

Nature = Creation [sin] - Grace = our calling [God’s gift]

Tillich

II

Nature = Creation (sin) -- Grace = our calling (God’s gift)

Rahner (IIb); Aquinas (IIa)

Attention to Creation and Fall : integration of Gift and Calling III

Nature = Sin (creation) --- Grace = God’s gift (our calling)

Brunner

IV

Nature = Sin [creation] ---- Grace = God’s gift [our calling]

Barth; Moltmann

Interpretive key: [ ] indicates minimized/neglected factors ( ) indicates factors taken into consideration but not given their appropriate weight - / --- indicates increasing tension between Nature and Grace.21

Not only does this typology sharpen up the classifications offered by Niebuhr, but it correlates well with the distinction explored earlier between position (a), which emphasizes the irreducibility of grace to nature, and position (b), which stresses nature’s yearning for unity with grace. Taking Type I (and the related figures and motifs mentioned above) as most clearly exemplifying position (b) and Type IV (and its associated thinkers and themes) as the purest form of position (a) enables one to read the figure above both as a judiciously framed continuum from ‘insufficient tension’ between nature and grace at the top to ‘too much tension’ between them at the bottom and as a more suggestively framed continuum (also from I to IV) that begins with the desire to celebrate and/or foster a divinely inspired spiritual unity and ends with the concern to recognize and/or safeguard a God-given irreducibility. While both readings may be pursued together, in the former approach, the normative centre of gravity lies in the middle, whereas in the latter approach, each position can be more easily affirmed as having its moment of truth. If one views Types II and III as mediating positions, then one might also see (given the brief analysis above) that the distinction between Thomism and neo-Thomism represents different leanings, each within Type II, towards emphases most clearly evident in Types IV and I – these being suggestive of subtypes that could be designated as IIa and IIb, respectively. This provides a way of differentiating, within the classic Thomist/contemporary neo-Thomist continuum, between those who stress that grace perfects nature (IIa) and those who emphasize nature’s graced yearning for perfection (IIb).

With the addition of Moltmann, Rahner, and the IIa/IIb distinction, this figure is taken from Olthuis, ‘Must the Church Become Secular?’, 120, 125n18. 21

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Finally (as touched on in the introduction), in addition to looking at a position’s way of relating nature to grace, one should also consider how it relates grace to nature. This may be especially important with respect to Type IV because what appears as a nature–grace opposition when one focuses on nature alone may become a transformative embrace when viewed in the other direction. This embrace certainly fits the dialectical moves in Barth’s theology (in contrast to the Type III, ‘paradoxical both/and’ approach of Brunner), and it also sheds light on Moltmann’s nature–grace–glory position. Consonant with this point, the continuum from Types I to IV does not only register an increasing stress on sin at the expense of creation as it may also mark a growing appreciation for the pull of the eschaton. As eschatology concerns the future of and for creation, systematic attention to this motif would likely prompt the further nuancing of this typology as a whole. My suggestion for moving forward is to take Olthuis’ two-sided notion of gift/call as a key to the understanding of grace while further proposing a correlative, two-sided understanding of nature as a way of receiving/working out the dynamics of grace. This latter development means that contrary to the ‘unity via response’ approach of position (b) above, nature is not simply the desire for or response to grace because the working out (which is thoroughly grounded in the receiving just as the call is of a piece with the gift) also points to human (covenantal) agency (beyond receptivity) which, in turn, may include faithful (covenantal) initiative. In other words, rather than picturing a nature–grace correlation in which the former merely desires and responds to the latter, nature may be seen as gifted/called to fully participate in the dynamics of grace. Given this proposal, it is telling that the first ‘commandment’ to human beings in the scriptures, which is often understood as a history-shaping ‘cultural mandate’, namely, Gen. 1.28, is not a commandment at all but a blessing (gift) that flows into a benediction (call). The New Jerusalem Bible translation nicely captures the opening to this verse: ‘God blessed them, saying to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill . . .”.’ The intimate connection between gift and call here is present in the German Aufgabe, which not only means a ‘task’ but also contains the term Gabe, which means ‘gift’. In this context, one may think of the divine breath of/for life, with which the creator breathes into the nostrils of hā’ādam (the earth creature) in Gen. 2.7, as simultaneously an empowering gift and call to live: the gift of breath and the call to breathe. To receive the gift is to respond to the call; to respond to the call is impossible without receiving and being empowered by the gift. This divine breathing into existence is one of no fewer than five interrelated breath/wind references found in the Bible’s opening chapters.22 Autonomy is as foolish as trying to hold one’s breath indefinitely just because one can. Heteronomy is not in the picture: like the first human being, the reader of Genesis is presented with the gift of their own life. And there is mystery, evident in the wind/Spirit anthropology of Jn 3.8, which is inspired by Gen. 1.2 and 2.7. Having initially introduced grace as what lies beyond the human being’s natural abilities or capacities, it is important to add that the divine gift that both exceeds and precedes authentic human power

These are: (i) rûaḥ as wind/Spirit in Gen. 1.2, (iia) nepeš ḥayyā as ‘breath of life’ in 1.30, (iii) nešaāmā ḥayyîm as ‘the breath of life’ followed by (iib) nepeš ḥayyā as ‘living being’ (or living breath) in 2.7, (iv) lerûaḥ hayyôm as ‘at the time of the evening breeze’ in 3.8, and (v) the etymology of ‘Abel’ [hābel] as vapour/breath in 4.2. While (i) and (iii) are linked via wordplay in (iv), they are directly combined/integrated in 7.22. 22

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(which is so different from would-be autonomous control) may also come to the human being from within. If one highlights the unity of gift and call via a single term such as Auf/Gabe, one may be less inclined to misinterpret this as a ‘given’ as such, which is crucial as any attempt to turn the gift of life into a possession (or to see one’s receiving/working out of the blessing/benediction as an autonomous achievement) is to lose it (see Gen. 3.6; Mt. 10.39; and Lk. 17.33). One way of interpreting the ‘grasp’ of the fall is to see this as a failure to live covenantally between the gift and call of imaging God, on the one hand, and the promise of becoming like God in time, on the other hand.23 This line of thought, with its focus on grace as both gift and promise, is suggestive of an eschatologically open view of creation as well as a creationally grounded view of the eschaton. If the German Auf/Gabe provides a useful shorthand for a creational dynamic that only human lives can spell out, Latin may help in the parallel arena of calling and promise. Here, one may turn to Moltmann’s term promissio, the Latin for promise that includes missio, the Latin for mission. As with gift and call, Pro/Missio refers to promise and call at one and the same time. In trusting a promise, one yearns for something that is coming: an ad-vent, not a telos. This is not passive. Through such hope, 2 Pet. 3.12 speaks of ‘waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God’. In receiving the gift in trust and in living in its economy or spirit with gratitude, those faithful to the covenant of existence allow its grace to extend into the future. In receiving the promise in hope and in living towards it in anticipation, they (we) allow God’s future to arrive. In addition to noting that gift/call and promise/call have their counterparts in the dynamics of evil,24 there are two final points that warrant at least a brief mention here. First, in distinction from the ‘libertarian’ and ‘freedom of inclination’ positions, which focus on decisions that flow from an autonomous will or from one’s existing nature (whether sinful or redeemed), true (i.e. covenantal) freedom is synonymous with participation in grace.25 Such freedom exceeds liberation as it is ‘[f]or freedom [that] Christ has set us free’ (Gal. 5.1). Second, while there is merit in seeing one’s reception and living out of the dynamics of grace in terms of one’s authentic nature, the fact that ‘nature’ is associated with ontology’s focus on ‘the nature of things’ means that the mystery of one’s identity – which the language of gift, call, and promise can help to honour – may easily get eclipsed via the metaphysical connotations of essence and substance. This is not to say that the conceptual grasp of general structures and the foregrounding of constancy as a correlate of change may not also be graced. But there are times when traditional ‘grace and nature’ terminology needs to make way for the language of ‘grace and identity/singularity/selfhood’ – as these terms are often more appropriate for the host of I–Thou relationships in which human beings stand with their fellow creatures.26

Consequently, I would interpret the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of Gen. 1.26-27 as a non-identical parallel that is echoed in the ‘form’/‘equality’ distinction maintained by Jesus in Phil. 2.6. On the latter passage, see James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 281–8. 24 See Ansell, The Annihilation of Hell, 265–6. 25 For engagement with Barth and Moltmann’s participatory views of freedom, see Ansell, The Annihilation of Hell, 194–206, 264. 26 See Brian J. Walsh, Marianne B. Karsh, and Nik Ansell, ‘Trees, Forestry, and the Responsiveness of Creation’, in Earthcare: An Anthology in Environment Ethics, ed. David Clowney and Patricia Mosto (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 71–81. 23

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The ‘Love That Fires the Sun’27 Although the language of grace is closely tied to redemption in the Protestant tradition, one exception is the notion of ‘common grace’. As Mt. 5.45b is invariably invoked to illustrate its central claim, alternate ways of reading this text provide a useful way to explore how ‘common grace’ differs from what is intended in this chapter by the term ‘creational grace’. In the common grace paradigm, Mt. 5.45b (in which Jesus says that the Father ‘makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous’) is taken to refer to a general, creation-affirming benevolence that is not salvific in its impact or intent. Once read in context, however, this inference is difficult to sustain as the Beatitudes, which focus on the unexpected agents through whom God’s kingdom will be made present in Mt. 5.3-11, taken together with the ‘light of the world’ imagery of Mt. 5.14, indicate a community called to embody God’s redemptive love to all peoples. This is why in Mt. 5.44-45a, Jesus challenges his followers to image on earth/Earth what God does from the heavens with the words: ‘But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be [sons and daughters] of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil.’ Although the sun – in/as God’s grace – points the way to a redemptive response to oppression here, a ‘creational grace’ dimension can also be appreciated via intertextual allusions to the ‘greater light’ that in being called to ‘rule the day’, brings light, and thus blessing, to the earth/ Earth and its inhabitants in Gen. 1.16-17. Given the likelihood that the ‘let there be light’ connotes God’s glory in Gen. 1.3, the connections between (i) divine blessing, the gift of the sun, and how it rules by reflecting God’s glory – thereby blessing others on God’s behalf in Gen. 1.16-18 – and (ii) how human beings are to rule/image God in Gen. 1.28 are deep and strong. In this light, God’s kingdom in Matthew (which also involves the covenant between the heavens and the earth [see Mt. 5.3, 6 in the light of 6.10; 16.19 and 18.18-19]) is related to the priestly/royal ‘image of God’ theme in Genesis 1.28 So how might this be brought together? Original blessing is not confined to the general ‘common grace’ patterns of creation’s order and preservation as it involves the reiterations and very specific expressions of God’s love. When put this way, it becomes clear that although grace may have many dimensions or foci, any conception of ‘creational grace’ as somehow separate from God’s redemptive love in a suffering, hurtful world is not a conception of grace. This means that in the ongoing divine/creational blessing and benediction of Gen. 1.3, 22, and 28, which is mediated via the graced spirituality of existence and oriented to eschatological fulfilment, divine giving also becomes forgiving, the miracle of birth is reaffirmed in the miracle of rebirth, and human (and non-human) participation in freedom becomes a participation in liberation. And vice versa! For, as Gal. 5.1 (discussed above) attests, the call to liberation draws its very breath from the gift and promise of freedom.

This phrase, which echoes the opening monologue, is from Bruce Cockburn, ‘Lord of the Starfields’, on In the Falling Dark, True North Records ILTN 9463, 1976, 33⅓ rpm. 28 For the sky–earth, grace–nature connection, see Ansell, The Annihilation of Hell, 268–72. 27

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Further reading Boff, Leonardo. Liberating Grace. Translated by John Dury. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1979. Duffy, Stephen J. The Graced Horizon: Nature and Grace in Modern Catholic Thought. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1992. Fairweather, A. M., ed. and trans. Nature and Grace: Selections from the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954. Jones, Serene. Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2010. Olthuis, James H. Dancing in the Wild Spaces of Love: A Theopoetics of Gift and Call, Risk and Promise. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2022.

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CHAPTER 23 PROVIDENCE AND PROMISE

Michael Weinrich

The horizon of the problem It is an integral part of the Judeo-Christian understanding of creation that God not only created the world as a living space for his creatures but also maintains it, accompanies it, and prevents it from being destroyed. As the creator, God is also the sustainer of the world. It is this act of God that is considered in the theological doctrine of providence, a part of the doctrine of creation. In his vigilance, God ‘will neither slumber nor sleep’ (Ps. 121.4). No sparrow falls from the roof without God knowing about it, and even the hair on one’s head is counted by God (Mt. 10.29-30). Even though, or because, individuals do not understand everything, there should be no doubt that the world and human destiny are in the caring hands of God.1 In the words of Joachim Neander: ‘Praise to the Lord, above all things so wondrously reigning; sheltering you under his wings, and so gently sustaining!’. This well-known seventeenth-century hymn is still loved around the world, but the question is if its content can be expected to be understood nowadays or, indeed, whether it was ever actually understood. Its words are certainly challenged by natural disasters, famines, serious diseases, pandemics, wars, and human crimes. One must reckon with the fact that there has always been a reasonable contradiction to every understanding of providence. In the past, people were by no means more naïve than those who present themselves as enlightened today. From the beginning, the idea of God’s particular providence emerged in tension with life’s experiences. There has never been a focus on providence that is unmarked by this tension. Claims about providence are always contested. How can evils be associated with God’s providence? Is suffering to be understood as a punishment from God? One cannot proceed far with the subject of providence without being confronted by such questions. On the other hand, there has been a far-reaching break in how providence is understood under the conditions and beliefs set by modernity. Today, first and foremost, is the conviction that history’s course is driven entirely by human hands. In this schema, everything in the world is determined by the indefinite sequence of cause and effect, even if these cannot always be precisely identified. It is the special privilege of human freedom to intervene over time, set one’s own beginning, and thus direct the otherwise untouchable passage of time and make it a ‘history’. It is no coincidence that the concept of ‘history’, the general term that unites all single events, is an invention of the nineteenth century. All stories happening in the world are embraced by one ‘history’, and the human drives this ‘history’ forward (man’s story – his

For biblical references, see Horton Davies, The Vigilant God: Providence in the Thought of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Barth, 2nd edn (New York: Peter Lang, 2018), 12–16; John E. Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence, 2nd edn (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2007), 38–139. 1

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story). In this Enlightenment achievement, the idea of God as the lord of history and of the whole world, who rules everything so beautifully, is a thing of the past. But in a sense, the ambitious metaconcept of ‘history’ continues the legacy of providence. As a modern universal category, ‘history’ provides an interpretation of the flow of time and can always take on a religious character.2 At the same time, beyond the confession of ‘history’, several more or less religious phenomena have survived, which point to an elementary human need for something like the ideas of providence and fortune. Many people attribute a fundamental meaning to fate. Horoscopes are as common as talismans in various forms. Falling stars trigger desires, just as (black) cats that cross the path at the wrong moment can give rise to fears. Adolf Hitler saw himself as a tool of providence, and his seizure of power in 1933 was widely understood as God’s will in Germany. Finally, it is surprising that, despite all the contemporary catastrophes, most individuals still believe in continuous historical progress. Actually, providence plays a decisive role in probably all religions, if not even the allimportant role. The doctrine of providence is in no way unique to the Christian faith. The specific concern of this chapter, however, is with a Christian understanding of providence.

Different perspectives A key question about providence in the face of widespread threats and uncertainties is: What can humans put their trust in, the trust that one needs to live by, if one does not want to despair? This is an existential question posed in the face of circumstances that cannot be easily remedied. It is also vulnerable (both temporally and systematically) to having providence, as an expression of trust in God, understood or employed instead as an instrument explaining the world’s events. However, the question of providence is always accompanied by the question of a plausibility check of events. There is a continuous mixture of different perspectives, which cannot be compared simply. This causes significant difficulties in any theological handling of the doctrine of providence. The first and fundamental answer to the question of providence is that no answer can be expected from experience because it is experience that raises the question in the first place. It is rather about something to which experiences are subordinate. However, experiences are not ignored, but they must be placed in a perspective that is not grounded solely in contingent provisions. Experience requires an axiom of understanding, or a belief, if one is to be oriented in reality, and this belief is not found at the level of experience itself. Either it must be postulated by one (that would be the task of philosophy) or it will be revealed to one (attention to which would be the task of theology). The question of providence is about attending to something that gives one’s experience in this world its proper place. Something like a hermeneutical key is needed to recognize something like reality in the contingency of events. This can be either a metaphysical thesis or a confession of faith. It can also be an inherently naturalistic ideology. In any case, it must be robust enough

See Michael Beintker, ‘Die Frage nach Gottes Wirken im geschichtlichen Leben’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 90, no. 4 (1993): 444–5. 2

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to deny experience its ultimate claim. It is precisely this belief, which relativizes the immediate experience that makes it possible to withstand the obvious dangers of life, which is considered in the doctrine of providence. In the light of providence, experiences are placed in a certain perspective. As a result, they now become experiences with a qualified understanding because the specific orientation assigns the particular experience its specific quality. The perspective of God’s providence is that of God’s caring presence. Given the unavoidable experience of actual suffering, real threats, and evils, there are three possible responses. Either the idea of providence is rejected altogether, or it is employed to give a certain meaning to suffering and threats, or it opens up the possibility of a certain relationship to misfortune. If it is assumed that the encounter with suffering and danger always precedes belief in God’s providence, only the second and third of these responses come into question. Suffering and danger can be understood as coming from God and thus received, for example, as a warning or punishment from God. But they can also be understood as a contradiction to the will of God, who sooner or later will prevail against them. In the latter case, reference to God’s providence means clinging to the promise that God has unwaveringly associated with his creation and so opposes every possible dualism. Providence and promise then belong together, as do providence and contradiction against suffering and danger. Finally, it is also conceivable that the second and the third possibility can be linked with each other, which would then mean that suffering and danger can undoubtedly be understood as a warning and punishment from God; but in the end, they do not contradict God’s faithfulness to his promise to be for creation. Providence does not offer an immediate explanation of experiences but rather refers to God’s non-suspendable presence and the promise that can never be unhinged from such. It is neither a world view nor a philosophy of history. It is instead a certainty directly associated with belief in God, which is continuously challenged by experiences, but which is also crucial, it seems, if one is to avoid having doubt turn into despair. So understood, providence is a kind of survival doctrine. As such, it belongs to the content of faith, not knowledge, and is inevitably at the mercy of criticisms of religion. It is important to keep this in mind as it is to venture to speak of the theological indispensability of God’s providence. Providence is about the present relevance of the divine promise, and it is predominantly a matter of pastoral care (what in German is called Seelsorge, care for the soul) to the extent that, upon closer inspection, faith as a whole is always a matter of pastoral care. In this sense, pastoral care is not only a subdiscipline of theology – which it undoubtedly is – but is also the central focus for all its endeavours. The teaching of providence can well demonstrate this.

Two roots The matter of providence has two roots that nourish two different horizons of perception. Both go back to ancient times. The first lies in the biblical wisdom literature of the Old Testament. The rule and custody of God appeal, above all, to demonstrations of trust and confidence beyond the day. The praise of God is for his inviolable providence. In view of suffering and danger, God’s faithfulness is met with a heartfelt request. And at the same time, God’s providence is a source of comfort where comfort has lost its grip in concrete everyday experiences. God is the sovereign heavenly king of the earth, from whom blessings come as well as calamities, which in turn only he can effectively change (Pss. 47.8; 145.15-20; 147.8-9; 299

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Jer. 44.7; cf. Mt. 5.45; 6.26; 10.29-31). The language is as doxological as it is appellative. The wisdom concept of providence aims at the promised care by God and sustainable protection through God’s prudence. As such, it has an existential character that does not claim to ever truly understand God’s providence. Yes, it is the heartfelt insight that the mystery and puzzle of creation can never really be perceived by the creature, which is why it should be kept in God with confidence because God has proven trustworthy. The second root has a philosophical character. In particular, it weighs up the relationship of the divine order of the cosmos with claims about human freedom. The wisdom of the order of nature, which corresponds to a divine will, advertises the provision and care of the gods – or of the supreme god, understood by Plato as the spirit pervading the cosmos. Behind provision and care stands a superior providence as the all-determining centre of reality in which the world is grounded. However, this providence brings human freedom into distress, so much so that Seneca finally sees it anchored solely in the possibility of suicide. In light of such a possibility, not taking advantage of this possibility also becomes an act of freedom. In this way, consent to the predetermined world can be understood as an act of freedom. Suicide, so the argument goes, reveals human superiority over providence. The philosophical concept of providence aims at an adequate understanding of one’s reality by representing the most plausible overall interpretation as if it were a theory of reality itself. As such, it has a speculative and ideological character. There is no doubt that biblical and philosophical perspectives of providence overlap, and at the same time, it is evident that they both have fundamentally different intentions. The biblical perspective is entirely geared towards the reliable load-bearing capacity of the earth, on which devotion to God gives humans a reliable perspective for their lives. The philosophical idea is, on the other hand, above all else, a plausible rescue of human beings from the deterministic brackets of fate.3

Reminiscences of theological history On the whole, it must first be noted that in almost all attempts to develop an adequate understanding of providence, biblical-wisdom paths are either equated with or essentially connected to those undertaken by philosophy. This is understandable because such paths are constantly dealing with the contemporary self-image. At the same time, they tend to limp on both sides. Philosophy would do well to exclude theological aspects as much as possible, just as theology should remain sceptical of all speculations. If these principles are disregarded, it can quickly lead to the creation of an opaque mélange that provides neither hoped-for explanatory power nor necessary theological depth.

Hermann Deuser distinguishes an existential–anthropological way from an analytic–systematic one without directly assigning such to biblical and philosophical understandings of providence. Hermann Deuser, ‘Vorsehung. Systematisch-Theologisch’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller, Horst Balz, and Gerhard Krause (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 35:302–23, see esp. p. 304. Ultimately, Deuser’s perspective remains focused on a third path – the cosmological-realistic way – in which the first two are to be brought together, but which can hardly work smoothly. It seems preferable to accept that this attempt at integration does in principle overwhelm our intellectual possibilities. 3

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The early church fathers had very different ideas about providence. Irenaeus assumed that God is influenced by his creatures and thus accepts that things would happen that were not intended by God. God is taking a certain risk that results from the freedom granted to God’s human creatures. Tertullian emphasized that God can change his mind, as is illustrated in the story about Jonah. John Sanders calls this the free will concept of providence, which follows the unpredictable dynamic of the interactions between God and humanity. According to Sanders, this concept contrasts with the alternative, in which only God’s superior and unchangeable sovereignty is decisive, in which God’s eternal providence determines what is not comprehensible in time. Augustine presents this concept with the utmost consistency. When Augustine exuberantly praises God’s providence, he locates it beyond space and time.4 His is a kind of theological philosophy of history that has shaped the entire western tradition of theology. Providence, it is argued, takes place in the eternity of God and is therefore determined by the characteristic simultaneity of eternity, in which all spatial–temporal distinctions are eliminated. Since God created time, time cannot apply to God but rather is destined from God’s inaccessible eternity.5 So, God is inevitably subject to a strict double decree on predestination, which is to be understood as a consequence of God’s understanding of providence. Only if not all are saved can God show his justice, and only if not all are condemned can God’s mercy be displayed.6 In his Neoplatonic inclination, Augustine did not consider evil as a variety of being because it has no substance that could be attributed to the good nature of being.7 Quite comparable, though different due to his Aristotelian perspective, Thomas Aquinas understands providence as the teleology of everything that God has created in his creation. While according to Augustine, God is completely unchangeable, Thomas sees God as a pure act of being8 – the unmoved mover – ‘He who is’. The creation is shaped by God’s essential love and grace. Providence relates to everything that happens in the world. From the perspective of the assumed relationship between nature and grace, the concept of providence is open to a scientific examination of nature and its developmental context, which can contribute to an understanding of the order of nature and of history. With his synthesis of reason and belief to understand reality, Thomas founded the tradition that persists today in the Roman Catholic Church. For the Reformers, the teleology of the order of being has been replaced by anchoring providence in God’s gracious will. Creation is also to be considered in the light of soteriology and eschatology. Cosmological and historical–rational thinking, and the determinism associated with such, takes a back seat to emphasize God’s faithfulness and the invincibility of God’s will. Undoubtedly, the incomprehensible mystery of God also stands for his incalculable all-effectiveness, even in the face of inexplicable evils. But God’s sovereignty is not abstract; it is, rather, concretely just and merciful. In its inevitable challenges, faith remains dependent and focused on God’s gracious will, as revealed in Jesus Christ. Faith in God’s sovereignty is

See Sanders, The God Who Risks, 141–53. Although this alternative assumed by Sanders turns out to be extremely prolific, it cannot be sustained systematically because the mutual intermingling of the two concepts is in fact stronger than Sanders perceives; something that could be shown by Karl Barth’s position. 5 See Augustine, Confessions, 12.15; 13.16. 6 See Augustine, The City of God, 21.12. 7 See Davies, The Vigilant God, 26. 8 See Davies, The Vigilant God, 56. 4

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not about being able to rationalize God’s hidden decisions, like the fact that there is a double predestination. Such decisions are, rather, to be recognized in the humility and modesty that befits faith.9 While for Martin Luther the rule of God is understood as the continuation of God’s activity as creator (creatio continua), for John Calvin divine providence stands for the reliability of the determination of God’s will, which is superior to nature.10 The pastoral dimension of providence plays a decisive role for both Luther and Calvin. In the systematization of altprotestantische Orthodoxie (Reformation Orthodoxy) in the seventeenth century, articulations of the doctrine of providence, with regard to everything created (providentia generalis), press for a distinction between that which concerns all living things (providentia specialis) and that which concerns only the faithful (providentia specialissima). The work of God includes preservation (conservatio), participation or cooperation (concursus), and divine government (gubernatio). In the development of theology, the question of cooperation (understood both logically and theologically) has created the most significant difficulties. And as an example, Friedrich Schleiermacher completely rejects this as an aspect of God’s providence, assigning instead God’s preservation to the centre of the doctrine of creation11 and divine government to the implementation of redemption within the horizon of soteriology.12 In the Enlightenment project, nature is completely removed from the framework of a cosmologically understood divine providence. Theism is accused of being pantheistic, hiding God in everything that happens; deism is charged with declaring God’s actions irrelevant by restricting them to a creative impulse at the beginning. Optimistic belief in continuous human progress pushes God out of the world’s processes and underscores accusations about the contradiction of all ideas about providence. The divine order of the world cannot be plausibly associated with suffering, so that naturalism, materialism, or positivism supplants the idea of divine providence. In the course of the detachment of the natural sciences from theology, providence becomes an element of individual religious self-interpretation in the liberal theology of the nineteenth century. God’s world rule, and thus God’s providence, is shown in personal faith in the example of fulfilled faith, as is revealed in Jesus Christ.

The doctrine of providence in the twentieth century: The witness of Karl Barth The loss of providence and the overestimation of theodicy By 1972, when Carl Amery announced ‘the end of providence’,13 the doctrine of providence had long since evaporated. In the optimism of historical philosophy in the nineteenth century,

See Martin Luther, WA 18:709–11; John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford L. Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1977), I.xvi–xvii. 10 See Christian Link, Schöpfung: Handbuch Systematischer Theologie (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1991), 7:34–5, 160–1. 11 See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), §§40.1; 46. 12 See Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube, §164; cf. Reinhold Bernhardt, Was heißt ‘Handeln Gottes’? Eine Rekonstruktion der Lehre von der Vorsehung (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1999), 238–55. 13 See Carl Amery, Das Ende der Vorsehung: Die gnadenlosen Folgen des Christentums (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1972). 9

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the human creature, gifted and called by God, took over the legacy of providence. And by the end of the First World War, theology had become silent about the idea that God acts in history and guides its course. Because God’s dealings with the world cannot be straightforwardly recognized, there is so much confusion about providence that Carl Heinz Ratschow declared it obsolete.14 Around the same time, Albert Outler stated: ‘We can no longer argue for a doctrine that portrays providence as a divine genie . . . or [as] unrolling the script of history.’15 Also, Langdon Gilkey stated: ‘Providence is the forgotten stepchild of contemporary theology.’16 However, one of the curiosities of history is that the problem of theodicy evidently survived the demise of providence. In fact, the question of theodicy is experiencing an incomparable renaissance, although it is generally accepted that there is no satisfactory solution.17 It is used only to underline that it is senseless to deal with God at all. It is not dealt with seriously, either philosophically or theologically, but has become a prominent instrument in the criticism of religion. Modern people have not been able to entirely wean themselves from blaming God for everything that goes wrong – all the misery and suffering that cries to heaven, where in most cases, humans have their hands in creating such. The apparent inactivity assumed by God immediately places God on the side of evil. A characteristic asymmetry arises between who humans believe the creator of history is and what they accuse God of. On the one hand, God is pushed out of history as often as possible; on the other hand, God is accused of history’s misery. The matter, of course, with which the theodicy question is proposed today shows that the provoked distress into which God-talk can be brought no longer really affects anything. Obviously, God’s marginalization causes no particular concern. This also reveals a widespread and regretful habit, even among theologians, of claiming that God’s presence in a situation is marked by God’s powerlessness. It seldom comes into view that with this God, reduced to his powerlessness, those affected by unspeakable suffering are denied the only possibility that they can still cling to. God’s coexistence: Necessary and modest It is against the background of these tense circumstances that Barth develops his own understanding of providence. He emphasizes that theology would have nothing more substantial to say if it were silent at this point. If theology were to concentrate only on the eschatological promise of salvation and the hope directed towards it, then it would have to join in the lament about the obvious misery of the present, which only longs for the end of this vale of tears. If faith loses the present in favour of the future, it loses all the promises concerning creation. All systematic problems – whether providence is dealt with in the doctrine of God (as did theology before the Reformation), or in the doctrine of creation (as per the Reformers), or

See Carl Heinz Ratschow, ‘Das Heilshandeln und das Welthandeln Gottes: Gedanken zur Lehrgestaltung des Providentia-Glaubens in der evangelischen Dogmatik’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 1, no. 1 (1959): 25–80. 15 Albert C. Outler, Who Trusts in God: Musings on the Meaning of Providence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 70. 16 Langdon B. Gilkey, ‘The Concept of Providence in Contemporary Theology’, The Journal of Religion 43, no. 3 (1963): 174. 17 See Christian Link, Theodizee: Eine theologische Herausforderung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016). 14

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in the context of reconciliation (as did theology in the nineteenth century), or, as is preferred today, in the context of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit18 – fade in the light of the demand to understand God’s actions as they take place in actual lived experience. If theology does not want to be silenced entirely, it must say something about God’s contemporary activity. However, Barth notes that even the Reformers provide only a little direction on this matter. The undoubtedly correct concentration on God’s sovereignty over his creature emerges as consistently too abstract because the Reformers do not consider enough God’s particular selfrevelation in Jesus Christ. The unintended result of this is that providence is, in fact, not free of fatalistic features.19 Thus, contrary to their own basic theological insights, the Reformers remain very much attached to the philosophical–logical tradition of medieval theology and their abstract approach to the question of God’s omnipotence. Consequently, their understanding of providence lacks the strict orientation of the perception of God’s action given solely in God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Barth’s decisive change has to be realized in the reversing of the relationship between providence and predestination. Predestination is no longer understood as an action of God’s sovereign providence. Instead, it has to do with election: the eternal decision of grace that precedes creation and now gives providence its decisive perspective (3–6). Election belongs to the doctrine of God and is an act of God’s free self-determination; providence belongs to the doctrine of creation, which speaks of the provision and maintenance of the living conditions in which God’s election begins to attain its realization. The doctrine of providence is concerned with the perspective of the mutual relationship between creator and creature; or, with ‘the praiseworthiness of the God of divine providence and the doxology of the creature’.20 The doctrine of providence does not systematize experiences and assemble them into a plausible world view. Instead, it appeals to faith in the presence of the creator, who is not revealed in the contemplation of nature but in God’s special action in Jesus Christ. For Barth, it remains decisive that the knowledge of faith is not found in the general sphere but is grounded solely on the particular – the particularity of God’s action – from where what is general is then placed in a new light. That is why Barth insists that theology is possible only because of the self-revelation of God.21 According to Barth, the classic biblical anchoring of providence is the story of Isaac’s binding, in which Abraham answers Isaac’s question about the sacrificial animal that God will provide (3–4). Abraham later names the place where the event happened as ‘The Lord will provide’ (Gen. 22.14). The word providence comes from here, which expressly refers not to an anticipation (praescientia) but rather to an active provision, an intervening divine action, through which Abraham is supplied with what he needs to fulfil the will of God. Providence

See Dietrich Ritschl, ‘Sinn und Grenze der theologischen Kategorie der Vorsehung’, Zeitschrift für Dialektische Theologie 10 (1994): 117–33; Bernhardt, Was heißt ‘Handeln Gottes’?. 19 See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.3, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and R. J. Ehrlich (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 115–16. Further references to this volume are noted in the main body of the chapter. 20 Christopher C. Green, Doxological Theology: Karl Barth on Divine Providence, Evil, and the Angels (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 40. 21 See Michael Weinrich, Karl Barth: Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019), 23–5, 188–226. 18

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stands for God’s active care for this world, in which God provides the world with the means to meet its challenges. Creation is about the foundation, the enabling, and the beginning of creational existence, and providence is about the duration and the historical maintenance of the created world. In the case of the doctrine of creation, the difference between creator and creature is emphasized; in the case of the doctrine of providence, the mutual relationship is inescapably contested. God does not simply leave the creature to itself; nor does God deny the creature its independence. On the contrary, the creator coexists with his creature; that is, the creature never exists in a reality shaped by itself without the living and acting counterpart of its creator (12–13). In this context, it should never be forgotten that God is the God of the covenant (35–36). In his providence, God always provides ‘time, space, and opportunity’ (47) for the history of the covenant of grace. According to Barth, the theological idea of providence expressly does not compete with philosophical and ideological world views. World history does not in itself open up a view of God. In the face of all the obvious confusion and aberration, world history remains silent when viewed in light of its purpose. The confession of God’s care for his world points to a light in the dark that can provide some orientation without revealing the whole picture. The belief in providence corresponds to a prophetic and concrete relationship to history, not a speculative one. The prophets do not decode world history, but they know about the presence of God to which they bear witness in concrete situations. They aim for lively interaction and do not refer to a calculable principle. Barth also compares the revelation of providence with the manna once provided in the desert, which is not suitable for permanent possession but only for immediate consumption, after which one has to wait again for a gift (24). And if the manna is not grasped, it will have no other use. It is clear that providence can never establish, promote, or justify triumphalism. Barth sees providence as a ‘Nevertheless’ that is not to be understood as fatalistic but rather as encouraging (44). It is not about the transfiguration of reality. God’s work is not sought in historical events but is believed and confessed above and amid its occurrences. That is why Barth’s doctrine of providence was called ‘post-critical’ because it soberly presupposes scientific insights.22 After all, it is not a Christian world view that shows a divine order but rather a very modest insight that, as such, has to be sought again and again. Barth keeps repeating that the cross of Christ stands in the way of all easy solutions. God’s coexistence: God’s care for creation Like Reformation Orthodoxy in the seventeenth century, Barth distinguishes between (a) preserving, (b) accompanying, and (c) governing in God’s providential action. Sung-Sup Kim points out that Barth refers to the three divine predications in Rom. 11.36: ‘For from him and through him and to him are all things.’23 According to Michael Plathow, the three modes

See Max Geiger, ‘Providentia Dei’, in Parrhesia: Karl Barth zum achtzigsten Geburtstag am 10. Mai 1966, ed. Eberhard Busch, Jürgen Fangmeier, and Max Geiger (Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 1966), 704. 23 Sung‐Sup Kim, ‘Barth on Providence’, in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth, ed. George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson (Chichester: Blackwell, 2020), 131; cf. Barth, CD III.3, 59, 95, 157. 22

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of providence correspond to the three aspects of the history of the covenant – justification, sanctification, and vocation – and to the three christological aspects in the doctrine of reconciliation – the true God, the true human, and the one guarantor.24 Finally, on the human side, participation in God’s providence emerges in faith, free obedience, and prayer, which complement each other (245–90). For Barth, all three aspects are important when considering the essential relationship between time and eternity.25 Time belongs to the creational order as its limitation. As such, however, it is neither a threat nor a doom that keeps God in suspense. Rather, instead of ruling, time remains dependent on its destiny, which it receives from the eternal God. a. Preserving. The embracing of time by the Eternal is the fundamental dimension of God’s preservation of his creation. The creature is thereby placed in a perspective that transcends its own possibilities. Because God is the Lord of time, time does not have the last word for the creature. Time is also part of divine preservation – God does not leave creation to the powers of destruction. The destructive forces must not be glossed over in any way, but the final destination of creation is not left to such. The meaning of the deluge or the plagues in Egypt, for example, is not to be sought in destruction but rather in the preservation which God has undertaken in a most peculiar way (74). Overall, it is not a matter of how providence takes place, but rather of who is responsible for it; and here, the christological orientation remains decisive for Barth because Christ is the ‘ontic basis’ (Grund) and the ‘noetic presupposition’ (Begründung) for God’s preservation of the world (73).26 b. Accompanying. God’s coexistence with creation is revealed in God’s accompaniment of human history. This accompaniment does not describe a state but rather an event. Accompanying is different from determination because it both preserves the other person’s freedom and does not remain in uninvolved observation; instead, it occurs in an affective and concrete relationship. ‘Per se the foreordaining activity of this God is not a constraining or humiliating or weakening of the creature’ (130). Rather, it is about the area of freedom in which people are expressly encouraged to act on their own. It is the covenant in which human persons are constituted as God’s free subjects. Barth acknowledges the charge that he gives too little space to human freedom, referring to such as ‘wearisomeness’ (Langweiligkeit) (188),27 underscoring that he is tired of having to repeatedly answer such criticism. He insists that there can be no recourse to any magical ideas about cosmic reason and stresses that God’s accompanying of humanity is oriented towards and revealed in the history of ‘Immanuel’, God with us. The relationship between God’s own eternity and the life of God’s creatures has its own reality, which includes temporality and which keeps the creature, in all its limitations, in the unbreakable and loving care of the creator. God is neither an empty concept nor an unknown abstract destiny. Instead, God has long been revealed and positioned. From this point of view, the cognition of God in current world affairs always has to be a kind of recognition.

Michael Plathow, Das Problem des concursus divinus: Das Zusammenwirken von göttlichem Schöpferwirken und geschöpflichem Eigenwirken in K. Barths ‘Kirchlicher Dogmatik’ (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976), 103. 25 See especially Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.2, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), §47. 26 See Kim, ‘Barth on Providence’, 132. 27 See Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik III.3, 2nd edn (Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 1961), 213. 24

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c. Governing. The emphasis on God’s claim to rule is, above all else, a critique against any ideology that strives for or assumes the superiority of rule by God’s creature. Above all, it is human creatures who strive to assume the role of the creator and who, in doing so, create the chaos of their own history. Humanity behaves like Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, who gives quickly into all temptations to self-expression and does so without risk assessment. Because, unlike God, the human creature cannot do everything it wants. It gets stuck halfway in its endeavours, where it can immediately get infected by novel ideas, which do not lead to the goal, but instead to further confusion. Even in the face of God’s reign, human beings must remain fully aware that they will have to reap what they sow. This does not mean, however, that human beings can control the entire course of history. Rather, it means that history and its central organization consist of the covenant of free grace that God has ‘executed, promised, and fulfilled’ (183). The economy of God’s ruling action is nowhere more evident than in the Christ event, from which faith is asked to recognize the world’s affairs in a particular light. With its ‘vertical relativisation of creaturely occurrence’, faith encourages a soberer view of reality, leading to a ‘horizontal relativisation’ (170). Barth liked to quote the old Swiss saying: Hominum confusione et Dei providentia Helvetia regitur (Switzerland is governed by the confusion of human beings and by the providence of God).28 God’s coexistence: The range of belief in providence Living as a creature means living in a lasting relationship with the creator. God’s current being as creator means living in a caring relationship with God’s creatures. As human persons perceive themselves as creatures, they know about God’s care without always being able to recognize or understand it. Current belief in the creator inevitably implies belief in God’s providence. In faith, humans do not become a ‘Schlaumeier’ (a ‘know it all’) who now have a master key in their hand. Rather, they become those who can know that there is no sustainable value in any of the keys that human beings have thought to discover and possess.29 Clearly, for Barth, Christian confession is addressed in terms of its substance, not as a manifest or triumphant Christian position but rather as a dynamic testimony whose certainty and clarity will always have to be struggled for anew and for which the revealing power of the Holy Spirit will need to be sought. Theology is not generic talk of ‘God’, as is undertaken by many for whom God is rather unknown (see Acts 17). Such talk underscores the world’s mystery and God’s inapproachability and incomprehensibility. It denotes the limits of one’s knowledge and speech. To get past this indeterminacy, Barth underlines not only that his doctrine of providence is never about God in general but also that it is precisely about the particular God who has revealed himself in the Word who became flesh in Jesus Christ. This must be emphasized again and again. Theology must avoid both general presumptions and arbitrary speculations and speak instead of the

See, for example, Karl Barth, Eine Schweizer Stimme: 1938–1945, 3rd edn (Zürich: TVZ Theologischer Verlag, 1985), 233. 29 See Barth, KD III.3, 275; Barth, CD III.3, 242. 28

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specific knowledge given in the biblical testimony, on which the promise is based that the living God speaks to individuals today precisely through this testimony.30 To speak of providence would be lip service if Christians in their relationships were driven by fear. Of course, human eyes must not be closed to evil. Any trivialization of such would be a reckless fallacy. But the resurrection of Jesus Christ is to be taken more seriously than is evil. Where this does not happen, the field is left to evil. Barth repeatedly pointed this out when accused of not taking evil seriously enough. God’s active care is as real as is the resurrection and is fundamentally related to it. Failure to assign any meaning to this reality – to the living Christ who sits at the right hand of God the Father – leads to a loss of nerve to speak of God’s action in history. With the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God’s true and benevolent rule over world events is confessed. The resurrection is as much a promise as it is already a present reality because the Risen One did not ascend to heaven to disappear but rather to live in the eternity of God and govern his creation from there. But correct theological insight alone is not enough so long as individuals allow themselves to be held captive by their distrust of and fear towards God (150). As with all subjects of faith, so too providence can only be properly recognized through active participation (239–90). That is the liberating gospel and the encouraging instruction of the first commandment; that when it comes to God, it is not about parts but rather about the whole.31

Outlook Providence always implies promise, just as promise always affects the present and therefore always concerns God’s providence. As the object of our trust, the laws of nature, like human reason, are too weak; they do not offer a viable promise. It is indeed beyond our abilities to make such a promise. It is, however, the privilege of the faith that is revealed to us that we can and should rely on a well-founded promise. This promise is about God’s action, which is as tense as it is targeted. On the one hand, it must be strictly excluded that God cooperates with evil to achieve the goal of creation’s history. God is never an accomplice of evil. On the other hand, it should be maintained that there is neither nothing nor no one unessential for God.32 God’s care places Christian existence on the horizon of prayer that trusts the promises of One who once gave manna in the desert and who attends to a sparrow’s needs. Faith is based on God’s gracious election and is oriented towards the kingdom of God, which, in the perspective of the life and destiny of Jesus Christ, will also provide appropriate language for bearing witness to providence in life’s specific situations. It is no more and no less than the effective presence of the risen Christ. It continually opens up the promise of God’s providence and the providence of God’s promise.

This is the key to Barth’s theology as a whole. See Weinrich, Karl Barth, 19–23, 168–72. For reasons of space, this chapter has concentrated on Karl Barth as a particular milestone in the rediscovery of providence in the twentieth century. This concept has now been particularly appreciated and critically developed by David Fergusson who has presented a well-founded and coherent case for an explicitly trinitarian doctrine of providence. David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 32 See Beintker, ‘Die Frage nach Gottes Wirken im geschichtlichen Leben’, 459–60. 30 31

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Further reading Crisp, Oliver D. and Fred Sanders, eds. Divine Action and Providence: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2019. Dietrich, Walter and Christian Link. Die dunklen Seiten Gottes: Willkür und Gewalt. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1995. Dietrich, Walter and Christian Link. Die dunklen Seiten Gottes: Allmacht und Ohnmacht. NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2000. Gorringe, Timothy J. God’s Theatre: A Theology of Providence. London: SCM Press, 1991. Kim, Sung-Sup. Deus providebit: Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth on the Providence of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014. Murphy, Francesca A. and Philip G. Ziegler, eds. The Providence of God: Deus Habet Consilium. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Tiessen, Terrance. Providence and Prayer: How Does God Work in the World? Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000. Wood, Charles M. ‘Providence’. In The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, edited by John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance, 91–104. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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CHAPTER 24 TRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE

Andreas Nordlander

‘Transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ is a conceptual pair that has exercised an enormous influence in philosophy, theology, and religious studies. Such is their ubiquity that it is easy to forget that they have a particular history; they are not simply natural givens of human language and thought but have been discovered (or invented) at a specific cultural moment. The roots of the notion of transcendence are to be found in the Platonic tradition, including its Aristotelian and Neoplatonic iterations, from which it was creatively appropriated in the Christian tradition, particularly in its doctrine of creation. Transcendence comes into the European languages from the Latin verb transcendere, the fundamental meaning of which is ‘to climb across or beyond’, and it was used by Latin authors to translate several terms in the Greek philosophical corpus. These have to do with: (i) what is beyond in an absolute sense, that is to say, beyond all beings and perhaps even being itself (i.e. the transcendent) and human or cosmic movement towards it; and (ii) a movement from a relatively speaking lower ontological order to a higher one (as in individuals transcending the sensible to reach the intelligible). Transcendence is, thus, at bottom, a metaphorical concept in that it invokes spatiality to speak of something rather more abstract – that which is beyond in a more general sense. The conceptual domain of transcendence offered itself to Christian theology as a way of speaking of the creator God in relation to creation. To say that the creator transcends the creation is to say that God is not part of the furniture of the universe, not a being within it but radically distinct from it. In contrast to the wholly immanent God of pantheism, the radically transcendent God is ‘wholly other’. On the other hand, orthodox Christian theology has also characteristically held that God is not only transcendent but also immanent in the world, present within it, something that, in turn, differentiates this theology from modern deism. Christian theology, at least in its classical formulations from Irenaeus to the Reformation and beyond, has attempted to articulate something that does not easily let itself be articulated – the simultaneous transcendence and immanence of the divine. In what follows, this rather daring theological attempt to speak coherently of God, which arguably reaches something of a conceptual apex in the work of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, will be charted. Then the criticism of this understanding emerging in modernity will be traced, taking Georg W. F. Hegel’s early nineteenth-century philosophy as the most sophisticated and influential alternative view, culminating in a revision of divine transcendence and immanence that has proven imperative for several later theological trajectories. Finally, these trajectories of revision will be addressed, as well as those seeking instead to retrieve the classical view in ways that typically emphasize modern concerns about the value and integrity of the immanent. For the purposes of this chapter, the primary reference of transcendence and immanence is the domain of the relationship between God the creator and the created world (rather than, say, the relationship between subject and object in a philosophy of consciousness), but this can be parsed in a number of ways: (i) divine transcendence can be spoken of in a more metaphysical

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or cosmological register, such as when exploring the meaning of saying that God is the creator of the world ex nihilo; (ii) parsed instead in epistemological terms, it can be asked what divine transcendence means for human knowledge of God; this must function very differently from ordinary human knowledge of things in the world; (iii) the adequacy of human language can be investigated given the transcendence of that of which we speak, necessitating perhaps the incorporation of a negative element in all theological speech; and (iv) a more ethical spin can be given to the idea of transcendence and immanence in debating the ultimate human good, which may be held to finally transcend the ordinary and immanent human goods that must also be sought. Each of these dimensions of divine transcendence and immanence has come in for scrutiny in modern thinking. However, what follows focuses on the metaphysical, not only because this is the most directly pertinent to a discussion about creation theology but also because questions about knowledge, language, and ethics follow upon a more basic understanding of the God–world relationship, which is in this sense fundamental to the entire theological enterprise.

A more radical transcendence There is some debate about precisely when creation ex nihilo was first explicitly formulated, but regardless of when it is clear that early church theologians come to articulate it as the orthodox hermeneutic of scripture in relation to several polemical fronts.1 Plato had told a ‘likely account’ of cosmic origins in the Timaeus, in which the creator is presented as a craftsman (δημιουργός, démiourgos) fashioning the harmonious cosmos out of the available primal matter. While the image of God as an artist does not lack biblical precedent, the church fathers rightly sensed that positing the co-eternity of God and matter would compromise the confession that there is but one God, one principle of existence. Recall the assumption of the early christological formulations: that which is not God is a creature; there is no middle term. If this much is admitted, that everything that is comes from the hand of the one creator, and if this creator is identified as good, then it follows that the most fundamental axiological determination of all that exists is that it is good; otherwise, God would be the author of evil. Now the Greek philosophical tradition was somewhat ambivalent about matter. Plato’s Timaeus, for instance, does not present matter as evil, yet it opened the possibility of understanding matter as at least recalcitrant to divine intentions and, therefore, as responsible for the disorder the world exhibits. Various Gnostic schools took this further and proclaimed salvation as an escape from the material world altogether. In light of this Gnostic depreciation, early Christian theologians, such as Irenaeus and Athanasius, began to stress the fundamental goodness of all created things, including matter. Both the idea of the co-eternity of matter and God, and the perception of material reality as less than good, compromise Judeo-Christian convictions: the first posits another principle alongside God and is, therefore, a denial of monotheism, and the latter compromises the

For the history of these debates, see Gerhard May, Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994). 1

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goodness of creation. These two points are conceptually related to yet another node in early creation theology: the freedom of God the creator. The notion of primary matter could already be seen as a kind of constraint on the creator’s freedom, an external constraint. But there was a more subtle question to be settled, one that emerged above all in relation to the philosophy of Plotinus, much appreciated by many of the church fathers for articulating a notion of the divine as transcendent, the sole principle of all that is. The Plotinian doctrine of emanation posits a transcendent principle, described as beyond being – the One. However, Plotinus understands this principle less as analogous to a person and more like an impersonal force. Hence, emanation/creation is understood as a spontaneous and automatic process, like how the sun radiates light and fire causes heat through no choice of their own.2 Such a divine principle may be transcendent yet is necessarily related to the world and is, therefore, not free in relation to that same world. While this is not the kind of crude external constraint that matter was for other thinkers in the Platonic tradition, it is nonetheless a more internal kind of compulsion. Concerning Plotinus, and in consonance with the scriptures and with the emerging doctrine of God as a circuminsessio of persons, early theologians stressed the divine freedom to create and, therefore, conceived creation as more like a gift given than an effect caused. As Augustine put it, the motivation for such a gift could only be that ‘something good should be created by a good God’.3 Early creation theology thus came to be conceptually oriented in relation to three nodes: (i) that God is the sole creator of everything that exists, both matter and form – the paint, paintbrushes, and canvas, as well as the painting itself; (ii) that creation is a free act of God, neither constrained by external principles nor by internal compulsion of any kind; and (iii) that the created world as such is, therefore, to be seen as wholly good, the gratuitous gift of a wholly good creator. All of this can now be articulated in relation to transcendence and immanence. That God is transcendent in regard to all created things is made clear in the rejection of other co-eternal principles alongside God, matter in particular. This kind of creation indicates that God is other than the world, beyond it, but it does not yet speak of their relation. It is only when theology insists on the free nature of God’s creative act that an understanding of that relationship emerges – in this chapter, this will be called radical transcendence. This latter rules out a relationship based on the necessity or need of God to create and stresses the gratuity of creation as it comes forth from God’s hand. As will be seen later, this radical notion of transcendence is crucial if one is to give an adequate account of divine immanence. The insistence on the goodness of creation already refers to the immanent sphere, which must now be affirmed as willed by God and can in no way be seen as the axiological other of the divine goodness, per the Gnostic refusal of the material world. The world becomes instead an image or echo of divine goodness, a theatre stage upon which the divine glory may be seen. But is it only a faint echo or glimmer from afar, or is God himself present even in the immanent sphere of the creation?

Plotinus, Enneades, 5.1.6; cf. 5.1.7; 5.4.1. Augustine, The City of God, 11.21.

2 3

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A more intimate immanence Stressing divine transcendence does not mean that early Christian theologians neglected divine immanence. How could they, given their belief in the incarnation? When speaking of divine immanence in this context, what is being spoken of is God’s presence and activity in the world, without which Christian belief turns into a form of deism. Indeed, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures everywhere attest to the presence and activity of God within the created world. In order, therefore, to affirm the simultaneous transcendence and immanence of the divine, Christian thinking has had to clear a path through some challenging conceptual terrain to avoid a deistic rejection of immanence in favour of transcendence, as well as a pantheistic collapse of transcendence into immanence. A key to understanding Christianity’s insistence on divine immanence in the world is to be found in the creative act itself, which is not understood merely as a past event in which the world comes into being from nothing – in a big bang, as it were – but always also as an ongoing act whereby God preserves the created order. That is to say that classical theology attempts to hold creatio originalis together with creatio continua. A correlate of this is that creatures are not seen as having their being of themselves – they are not self-sufficiently existing – but rather continually receive their being from God: ‘If [God’s] working were to be withheld from the things he has set up, they would simply collapse’, said Augustine.4 From these premises, early theology suggested that God, as the giver of existence, must be interior to each creature – at the foundation, so to speak, of their very being. Thus, Augustine will also speak of God as interior intimo meo (more intimately present to me than my innermost being) and insist that God is ‘both interior to every single thing, because in him are all things, and exterior to every single thing because he is above all things’.5 These ideas receive a systematic treatment of unprecedented conceptual clarity in the thought of Aquinas and his metaphysics of esse (the act of being; existence), in which the doctrine of existential participation is essential. To exist as a creature, says Aquinas, is to participate in the divine gift of being, to constantly receive one’s very existence and operation from God: ‘God is essentially self-subsisting Being. . . . Therefore all beings apart from God are not their own being, but are beings by participation.’6 Moreover, each creature participates in its own way in the divine gift of being, such that the essence of a thing describes the manner in which it receives its existence from God, the mode of its participation. Within this framework, to say that God is the creator of the world ex nihilo is to say that God is the cause of the very esse of creatures, which in various and limited ways continually participate in the divine act of being itself, which is freely given to them at every instance. As creator, God radically transcends the world. Still, he is also radically immanent, present to each creature as their participated source of existence: ‘Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being. But being is innermost in each thing. . . . Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.’7

Augustine, On Genesis Literally Interpreted, 5.20.40. Augustine, Confessions, 3.6.11; Augustine, On Genesis Literally Interpreted, 8.26.48. 6 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), I, Q. 44, Art. 1. 7 Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 8, Art. 1. 4 5

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From this vision of God as the cause of creaturely being, Aquinas draws a subtle, yet allimportant, consequence. As the transcendent and universal cause of being, God is not to be put alongside other causes in the immanent causal matrix, such as being the first in a causal series; instead, God is the sustaining cause of the causal matrix itself – the causa causarum (cause of causes). Consequently, God must operate differently from all other causes, especially since they are all what Aquinas calls ‘somewhat violent’.8 What he means is that while causes on the same ontological plane compete for power, so to speak, as when the power of an aeroplane’s jet engine works to stave off gravity, the divine cause operates not on some already existing thing with its independent powers, but is what gives each thing existence and power in the first place. In this way, Aquinas suggests that it is precisely because God is the transcendent creator ex nihilo that he can be immanent in every created thing as its source of existence without thereby competing with created things. This notion of a non-competitive relationship between the transcendent God and the immanent sphere is crucial for contemporary theology and will be returned to later.

The modern suspicion of transcendence Western modernity has witnessed a critique along several fronts vis-à-vis previous understandings of divine transcendence of and immanence in the world. Some of these were rooted in developments in late Scholasticism itself, which moved towards an increasing separation between divine transcendence and the immanent sphere – between grace and nature – stressing the need for a purely natural dimension. The Protestant Reformers later picked up on this separation between grace and nature as a way of distinguishing as far as possible the sufficient grace of God from the inadequate natural works of human beings. Upon the heels of these theological developments followed the emergence of modern epistemology and science that seemed to further decouple transcendence and immanence – creator and creation – and approach the natural world as a self-contained system without any transcendent referent. This is perhaps most famously encapsulated in Pierre-Simon Laplace’s alleged response to Napoleon Bonaparte’s question about the place of God in his system: ‘I’ve had no need of this hypothesis.’ The point here is not that there is no God, but that God is not a necessary part of a scientific explanation of the world, as had still been the case for Isaac Newton and the deists. In short, science drives culture in the direction of what Charles Taylor has called an ‘immanent frame’, where reference to the supernatural or the transcendent becomes superfluous, a private option for some but increasingly rejected in the upper echelons of educated society.9 This is not to say that modern science rules out the transcendent, but rather that science is increasingly seen as pushing in the direction of materialism and, therefore, of a ‘cosmic imaginary’ in which the immanent sphere of nature is all there is. But there is arguably a more important reason for modernity’s suspicion of the transcendent, which operates in tandem with theological and scientific developments but with a much stronger motivational force – the ethical objection. This comes to its most powerful expression

Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 103, Art. 1. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 539–93.

8 9

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in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who relentlessly pursues this one specific line of critique in relation to Judeo-Christian commitments: they denigrate the immanent sphere – the earth itself, embodied existence, the unreserved affirmation of life here and now – in favour of some transcendent reality. Nietzsche claims this is the ultimate nihilism, the ultimate rejection of true values, and he calls instead for people to swear allegiance to the earth.10 Similar things had already been argued by Ludwig Feuerbach and have since become a staple of philosophical criticism of Christianity, at least in the continental tradition.11 What is particularly striking in these arguments is the pathos with which they are made; there is a deeply felt sense that an orientation of persons and cultures to the transcendent is unethical, a position that it would be apposite to call ethical immanentism. Appearances notwithstanding, this line of critique has deep theological roots, both in the patristic defence of the created world against its Gnostic defamation, in the insistence that the immanent sphere be not left behind in a flight towards the transcendent, and in the Protestant re-affirmation of ordinary life and secular vocations. What is new is that this affirmative view of the sphere of immanence is now seen to entail a rejection of divine transcendence as such; transcendence and immanence have become antithetical.

Hegel and modern theology The suspicion of transcendence and its antithetical position vis-à-vis immanence was never going to be the whole story of western modernity, however. Not only did the classical doctrine of creation live on, of course, in Roman Catholic and more traditional Protestant circles, but towards the end of the eighteenth century the disenchantment of modern immanentism met powerful opposition in German Romanticism and Idealism as well. The Romantic generation sought to unify what so much previous modern thought had torn asunder – mind and body, humanity and nature, God and world, transcendence and immanence – and to restore a sense of the mystery of nature, that ‘sense sublime / of something far more deeply interfused . . . a motion and a spirit / that . . . rolls through all things’, in the words of William Wordsworth.12 The fate of transcendence and immanence in modernity – and its theological understanding – is deeply bound up with this Romantic riposte, and particularly with the philosophy of Hegel. Arguably, the most significant contemporary theological alternatives to the classical view of divine transcendence and immanence – such as process theology and its derivatives – can be directly traced to Hegel’s thinking. Recent scholarship suggests that Hegel’s philosophical theology is best read not as a type of pantheism but rather as a version of panentheism, the doctrine that the world is in God and is

See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ and Other Writings, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trams. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 11 See Ludwig Feuerbach, Thoughts on Death and Immortality from the Papers of a Thinker, along with an Appendix of Theological-Satirical Epigrams, Edited by One of His Friends, trans. James A. Massey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Also, Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019). 12 William Wordsworth, ‘Lines, Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798’, in The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Poet Laureate, etc., etc., ed. Henry Reed (Philadelphia: Troutman & Hayes, 1851), 194. 10

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in some sense part of God – as a manifestation of the divine or the body of God – even though God also transcends the world rather than being identical with it.13 The meaning of this for divine transcendence and immanence can be approached by looking at Hegel’s philosophical reworking of the doctrine of creation. Part of Hegel’s genius is his ability to translate traditional Christian doctrines in terms of his own philosophical system and thus to present a rational articulation by way of concepts (Begriffe) of what was previously only understood by way of religious representation (Vorstellung). The doctrine of creation is no exception. Hegel takes it to mean that the infinite God – the absolute idea – needs an ‘other’ to become fully actualized and conscious of himself as such. God thus posits (setzt) the finite world, but the otherness of this world in relation to God means that creation must be seen as a fall away from unity with the idea – ‘the idea in diremption’ – and therefore as estranged and alienated (an interpretation of creation and a vocabulary that is picked up in the theology of Paul Tillich).14 Throughout history, this estrangement and all its contradictory manifestations must be reconciled, which happens as human beings come to understand their eschatological unity with the divine source, ‘the real consummation of spirit’.15 Creation and history are thus the means through which all otherness, contradiction, and negation will become sublated (aufgehoben) in the richest possible unity since it is a unity which has subsumed into itself on a higher plane all disunity. God and the world will thus have become fully actualized together at the end of history. Hegel’s philosophy shares with Romanticism a quest for unification, a unity that he thinks is not originally given, neither in creation nor in God’s own being, but will instead be the endpoint of a long historical process of becoming. This telos of unity will be realized when cosmic spirit (Geist) comes to full self-realization, which it does through the vehicle of human consciousness and its self-realization. In a sense, then, the history of the world and of humanity is the history of God. In a pithy formulation from the Phenomenology: ‘This much must be said of the absolute: it is essentially a result, and only at the end is it what it is in truth.’16 This understanding of spirit/God as involved with the world in a mutual and dialectical process of becoming is a modern phenomenon. It breaks with the classical Christian understanding, which takes divine transcendence to imply that God is beyond change – that there is no divine potentiality to be actualized through the history of creation. But it is important to see that by the same token, it also breaks with the Plotinian trajectory of thought, which, though it often employs dialectical thinking, takes the transcendent One to be unaffected by all that emanates from it.

See Peter C. Hodgson, editorial introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume III: The Consummate Religion, by Georg W. F. Hegel, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 16–17; Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); John W. Cooper, Panentheism – The Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to the Present (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006). 14 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), 1:252–63; cf. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), 3:403–6, 420–3. 15 Georg W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume III: The Consummate Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 91. 16 Georg W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), §20. 13

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In the Hegelian scheme of things, the understanding of creation is thus altered in significant ways. Not only is God drawn into the historical process of becoming, it no longer makes sense to speak of divine creation as a free act. Instead, such action must be understood as a necessity: ‘Without the world, God is not God.’17 Thus, at the level of religious Vorstellung, God is pictured as free to create or not to create, but the real conceptual truth is that God posits the world because, without it, God cannot attain his goal to come to consciousness of himself: ‘God as spirit is this process . . . the divine idea actualizes itself in and to finite consciousness.’18 Much hangs on this rejection of what is here called radical transcendence. As Charles Taylor perceptively argues in his major book on Hegel, on this rewrite of Christian faith, God cannot really be understood as free, and that means that creation cannot really be seen as gift; and this means, too, that divine love or grace cannot really be spoken of anymore.19 Moreover, it would seem that a world that is necessarily posited rather than gifted freely and gratuitously is difficult to affirm fully. While Hegel does not at all reject material reality as such, he does speak of creation as an estrangement (Entfremdung) or alienation from the divine source in such a way as to reintroduce the ancient question mark concerning the goodness of creation; creation and fall coincide, and creation comes forth as an ambiguous rupture. It entails evil and suffering as alienation from God and an assertion of finite will over and against the infinite. But there is also the possibility of reconciliation as the dialectic of history moves towards the ultimate union with God (represented in religious thought as incarnation and kingdom of God). What does all this imply concerning transcendence and immanence? As already indicated, Hegel can plausibly be read as a panentheist, and it is in panentheistic forms of theology that his legacy remains most vibrant. With contemporary forms of panentheism, Hegel holds that God is transcendent and should not simply be identified with the world. But he also holds that the world is, in some sense, a manifestation of the divine or even its necessary embodiment; in this sense, God is also immanent. But the relationship between these – and this is the crucial point – is one of dialectical tension, opposition, and estrangement in need of reconciliation. Hegel has a clear view of what such reconciliation will finally amount to: a fusion of God and creation, a final synthesis in which all opposition is overcome. This begins to look like a pantheism after all, but an eschatological one.

Trajectories of revision and retrieval Some of the basic intuitions of Hegel’s philosophy have been extraordinarily influential in modern theology’s attempts to conceptualize the relationship between God and the world. This is especially true of those schools of theology that have been dissatisfied with the idea of divine transcendence, as it follows from the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, and have sought to revise it in a more panentheistic direction. In this chapter, these will be called revision-oriented.

Georg W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume I: Introduction and the Concept of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 308n97. 18 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3:91–2. 19 Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 493. 17

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Process theology is doubtless the most important example, but certain strands of feminist theology and ecotheology have also drawn freely on this legacy. Other theologians, however, see in these developments only a dead end for theology, the return of pagan elements already refused by early Christian orthodoxy – these will be called retrieval-oriented. Divergent as these trajectories are, most contemporary theologies of both orientations share a sense of the kinds of concern that a doctrine of creation should be able to address and the types of commitment it should be able to shore up. Arguably, at the root of these concerns lies the spectre of dichotomous thinking. Revision-oriented theologians – internally diverse, to be sure – have felt that a radical distinction between God and world is the arch-dualism that subtends all other dualisms and inscribes into the order of things a primordial hierarchy of value that plays itself out in history. Thus, certain feminist theologians have worried that creation ex nihilo, with its radical conception of divine transcendence, subtends what Catherine Keller calls a ‘masculinizing dominology’, which she explains as ‘a rhetoric of sheer power’. In her telling, therefore, ‘Christian orthodoxy originates in a symbolic misogyny’.20 The image here is of a transcendent creator dominating the subjugated immanent sphere of creation, a coercive relationship that has all too often been the model for relationships between men and women. According to Keller, this concept of God symbolically undergirds unlimited and coercive power over an entirely passive other. As an antidote to this rather chilling picture, she offers creatio ex profundis, where a kind of Platonic primary matter returns in the form of the chaotic ‘deep’ (tehom), out of which God and world emerge in a reciprocal process of becoming: ‘In the reciprocity of influence, both [God and world] arise as effects of the primal creativity.’21 Clearly, the rejection of radical divine transcendence here is meant to secure reciprocity between creator and creation as a model for human relationships. Similarly, a strand of ecotheology points out that the traditional distinction between divine transcendence and created immanence has led to a desacralizing of the immanent sphere, which now becomes passive matter at hand for human use and abuse. An early influential example of this conviction is found in the work of Jürgen Moltmann, who describes the traditional relationship between transcendence and immanence thus: ‘God’s context is transcendence, and the world, as “the work of his hands”, is turned into immanence. Nature is stripped of her divinity. . . . The world is turned into passive matter.’22 As Moltmann understands it, the emphasis on the transcendent otherness of God has desacralized the world and legitimated its ruthless exploitation. For this reason, theology must now begin to emphasize the divine immanence instead – the Spirit in the world. Moltmann does this by way of a panentheistic doctrine of God that does not deny divine transcendence but places the emphasis firmly on divine immanence: ‘The centre of this thinking is no longer the distinction between God and the world. The centre is the recognition of God’s presence in the world and the presence of the

Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), 53–4. Keller, Face of the Deep, 181. Cf. ‘The creature responds to the lure of the creator; the creator responds to the action of the creature. To respond is to become. Without such a reciprocity of genesis, there can be no serious theology of becoming’ (p. 198). 22 Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 13. 20 21

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world in God.’23 It follows from the panentheistic logic of Moltmann’s proposal that a divine ‘withdrawal’ or ‘self-limitation’ is required for the world to be at all and a ‘kenosis of the Spirit’ for God to become present in the world, even to the point of viewing ‘the history of nature and the history of humanity as the divine history of the Spirit’.24 These and other tendencies in contemporary thinking about transcendence and immanence can reasonably be thought of as explorations of paths opened up by Hegel and his Romantic contemporaries by revision-oriented theologians. This is particularly evident in the emphasis on process and becoming as fundamentally true of God and world alike, and in the suspicion of the dualistic ways of thinking taken to be characteristic of more classical formulations of divine transcendence. Detectable in these theological trends is a strong yearning for unification beyond debilitating dichotomies – between men and women, humankind and nature, and, ultimately, between God and the world. Retrieval-oriented theologians, however, may want to point out that these theologies also seem to share the notion that divine transcendence somehow competes with immanence, which makes it imperative to curtail or domesticate this transcendence to make room for the value and integrity of the immanent sphere. Thus, Keller’s account rests on an ultimately contrastive logic in that the power of God must be severely limited to save the God–world relationship from being coercive and guard the agency of an otherwise passive creation; and, for Moltmann, God must limit himself to create and be fully present to creatures. These moves make perfect sense as long as divine transcendence and the immanent sphere are understood as competing for influence, one at the expense of the other. But a very different account can be given. Part of the difficulty is that the very distinction between God and creation immediately causes a logical problem since ordinary distinctions always assume some overarching context within which a distinction can be made. To distinguish A from B is to look for their specific difference (differentia specifica) within a common genus. Thus ‘reason’ (λόγος, logos), for Aristotle, is the specific difference that distinguishes human beings within the common genus of ‘animal’ shared with other so-called non-rational life-forms. But, as Aquinas said, God is ‘not contained within a genus’.25 There is no overarching conceptual framework, such as the abstract notion of ‘being’, that can contain God and world alike and within which a distinction between them can be made. Indeed, if there is such a common framework, ultimately, God is made into a being among others within the world, whereas creation ex nihilo is meant to express that without divine creation there would be no world at all; there would be nothing. And yet God would be as much God without the world since the world does not exist by some kind of necessary outflow of God, but by his freedom and love. Consequently, the ‘Christian distinction’ must be one of a kind since no common context or horizon can be stipulated for the creator and creation alike, and it must thus operate singularly.26 This means that God cannot even be said to be other in the ordinary sense of the term, for all other things share a commonality – that of being created – within which they can

Moltmann, God in Creation, 13. Moltmann, God in Creation, 88, 102. 25 Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 3, Art. 5. 26 For these formulations, see Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995). 23 24

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be differentiated so as to become each other’s other. Put differently, the Christian distinction means that divine transcendence is not ‘beyond’ in any kind of domesticated sense, such as could be approached by a dialectical negation – Hegelian or otherwise – of the immanent, but is instead utterly radical. And it is only from this kind of transcendence that a most intimate divine immanence can follow. How is that? Kathryn Tanner’s seminal God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? is one of the most careful articulations of the conceptual logic involved in the classical position.27 Her account hinges on the insight that theology, when speaking of divine transcendence, should never suggest that God is the apex in a series of increasingly transcendent beings, such that God is nearer to those further up the scale of being than to those on the lower end. For all such ideas inevitably end up with a God who is at the same ontological plane as all other beings, only higher up the scale, and who must therefore compete with them; needless to say, those lower on the ontological scale will always lose that competition, and divine transcendence will turn out to be a kind of tyranny. Instead, creation ex nihilo ushers in a non-contrastive notion of transcendence and, therefore, a non-competitive relationship between God and creatures: God the creator is now understood as the ultimate empowerer of creatures, the one who fully constitutes them in being and operation. Aquinas meant this when he spoke of a kind of ‘violence’ that occurs in ordinary causal relations between creatures but not in the relationship between God and creatures. Karl Barth, too, understood this logic at a deep level when he came to the doctrine of God in the second volume of his Church Dogmatics. His discussion centres on the concept of divine freedom, which means, says Barth, that God is free, in his radical transcendence, to be immanent, to reveal himself in the immanent sphere. Barth expresses the Christian distinction succinctly as follows: The element God stands in such a relation to all other elements, that the latter, in spite of individual variations, are all characterised as one group; that by their intrinsic difference they are all separated from the divine in such a way that no higher unity is possible between them and God which can be expressed by a higher comprehensive term.28 This rules out not only pantheism but panentheism as well, since ‘God enters into the closest relationship with the other, but He does not form a synthesis with it’.29 The consequence of this absolute transcendence, which rejects a God fused with something else, is – somewhat counterintuitively – a radicalized notion of immanence: It is just the absoluteness of God properly understood which can signify not only His freedom to transcend all that is other than Himself, but also His freedom to be immanent within it, and at such a depth of immanence as simply does not exist in the fellowship between other beings. No created being can be inwardly present to another, entering and

Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. T. H. L. Parker et al. (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 310. 29 Barth, CD II.1, 312. 27 28

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remaining in communion with him [or her] in the depts of its inner life. No such being can create and sustain the life of another, seriously leading and governing, binding itself to the other and the other to itself in eternal faithfulness and whole-hearted devotion.30 This passage is a beautiful and fitting summation of what a radical notion of transcendence implies for the relationship between God and creatures. The retrieval of this non-competitive logic cannot, however, be a matter of merely repeating Augustine, Aquinas, or Barth. For one thing, the consequences of the doctrine of creation must now be related to contemporary concerns, such as those raised by feminism and ecotheology, but also in relation to the science and religion debate.31 What is suggested in this chapter in arguing for the retrieval of a more classical understanding of the relationship between divine transcendence and immanence is, rather, that such new explorations would do well to follow the conceptual logic carefully traced out by the classical theology and rearticulated by Tanner and others. For only a radically transcendent God can enter into a non-competitive relationship with the created other. The establishment of such a relationship is indeed ‘the triumph of God’s freedom in immanence’.32

Further reading Anderson, Gary A. and Markus Bockmuehl, eds. Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Burrell, David. Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, 2003. May, Gerhard. Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994. Moltmann, Jürgen. God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. Tanner, Kathryn. God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

Barth, CD II.1, 313. My emphasis. See Janet M. Soskice, ‘Why Creatio ex nihilo for Theology Today?’, in Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges, ed. Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 37–54; Andrew Davison, ‘Looking Back Toward the Origin: Scientific Cosmology as Creation ex nihilo Considered “from the Inside”’, in Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges, ed. Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 367–89; Andreas Nordlander, ‘Green Purpose: Teleology, Ecological Ethics, and the Recovery of Contemplation’, Studies in Christian Ethics 34, no. 1 (2021): 36–55. 32 Barth, CD II.1, 316. 30 31

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CHAPTER 25 THE LAND, CREATION, SOVEREIGNTY, AND PROPERTY

Tink Tinker

Our Grandmother is severely scarred and damaged, and it may take millennia for her to heal again. The dominant eurochristian worldview and its concerted political apparatuses have created giant artificial persons that have perpetuated the damage as part of their ultimate goal. Grandmother has been divided into pieces, small and large. In a gesture of sentimentality, these eurochristian liberals have thought of Grandmother as ‘creation’. However, it has proven to be more profitable to divide creation into this abstract signifier called ‘property’. And these giants control the largest pieces of Grandmother, which they use to energize their extractive industries. These giants, going by names like ‘rio tinto’ and ‘exxon mobile’, may be invented persons, but they have the full force of eurochristian law as full-fledged persons. These giants are then given shelter by other giants, who make claim to something called ‘sovereignty’, giants called the u.s., the european union, australia, china, brazil, and others. Insofar as we Indigenous Nations are allowed to lay claim to this word ‘sovereignty’, our sovereignty is always subservient to the greater sovereignty of these suzerain lords. Relationship with Grandmother has been replaced with the mechanical administration of ‘creation’, which seems to be the nature of eurochristian sovereignty.1 At the same time, ‘creation’ and ‘sovereignty’ are eurochristian universalizing abstractions, vessels for ideals and values that are not necessarily shared in the reality of particular contexts and worldviews of actual human communities. If creation and sovereignty are imposed eurochristian terms, which are universalizing and totalizing abstractions, then I must protest, as an American Indian trying to hold onto an Indigenous worldview, that I cannot merely find a way to use these words to talk about anything real in the American Indian world. That would immediately falsify the Native reality. Therefore, I must resist the temptation to assimilate or acculturate just to be able to communicate with the colonizers on their terms. Eurochristian notions about ‘sovereignty’ corrupt, distort, and disfigure the relationships that Indigenous Peoples have with this abstraction that eurochristians call ‘creation’. Sovereignty is also an abstraction composed of titles and authority that have no actual basis in lived, reciprocal relationships that Native Peoples experience with all the other (including non-human) Peoples of the earth around us. The problem of eurochristian languaging, particularly in the context of christian theological language, is one of worldview and the extent to which colonial invasion and domination have

Throughout this chapter, the capitalization and non-capitalization convention is very intentional – even as it may seem idiosyncratic. It is an attempt to diffuse the sense of reification and nominalization that comes with much of capitalization in the usual english language conventions. American Indian languages are ‘verbal languages’ in that verbal action is more important than nominal actors, the opposite of eurochristian languages I am most familiar with. 1

Land, Creation, Sovereignty, Property

functioned to destroy the Indigenous worldview in order to replace it with the eurochristian worldview, both intentionally and by osmosis. It has been impossible to convert Native Peoples to the colonial religion of christianity without solidly implanting the eurochristian worldview. Let me begin by socially locating myself in the global landscape. I am Indigenous, an American Indian, a citizen of the Osage Nation, wazhazhe udsethe. In some ways, this already begs the question since it presumes some common and concrete notion of what a nation is because it presumes that Native folk would necessarily use words exactly as our colonial oppressors do. The word ‘nation’, from latin origins, came into more prominence in europe after the 1648 treaty of westphalia, where modern eurochristian notions of sovereignty were hammered out to stop christians (catholics and protestants) from killing each other. However, more than religion, at that point, ‘sovereignty’ had to do with property. Territory. The Land. And sovereignty especially had to do with the state, although the word ‘nation’ has been more typically used in english to signify the state. At the same time, this notion was never entirely new in europe. It was very much a factor in lawyer rodrigo borgia’s 1493 legal, if entirely fictive, proclamation as europe’s top judicatory power, adjudicating between the claims of different eurochristian nations and monarchs to American Indian territories after christopher columbus’ errant voyage.2 So, under this law, the english and then the americans laid claim to my own country and militarily reduced my people to subjection.3 Yet after 530 years of colonialism and Indigenous erasure, I still identify today as an Indigenous person, someone who writes very intentionally out of an Indigenous worldview – in this case, about creation, the Land, and Indigenous sovereignty. However, like all American Indians today, I find myself using their language and legal categories (e.g. ‘sovereignty’) to define who we are. There is something inherently wrong with doing so. We cannot discuss creation or sovereignty without clarifying the radical fundamental difference in worldview between the eurochristian colonizer and Indigenous Peoples, and highlighting the genocidal result of the colonialist imposition of this worldview shift on every Indigenous community. I focus more specifically on American Indian Peoples, the Indigenous communities I know most intimately. By worldview difference, I mean to signal difference in terms of reflexive or automatic habits of behaviour in thoughts and actions, human social structures, and the like, all within a given cultural community. Worldview is best measured in the everyday habitual responses of people to the world around them, rather than in a few

Borgia, an aragonese (spanish) lawyer, also went by the name alexander, but that was a pseudonym he took upon himself as the metaphoric papa/pope of the eurochristian church in rome. American Indians NEVER engage in selfnaming, but that is another story. The legal proclamation at stake is called a papal bull, for which Indians have another name, having to do with manure. But this eurochristian warrior culture had developed the massive firepower to make its invented legal proclamation stick, and stick oppressively for Native Peoples eventually over the entire globe. For useful expositions of this document, see Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008); Steven T. Newcomb, The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code, directed by Sheldon P. Wolfchild (Morton: 38 Plus 2 Productions, 2014), DVD. Newcomb persistently argues that u.s. federal Indian law and policy are premised on eurochristian biblical narratives of chosen people and promised land, best exemplified in the 1823 Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. McIntosh: the first ‘Christian people’ to ‘discover’ lands inhabited by ‘heathen’ Natives ‘have an ultimate title to and dominion over these lands and peoples’. This becomes an important legal precedent throughout eurochristian colonized territories of the globe. 3 See Tink Tinker, ‘Discovery, St. Junípero, Lewis and Clark’, The New Polis, accessed 17 February 2022, https:// thenewpolis​.com​/2020​/11​/03​/discovery​-st​-junipero​-lewis​-and​-clark​-tink​-tinker​-wazhazhe​-osage​-nation. 2

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grand ideas. We can trace something of these differences as they emerge in human languaging. I would hope we can begin to see difference in terms other than merely cultural, political, or theological (surface structure) differences. I think we fail to understand difference until we begin to understand this important analytical category of worldview, which runs much deeper than these other categories. In this sense, worldview certainly does not signal those distinct cultural forms or activities that are incessantly appealing to tourists and new-agers – even as it may have undoubtedly generated them. In this eurochristian sense, then, every human community, past and present, has narratives that seem to fit into the eurochristian theological/anthropological category they label ‘creation’, but the question is whether the category of creation actually fits those Indigenous narratives with real precision, or whether creation is merely a convenient colonialist cognitional category to give the colonialist (missionary, academic, or government functionary) requisite control over Native Peoples and traditions. There is always a simplistic presumption, almost always unspoken, that these Native narratives must function similarly to the creation narratives in the eurochristian bible. Unfortunately, this precludes any real understanding of the Native narrative in its own milieu and on its own terms. As colonialist interpreters began to identify something they can label ‘creation narratives’ in every human community, then it was not a huge leap for them, with an arrogant presumption of normativity and universalism, to then suppose that every human community reveres some ‘higher power’ figure(s) that can be labelled ‘creator’, usually with an initial capital letter (i.e. god/God/Creator). Then colonialist missionaries could cherry-pick one Native word to serve that function. That, in turn, imposes eurochristian political notions of hierarchy on the colonized, building on the eurochristian foundation of religion, and therein lies the problem with the pervasiveness of the colonialist eurochristian categories of cognition. Colonialism and missionaries have mapped for us their platting of the terrain of our own Indigenous experiences and intelligences, and, somehow, we are left with trying to fit in. The eurochristian worldview becomes an overlay that perforce (re)structures all Native communities and their ways of life, leaving Natives with the unending task of decolonizing the Native self. Once the eurochristian missionaries have picked one of our words to represent their notion of god, how can we ever undo that powerful act of naming? These hierarchical political notions are then reified in the further abstraction called ‘sovereignty’. I use ‘worldview’ to signal a deep framing of reality that comes with birth and early childhood nurture into a specific communal/societal whole, much like being born into a native language, and in fact language and worldview are deeply enmeshed with one another.4 Like language, one’s worldview is never a personal choice at the surface level of consciousness – even as it functions to generate a variety of personal ideological choices. Cognitive linguists george lakoff and mark johnson express the point even as they use different language: ‘Our conceptual system is not something that we are normally aware of. In most of the little things

It is not surprising that forcing a shift in Native worldview came hand in hand with eurochristian colonizers’ efforts to erase all Native language in favour of teaching savages to speak the colonial language – english, spanish, or portuguese, in the territories of Turtle Island. On this church and state cooperative effort in latin america, see Gerard Colby, with Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995). 4

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we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines.’5 While we might think of worldview as a conceptual system, we must be clear that worldview is not the same as ideology, which comes with a much stronger aspect of personal choice. Republican or democrat; catholic or baptist; chevy or ford pickups; rural or urban; capitalist or socialist; democratic capitalism or marxist communism; christian or non-christian, even new age – these are personal ideological choices, the kind that all people make within the same eurochristian worldview. Allow me to give a somewhat facile example of how worldview functions in terms of muscle-memory habitual behaviour. In this example, worldview is physically embodied. At a Southern Ute sun dance some three decades ago, I rather keenly watched the activity of the drum, somewhat stunned by what I saw. Four or five men around the drum were marking the rhythm on the drum for the dancers as they sang. Six or seven women sat on the ground around the male drummers, also marking rhythm, each with a full handful of long prairie grass. Half of the women were eurochristian by all visual accounts; they held their handful laterally and with twisting of the wrist the heads of grass seed bounced up and down like the men’s drumsticks. The Indian women, on the other hand, held their stalks straight upright, so that the grass waved much like grass blowing in the breeze of the wind over the prairie as they more gently raised and lowered their hands up and down vertically in time with the drum, but without flicking their wrists. Neither the Indian women nor the eurochristian women seemed to notice that they were instinctively doing things so differently. That is a very tiny example of worldview in action.6 Can any eurochristian learn to do this the way the Ute women did? Of course. That part is easy. The hard part is realizing that worldview finally consists of a nearly infinite number of these kinds of habitual actions, thoughts, feelings, and language patterns, and what they mean within a society’s culture. Learning ten or twelve of them is easy enough. Learning seventeen billion of them by supper time is, to put it mildly, not just unrealistic but as silly as thinking that an english speaker might choose to be fluent in mandarin by tomorrow morning. That is what makes worldview a less-than-conscious substance and makes it impossible to reduce it to a personal choice.7

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 3. Italics added. 6 To extend this analysis a bit further, one colleague suggested that the women holding their tuft of prairie grass like a drumstick were actually using their handful as an abstraction for the male identified drumstick, while the Native women were allowing their handful of grass to reflect its own being in the world – with no need to merely mime maleness. Many American Indian communities have stories remembering that the large drum was a gift to the men from the women, a gift intended to give men a greater share in the power that is inherent in women as life-givers. 7 Mark Freeland, writing about his anishinaabeg people, usefully defines worldview thus: ‘[A]n interrelated set of cultural logics that fundamentally orient a culture to space, time, the rest of life, and provides a methodological prescription for relating to that life. In this definition there is a brief description of what a worldview is (interrelated set of cultural logics) and four components to which those logics associate (relationships to space, time, the rest of life and a methodological prescription to relate to life). With this definition I am positing that each culture has a set of logics that allows its constituents to negotiate the world. These logics orient the culture to a consistent trajectory of thought organized around relationships that must be addressed to be able to build a meaningful life. Each culture must have some type of relationship to the lands they occupy, to time, to the rest of life, to be able to live in the everyday.’ Mark D. Freeland, Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021), 23. 5

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If worldview encompasses seemingly small matters such as how women at a drum might hold a tuft of grass, then it should be clear that the broader thinking of a community is also enmeshed in worldview. As we return to the eurochristian theological notions of creation, legal/ theological concepts of Indigenous sovereignty, and the histories of eurochristian colonialism, we must include some memory of the forced processes involved in the colonizing of Native Peoples in terms of forcing a shift in worldview. It becomes important to clarify what those attempts have done to the social fabric of each People. My argument is that each People lived a worldview that was marked by both particularity and radical disparity from the worldview of the invading eurochristian colonizing power. Thus, it was never a simple matter of adding a few new (eurochristian) words to a Native language. Rather, each Native People was forced to shift its worldview to accommodate those new word usages and to learn to think more in line with the colonial occupying governments and their religious institutions. It was, rather, a matter of changing the fundamental roots of a community’s behaviour and thinking about the world. The world was no longer a collateral–egalitarian one of equals, but was one of hierarchy and control, beginning with the male-dominated sky person that the almighty colonizer called ‘god’. And Indians and Indigenous Peoples everywhere are at the bottom of this colonialist hierarchy of being.8 A decade ago, I wrote a chapter for a mennonite editor in canada. The chapter was titled, ‘Why I Do Not Believe in a Creator’.9 It details my worldview objections to the abstract eurochristian notions of creator, god, higher power, etc., even as I acknowledge that every Indian Nation has adopted some word co-opted by the missionaries to signify the eurochristian notion of god with a capital ‘g’ in each Native language. In short, the abstract eurochristian notion of god immediately imposed hierarchical thinking on collateral–egalitarian Natives. Our languages had no word for ‘god’ until the missionaries picked one in each language, thereby ruining that word in its original meaning for each People. Rather than having natural hierarchical social structures built on the metaphor cognitive linguists label the up–down image schema, American Indian societies were constructed around a different metaphor – the collateral–egalitarian image schema. There is no higher power to which we must bend our wills. Therefore, with a Native rejection of hierarchy and sovereignty, there is a direct implication for how Native Peoples perceive this abstract thing that eurochristians have objectified as ‘creator’. The wanagi that we summon in our ceremonies are ancestral. They are our relatives and never our superiors. In an Osage village, the gaihega (always mistranslated as chief) never had autocratic decision-making power. Indeed, every Osage village had a pair of these gaihega, one from each moiety, who took turns every other day in exercising what authority they did have to reflect back the consensus of the People.10

It should be noted that joe biden’s appointment of an American Indian woman as secretary of the interior does not yet mitigate the analysis being offered here. The appointment of deb haaland only came after she proved herself as fully conversant in the eurochristian worldview. See Tink Tinker, ‘Much Ado about Nothing’, in Faith and Reckoning after Trump, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre (New York: Orbis Books, 2021), 184–92. 9 Tink Tinker, ‘Why I Do Not Believe in a Creator’, in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice, and Life Together, ed. Steve Heinrichs (Waterloo: Herald Press, 2013), 167–79. 10 See Tink Tinker, ‘Religious Studies: The Final Colonization of American Indians, Part 1’, Religious Theory, accessed 17 February 2022, http://jcrt​.org​/religioustheory​/2020​/06​/01​/religious​-studies​-the​-final​-colonization​-of​ -american​-indians​-part​-1​-tink​-tinker​-wazhazhe​-udsethe; Tink Tinker, ‘Religious Studies: The Final Colonization of 8

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Classic eurochristian anthropocentrism, putting human needs and desires ahead of all other life on earth, is a typical example of this up–down image schema and hierarchy, something that is already embedded in the eurochristian biblical narratives about creation.11 The American Indian understanding of life sees all other (i.e. non-human) People as being of equal importance to humans. Therefore, the Native appropriation of the lives of other Peoples for food, for example, must be done with utter respect for those Persons. Corn, Beans, and Squash are our close Grandmothers who need to be treated with complete respect before we can feed ourselves. As eurochristian science and technology begin now to harvest animal lives for transplant parts into human patients, American Indian People are left wondering what kind of ceremony was required to take that animal’s life. Our principle of reciprocity means that we do not take from our relatives without giving back. What kind of offerings do my close relatives need to give to the Pig níkashiga to receive a Pig heart transplant without disrupting the cosmic balance, and the relationship between my People and that Pig’s People? And what do we do about the nation of Baboons whose People were used (and inevitably died) as test animals for these transplants before they were tried on humans?12 Pigs and Baboons, like Deer and Buffalo, or Corn and Squash, have their own lives and their own communities. In our Indian worldview, none of them are in any way subservient to the needs of humans. If we take the lives of any of them, we need to do so with full respect of their personhood and with some reciprocal action or gift that demonstrates our ongoing respect. Otherwise, the cosmic circle of life is broken. The selection of an Osage word as the Osage equivalent to reference the eurochristian higher power was an intentional attempt to shift the Native worldview to the up–down hierarchical worldview of eurochristians. It was an overnight attempt to change the centurieslong relationship that humans in an Osage community had with all other Peoples, non-human peoples in particular. Suddenly, our Grandmother, the Land, became thingified as property; she was divided up into pieces to be regulated, bought, sold, and controlled under the totalizing power of a sovereign government, reified objects assigned some monetary value. Suddenly, Natives could no longer have a close relationship with our Grandmother without violating someone’s sacred property rights of ownership. The imposition of a single eurochristian word changed ultimate reality for Native Peoples. We can begin to see what is at stake by looking at just a few eurochristian words/concepts that missionaries and government functionaries inserted into Native languages. As an American Indian, I will use our communities and languages and the particularity of our history of colonization, but along the way I will insist that all Indigenous Peoples today have

American Indians, Part 2’, Religious Theory, accessed 17 February 2022, http://jcrt​.org​/religioustheory​/2020​/06​/09​/ religious​-studies​-the​-final​-colonization​-of​-american​-indians​-part​-1​-tink​-tinker​-wazhazhe​-udsethe​-2. Note also the important historical analysis in David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014). 11 Under the regime of modern eurochristian liberalism, of course, this fact has been something of an embarrassment requiring persistent reinterpretation of biblical texts in attempts to weed out the harshest notes of hierarchy and anthropocentrism. Thus, the word ‘dominium’ (dominion) in genesis is quite often given the new translation of ‘stewardship’. Yet, the hierarchy is still there. 12 See ‘Pig-to-Human Heart Transplant Is Science Gone Hog-Wild’, Rise for Animals, accessed 17 February 2022, https://riseforanimals​.org​/news​/pig​-heart​-transplant​-is​-science​-gone​-hog​-wild.

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a necessary task of decolonizing our minds and our use of language – both Native language and the colonial languages (e.g. english, portuguese, spanish, french, etc.). In north america, there are virtually hundreds of Indian languages and dialects still spoken – albeit universally in danger of permanent erasure under the contemporary colonialism of american education (in english, of course). Yet it is important to note that some very key theological, political, and social terminology used in everyday eurochristian english simply have no counterparts in any of these Native languages. That is, there is/was no counterpart until the missionaries invented Native usages that functioned to signal the missionaries’ own theological/political intention being imposed on each Native People. To wit, there are no words in ie wazhazhe, the Osage language, for the following: ‘creation’, ‘creator’, ‘god’, ‘evil’, ‘satan’, ‘the devil/adversary’, ‘sin’, ‘sacred’, ‘holy’, ‘secular’, ‘heaven’, ‘hell’, ‘worship’, ‘prayer’, ‘supernatural’, ‘spirit’, ‘ownership’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘real estate’, ‘property’, ‘law’, ‘justice’, ‘rights’ (e.g. human or civil), ‘church’, ‘global church’, ‘mission’, ‘redemption’, ‘theology’ (including contextual theology), ‘gospel’, ‘faith’, ‘christ’ (cosmic or otherwise), ‘justification’, ‘incarnation’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘eschatology’, ‘soteriology’, ‘salvation’, ‘pneuma’ (let alone pneuma hágion, ‘holy spirit’, since there is no word for ‘holy’), etc.13 Even the word ‘religion’ has no Native language counterpart. Despite all those anthropology textbooks, there is/was no part of our social life in any community of Indian People that could be separated out and labelled as ‘religion’ – until missionary conversion, of course.14 Each of these words signals a eurochristian worldview, which is then operationalized or enacted through a multitude of rules, codes, laws, directives, etc., that are in complete opposition to an Indigenous value system. How can such a discrepancy lead to any real conversation about ‘creation’, or any common notion of ultimate reality? All of them, from ‘god’ to ‘property’ to ‘religion’, are abstract nouns that defy any easy definition, which helps to put the missionary as the theological expert in control over Native minds and bodies. American Indian languages all tend to be verb-based rather than nounbased, and, hence, abstractions are far less common in traditional Osage, even as they appear in everyday abundance in english. So, we might begin describing worldview differences in terms of verb-based versus noun-based languaging, things people do automatically when they speak, without thinking about it. In the colonization process, Indian folk had to be taught to see the world in terms of these abstract nominal concepts. And this list is only the beginning. There are no words for ‘war’, ‘warrior’, ‘king’, ‘bloodthirsty’, ‘savage’, or even ‘tribe’ in Osage languages, just as there are no words for ‘property’, ‘title’, ‘tract’, or ‘profit’;15 nor are there words

This is just a short list of non-translatable words, words that are more pertinent to the immediate discussion here. See Tinker, ‘Religious Studies’. 15 Francis La Flesche, like other anthropologists, calls one ceremony he documents the ‘Osage War Ceremony’. But in reality, there is no word for ‘war’ in the Osage title – ‘Making Charcoal’. Even the name of the bundle-keeper who accompanies the young men to defend the village, dodon honga, has no word for ‘war’ in it. That person is not a ‘war chief ’ but is actually a non-combatant who accompanies the defenders. That said, I cannot imagine what a ‘war party’ might be. Are there balloons? booze? cake? The phrase is a White invention to justify killing more Indians and taking more Land. It is a label that allows them to define us. And the Osage word ákida does not translate as ‘warrior’ but rather as ‘defender’. Even La Flesch says as much, in contrast to his Dictionary definition which recites the usual colonialist mistranslation. See Francis La Flesche, War Ceremony and Peace Ceremony of the Osage Indians (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1939). 13 14

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for ‘nature’, ‘wild’, or ‘wilderness’. These are all realms of our relatives and must even include ourselves. Worldview difference, then, needs to be carefully parsed in some depth, something that cannot be done here. So, I can only outline what these differences between American Indian and eurochristian Peoples include, and note that I have written about these in past writings. This list is only suggestive, then, and not nearly exhaustive or thoroughly argued:

1. Temporal versus Spatial. Perhaps the easiest difference to track is the difference between the eurochristian foundation in temporal thinking and temporal metaphors versus the American Indian deep rootedness in spatiality:16 (i) Notions of progress or development are the normal trajectories of life for eurochristian colonialist folk. Even the more liberal notions introduced in the 1990s of ‘sustainable development’ are inherently rooted in temporality and progress. (ii) Yet for Indian folk, the foundation is the place and spatial relationships around us. That means the goal for American Indians is not progress but rather balance – cosmic balance, community balance, and relationships for maintaining balance. (iii) The eurochristian notion of Property is utterly antagonistic to the Native relationship with Land as Grandmother. Native relationships with all other Peoples are reciprocal. We eat corn, beans, and squash, but we also return to those Grandmothers our respect, particularly in ceremonies around planting, harvesting, and mealtimes. We take nothing without giving back in return. That is reciprocity. (iv) When the Land is thingified as ‘property’, then our Grandmother only serves to provide resources waiting to be extracted, usually with violence to the Land herself. American Indians traditionally respect all life in the People’s territory, including the Land herself. The difference here is extraction versus relationship. (v) Maximizing and storing personal wealth (an abstract explained by john locke in terms of possessive individualism and property17) then becomes a primary goal for eurochristians. Traditional Indian value expresses care for the whole of a community, what one might call community-ism.



2. Hierarchical/up–down image schema versus the Native collateral/egalitarian cognitive metaphor: (i) Whether the topic is religion, politics, business, or general social structuring, the eurochristian world always thinks and builds structures in terms of hierarchy. This begins with their affection for the nominal abstraction they

See, for instance, George E. Tinker, Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004). 17 See George (Tink) Tinker, ‘John Locke on Property’, in Beyond the Pale: Reading Ethics from the Margins, ed. Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas and Miguel A. De La Torre (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 49–60. 16

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call ‘god’ – usually a White male sky god who resides in some abstract above, and from whence he rules the cosmos, which, after all, he created. Hierarchy reigns in modern eurochristian business, political structures, and religious structures. (ii) The word ‘sovereignty’ almost automatically demands a sovereign (monarch, president, prime minister, etc.), and any notion of ‘sovereign people’ in north america fades beneath the sovereign weight of washington, toronto, and la ciudad de mexico. Hierarchy, even in terms of sovereignty, means that the superior sovereignty of a federal government leaves Native sovereignty impoverished and with little recourse other than to hopelessly and endlessly seek respite in the colonizer’s court system. And when we are perceived as having won one, we are then expected to shut up and be happy – and get out of the way of the extractive industry’s perpetual development of pipelines and roads through our Land, now their property.

3. Individualism versus Community-ism: (i) Of course, one central building block of the eurochristian worldview is the radical individualism that shapes all eurochristian thinking beginning with the renaissance – after the devastation in europe caused by the mid-fourteenthcentury plague event. Only then in europe do artists begin signing their works of art: leonardo, raphael, donatello, and michelangelo, for instance. The primary questions of existence are inherently about the cartesian self: ‘I think; therefore I am’. (ii) The eurochristian notion of salvation is always about the ‘I’ and not at all about the Indigenous ‘we’. In contrast to the radical individualism of the eurochristian worldview, Indigenous Peoples are inherently community-ist. The ideal of harmony and balance involves all of us, and not just me as a person. And the goal is never some progressive notion of the hereafter concerning the individual person. Rather, balance is a constant part of our dynamic stasis. The community is always working to re-establish balance.



4. Anthropocentrism versus Interrelationships with all life: (i) In the eurochristian worldview, all of social and political life is dedicated to making the world allegedly better for human beings. All other (non-human) People are thingified as lesser beings or neutered subjects: it and things. (ii) In the Native worldview, all life is interrelated. The Land is my Grandmother. Water is my Grandfather. Because my daughter is Buffalo clan, the Buffalo are her close relatives, and their clan is dedicated to maintaining the relationship of respect between Buffalo and the Osage People. (iii) ‘It’/‘thing’ versus he/she [é, í, itá]: There are no words for ‘it’ or ‘thing’ in American Indian languages. Pronouns in ie wazhazhe are wonderfully nongendered and non-numbered. In many Indian communities, there are stories from a generation ago of elders who still confused ‘he’ and ‘she’ when speaking english. Where’s grandpa? ‘She went to town’.

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5. Cosmic struggle of good and evil versus balance and harmony of all life: (i) Sin of the individual human, original sin, and the universal need for salvation are keys to understanding the eurochristian worldview. Against that, Indian folk have the ideal of community balance and imbalance. Imbalance is never evil. Rather, it is an everyday occurrence that calls for re-balancing. That is our work. (ii) Even international politics (and, for example, u.s. foreign policy) is predicated on the religious imaginary of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, where the u.s. (or canada or australia or new zealand) is always the embodiment of the good. (iii) But there are no words for ‘evil’ in any American Indian language. Cosmic balance is never predicated on some mythic defeat of evil – until the missionaries embed the notion into our languages by picking words or creating words. And there are no words for the eurochristian abstract called ‘sin’.



6. Fundamental language differences: nominal abstraction versus verb-based languages of concrete action.

In terms of my social location, I should add that I have long ago stopped identifying as ‘christian’ (lutheran by maternal upbringing and ordination) in favour of holding on to traditional American Indian ceremonial traditions and language – a serious decolonizing project for Native folk wherever we live.18 The first and most important part of decolonizing is to reclaim and restore our Native worldview, which under forced conversion therapy has had to persistently give way to the eurochristian worldview with its focus on temporality, hierarchical structuring, and, above all, radical individualism.19 And any worldview analysis must begin with language. Here it needs to be reiterated that so much eurochristian languaging (both secular and theological) can only be vocalized in a Native context after heavy-handed colonization has changed the worldview focus of local Native Peoples. But perhaps we should begin here with the words ‘thing’ and ‘it’. As I constantly work to decolonize my own use of colonial language, I have been trying to avoid almost all usage of these two words in english. There simply are no things or its in the Indian world – until, I suppose, the creation of plastics, electronic circuit boards, and machines. As my now thirteenyear-old daughter has tried to remind every teacher since kindergarten, everyone has their own personhood. Rocks, she has insisted, are not inert or non-biotic things but are alive and have their own consciousness.20 The same, then, is true for Corn, an important Grandmother;

American Indians, like Māoris, Aboriginals, and First Nations Peoples, are continuing the struggle to decolonize after 529 years. Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh wish to argue that the decolonizing project was completed in the 1970s. See Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). This is wishful thinking. Just ask Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women in the u.s. and canada. 19 See Tink Tinker, ‘Weaponized Christianity: Missiology, Jesus, the Gospel, and Indigenous Genocide’, in T&T Clark Handbook to Intercultural Theology and Mission Studies, ed. John G. Flett and Dorottya Nagy (London: T&T Clark, forthcoming). 20 See George ‘Tink’ Tinker, ‘The Stones Shall Cry Out: Consciousness, Rocks, and Indians’, Wicazo Sa Review 19, no. 2 (2004): 105–25. My daughter’s teachers, being good eurochristian liberals, always seem to step back with a comment like: ‘Oh, yes. Some people believe . . .’. No, we don’t believe that rocks are alive. We know. That is part of the American Indian knowledge system, our Indigenous scientia! 18

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for Deer, an important source of meat protein and yet a close relative (we Osage have a Deer clan); for Trees and Rivers. Water, indeed, is a most important close relative, a Grandfather who helped birth Osage residence on the Earth, our Grandmother. I was interviewed on the topic of Water last year by a dedicated Water conservationist journalist. I had to explain to him that I could in no way become a Water conservationist myself since that would require my conceding the eurochristian worldview by commodifying my Grandfather, learning to value my Grandfather in primary terms of monetary value per litre or acre. Rather, I assured him that my role in life was to live in a relationship of utter respect for ni, Grandfather Water, without whom we could not live. In terms of Land, creation, sovereignty, and private property, we can now say that the Land also has her own life and consciousness. She is certainly not an ‘it’ or a thing simply to be manipulated through legal fictions of ownership. She is our Grandmother who gives all people life, and by all people we mean necessarily to include the other-than-human people of the world. By that simple conversion to private property, the most natural thing in the world for eurochristians, Native Peoples have been suddenly deprived of our ancient relationship with the Grandmother!21 To imagine that we Natives can easily continue our ancient filial relationship with the Land under the regime of private property (deeds, mortgages, ownership, etc.) is like presuming the american romance that eurochristian slave owners somehow managed to maintain their wholesome respect for another human being – whom they owned and upon whose labour their own wealth depended. As the canadian colonial government today tries to advance the economic development of their state, they are forcing the construction of one fossil fuel pipeline after another (natural gas or crude oil) onto Native Peoples across canada (particularly unceded Treaty Lands), at which point it becomes painfully clear that Native sovereignty comes pretty far down the pecking order from colonial canadian national sovereignty. The same is true in the united states. One hears the repeated protest of American Indian leaders from virtually all Indian communities crying out – ‘respect our sovereignty’. Yet from the beginning of the u.s. republic, and particularly with the passing of the u.s. constitution in 1789, the colonial government has claimed ‘the plenary power of congress’ over all Indian Peoples; Indian sovereignty became just another abstract fiction.22 It was a fiction like the plenary power of congress itself, except that the colonizer had the weaponry, the firepower, and hence the political power to make the fiction work – for themselves and against Native Peoples. In canada, as Natives try to defend their Land, even ‘unceded treaty’ Land, against the invasion of extractive industries; Natives are repeatedly reassured: ‘This is crown land’, that is, state property. Higher sovereignty (i.e. state sovereignty) trumps Native sovereignty! and eurochristian hierarchy reigns supreme. This, of course, harkens back to the old eurochristian

See Tink Tinker, ‘How the Eurochristian Invasion of Turtle Island Created the Environmental Crises’, in Shifting Climates, Shifting People, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2022), 19–30; Tink Tinker, ‘Occupation in North America: States, Rule of Law, Language, and Indians’, in Resisting Occupation: A Global Struggle for Liberation, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre and Mitri Raheb (Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2022), 175–93. 22 u.s. constitution, article one, section 8, accords to congress the broad power ‘To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes’. With court interpretation, plenary power gave and gives ultimate authority over Native Peoples to the u.s. congress. 21

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theological/social teachings about the ‘orders of creation’ (husbands-over-wives; parents-overchildren; masters-over-slaves; humans-over-animals; etc.), and it seems that all Native claims are now legally inferior to the superior claims and economic powers of the invader. This is the stuff of worldview, and the eurochristian worldview is predicated on hierarchy, which cognitive linguists identify as the up–down image schema/primary cognitive metaphor. There is always some higher power to which one must accede. To bring Indigenous Peoples of north america into line with their own understandings of life, then, the invaders created narratives of us – of Indigenous americans – wherein we had the same sort of hierarchical social structures as they themselves and could be easily brought under their superior sovereignty. And especially since the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, the colonial power has reinvented American Indians precisely as miniature copies of the united states. For instance, the new Osage constitution calls for the election of a principal chief, a vice-principal chief, a national congress, and the appointment of a national judiciary. While it is unicameral, it reflects the structure of the colonialist u.s. government itself. Today, Native sovereignty is fully dependent on having a self-governing system that replicates the political structures of the colonizer. We have an Osage congress; the Sami have a Sami parliament. Let me be clear then: ‘sovereignty’ is a word that has no counterpart in any of our languages. It is not our word. For starters, it immediately announces a eurochristian worldview. Period. It presumes lakoff and johnson’s up–down image schema, immediately emplotting a power hierarchy, something totally foreign to the American Indian worldview of collateral–egalitarian relationships with all life. So, my main problem with sovereignty has to do with such collateral–egalitarian matters. We cannot even use the word to claim sovereignty over the Land. When the christian invasion came in north America, along with religious experts focused on converting Native Peoples to their worldview (and their jesus and their god), they also immediately went about their business of converting the Land – the Earth – into property, via eurochristian individualism and private property. We never conceived of subjugating the Land, our Mother/Grandmother, that way. We always lived in a balanced relationship with her, the wakon-person. So even Native sovereignty over their own Lands is a postcolonial condition, a christian invention. If there is anything real about the concept of sovereignty, then we do not traditionally have sovereignty even over our own Lands. Rather, if there is to be any notion of hierarchy, then the Land has sovereignty over us! So, what American Indians want is LandBack! That is, Indian Peoples want their relationships back – with Land, with Water, with our four-legged relatives, with the Tree nation, with the Mountains and Hills, with all the flying Peoples, from Eagles to Hummingbirds. We want our cultures, our value systems, and, most importantly, our worldview back. That is what it would take for us to achieve LandBack, the radical cry heard across Indian Country from the arctic south into mexico. And that means reversing the thingification of Land, reversing the conversion of Land into ‘property’. It means putting an end to the eurochristian extractive industries that have invaded our Land, from mining to fossil fuel pipelines.

Further reading De la Torre, Miguel. The Colonial Compromise: The Threat of the Gospel to the Indigenous Worldview. Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020. 333

T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation Freeland, Mark D. Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021. Hall, Anthony J. Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism. Montréal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2010. Tinker, George E. ‘What Are We Going to Do with White People?’, The New Polis, 17 December 2019. https://thenewpolis​.com​/2019​/12​/17​/what​-are​-we​-going​-to​-do​-with​-white​-people​-tink​-tinker​ -wazhazhe​-osage​-nation/. Tinker, George E. ‘Why I Do Not Believe in a Creator’. In Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice, and Life Together, edited by Steve Heinrichs, 167–79. Waterloo: Herald Press, 2013. Tinker, Tink. ‘American Indians, Conquest, the Christian Story, and Invasive Nation-Building’. In Wading Through Many Voices: Toward A Theology of Public Conversation, edited by Harold J. Recinos, 255–74. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011. Tinker, Tink. ‘The Irrelevance of euro-christian Dichotomies for Indigenous Peoples: Beyond Nonviolence to a Vision of Cosmic Balance’. In Peacemaking and the Challenge of Violence in World Religions, edited by Irfan A. Omar and Michael K. Duffey, 206–25. Malden: John Wiley and Sons, 2015.

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CHAPTER 26 ELECTION AND COVENANT

Margit Ernst-Habib

Creation, election, and covenant: The storyline reconsidered Summarizing the story of God’s involvement with creation, one may be tempted to follow a well-known, simple, and one-dimensional synopsis of the biblical story: In the beginning, God created heaven and earth and declared good all that is. In Adam and Eve, though, humanity sinned and was expelled from paradise. Yet God remained faithful in choosing the people of Israel, establishing a covenant with them for the sake of all humanity, despite humanity’s continuous sinfulness. In Christ, the covenant of this faithful God is confirmed and renewed as the new covenant; the crucified, risen, and ascended Son of God will return at the end of times, ushering in the reign of God. Christ will then gather the elect from all people to their heavenly home so that they will reign with him over all of creation for eternity. In this abbreviated version of the biblical story, creation is not much more than the setting for the ‘real action’ or ‘backdrop’ for God’s saving work for the benefit of humanity, a sort of display of divine goodness and grace in God’s election of and covenant with God’s people.1 Neither election nor covenant, though both represent central biblical themes, seems to be of any relevance for all of creation in this story: God, the creator, redeemer, and sanctifier, appears to be concerned exclusively with redeeming and sanctifying human beings. Correspondingly, the divine works seem to be separated from one another, divided up and following each other consecutively along this storyline. Even the three articles of the Apostles’ Creed appear to follow a similar pattern: God the almighty Father created heaven and earth, God the Son redeemed and reconciled fallen humanity to God, and God the Holy Spirit sanctifies the reconciled people of God to live holy lives, gathering, protecting, and preserving the elect as the church. Indeed, in most Christian confessions, non-human creation is an article of Christian faith only with respect to its beginnings and its subordinated role in serving humankind. With this kind of understanding, the doctrine of creation clearly ‘tends to be limited to protology, the question of how things began . . . once upon a time’,2 rather than being an articulus fidei (article of faith) related to other doctrines within broader Christian belief. The biblical themes and theological doctrines of creation and covenantal election of God’s people appear as intertwined yet noticeably ordered: creation, declared to be ‘good’ at the beginning of all time by the creator, is understood here exclusively in the sense of being ‘good for’ the purpose of saving God’s chosen people. Apart from this purely supportive relevance for the Heilsgeschichte (history of salvation), creation does not seem to possess any inherent value or relation to God’s

See Sallie McFague, ‘The Scope of the Body: The Cosmic Christ’, in This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment, 2nd edn, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York: Routledge, 2004), 264. 2 Ian A. McFarland, introduction to Creation and Humanity: The Sources of Christian Theology, ed. Ian A. McFarland (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), xiii. 1

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saving will and redeeming love. Christian theology often has, as David Fergusson observes, little to say about the status of non-human creation with respect to salvation.3 It is and remains a difficult task in Christian theology, past and present, and even in contemporary forms of ecotheological endeavours, ‘to do justice to both the theme of creation and the theme of salvation, to the Christian faith in God as Creator and as Savior, to the first and the second articles [and the third, one may add] of the Christian faith’.4 This observation becomes even more apparent when one turns to what for some Christian traditions is the centre of God’s Heilsplan (plan of salvation) – the doctrines of election and covenant.

Chosen by grace: Election and covenant in Christian doctrine That the God of the Bible chooses, elects out of grace,5 is a central theme in Christian theology and dogmatic discourse, particularly in western Christianity. Both testaments of the Bible witness to this faithful, covenantal, and electing God in a multitude of ways: From the election of Abraham, in whom ‘all families of the earth shall be blessed’ (Gen. 12.3), to Sinai, where the liberated people of Israel were ‘chosen out of all the peoples on earth to be God’s people, God’s treasured possession’ (Deut. 7.6); from the Apostle Paul who understands himself as an apostle of Jesus Christ ‘for the sake of the faith of God’s elect’ (Tit. 1.1) and who calls upon Christians to act according to their vocation as ‘God’s chosen ones’ (Col. 3.12), to the author of the First Letter of Peter that reminds the Christian community that they are and remain ‘God’s own people’ (1 Pet. 2.9) despite all counter-factual experiences of persecution and rejection. These biblical insights into God’s gracious and unmerited faithfulness have traditionally been developed into two separate, yet interconnected, doctrines: the doctrine of election and ‘its near neighbor’,6 the doctrine of covenant(s). Both doctrines, though, are developed, more often than not, with little or no consideration of creation beyond humanity as the object of God’s saving and redeeming love and will. ‘I will take you as my people, and I will be your God’:7 The electing God and the elected people Contrary to popular opinion, the doctrine of election is devoted not primarily to the question of whom God elects (the answers to this question may vary considerably) but rather to God’s unchanging faithfulness to and unmerited grace for the elect. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) taught that all of humanity became a massa damnata (mass of the damned) because of original

See David Fergusson, ‘Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Creation: Church-bells Beyond the Stars’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 18, no. 4 (2016): 415. 4 Ernst M. Conradie, Saving the Earth? The Legacy of Reformed Views on ‘Re-Creation’ (Zürich: LIT-Verlag, 2013), 9. 5 See Rom. 11.5. 6 Nathan MacDonald, ‘Did God Choose the Patriarchs? Reading for Election in the Book of Genesis’, in Genesis and Christian Theology, ed. Nathan MacDonald, Mark W. Elliott, and Grant Macaskill (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2012), 245. 7 Exod. 6.7. 3

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sin and that all, without exception, deserve God’s eternal judgement and rejection. But, according to Augustine’s reading of the Bible, God decided before all times – and so not based on human merits – to save a few out of this sinful and damned mass to demonstrate God’s grace while passing over the rest to demonstrate God’s justice. This predestination (from the Latin prae-destinare: determining beforehand) of only a certain number of the elect to be saved is understood as an act of God’s saving grace – grace unconditionally given, unmerited, and irresistible – and thus as Good News for the elect. The French reformer John Calvin (1509–64), though certainly not the inventor of the doctrine of predestination, became one of Augustine’s leading interpreters and advocates and brought Augustine’s understanding of God’s grace into the centre of theological discourse. Calvin followed Augustine’s line of thought closely, developing a teaching meant to comfort and strengthen the tormented souls of troubled and persecuted Christians, proclaiming the Good News that one cannot lose God’s grace – as long as one belongs to those chosen for salvation before all time. Calvin believed that God’s eternal decree (which Calvin himself called a ‘horrible decree’, decretum quidem horribile8) was indeed twofold: some are foreordained for eternal life, and the rest for eternal damnation. Thus the doctrine of double predestination was born: ‘We call predestination God’s eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each [person]. For all are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others.’9 In a similar way to Augustine, the ‘doctor of grace’, Calvin’s emphasis lies on the comforting teaching that God’s grace in election is a pure, unmerited gift and is not dependant on those chosen. This gift, Calvin explains, is most clearly to be seen, known, and believed in Christ, who is the ‘bright mirror of the eternal and hidden election of God, and also the earnest and pledge’.10 With a decidedly christological focus, Calvin aims to ground his doctrine of predestination not in metaphysical speculation but rather in the biblical witness, and human experience. As with Augustine, however, creation as creation – that is, creation apart from human concerns – does not play a decisive role in Calvin’s theological deliberations on election and predestination. Even though creation holds a place of honour in Calvin’s theological thoughts,11 even though Calvin can understand creation as theatrum gloriae Dei (theatre of God’s glory),12 God’s saving will and love appear to be quite unrelated to it. ‘I establish my covenant with you’:13 Covenantal theologies God’s grace in electing, justifying, and sanctifying God’s people for salvation became an important focus in another theological teaching, also prominent within the Reformed traditions – the so-called Federal Theology. The term ‘federal’ refers to God’s foedus (covenant)

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford L. Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1977), III​.xxiii​​.7. 9 Calvin, Inst., III​.xxi​​.5. 10 John Calvin, Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, trans. J. K. S. Reid (London: James Clarke and Co., 1961), 127. 11 See Lukas Vischer, Rich Before We Were Born: On Calvin’s Understanding of Creation (Louisville: Presbyterian Church, USA, 2009). 12 See Calvin, Inst., I.v.5; I.xv.20. 13 Gen. 9.11. 8

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with God’s chosen people, which God will never forsake. The theological importance of the biblical metaphor of covenant for all of theology and Christian faith had been constitutive for earlier theologians, beginning even with Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–c. 202), but the Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75), building on thoughts of Huldrych Zwingli (1484– 1531), rediscovered the centrality of the theme of covenant not only for interpreting the Bible and for structuring systematic theology, but indeed for understanding all of history as the unfolding of God’s covenant. The exposition of Christian faith and belief, according to Bullinger’s perspective, is thus given a historical form: there is but One and Eternal Covenant of God (as the title of Bullinger’s famous work from 1534 puts it) and the content and substance of this one covenant is grace. From Abraham to Christ, the one covenant of grace is known as the Old Covenant, given in law and ceremonies, promising eternal life and pointing towards the work of Jesus Christ and eternal salvation. This same Old Covenant (between God and Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses – for the sake of the chosen people) is then fulfilled in Christ, thus establishing the New Covenant. Taken up within Reformed Protestant orthodoxy (which flourished from the middle of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the eighteenth century), Federal Theology became an all-embracing system for theology and faith in parts of Europe and, later, in the American colonies. One of the most influential confessional documents of the Protestant Reformations, the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), incorporated this concept of Federal Theology into its confessional body, giving it a place of prominence for centuries to come. Irrespective of substantial differences in differing interpretations of the covenanting acts of God, Federal Theologies share one major characteristic that in itself proves to be highly problematic in a similar way to what is evident with respect to the doctrine of predestination: yet again, creation beyond human concerns is presented as a mere foil on which salvation history unfolds; all of history, of created time, is perceived from an exclusively anthropocentric perspective, and with this the creator and redeemer God is presented as being invested in the salvation of humanity only. The anthropocentrism of most traditional teachings concerning creation (placing humanity at the centre of all God’s creating will and love) translates rather inevitably into an anthropocentric view of God’s choosing, saving, and redeeming will and love (as expressed in the doctrines of election and covenant), and vice versa. ‘Creation as the external basis of the covenant’ and ‘the covenant as the internal basis of creation’14 (Karl Barth) The Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) endeavoured to revise the traditional view of election and predestination as it had been advanced from Augustine through to Reformed scholasticism and Federal Theology. His interest did not lie in abstract, pre-temporal decisions of an electing God, although he shared the emphasis on unmerited and sovereign grace that former predestinarian theologians had relied on. Barth, instead, placed the doctrine of election, as he did with most theological deliberations, firmly in the realm of christological argumentation: ‘The doctrine of election . . . must begin concretely with the acknowledgement

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), §41.2–3. 14

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of Jesus Christ as both the electing God and elected man.’15 In freedom and love as defined in and through this Christ, God has chosen to be the God of human beings – and that is good news, even the ‘sum of the gospel’, ‘the Gospel in nuce’ (in a nutshell).16 God, as the relational triune God, has decided from the beginning to be in relationship with human beings and has created human beings to be in relationship with God; election out of grace and the covenant of grace are woven together: ‘The fact that God makes this movement, the institution of the covenant, the primal decision “in Jesus Christ”, which is the basis and goal of all His works – that is grace.’17 This christological–covenantal understanding of election is not concerned, in the first place, with individuals and their eternal salvation but is rather understood as the ‘election of grace’ of the community of God.18 Only as a member of this community, in and through this community, do individual human beings receive the good news of Christ’s eternal election and become themselves bearers of that witness to the whole (human) world.19 Election, thus, is not a gift of God to be stowed away but is, first of all, a call to discipleship; it is a gift of grace, to be sure, but only in the sense of the gratia duplex (double grace), of being elected for the community with God while being elected to service and vocation. With this interpretation, election, as an act of the gracious God, is not merely a backwards-oriented teaching but is also a teaching that opens up the future of the elected community for service of God and world. Barth takes another rather inventive step (at least for his time) by re-joining the formerly dis-jointed topics of creation and covenant so closely to each other that they become correlative terms, almost inseparable. In §41 of his magisterial work, the Church Dogmatics, titled ‘Creation and Covenant’, Barth argues that the inherent meaning of creation is to make possible the history of God’s covenant with human beings: ‘The fact that the covenant is the goal of creation is not something which is added later to the reality of the creature, as though the history of creation might equally have been succeeded by any other history. It already characterises creation itself and as such, and therefore the being and existence of the creature.’20 According to Barth, in this covenantal perspective, all creation has its beginning, centre, and culmination in Jesus Christ. The history of the covenantal election is as much the goal of creation as creation itself is the beginning of this history. Barth proceeds to state that ‘creation is the external basis [“Grund”] of the covenant’ and that ‘the covenant is the internal basis [“Grund”] of creation’.21 Creation is no longer just the negligible backdrop for salvation; instead, creation and covenant are joined together before all time in Jesus Christ as the subject and object of divine election. Both the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of election/covenant are interlaced and firmly placed on christological grounding. They cannot, therefore, be developed and interpreted separately from one another precisely because the electing and covenanting God is the creator and redeemer. God’s ‘Yes’ to creation – all creation! – is irreversible because ‘the creation of God carries with it the Yes of God to that which He creates. Divine creation is divine benefit. What

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.2, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 76. 16 Barth, CD II.2, 3, 14. 17 Barth, CD II.2, 9. 18 See Barth, CD II.2, 195–205. 19 See Barth, CD II.2, 307. 20 Barth, CD III.1, 231. 21 See Barth, CD III.1, 94–329. 15

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takes shape in it is the goodness of God’.22 Creation is good because in it the goodness of God takes shape. At this point, it is significant to note that the one-dimensional storyline mentioned earlier does not pertain to the Federal Theologies or the doctrines of election described above. Covenant and election are not divine afterthoughts here; rather, God in Godself, and God in relation to all God created, is the covenantal and electing God. Covenantal election is not the consequence of a fallen creation; rather, creation is the consequence of and the taking shape of the goodness of this relational–covenantal, electing God of grace. And yet: the deep divide between human and non-human creation seen through the lens either of salvation history or covenantal election, between God’s saving love and will for humanity and God’s ostensible negligence of non-human creation, between God’s election of humanity in a covenantal relationship and God’s leaving everything else out of this saving relationship does remain. For Barth, neither the doctrine of election nor the doctrine of covenant(s) incorporates the non-human creation in the sense that it participates in salvation and God’s eschatological glory; both doctrines subordinate non-human creation or remain even exclusively anthropocentric23 with respect to redemption and glorification as the goal of God’s covenantal election. Concerning this deep divide, Fergusson notes that with theologically justified anthropocentrism, where ‘the natural world is assigned only an instrumental function in the human-focused drama of covenant history’,24 it is understandable why the ethical significance of the non-human world would be diminished – a rather daunting thought in times of challenges and crises needing immediate attendance and response. Creation as covenant and the community of creation (Jürgen Moltmann and Adrian Langdon) It is precisely this continuing anthropocentric focus in Barth’s theology of creation and covenant that the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann (1926–) responds to, and which he aims to remedy in his response to Barth.25 Moltmann rejects Barth’s still-apparent dualism of creation and covenant, especially in relation to Christ, who appears to be reconciler and Lord only to humankind and not to the non-human world. Referring to Johannes Cocceius’ (1603–69) concept of the covenant of creation, Moltmann maintains that creation is not only the consequence of covenant but that creation itself is covenant and so is irreducible to a divine work that makes the covenant possible. With his emphasis on eschatology and on the difference between grace (in reconciliation) and eschatological glory (in redemption), Moltmann includes all of creation – human and non-human – sighing in the hope of redemption and consummation. Creation, then, can only truly be understood from the perspective of the hope of God’s reign that has begun in Christ – the firstborn of the whole creation: ‘Any really Christological doctrine of creation must take Jesus Christ seriously as the messiah of the

Barth, CD III.1, 330. Barth acknowledges that the Bible sometimes does not share this exclusively anthropocentric perspective of creation, for example within the creation accounts in Ps. 104 and Job 38. See Barth, CD III.1, 21. 24 Fergusson, ‘Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Creation’, 430. 25 See Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Creation, Covenant and Glory: A Conversation on Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Creation’, in History and the Triune God: Contributions to Trinitarian Theology, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 125–42. 22 23

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coming kingdom. . . . The creation is the ontic promise and the ontological parable, the real promise and the real symbol of the coming kingdom of God.’26 This, for Moltmann, is the ground for a cosmic hope, for an eschatology related not only to human destiny exclusively but also to non-human creation. The Canadian theologian Adrian Langdon takes up this lead from Moltmann and, by modifying Barth’s doctrine of election, aims to reconsider the place of non-human nature and to overcome the dualism between humans and the rest of nature. Based on Jn 1.1-18, Col. 1.14-20, and Rom. 8.18-23, Langdon argues christologically, following Barth’s line of thought, that in the Son’s taking up human suffering on the cross, God identifies with humanity. He then extends Barth’s view by claiming that the cross is, simultaneously, God’s identification not only with the suffering of humanity but also with the suffering of all creation; it is also the anticipation of redemption not only for humanity but also for non-human creation: ‘[N]on-human creation has a place secured in the eternal will and purposes of God, and Jesus Christ is viewed as the creator and saviour of humanity and nature. The natural world becomes an object of God’s electing will and not merely the place in which human election is received.’27 With this dialogue with, and revision of, aspects of Barth’s theology, Langdon brings the doctrines of creation and election together in a way that may prove to be not only biblically and theologically insightful but which may also help Christian theology to respond to challenges the world faces in the twenty-first century. This is particularly the case when he suggests that ‘humanity is elected for fellowship within the community of creation’.28 Keeping these theological perspectives in mind, the discussion now moves forward into envisioning the doctrine of creation as based on the doctrine of the communal God of grace and as inherently related to the doctrines of election and covenant(s), told from the perspective of the grace of God.

The communal God of grace and the community of creation The community of creation and the one redeeming will and love of God: Biblical perspectives Throughout the Bible, there is a host of witnesses to the belief that God is and remains connected to all creation through God’s covenant (cf. Gen. 8–9),29 witnessing to the claim that God’s saving, redeeming, and holy love and will is not limited to human beings, and that nonhuman creation is not obsolete in God’s eyes. That the established narrative order described above needs to be reconsidered is blatantly apparent, not least so because of its distinct anthropocentric focus that reduces all of God’s magnificent and glorious, yet suffering, creation to a commodity for humans’ sake – a view prevalent for most of the post-industrial era, and

Moltmann, ‘Creation, Covenant and Glory’, 130. Adrian Langdon, ‘Jesus Christ, Election and Nature: Revising Barth During the Ecological Crisis’, Scottish Journal of Theology 68, no. 4 (2015): 454–5. 28 Langdon, ‘Jesus Christ, Election and Nature’, 469. 29 See Kris Hiuser and Matthew Barton, ‘A Promise is a Promise: God’s Covenantal Relationship with Animals’, Scottish Journal of Theology 67, no. 3 (2014): 347. 26 27

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that is at least co-responsible for many of the life-threatening crises of contemporary times, such as climate change, environmental pollution, and the rapid extinction of many species. But even more so, this storyline needs to be reconsidered because it not only abbreviates and, indeed, distorts the rich biblical witness of God’s ongoing relational and redeeming love and will for all of creation, but it also constricts and limits the meaning and scope of God’s choosing, saving, and recreating activity in election and covenant. By doing so, it constricts and limits the work of the second and third person of the Trinity and the inner-trinitarian relationship. Furthermore, this storyline ignores biblical witnesses (beyond the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2) who place Jesus Christ, the ‘firstborn of all creation’ (Col. 1.15), at the foundation of God’s creative act, and who confess this same Jesus Christ to be reconciler and telos (ultimate end) of all creation: For in [Christ] all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. . . . For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven. (Col. 1.16-17, 19-20. Italics added.) Not only the children of God but ‘creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom. 8.21). The Apostle Paul is convinced that the good news will indeed prove to be good news not only for human beings but also for all of God’s groaning creation. It is in Christ that all things will be gathered up at the fullness of time, ‘things in heaven and things on earth’, according to God’s ‘pleasure that [God] set forth in Christ’ (Eph. 1.9, 10). In other words, God’s creative love and God’s redeeming love, God’s creative will and God’s redeeming will, are the same from the beginning. The work of God the creator cannot (and must not) be separated from the work of God the redeemer and God the sanctifier. With this biblical perspective, the doctrine of creation belongs ‘within the circle of faith’ and ‘is shaped by distinctive convictions surrounding divine grace, covenant and Christ’s work of reconciliation’.30 The doctrine of creation, thus, needs to be moved beyond a protological account of origination. And it is precisely at this junction that the doctrines of covenant and election provide a narrative that might help preserve this decisive, deeply theological, and spiritual connection and conjunction. ‘Lord and giver of life’:31 The Holy Spirit and the community of creation Neither the doctrine of creation nor the doctrine of election or covenant are fundamentally and exclusively teachings about human beings – whether about human origins or human destinies. Instead, they are first and foremost articulated convictions about who God is and what God has done and continues to do; in the strict sense of the word, they are, therefore,

Fergusson, ‘Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Creation’, 421. The Nicene Creed: ‘We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life’.

30 31

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‘theo-logical’ and not ‘anthropo-logical’ doctrines. Concerning teaching on creation, this is a caveat requiring serious consideration. At the centre of these doctrines is the communal, triune God who creates out of sheer grace because of who God is in Godself; in that sense, even a theo-logical doctrine cannot be developed without reference to creation for God is the one who in grace elects to creates all things. With creation, the communal and relational God (traditionally named as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) establishes a space of grace, a covenant of grace, electing Godself to be the God of all creation. Imagining creation as the ongoing work of the three persons of the Trinity provides not simply a protological account of the beginning of time but also underscores the relational and communal realities borne witness to by the claim that God creates and continues to uphold in covenant. Covenant and election do not describe a form of legal act or contract, but rather the faithful God being in relation and communion with what God creates, sustaining the community of creation with the goal of bringing it to glory. If humanity is elected in Christ (the firstborn of all creation) to be and to remain within this covenantal community for the glory of God, then ‘we do not need to claim that otherthan-human creatures are elected only secondarily’.32 Redemption and salvation are no divine afterthought, no ‘Plan B’ for failed humanity, but rather flow from God’s faithful grace for all creation since God’s essence, nature, and works cannot be divided up. Since electing and covenanting are not ends in themselves, they are rightly understood only as instruments to carry out ‘God’s purpose of blessing for the whole created order, which is the intention of election from the outset’.33 Christians, then, would have to confess ‘nulla salus sine terra – there is no salvation without an earth’.34 Covenant and election, as seen in Christ and experienced through the Spirit of Christ, become part of lived life in the history of creation, not timeless verdicts of a distant and disconnected deity. It is this work of the Holy Spirit, then, that needs to come into focus, broadening the understanding of the communal God and the community of creation. That very same Spirit is the bond by which Christ binds not only humanity to himself, as Calvin suggested,35 but also, as the Lord and Giver of life, the Spirit effectually binds all created life to Christ. Since creation is already a trinitarian process, with the Father creating through the Son in the Holy Spirit,36 how could the operations of the Spirit, who continually sustains all of life, be reducible to human concerns? The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of covenant and election, is the pneumatological dynamis (transforming power) that concretely, in the actualities of creation’s own history, brings creation to, and sustains creation in, right relationship with God. This communal, life-giving and life-sustaining Spirit does not change in actualizing and realizing election by segregating and eliminating most of the Spirit’s creation; the redeeming and loving will and acts of God are not restricted through the working of the Spirit to only a minor part of the

David L. Clough, On Animals: Volume 1: Systematic Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 98. Suzanne McDonald, Re-Imaging Election: Divine Election as Representing God to Others and Others to God (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010), 129. 34 Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 274. See also Ryan P. Mclaughlin, ‘Anticipating a Maximally Inclusive Eschaton: Jürgen Moltmann’s Potential Contribution to Animal Theology’, Journal of Animal Ethics 4, no. 1 (2014): 18–36. 35 See Calvin, Inst., III.i.1. 36 See Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 9. 32 33

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world God so loves. As the Spirit of Christ, the all-embracing creational grace of the Holy Spirit is not limited by the covenanting and electing grace; just the opposite – the Spirit of Christ brings forward God’s all-embracing grace in a truly all-encompassing eschatological perspective. How could God’s electing and covenanting truly be Good News, the very ‘sum of the Gospel’,37 if human creation had to give up all hope and faith for its creational siblings, if human creation had to leave the community of creation behind to be reconciled to God? The joy and comfort the Holy Spirit brings is the joy and comfort of the communal God of grace, a communal joy and comfort that would be incomplete if it concerned only a fragment of creation. Instead, humans share ‘creaturely solidarity’ with all creatures, as British ethicist David Clough maintains, because of God’s act of becoming a creature, taking on ‘flesh, the stuff of living creatures’.38 All of created life, thus, is interconnected in Christ, and God’s covenantal relationship and interaction with this interconnected community of creation determines the covenantal relationship of humanity and non-human nature, setting boundaries on human relationships towards nature.39 Just as the Holy Spirit brings joy and comfort to all creation, the covenantal and electing Spirit of Christ claims all of created life for service in and for this community of creation. As noted earlier, neither election nor covenant may be understood as a mere declaration of grace. Both also serve as the foundation for all Christian ethics, for creaturely responsibility. Human beings as creational siblings40 The dangerous dualism of human and non-human creation, and the deep divide in God’s community of grace concerning the understanding of God’s saving will and love, also translates into many Christian interpretations, past and present, of who human persons are as human beings. While the created human body seems to be of lesser or even no importance with respect to eschatological salvation and redemption, the soul or human spirit is what supposedly ‘goes to heaven’ after humans die. The body seems to belong to the ‘creational side’ (together with non-human creation) that becomes obsolete after death, and that does not seem to be relevant for God’s saving and redeeming purposes. Despite the biblical witness that God creates both body and soul, this apparent dichotomy of body and soul has led to neglect of created bodies throughout church history and in Christian spirituality. Only the human spirit, the human soul, is understood to commune with God, to be in relation with the communal God of grace, and not the whole human being as created by God. God’s everlasting covenant seems, on this assessment of things, to pertain to only one ‘part’ of human beings. Not only do humans

Barth, CD II.2, 3, 10, 12, passim. Clough, On Animals, 85, 174. See also Grace Y. Kao, ‘Creaturely Solidarity: Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Relations’, The Journal of Religious Ethics 42, no. 4 (2014): 743–68. 39 See Brandon Frick, ‘Covenantal Ecology: The Inseparability of Covenant and Creation in the Book of Genesis’, in Genesis and Christian Theology, ed. Nathan MacDonald, Mark W. Elliott, and Grant Macaskill (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2012), 215. Despite the anthropocentric view noted above, Barth does share this concern, for example when he discusses the killing of animals as annihilation and as akin to homicide: ‘The killing of animals presupposes that the peace of creation is at least threatened and itself constitutes a continuation of this threat’. Barth, CD III.4, 352. 40 In his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis adopts the expression of St. Francis of Assisi, referring to all God’s creatures as siblings of the human creature. See Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015), 45 (§92). 37 38

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understand themselves as those above the rest of creation, but they also perceive their own bodies to be less ‘godly’ because they are more creaturely than is the human soul. Instead of understanding both body and soul as being created by God,41 both being part of creation and sharing its universal fate, both being mortal and in need of being re-created and redeemed by the covenantal God through the covenantal Spirit, the ‘soul’ appears to be the divine spark that needs to leave the created world behind. A first step, then, towards a more biblical understanding of the community of creation may be the acknowledgement that human beings do not exist outside or apart from creation, that no part or aspect of human life is divine, but is and remains inescapably part of the creation. Human beings are and remain siblings within the community of creation; there is no dualism of human and other-than-human creation, just as there is no dualism of the human soul and the human body. All stand under the same promise of the God of grace who became flesh in order to reconcile and heal not only human beings with God’s self but who also ‘brings about the reconciliation of the world’ in Christ’s bodily form.42 The suffering and redemption of all creation: An eco-theological outlook From this perspective of ‘creation siblings’ and ‘creaturely solidarity’, it becomes clear why the traditional understanding of covenant and election as pertaining to human beings alone is deficient and missing biblical witnesses and central faith claims about God and God’s relation to all God’s creation. Creation and redemption cannot be understood as a two-term dual structure without missing the decisive dimension of the life-giving, life-supporting, and liferenewing Spirit.43 This dimension is also missing in much of eco-theological literature, where soteriological concepts are not typical and where aspects of salvation often appear to be sidelined to ‘ethical’ concerns. Yet it is precisely at this point that the doctrines of creation and redemption must be held together.44 A starting point for bringing together these two doctrines again in eco-theological concepts, understanding their interrelatedness in the divine will and work, would be provided by underscoring Jesus’ suffering on the cross for the sake of all creation and connecting this with the suffering of creation in the world of today. The point of departure for an eco-theological revisioning of the human–non-human relationship in covenantal perspectives would then no longer be reduced to simply affirming the goodness of God’s creation but rather would consider the suffering of creation45 and the divine covenantal promise of not forsaking any part of God’s creation. It is from the perspective of reconciliation and salvation secured in Christ, the Electing God and Elected Creature, that one may see that God in Christ has reconciled the whole cosmos to Godself (see 2 Cor. 5.19), that the original covenant of creation has not been broken, and that God has not forsaken what God elected to be in communion with.

See the discussion in Moltmann, God in Creation, 244–75. Moltmann, God in Creation, 246. 43 See Moltmann, God in Creation, 7. 44 See Clive W. Ayre, ‘Eco-Salvation: The Redemption of All Creation’, Worldviews 14, no. 2–3 (2010): 232–42. 45 Ulrich Duchrow and Gerhard Liedke, Shalom: Biblical Perspectives on Creation, Justice, and Peace (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1989), 50. 41 42

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With this, the works of the Holy Spirit in creating, redeeming, and sanctifying are understood as the works of the covenant, and the telos (final goal) of the covenant is not merely the salvation of humanity (or parts thereof) but rather the glory of God – the fulfilment of God’s will for all creation, the realization and implementation of God’s reign as the community of grace. From this telos, one derives the eco-theological mandate of election and covenant: living as God’s covenantal partners, called and sustained by the Spirit of the covenant, being oriented towards the well-being, healing, and fullness of life for all of creation. Under this mandate, humans, as God’s covenanted partners, are called to a life of service, not destruction, exploitation, and ignorance, because it is through God’s covenant that the Holy Spirit brings all created life into the closest possible relationship with Godself, and keeps them there for the sake of all that is. Marit Trelstad convincingly brings together this understanding when she writes about the covenant as ‘the fundamental promise and reality of relationship God offers to creation’.46 Her poetic words conclude this chapter’s deliberations on creation, covenant, and election: The doctrine of covenant and election ‘does not argue a supersessionist or exclusionary notion of election and covenant since it assumes, ultimately, that covenantal love is essential to God’s nature and thus this relationship is extended to all creation. This atoning relationship does more than correct wrongdoing. It offers a wider vision of salvation as wholeness and beauty; it provides creative possibilities for new forms of becoming. Grace and truth meet together in God’s continual offer of love to the earth and God’s enfolding of creation back into God’s self ’.47

Further reading Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics II.2. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, J. C. Campbell, Iain Wilson, J. Strathearn, Harold Knight, and R. A. Stewart. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957. Conradie, Ernst M. Saving the Earth? The Legacy of Reformed Views on ‘Re-Creation’. Zürich: LIT, 2013. Duchrow, Ulrich and Gerhard Liedke. Shalom: Biblical Perspectives on Creation, Justice, and Peace. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1989. McDonald, Suzanne. Re-Imaging Election: Divine Election as Representing God to Others and Others to God. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010. McFarland, Ian A., ed. Creation and Humanity: The Sources of Christian Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. Moltmann, Jürgen. God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

Marit Trelstad, ‘Putting the Cross in Context: Atonement through Covenant’, in Transformative Lutheran Theologies: Feminist, Womanist, and Mujerista Perspectives, ed. Mary J. Streufert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 109. 47 Trelstad, ‘Putting the Cross in Context’, 109. 46

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CHAPTER 27 LIBERATION, RECONCILIATION, AND CREATION

Ernst M. Conradie

On speaking about creation from this place To confess faith in God as the creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible, is to adopt an encompassing vision. For contemporary Christians, that evokes images of a blue planet, stars, and galaxies. For the priestly authors of Genesis 1, such a claim would have evoked images of the distant horizon, where ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ means ‘sky’ and ‘land’. They confessed faith in Elohim as creator while being exiles in Babylon. Such faith was deeply polemic and counter-intuitive, as it must have seemed clear to arrogant outsiders and faltering insiders alike that the Babylonian gods were superior to the God of Israel. This suggests the need for recognizing how one’s context may shape one’s doctrine of creation – in terms of topography, geography, demography, and confessional tradition, as well as issues of class, race, and gender. Such particularity enables but can easily also distort an encompassing vision. This is sharply articulated by Vítor Westhelle, who argues that where the landed classes see the beauty of God’s creation, poor peasants only see gates and fences keeping them out.1 For me, such particularity is shaped by the tension between the beautiful Jonkershoek valley near Stellenbosch, where I grew up and still live, and my adolescent awareness during apartheid South Africa that the rest of the world is not quite as beautiful, to put it mildly. This tension subsequently became one between Stellenbosch, possibly the most economically unequal town in the world (given a concentration of very affluent citizens) and the University of the Western Cape (UWC), where I have been working since 1993. Historically, this is a Black university with a student body that carries global problems onto the campus on a daily basis but one that nevertheless counts among the top ten universities in Africa. How, then, does one speak about God as creator from such a place? This question is brought into sharper focus by the theme suggested to me as a ‘doctrinal key’2 to approach the doctrine of creation; namely, liberation and reconciliation. Each of these three terms (creation, liberation, and reconciliation) carries a symbolic significance in the South African context that is in direct conflict with each other. The most intriguing word in the title is, therefore, the third – the ‘and’ that seeks to hold these together.

See Vítor Westhelle, ‘Creation Motifs in the Search for a Vital Space: A Latin American Perspective’, in Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside, ed. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and Mary Potter Engel (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998), 146–58. 2 On the notion of a ‘doctrinal key’, see Ernst M. Conradie, ‘What on Earth Is an Ecological Hermeneutics? Some Broad Parameters’, in Ecological Hermeneutics: Biblical, Historical and Theological Perspectives, ed. David G. Horrell et al. (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 295–314. 1

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In South Africa, creation theology is most readily associated with apartheid theology. This was a theology based on the so-called creation orders that God supposedly employed through ‘common grace’ to ensure the maintenance of the world despite the impact of sin. As these orders were presumed to include racial differences, the implication was that God uses racial segregation to ensure relative peace because imperial integration was countered after Babel (Genesis 11). Forced integration under (British) imperial rule can only lead to conflict so that the ‘only way’ to keep the peace between different racial groups (and to maintain ‘civilized standards’) is purportedly through separation.3 This way of thinking is indeed more common than many would think. Just consider how many Christian congregations have two worship services – one for the youth and one for the rest, given liturgical needs that are regarded as ‘incompatible’. Nowadays, creation theology is associated with a strong emphasis on environmental stewardship among evangelicals, who typically represent the landed classes that see the need to care for ‘their’ land wisely.4 By contrast, the symbol of ‘reconciliation’ was employed in the theological critique of apartheid since the ‘Message to the People of South Africa’ (1968).5 It is best associated with the famous Confession of Belhar that emphasized the indicative of reconciliation in Jesus Christ, in the body of Christ, and, therefore, the imperative of the ministry of reconciliation in society.6 This was built on a crucial insight formulated by a group of UWC students in 1978; namely, that the deepest theological critique of apartheid was that it assumed the fundamental irreconcilability of people.7 Different racial groups, therefore, had to be kept apart. Where this strategy is followed in society, it leads to injustices; where this is defended theologically in the church, heresy looms. In the public domain, the symbol of reconciliation is more readily associated with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, 1996–8), chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The focus here was on the presumed need for national reconciliation following the negotiated settlement in Kempton Park between the African National Congress (ANC) and the former National Party (and behind them, big business) in 1993. The legacy of the TRC is typically much praised by outsiders and much maligned by insiders (see below). For Tutu, though, it was clear that there is no future (or social cohesion) without reconciliation, no reconciliation without forgiveness offered by victims to perpetrators, and no forgiveness that does not imply the need for justice and restitution.8 The symbol of liberation is still widely used in public discourse in South Africa. It morphed from liberation from political oppression, to liberation from economic inequalities based on the imperial and colonial conquest of land, to psychological liberation not to adopt the

For one analysis, see Murray H. Coetzee and Ernst M. Conradie, ‘Apartheid as Quasi-soteriology: The Remaining Lure and Threat’, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 138 (2010): 112–23. 4 See Ernst M. Conradie, ‘Stewards or Sojourners in the Household of God?’, Scriptura 73 (2000): 153–74. 5 See the Appendix in John W. de Gruchy and Charles Villa-Vicencio, eds, Apartheid is a Heresy (Cape Town: David Philip, 1983), 155. 6 See, especially, G. D. Cloete and D. J. Smit, eds, A Moment of Truth: The Confession of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, 1982 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1984). 7 For one account of this remarkable class, see H. Russel Botman, ‘Narrative Challenges in a Situation of Transition’, in To Remember and to Heal: Theological and Psychological Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation, ed. H. Russel Botman and Robin M. Peterson (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1996), 37–43. 8 Desmond M. Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (London: Rider, 2000). See also Allan A. Boesak and Curtiss P. DeYoung, Radical Reconciliation: Beyond Political Pietism and Christian Quietism (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2012). 3

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mindset of former oppressors. This is expressed in postcolonial and decolonial critiques and is typically associated with the legacies of Franz Fanon and the Black consciousness movement led by Steven Bantu Biko.9 Most recently, it is associated with the ‘fallist’ student movement (with its slogan ‘Rhodes must fall’) that questioned the legitimacy of the negotiated settlement of 1993, given the lasting impact of poverty, unemployment, and inequality. In theological discourse, the term ‘liberation’ is best associated with the famous Kairos Document of 1985.10 This statement offered a critique of state theology (the reigning ideology of state security at that time) and of what was called ‘church theology’. The latter was directed against the emphasis, in evangelical circles, on reconciliation. It was argued that one could not reconcile good with evil without compromising the gospel. What was needed, therefore, was liberation, not reconciliation. Such critiques were subsequently also raised in response to the proceedings of the TRC. It was argued that Black people needed to be reconciled with their land and the means of production, not primarily with whites.11 Accordingly, the TRC focused only on gross human rights violations, leaving aside the role of the architects of apartheid, many minor human rights abuses perpetrated at a local level, and especially the economic beneficiaries of apartheid.12 Since the economic benefits of colonial conquest and apartheid are still evident, given sharp economic inequalities (with one of the worst Gini coefficients in the world), the need for liberation remains as prevalent as ever. It should, therefore, be clear that the three terms (creation, reconciliation, and liberation) cannot be easily made compatible with each other. Moreover, there is a fourth term that comes into play – ‘development’. In South Africa, this is best associated with the ‘Reconstruction and Development Programme’, which was the election manifesto of the ANC in 1994, and more recently with the ‘National Development Plan’ proposed by the government in 2011 with a vision towards 2030.13 Of course, this is situated amid global discourse on social, economic, and sustainable development – and critiques about the many failures of such development. In recent years, such failures have prompted the political rhetoric of ‘radical economic transformation’, aimed against ‘white monopoly capitalism’ and towards land redistribution without compensation. In the early 1990s, there was some interest in a theology of reconstruction in (South) Africa,14 but the focus shifted towards various notions of (community) development and, for some, sustainable livelihoods.15 There remains a widespread interest among students,

See Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2017); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2017). 10 See The Kairos Document: Challenge to the Church (Johannesburg: Institute for Contextual Theology, 1986). 11 See Itumeleng Mosala, ‘The Meaning of Reconciliation: A Black Perspective’, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 59 (1987): 19–25. 12 See, especially, Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Reconciliation without Justice’, Southern African Review of Books 46 (1996): 3–5. 13 See Ernst M. Conradie, ‘What Diagnosis? Which Remedy? Critical Reflections on the Diagnostic Overview of South Africa’s National Planning Commission’, Scriptura 117, no. 1 (2018): 1–21. 14 See Jesse N. K. Mugambi, From Liberation to Reconstruction: African Christian Theology after the Cold War (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1995); Charles Villa-Vicencio, A Theology of Reconstruction: Nation-Building and Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 15 See Steve de Gruchy, Keeping Body and Soul Together: Reflections by Steve de Gruchy on Theology and Development, ed. Beverley Haddad (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2015). 9

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also coming from elsewhere in Africa, in the discourse on ‘theology and development’ – with ‘development’ always in need of definition.16 The tension between these three (or four) terms cannot but evoke theological reflection. In grappling with this tension, this chapter is concerned with two research initiatives that emerged at UWC but which both required global participation to explore in more depth. In this way, it will represent a fidelity to the need to speak from a particular location while also recognizing the role of global interlocutors and the kind of encompassing vision that any form of creation theology requires. Since there is a sizable corpus of literature available in this regard, this chapter will only sketch some of the core developments and insights.

Liberation, reconciliation, and reconstruction? UWC and the legacy of Gustaf Aulén The theology students, alumni, and staff of UWC are influenced by all three theological discourses sketched earlier – on liberation, reconciliation, and reconstruction and development. Despite the obvious tensions, most feel the need to keep these together, given the churches within which they were nurtured, the challenges posed by society, and practical ministerial needs. How is this possible? In 2005, Hans Engdahl was appointed as a professor in the Department of Religion and Theology, where I am based. He regularly taught postgraduate courses on the legacy of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, often with the poet Antjie Krog, the author of Country of My Skull,17 who is also based at UWC. They used Gustaf Aulén’s famous book Christus Victor (1931)18 as one prescribed text upon recognizing that the Swedish word for reconciliation (försoning) is the same as the one used by Aulén for atonement. The same applies to Afrikaans, Dutch, and German.19 Several postgraduate students at UWC also started using this typology for diverse topics such as Akan thinking about atonement, feminist discourse on ‘carrying one’s cross’, Pentecostal notions of deliverance, missiological discourse on the spiritual and material agenda of churches, soteriological images in contrasting music ministries, and the symbol of reconciliation in theological discourse in South Africa.20 Eventually, this led to a

There is a huge corpus of literature here. See Ernst M. Conradie, ‘Why Can’t the Term Development Just Be Dropped Altogether? Some Reflections on the Concept of Maturation as Alternative to Development Discourse’, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 72, no. 4 (2016): 1–11. 17 Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (New York: Random House, 1998). 18 Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A. J. Herbert (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2002). 19 I have also made use of Aulén’s typology to reflect on issues of health and healing, and on anthropogenic environmental destruction. See Ernst M. Conradie, ‘Healing in Soteriological Perspective’, Religion & Theology: A Journal of Contemporary Religious Discourse 13, no. 1 (2006): 3–22; Ernst M. Conradie, ‘The Salvation of the Earth from Anthropogenic Destruction: In Search of Appropriate Soteriological Concepts in an Age of Ecological Destruction’, Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, Ecology 14, nos. 2–3 (2010): 111–40. 20 For an overview of these projects, see Ernst M. Conradie, ‘The UWC Reception of Gustaf Aulén’s Christus Victor Typology’, Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 95, no. 2 (2019): 79–92; Demaine Solomons, ‘Reconciliation as a Controversial Symbol: An Analysis of a Theological Discourse in South Africa between 1968 and 2010’ (PhD diss., UWC/Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2018). 16

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colloquium on the legacy of Aulén, with UWC staff and students participating. It was held in Lund, Sweden, in April 2014. Why such interest in Aulén? This not only has to do with his retrieval of the victory of Christ over evil but also because his typology offered a way to hold together liberation, reconciliation, and reconstruction. How? The intuition behind retrieving Aulén’s typology is that his ‘classic’, ‘Latin’, and ‘modern’ types may be correlated with the three soteriological concepts identified here – liberation, reconciliation, and reconstruction and development. In other words, his typology offered the conceptual tools to understand the underlying tensions within contemporary soteriological debates. The interest is not in Aulén as such nor in an accurate interpretation of his typology but in the creative adaptation of his analysis to address contextual needs. In short, this is based on the following observations. There are some situations where it has become impossible to continue with business as usual if an immediate problem is not addressed. In South Africa, the standard example is that it was not really possible to address the challenges around education, health, poverty, or the like unless the oppressive system of apartheid came to an end. Numerous soteriological images address such immediate threats, including (in no specific order) being held ransom, being enslaved, being attacked by gangsters, being caught up in violent conflict, tyranny, imperial occupation, starving, thirsting in the desert, drowning, being trapped in paedophile relationships, terminal diseases, psychological affliction, spreading pandemics, demonic possession, toxic pollution, and so forth. In each case, there is a present predicament so overwhelming that no future seems possible without the specific predicament being addressed first. In the biblical roots of the Christian tradition, images abound that address such a Sitz-im-Leben: the liberation of slaves or captives, liberation from tyranny, healing, exorcism, ransom, feeding, military victory, and even the resurrection of the dead. The focus is clearly on victory over evil and death (Aulén’s classic type), symbolized by the resurrection of Christ. In the South African context, the metaphor of ‘liberation’ captures what is at stake here. In more recent times, many argued that (former president) Jacob Zuma ‘must fall’ in order to address the widespread corruption associated with ‘state capture’. Without that, there is no going forward. There are other situations where the focus shifts from a present predicament to the legacy of the past. There is no going forward unless previous cases of oppression and injustices that continue to undermine current relationships are addressed for the sake of a ‘healing of memories’. Victory over evil is never complete in this dispensation, especially if the past continues to shape the present. In the South African context, such a past includes imperial conquest, colonial rule, and apartheid. The only way forward to address the injustices of the past is through restitution, but this is often no longer possible. There is an obvious need to give back what can be given back, but over time this becomes ever harder because the impact of past injustices becomes dispersed, even though such injustices also become aggravated if justice is delayed. How, then, does one address that which can no longer be given back (what is called the ‘deficit’ at UWC21)? Again, many biblical examples address such situations,

See Ernst M. Conradie, ed., Reconciliation as a Guiding Vision for South Africa? (Stellenbosch: SUN Press, 2013). This deficit is constituted by what can never be given back and requires four components: restitution (goods that can still be returned), compensation (for specific cases of harm done), restoration (where creative responses are needed to 21

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including indebtedness, violating the dignity of another (or the name of God), and longterm intergroup conflict in which both parties have become complicit (e.g. between Jews and Samaritans). This prompts soteriological images such as paying for debt on behalf of another, mediating in conflict, symbolic sacrifices, some form of satisfaction (i.e. doing enough to restore a relationship), penal substitution, vicarious suffering, and dying on behalf of others. The aim of such processes is always reconciliation in one form or another, but then with the dual recognition that reconciliation without justice is impossible and that full justice can never be accomplished. Aulén’s maligned ‘Latin’ type comes to mind here. There are yet other situations where the realization gradually emerges that victory over evil is always partial and that the injustices of the past will prevail, at least to some extent. The victims of yesterday may well become the perpetrators of tomorrow. To seek to eradicate evil completely will only exacerbate evil, given the instruments employed. How, then, does one continue in the present to create a better future while recognizing such limitations? Again, numerous biblical examples address this realization: consider the role of the law, wisdom literature, prophetic admonishments, Jesus’ teachings to his disciples, and Pauline imperatives and pastoral injunctions. None of these suggests compromises with evil, but all seek to find a way forward amid current challenges. Following Aulén’s ‘modern’ type from Abelard onwards, this has been understood as the imitation of Christ, moral influence, the messianic way, the social gospel, non-violent resistance, and so forth. In the South African context, this has been understood by some as the need for ‘moral regeneration’ to strengthen the moral fabric of society following the social impact of apartheid. It has more readily been understood as the need for reconstruction and development. The focus is clearly on the example of Christ and, thus, the symbol of the incarnation. At best, the cross becomes a matter of counting the costs, while the resurrection symbolizes the hope for building a better society. Often this approach becomes secularized so that the religious symbolism is underplayed. It should be clear from this discussion that the three symbols of liberation, reconciliation, and reconstruction speak to distinct situations, are often in direct conflict with each other, and that the legitimacy of each can be recognized because of how they address present predicaments, the legacy of the past, and prospects for a better future. How, then, are these related to the doctrine of creation?

And creation, then? The earth in God’s economy The Christian Faith and the Earth project commenced in 2007. This was an international collaborative project to reflect on the content and significance of the Christian faith from the perspective of contemporary ecotheology. Various working groups did some preparatory work that culminated in a conference hosted by UWC in 2012.22 The project covered all aspects

address the injustices of the more distant past), and reconciliation (which requires a process of giving and receiving to heal a broken relationship). 22 The plenary papers were published in Ernst M. Conradie, Sigurd Bergmann, Celia E. Deane-Drummond, and Denis Edwards, eds, Christian Faith and the Earth: Current Paths and Emerging Horizons in Ecotheology (London: T&T Clark, 2014).

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of the Christian faith, but most of the energy went into methodological discussion and an understanding of the relationship between God’s works of creation and salvation. All scholars working in the field of Christian ecotheology would seek the salvation of the earth to counter escapist notions of salvation from the earth. Nevertheless, it soon became evident that it is far more difficult to do justice to both God’s work of creation and of salvation than what the motto ‘saving the Earth’ seems to suggest. Why is this the case? In the Nicene Creed, an ‘and’ links the first and second articles: ‘And in one Lord, Jesus Christ .  .  .’. In the early centuries of the Christian tradition, this ‘and’ evokes christological controversies – how could both the Father and the Son be called ‘God’? Such controversies often missed the point that Jesus is not only divine, but that God is like Jesus – even though he died young, in a remote Roman province, without children, possessions, writings, or even followers (except for his mother and a prostitute). This ‘and’ harbours at least four further longstanding theological problems regarding the relationship between creation and salvation. (The difference between these problems emerges once a distinction between the act of creating [creation], the created reality [creatura], and the creator is recognized.) A first problem is epistemological: Does knowledge of God as saviour precede knowledge of God as creator so that the one is an extrapolation of the other? Or does knowledge of God as saviour presume a notion of the divine that precedes experiences of salvation? In the African context, this is by no means an innocent question. The underlying problem is best expressed by Mercy Amba Oduyoye, the mother of African women’s theology, in a profound question: ‘Is the God of our redemption the same God of our creation?’23 This question is born from the African quest for continuity between a pre-Christian African notion of the Supreme Being as creator and the Christian message of redemption that took root in Africa following the work of western missionaries. Since the earliest Bible translators used the same word and name for the God of our ancestors and for the God of Christian proclamation, there appears to be some continuity, but, given the legacy of colonialism, there are certainly also deep tensions in this regard. A second problem concerns how the act of creating is related to the act of saving. In the past, these acts were regarded as discrete events, so separating them tended to either marginalize creation theology (as a stage for the history of salvation) or assign priority to creation so that salvation amounts to the restoration of what was created (the orders of creation) – which typically legitimized reigning interests, a fact well illustrated by apartheid theology. In response, the contemporary tendency is to fuse the acts of creating and saving so that creation is portrayed as salvific (establishing order amid chaos), while salvation is regarded as creative (bringing forth new life in deadening situations). This tends to undermine the distinction between creator and creature with far-reaching secularizing implications. Consider these questions: What is being saved? Where does salvation come from? Who is the saviour? How is this saviour related to what is being saved? How does such salvation become possible – from the inside or the outside? Neither fusion nor separation offers a way forward. A third problem focuses on the impact of salvation on the created reality. There may be some consensus that salvation cannot be understood in a Gnostic way as salvation

Mercy A. Oduyoye, Hearing and Knowing: Theological Reflections on Christianity in Africa (Nairobi: Acton Publishers, 2000), 75. 23

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from creation but rather only as the salvation of God’s beloved creation. But this is still understood in very different ways, depending on how evolutionary history is factored in and how the problem of natural suffering is addressed. There are at least four options here that are embedded in different confessional traditions and theological schools. A typically Reformed strategy is to say that salvation restores creation. Still, the question remains as to what exactly is being restored: the pristine beginning, a particular phase in evolutionary history, the ability to flourish, or something else? A Roman Catholic option is to think of grace as elevating nature, while the Orthodox tradition argues for a divinization of nature (theosis). It remains doubtful that this strategy can do justice to what is material, bodily, and earthly, while the self-divinization of the God-species (Homo deus) characterizes the advent of the Anthropocene. An Anabaptist strategy is to think of replacement, thus emphasizing the problem of natural suffering in hoping for an entirely new dispensation. This necessarily underplays the continuity between creation and new creation. A more secular option is to think of salvation as recycling; that is, of salvation as an ongoing process through which creation is allowed to replenish itself. Each of these strategies remains deeply flawed, albeit for different reasons. A final problem concerns the identity of the creator and saviour. In the Nicene formulation, one has to speak of the ‘triune creator’ since the Father is confessed to be the creator of heaven and earth, the Son is the one through whom all things were made, while the Spirit is the giver of life.24 Despite the ecumenical status of the Nicene Creed, there is no ecumenical consensus on the relationship between the three articles. Put very briefly, the problems pertaining to creation and salvation, as sketched earlier, plague the relationship between the first and the second article. The filioque controversy plagues the relationship between the second and the third article. There are deep divides in global Christianity on the question of whether or not the Spirit works (either also or even primarily) independently of Christ (or independently of the body of Christ).25 The relation between the first and the third article is also subject to controversy: The Spirit ‘proceeds’ (receives instructions) from the Father, but how is this to be understood in the context of religious plurality? Can there be common ground with other religious traditions regarding the Spirit that is harder to find with the Father or the Son? Again, there is no consensus in global Christianity on this problem. One may say that only a deeply trinitarian theology will do, but this is harder to find than what contemporary retrievals of the ‘social analogy’ acknowledge.26 The Christian Faith and the Earth project addressed these four problems, primarily through two edited volumes. The first of these offered a ‘mosaic’ of classic theological figures and movements, with chapters on Irenaeus of Lyons, Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine of Hippo, Maximus the Confessor, female medieval mystics, the Franciscan tradition, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. Each author portrayed

See Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998). For a discussion, see Ernst M. Conradie, ed., Notions and Forms of Ecumenicity in South Africa (Stellenbosch: SUN Press, 2013). 26 See Ernst M. Conradie, ‘Only a Fully Trinitarian Theology Will Do, But Where Can that Be Found?’, Ned Geref Teologiese Tydskrif 54, nos. 1–2 (2013): 1–9; Arnold A. van Ruler, ‘The Necessity of a Trinitarian Theology’, in Calvinist Trinitarianism and Theocentric Politics: Essays Towards a Public Theology, ed. and trans. John Bolt (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), 1–26. 24 25

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how these problems were ‘solved’ within these traditions, only to be disputed in other movements. The second volume offered a ‘companion’ on recent theological movements and a barometer of how these problems have been addressed since the late nineteenth century. It included chapters on Eastern Christian thought, Roman Catholic theologies, North Atlantic Lutheran theologies, West-European Reformed theologies, Nordic theologies, science and theology discourse, process and relational theologies, western ecofeminist theologies, North American perspectives from the margins, Latin American theologies, African theological perspectives, Asian theological perspectives, and Oceanic readings.27 It offered a bewildering array of contrasting perspectives, with some eighty-seven sections written by fifty-four authors from around the world. It illustrates how the relationship between creation and salvation remains a core problem for contemporary theology. In two monographs, I took this discussion forward from within the South African context. The first, entitled Saving the Earth? (2013), explored the notion of ‘re-creation’ as understood in radically different ways in the Reformed tradition of Swiss, Dutch, and German origin, and the disastrous reception of this tradition in the South African context.28 It was disastrous because apartheid theology emphasized creation (as creatura) and understood salvation accordingly, while the critique of apartheid in Reformed theology emphasized reconciliation but paid scant attention to creation theology. This has serious implications for the ability to respond to several contemporary challenges that cannot be addressed without an adequate doctrine of creation (e.g. on sexual orientation). The volume aimed to understand the complexity of this set of problems, not to resolve them. A more constructive argument was presented in The Earth in God’s Economy (2015).29 This may be understood as a form of narrative theology in which the story of God’s work is sketched as a liturgical vision to articulate the deepest mystery of history. I identified seven ‘chapters’ in this story – creation, ongoing creation, the emergence of humanity and its distortion through sin, providence, salvation history, the church and its ministries and missions, and the expected consummation of God’s work. Creation and salvation are, therefore, only two of seven chapters. Justice can be done to both only if, like in the image of a juggler, all seven cones are kept in the air, allowing for distortions in one to be corrected by the others. I also offered a tentative way forward regarding the relationship between salvation and created reality through the wine-growing term ‘maturation’. In contrast to the categories of restoration, elevation, divinization, replacement, and recycling, as discussed earlier, the term ‘maturation’ recognizes the finitude of creatures and also their evolution over time. What is required is not endless continuation or exponential growth (or, for that matter, development) but instead reaching full maturation at multiple levels. Salvation is not equated with maturation but with addressing the many obstacles, given the impact of sin, that thwart the maturation of God’s beloved creatures.

Ernst M. Conradie, ed., Creation and Salvation, Volume 2: A Companion on Recent Theological Movements (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012). 28 Ernst M. Conradie, Saving the Earth? The Legacy of Reformed Views on ‘Re-creation’ (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2013). 29 Ernst M. Conradie, The Earth in God’s Economy: Creation, Salvation and Consummation in Ecological Perspective (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2015). 27

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So, what is the question? Implications for contemporary creation theology The discussion earlier indicates the complexity of approaching any creation theology. In many ways, the question has become what the appropriate question really is.30 And, some would add, ‘So what?’ Some creation theologies focus on the question of whether the world was indeed created. In the past, this question was addressed in philosophical conversations with atheist critics, often with the help of natural theology. Nowadays, this question drives discourse on theology and the natural sciences with specific reference to quantum cosmology. Some creation theologies focus on how the world was created. Traditionally, theologians affirmed the role of divine decrees (by word), while nowadays, this question elicits debates with geology and evolutionary biology, with positions ranging from creationism and intelligent design, to deism to theistic evolution. Some suggest that the most significant question is who created. This allows for a form of doxology for the triune creator but also for polemics with rival claims, thus inviting discourse on religious plurality. Many creation theologies reflect on the meaning of the activity or process of creating and thus enter into discussions on the connotations of letting be, ex nihilo, forming, separating, judging, blessing, vulnerability, birthing, co-creating, and so forth. Traditionally, the speculative question as to why God created elicited much discussion. Is creation merely for the sake of God’s own glory? Or for the sake of humans (a position widely criticized in ecotheology as anthropocentric)? Or out of the need for love? Or for the sake of the sabbath, the feast of creation?31 Finally, there is also considerable interest in the question of what God created. This can go into diverse directions – for example, light (energy), stars, planets, natural ‘resources’, plants, animals, the human animal only, being the image of God, angels, the invisible, the orders of creation. For various reasons, humans do not really know that or what God created. Humans were not there ‘in the beginning’ and so have no privileged revealed information in this regard. Given cosmic and biological evolution, what God created cannot be regarded as static (not even if the Genesis creation narratives are taken literally), so no one phase can be selected as normative. What God presumably created is an evolutionary process rather than some thing. The world, as observed, is messed up by sin but has also been shaped by the history of salvation. Human knowledge of the world is also deeply infected by sin. A distinction between what God has presumably created and what may be humanity’s own doing is, therefore, somewhat arbitrary and subject to ideological distortion. Given these observations, my thesis is that ‘creation’ is best regarded as a deeply counterintuitive but nevertheless profound re-description and ascription of the world as humans experience it. The Christian confession of faith in the triune creator thus:

See Ernst M. Conradie, ‘What on Earth Did God Create? Overtures to an Ecumenical Theology of Creation’, The Ecumenical Review 66, no. 4 (2014): 433–53. 31 See Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1985).

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offers a way of perceiving the world, a way of seeing by seeing as, a cosmological and liturgical vision¸ an interpretative framework, a way of making sense of reality around us. In short, it confesses that the world as we know it in all its grandeur and misery, its ironies and ambiguities, its delights and its distress, its panache and its pain, its inadequacies and injustices, the ecstatic dance of creatures amidst death and destruction, belongs to the triune God.32 On this basis, it affirms that this world is God’s beloved creation. It is nothing but the household (oikos) of the triune God. This suggests that through God’s eyes, that which is material, bodily, and earthly is precious to the Father, is worth dying for by the Son,33 and is being sanctified by the Spirit. If only what is regarded as beautiful is focused on, this becomes a platitude. However, if this is a comment about rapists and rape victims, torturers and the tortured, slave owners and slaves, Adolf Hitler and the like, one’s own children and those of others who are dying from hunger, the severely handicapped, the second pelican chick, diseases like Covid-19, to mention only a few examples, such a re-description becomes deeply disturbing and challenging. One simply has to tell the rest of the story, given the tension between the affirmation and the palpable evidence. Likewise, the ascription of the world to the triune God raises further questions. Such ascription implies that the world does not have its ultimate origin, current existence, and ultimate destiny in itself, but rather that this rests in the God whom humans know best through Jesus, the Christ. However, how could this messed-up world be the creation of this God, given this God’s identity and character? It is even less self-evident that this God is the creator than the claim that this God is a saviour. Again, such a doxological confession is deeply counter-intuitive but profound: it expresses trust in this God, despite whatever is seen. This chapter is, therefore, an attempt to distinguish clearly between creation and salvation, but in such a way that these two aspects of God’s work are held together. Likewise, it recognizes the need to hold together an array of soteriological images symbolized by the categories of liberation, reconciliation, and reconstruction. This is only possible if the world is held together by God’s love. In the concise words of John’s Gospel: ‘For God so loved the world . . .’ (Jn 3.16). Further reading Boff, Leonardo. Ecology and Liberation: A New Paradigm. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995. Chung, Meehyun. Liberation and Reconciliation: Feminist Theology’s Relevance for Korea. Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2014. Conradie, Ernst M. and Hilda P. Koster, eds. T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change. London: T&T Clark, 2019. Edwards, Denis. Christian Understandings of Creation: The Historical Trajectory. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017. Gebara, Ivone. Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999. Tinker, George E. Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004.

Conradie, ‘What on Earth Did God Create?’, 441. Italics in original. See Douglas J. Hall, The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2003), 24, 31. 32 33

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CHAPTER 28 TIME AND ETERNITY

Ephraim Radner

Introduction: Historical bodies and eternal beings In his small treatise De Pigneribus (c. 1120), Guibert de Nogent wrote a scathing attack on certain purported relics of Jesus’ body. At issue, in particular, was the relic of one of Jesus’ baby teeth in Saint-Médard of Soissons. For Guibert, Jesus’ resurrection necessarily included the complete range of his incarnated existence, umbilicus, foreskin, teeth, hair, and the rest. All were taken up into heaven in one moment, and there could be no teeth, infant or otherwise, left behind. Otherwise, Guibert argued, multiple resurrections would be required, not just for Jesus’ own discarded physical bits and pieces but for all persons and their developmental anatomical detritus. Furthermore, how might the Eucharist present Christ’s body whole if there were portions of it still scattered about the earth encased in reliquaries? Defenders of the Holy Tooth, however, saw these physical traces of Jesus, laid away in time, as necessary and, in a sense, awesome, signs of Jesus’ fleshly mutability, the ‘suffered’ growth of his own physical self, and hence of his incarnate passion in its cosmic reach. Tooth and Cross were inextricably bound together.1 The recondite debate of the Holy Tooth was, on a deep level, about the ongoing character and value of a passing temporal reality with respect to salvation and its eternal significance. What is the significance of past moments given in a sequence of developing human experience? Are the moments of the past contained in the present? Are they assumed in a future? Are they integrated, and if so how, within the eternity of God? The problem is ultimately not one of teeth but of whole persons, in their temporally constructed forms, with moments of joy as well as those of suffering and despondency, some of which can overwhelm the others in proportion, and, in their ‘final’ temporal form, can be abruptly left hanging. The fate of these forms gives the nexus of time–eternity its compelling urgency. Indeed, this fate – what happens to time itself – defines the reality of what in this chapter will be dubbed ‘timeliness’, the textured character of created life in time, with its meanings and perplexities. ‘Timeliness’ in this context combines two historic usages of the term: first, temporality itself as a kind of category; second, temporality’s specificities, in their unique and unrepeatable forms, that are thus ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in their consequential configurations. These would include the ‘time such as this’ in Est. 4.14 and the ‘perfected’ or ‘fulfilled’ time of Gal. 4.4, but also the ‘wrong times’ that had been better missed (Mk 14.21). Timeliness refers to times that are broken, regretted, remembered, and enjoyed, with their words, smells, atmospheric pressures,

See William MacLehose, ‘The Holy Tooth: Dentition, Childhood Development, and the Cult of the Christ Child’, in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha Es Et O, ed. Theresa M. Kenney and Mary Dzon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 201–23. 1

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and lustres. It is the nature of these elements that is centrally at issue in theological discussions of time and eternity. There has been no single view on the fate of time, or of timeliness, among Christians. Despite Guibert’s protestations, the popular ideas of Jesus’ infant tooth moved in a quite specific direction of response which, even if it could not quite make sense of the relic, ended by providing a rich understanding of created time and eternity that this chapter will finally commend, though only in conversation with other claims, and with an acknowledgement of its difficult contours. That view, which trades on the notion of Christ’s own body and person as being somehow collective of all bodies and persons and thus of all times and their scriptural referents, becomes traditional in both Catholic evangelical christocentrism and Protestant scripturalism.

The untimely dead This section returns to the question of Jesus’ infant body and its moments and parts, and reflects on human children more widely in their created limitations. If a child dies, ‘who’ is it that dwells – if at all – in the realm of the supratemporal, understood as an ‘after life’, or ‘heaven’, or ‘eternity’ itself? Such questions are hardly abstract reflections: today, children are both granted legal value based on their ‘potential’ economic contributions, as well as given ‘rights’ based on their ‘as is’ being. These two assessments sit uneasily together in the sphere of social policy.2 Furthermore, these questions have permeated human experience because of the predominance of infant and child mortality until recently. Contemporary demographers estimate that, until the twentieth century, almost 50 per cent of the world’s children died before reaching the age of fifteen (half of these in their first year).3 The experience of such widespread death darkly streaked the consciousness of those who suffered loss and drove religious consideration of the matter with an unrelenting urgency that has waned only in the past century. In the early 1850s, the American Reformed theologian Henry Harbaugh (1817–67) set about calculating the number of dead children who, in human history, might somehow now be swept up into the currents of the afterlife. Based on an estimated 140 generations since Adam, and the demographic theories of the famous eighteenth-century German physician and inventor of ‘macrobiotics’ Christophe Hufeland, Harbaugh came up with the figure of fourteen billion ‘infants in Heaven! – a number which no imagination can grasp’.4 He emphasized the obvious disproportions of regret this implied, for ‘as on all trees, there are more blossoms in spring-time than there are ripe fruits in autumn so there are more infants than adults that drop away from the circles of earthly love’.5 Everyone, and every culture, has had some notion of the fate of dead infants and thus of time

See Jens Qvortrup, ‘Are Children Human Beings or Human Becomings? A Critical Assessment of Outcome Thinking’, Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali 117, nos. 3–4 (2009): 631–53. 3 See Anthony A. Volk and Jeremy A. Atkinson, ‘Infant and Child Death in the Human Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation’, Evolution and Human Behavior 34, no. 3 (2013): 182–92. 4 Henry Harbaugh, The Heavenly Home; Or, The Employments and Enjoyments of the Saints in Heaven (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1853), 351. 5 Harbaugh, The Heavenly Home, 351. 2

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and eternity in a concrete manner. Concerning dead children, there have historically been at least three main views. Mostly lost A common view among ancient Greeks and Romans, familiar to early Christians, was that dead children are simply ‘lost’ creatures. Non-Jewish and non-Christian views of the ‘afterlife’ in the ancient world were diverse, unsystematic, often confused and contradictory, and thus, with respect to children, much given to the stoking of parental anxiety. There were vague hopes for a post-mortem existence of relative peace, much concern with post-mortem judgement and suffering, and a general sense that dead children had no part of either.6 Often it was felt that their spirits hovered on the threshold of the netherworld, caught in a nebulous web of unformed spirit, their truncated existences incapable of achieving the resolutions for good or ill of a full life. The ahoroi – the untimely dead – joined the host of the violently murdered to wander aimlessly in the corridors of time’s deracinated echoes, coming back as ghosts, perhaps, or simply casting their wails through space. For some, this wretched lot lasted only for as long as the dead child’s spirit needed to reach a full lifespan; then might come an ‘adult’ judgement and, if lucky, an ill-defined peace. Funerary monuments might express regretful love, but there was little hope for more than regret. There are hints, here and there, of imagined nether joys – images of a dead child playing with toys by the side of death’s river. But little else. Seneca chides his friend Marullus who mourns his infant child: ‘You are like a woman in the way that you take your son’s death; what would you do if you had lost an intimate friend? A son, a little child of unknown promise, is dead; a fragment of time has been lost.’7 Perfected The Christian resurrection faith pressed in another direction. Tertullian, for one, rejected the notion of the wandering ghosts of the ahoroi, and after Augustine, the general sense was that a resurrected body – whether of an infant or a senile elder – would rise in the form of physical perfection, which was defined in terms of a ‘mature youth’.8 The growing reflection on human purpose in terms of the ‘beatific vision’, an unimpeded creaturely contemplation of God, meant that human capacities after death required extension and flourishing, moving beyond the constricted rationality of children to penetrate modes of being, like God’s, that were not bound to temporal limitations. For Thomas Aquinas, the category of angelic existence, though

See Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 190–9; Danuta Shanzer, ‘Voices and Bodies: The Afterlife of the Unborn’, Numen 56, nos. 2–3 (2009): 326–65; Sarah I. Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 7 Cited in Margaret King, ‘Commemoration of Infants on Roman Funerary Inscriptions’, in The Epigraphy of Death: Studies in the History and Societies of Greece and Rome, ed. Graham J. Oliver (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 145. 8 Tertullian, The Soul, 56–7. See J. H. Waszink, ed. and trans., Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani De Anima (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 564–86; Arthur D. Nock, ‘Tertullian and the Ahori’, Vigiliae Christianae 4, no. 3 (1950): 129–41; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), III (Suppl.), Q. 81, Art. 1. 6

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distinct from the heavenly resurrected life of embodied human beings, provided a benchmark for post-mortem experience. The difficult integration, therefore, of creaturely time and divine eternity became a key area of reflection.9 Perfected humanity, however, could be conceived in terms other than of bodily and mental form, however transfigured. The Christian Platonist outlook, most influentially reflected in Boethius (c. 477–524), focused on redeemed existence more in terms of participation in the Good – that is, through sapiential contemplation of God – than in the fulfilment of creaturely form.10 Such participation could be enjoyed within temporal life to a real degree, would be consummated beyond death, and thus, quite deliberately, questions of unfulfilled temporal lifespans could be left to the side. Boethius expresses his greatest human joy and fatherly pride in his sons’ achievements as young adults.11 Yet, in the quite sorrowful face of his ruined career and approaching execution, in the shadow of which he wrote his greatest work, philosophy’s ‘consolation’ is precisely the reality of a Good that stands beyond the disappointments of temporal vicissitude. This is not Seneca: the Good, who is God, contains, after all, the fullness of all temporal realities in a kind of simultaneous grasp – ‘eternity’.12 To participate in God’s life is thus to transcend the particulars of this or that ‘time’ and to somehow know the ‘whole’ as a singular entity. This notion of eternity-as-divine simultaneity became classic in Christian philosophy and remains a major orientation of thought. In any case, for Boethius’ God, children are not mere ‘fragments’: they are bound to God’s life simply by being at all; made in time, that are caught up in the whole of God’s single creative act. On the other hand, children have no need for some further life, and the question of their resurrected being (or anybody else’s) does not arise with compulsion. Normative Christianity in the west, through the Middle Ages, maintained an uneasy grasp of both aspects of post-mortem ‘perfection’: accomplished maturity and eternal participation. The vivid articulations of heaven and hell, the promise and threat of baptism as key to one or the other, meant that dead children remained the focus of intense worry and imaginative hopes; while adults could, at the same time, seek solace in the eternal present of God’s goodness. ‘This’ life, marked by its few years and then evident temporal termination, stood as a contrast to the ‘something else’ that constituted judgement, heaven, hell, and, finally, the limbo of unbaptized infants. What exactly that ‘something else’ amounted to was driven by the emotional demands of parents, priests, and scholars in varying ways.13

See Richard Cross, ‘Angelic Time and Motion: Bonaventure to Duns Scotus’, in A Companion to Angels in Medieval Philosophy, ed. Tobias Hoffmann (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 117–47. Thomas, however, did not equate heaven and hell, in their human habitation, with ‘eternity’ itself but rather as somehow temporal in a different metaphysical dimension, and hence patent of human experience. See Aquinas, ST, 1, Q. 10, Art. 3. 10 Boethius, ‘Consolation of Philosophy’, in Theological Tractates: The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 128–411. On participation in the Good, see Boethius, ‘Consolation of Philosophy’, 225–97. 11 Boethius, ‘Consolation of Philosophy’, 185. For more on Boethius’ views of time, see John Marenbon, Boethius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 125–45. 12 Boethius, ‘Consolation of Philosophy’, 399–411. 13 See Francis A. Sullivan, ‘The Development of Doctrine about Infants Who Die Unbaptized’, Theological Studies 72, no. 1 (2011): 3–14. 9

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Restored and enjoyed The post-Reformation and finally modern approach to dead children narrativized this uneasy combination of perfected bodies and contemplative timelessness. These developments track with the expansion of theodical burdens and (in the west) the search for domestic peace.14 In general, in developing modernity there is a growing hope for the restoration of dead children, in heaven, to their childlike affections. This hearkens back, in a now-thoroughly resolved way, to the pagan anxieties of the ahoroi: Christians had become convinced that those untimely dead would rise to a timely – not just fulfilled – life.15 At the same time, this notion of restoration, where parents will be reunited with their children and renew their affective relationships, takes up a long tradition of child saints and the virtuous power of infantile innocence that persisted from the early church. Heaven is populated by the purity and faith of the young.16 The picture of heaven as a divinized domestic dwelling became not only widely popularized in the nineteenth century but also elaborately theologized.17 The restoration of the lost and the fulfilled enjoyment of a fractured and truncated temporal set of personal loves remains the most persistent Christian conception of the ‘afterlife’. Modern Roman Catholic disengagement of the never-quite-dogmatized notion of limbo reflects this pressure, even if its meaning is still not, officially, quite resolved. The tradition of Jesus’ life of infantile experience, teeth and all, remains something with continual purchase in this modern sensibility. Children, simply as children, are granted a kind of divine permanence precisely through the incarnate adoption of their limitations by Jesus. While devotion to the ‘child Jesus’ is medieval in origin, its flourishing within the contours of domestic piety is modern. Modernity elaborated, furthermore, the way that every stage and moment of human life is similarly adopted by Jesus’ Incarnation, so that, even if cut off ‘prematurely’, it has been touched by the eternity of God. Children can thus, as children, ‘live forever’.18

See Ephraim Radner, A Profound Ignorance: Modern Pneumatology and its Anti-Modern Redemption (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2019). 15 More contemporary views about the fate of dead children still adhere to these hopes, although they are more personally held, and stand in some real tension with larger social outlooks. See David M. Pomfret, ‘“Closer to God”: Child Death in Historical Perspective’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8, no. 3 (2015): 355–77. Reformed and Evangelical theology had steadily moved in the direction of affirming the salvation of all infants, baptized or not. Cf. Benjamin Warfield, The Development of the Doctrine of Infant Salvation (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1891). 16 The greatest poem to the Holy Innocents was written by Charles Péguy in 1912. See Charles Péguy, The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems, trans. Pansy Pakenham (London: Harvill Press, 1959). 17 See Ann Douglas, ‘Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in the Northern United States, 1830–1880’, American Quarterly 26, no. 5 (1974): 496–515. Cf. Harbaugh, The Heavenly Home, 343–65. 18 The Ignatian tradition especially, with its meditative focus on the successive stages in the life of Jesus, gave particular impetus to this modern sensibility within Catholicism; but Protestant devotion picked this up imaginatively through, for example, profuse biblical pictorial illustrations, often shared with Catholics. See Celeste Brusati, Karl A. E. Enenkel, and Walter S. Melion, ‘Introduction: Scriptural Authority in Word and Image’, in The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, ed. Celeste Brusati, Karl A. E. Enenkel, and Walter S. Melion (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 1–46. On nineteenth-century applications of this to the sphere of domestic Christianity especially, see David O. Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 14

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Types of time for the untimely These three outlooks, with respect to dead children, do not only constitute a cultural array of pious postures of bereavement. Each assumes, if usually unconsciously, profound understandings of time, which remain debated by theologians and philosophers, but which – more importantly – continue to shape Christian belief and hope in the contemporary world. Moreover, standard introductions to the philosophy of time (as they discuss, for example, theorized ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ frameworks of temporality) are, beyond their abstractions and attempts at integrating modern mathematical physics into conceptual terms, in fact, articulating different forms of existential faith.19 Thus these more general frameworks can be summarized according to each of the above outlooks regarding dead children. Mostly lost time Behind the regretful consignment of dead children to a drifting disappearance is the general notion of what today is called ‘entropy’. The term – undergirding the Second Law of Thermodynamics – denotes the seemingly necessary and non-reversible movement from order to maximal disorder, initially at the microscopic level but more broadly applied to the cosmos as a whole. The principle of entropy, elaborated temporally, has been dubbed ‘time’s arrow’ (a phrase associated most famously with the astrophysicist Arthur Stanley Eddington), which articulates the experiential intuition that ‘time’ moves in only one direction; that is, that one cannot return to past times; and, furthermore, that this fundamental temporal movement must therefore be one of unremitting disappearance, of leaving things behind, including children.20 ‘Time’s arrow’, and the entropic cosmos it informs, challenge basic Christian claims precisely at the point where death and after-death are confronted. Antique notions of historical circularity (e.g. Stoic ideas) might seem to subvert the entropic premise, but not practically, as the intuitive notion of history’s experiential definitiveness is rarely abandoned. Even religious theories of metempsychosis cannot escape the fundamental belief that this life, in its particularities, is non-repeatable: when children die, they remain dead and gone just insofar as they are these children whom one might love and mourn. Contemporary cosmology, thus, maintains a strong conceptual and, finally, existential link to pre-Christian attitudes. Even the Stoic vision of cosmic circularities of coming and fiery going fit well with modern cosmological speculations regarding temporal infinities. Such temporal delimitation permits conceptual thresholds – the ‘big bang’ and perhaps an ultimate (and thus eventual nontemporal) entropic equilibrium – but these thresholds are, by definition, incapable of analysis, religious or otherwise. In contemporary physical categories, ‘endless time’ becomes both a reality and an empty horror together. There are the living who live in this or that limited manner, and then these living moments pass and disappear.

See Quentin Smith and L. Nathan Oaklander, Time, Change, and Freedom: An Introduction to Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 1995); Philip Turetzky, Time (London: Routledge, 1998); Sam Baron and Kristie Miller, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). 20 See Sean Carroll, ‘Does the Universe Need God?’, in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, ed. James B. Stump and Alan G. Padgett (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 185–97. 19

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It is a now-standard scholarly claim that the articulated doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is a post-biblical and mostly Christian theory. Among the motives for its elaboration appears at least to be the assertion of personal resurrection and the problems of temporality this assertion exposed.21 The horror of endless time, driven unidirectionally by the flow of history, was subverted by the hope of resurrection; but so, too, then, was time’s free-standing domination of experience. As matter was carefully delimited to creaturely status, so too was matter’s movement – the Aristotelian conception of time – also reduced to a creaturely aspect, subject to and congruent with the Divine will. With time now lifted up as a creature, eternity could be redefined simply in terms of the divine being and act that constitute the creature’s condition of existence. What God creates cannot, by the nature of the case, be ‘lost’. God may well destroy it, but that is a mark of eternal purpose, not of temporal contingency. The distinction is important because while creatio ex nihilo offers a clear promise, it also underlines a troubling fear ingredient to all life. Dead children may not simply leave their toys to disintegrate on Styx’s bank; yet their final fate lies in the hands of a God whose ordering of time includes time’s own potential annihilation, along with all the ‘fragments’ that had coloured its beauty. Christian hope, that is, required further temporal adjustments. Perfected time Resurrected maturity, ordered to the beatific vision, traded, as noted above, on two elements: the creation of fulfilled human capacities, and human participation in the divine reality of eternity, with its simultaneous grasp of all times. Both aspects, obviously, stand outside the pull of entropic purposelessness. The first element relies on the incomprehensible acts of a creator God; while the second describes the experience of living with such a God. It might be argued, however, that each derives its force from distinct notions of temporality. Turning initially to the second element – participation in divine eternality – its presuppositions can be linked to a clear metaphysical schema that, since Boethius certainly, has remained constant in Christian philosophy and has now embraced the conceptual framework that informs the specific space–time theories of modern physics. Often bundled together as the so-called ‘block theory’ of the universe, this framework posits a single reality of all space– time configurations – creation – analogized to a four-dimensional mass. Any given ‘slice’ of this block would constitute some piece of historical reality; but, in fact, these exist together as parts of an integrated whole that does not develop temporally, but that is configured only in terms of relationships between slices within the block. Taken as a whole – which God can do and does as their creator – these relationships to which are given the terms ‘before’ and ‘after’ are, in reality, an articulated singularity that can be conceived of in an infinite set of configurations from the divine perspective of the whole. Even before the advent of relativity theory, philosophers had speculated on how events might be conceived apart from some presumed independent temporal container and

See Michael Azkoul, ‘On Time and Eternity: The Nature of History According to the Greek Fathers’, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1968): 56–77; Brian D. Robinette, ‘The Difference Nothing Makes: Creatio Ex Nihilo, Resurrection, and Divine Gratuity’, Theological Studies 72, no. 3 (2011): 526–57. 21

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continuum such as Isaac Newton had theorized (time on the analogy of space).22 But while it is possible for entropic theorists to hold to the block theory – burdened, like all others since Boethius, with worries over how the simultaneous givenness of all times can escape the threat of a deterministic universe – it is only theists who can imagine a human transposition to a perspective that can transcend the entropic experience. That is, only theists can assert that lostness is not itself a necessary aspect of the block (however determined its aspects may be), for there is a reality, God, who stands outside the totality, and whose ‘realm’ can somehow be shared even with the block’s constituents. This position is taken up especially by Christian physicists and philosophers, and it permits, in some way, the possibility of a beatific vision.23 A key issue is the status of the ‘slices’, the particularities of this or that life lived. Part of the block theory’s imagery is that of varying perspectives of a given whole, perspectives that God or someone participating in God’s vision might hold. Yet the elements variously perceived are nonetheless fixed within the block of reality and do not clearly intersect. Some Christian thinkers do not see this as a problem for hope – precisely in their fixity, specific lives are made ‘definitive’; though they may seem isolated, they never disappear from their divine apprehension. They are ‘eternal’ in that respect, ever before the eyes and heart of God, even if distant from the perception of others.24 While there may be comfort in this thought for some, that ‘just this life’ is absolutely settled within reality, for others, it would appear that, as eternally fixed, the short lives of infants who die, in this case, are thus eternally minimized. It is possible, then, if the block theory is taken in a determining way, to see life lived and lost as, quite literally, ‘all there is’. The tooth of the infant Jesus becomes, in this context, an artefact of transience rather than a sacrament of the fullness of God. However, traditional Christian philosophers try to avoid such a conclusion.25 One might, for instance, emphasize the distinctive character of the two modes of reality, eternity and time – the former including the divine simultaneity of all moments (the infinite slices of created reality), including those of ‘possible worlds’; the second constituting the creaturely and temporal experience of just some of these moments. Here one could rely on divine omnipotence (a corollary of the tradition of creatio ex nihilo) to overcome concerns about the interaction of these two modes and insist thus on divine intimacy with every moment: as God, God can, in a way that creatures cannot, be utterly present to each definitive moment of the block; which, of course also means that each moment has some bridge to the eternal. Time is not, on this theory – and in distinction from a Neoplatonist perspective – ‘the moving image of eternity’, construed in emanationist terms. Instead, time is its own integral – created – constitution of being that does not so much reflect God as lie in the creating God’s power to engage. There are two issues here, at least. First, the notion of divine omnipotence supervening on human transience implies a divine mode of reality that cannot simply be stated using temporal

Most influentially, an article by the English philosopher John McTaggart has continued to provoke discussion. See John M. E. McTaggart, ‘The Unreality of Time’, Mind 17 (1908): 457–74. 23 See Russell Stannard, ‘God in and beyond Space and Time’, in Science and the Renewal of Belief (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2004), 143–60. 24 See Mikel Burley, ‘Eternal Life as an Exclusively Present Possession: Perspectives from Theology and the Philosophy of Time’, Sophia 55 (2016): 145–61. 25 See Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, ‘Eternity’, The Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 8 (1981): 429–58; Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, ‘Eternity, Awareness, and Action’, Faith and Philosophy 9, no. 4 (1992): 463–82. 22

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categories (e.g. endless, simultaneous). This is an important caveat, for it precludes a simplistic via negativa means of construing eternity. Instead, the notion of a completely ‘other’ eternal mode makes space for a host of both scriptural and human relational claims about reality, which seem to imply temporal-like elements in what is nonetheless an extra-temporal realm. Second, just this extra-temporal divine reality is what founds the possibility of God’s eternity as somehow including, through both creation and presence, the full range of temporal moments and their textured sensibility. Divine extra-temporality, in this view, is comprehensive of the richness of creaturely interaction, incompletion, uncertainty, and temporal extinction, sometimes and limitedly bound to traces of human memory. In short, love and loss, hope and despair, and coming and going are all elements God eternally grasps in some fundamental creative relationship. If dead children are somehow ‘perfected’, it is possible, then, that this perfection does not destroy the particularities of their temporally bounded existences, which are both given by God and bound to God eternally in a basic way. To be sure, proponents of perfected time do not usually press this line of thought – one along which divine eternity is viewed as itself always retaining divine ‘timeliness’ within it, wretched and exhilarating times whose pressures and endings themselves constitute their meaning. Instead, even though progressive views of creaturely eternity, like Gregory of Nyssa’s, may well maintain temporal differentiation as a part of the resurrected life, this is usually expressed in terms of leaving temporal things behind, even as new things are taken in within the maturing vision of God, a vision that no longer includes the delicate edges of the transient, its tears and passions.26 Restored and enjoyed time In modern times, many people think that family relationships may be restored after death – one in which dead children might once again play and laugh with their parents and siblings. Nineteenth-century reflection on such themes, with their dated images of, among other things, gender roles and class mythologies, makes easy targets for today’s cultural critics. Restored time, furthermore, operates within its own conceptual frameworks of temporality that philosophers have derided. Eschatological restoration and enjoyment, it is argued, depends on crude versions of ‘endless’ time (as with the ancients) that is simply tidied up. Bernard Williams, in a celebrated anti-religious essay, argued that the sanitized ‘immortality’ connected with such endless time would be inherently ‘tedious’ and certainly not desirable.27 Oddly, though, Williams upholds one important element that stands behind the Christian restorationist impulse while ignoring

Gregory of Nyssa’s views on the soul’s eternal progress (epektasis) can be found, and accessibly explicated, in Gregory of Nyssa, From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings, trans. Herbert Musurillo (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961). Process views, which completely temporalize God, end up doing something similar: while change may well carry traces of the past (especially if these might be, as perhaps with Christ, paradigmatic of reality’s evolving direction), it is the future and its ever-unique instantiations that carry value. These are difficult concepts to sort out. See, for example, Robert L. Kinast, ‘Resurrection or Prehension of the Body?’, Anglican Theological Review 65, no. 2 (1983): 131–43. 27 Bernard Williams, ‘The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality’, in Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 82–100. 26

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another that, just in its Christian presuppositions, maintains the first as a coherent metaphysical possibility. First, in analysing the supposed tedium of immortality, Williams valorizes the thickness of ‘just this [mortal] life’, which ‘immortality’ seems to flatten out. Domestic heaven will be repugnantly boring, Williams claims, simply because it is not the intricately challenging and limited life that mortality represents. In this, he is theoretically correct. But his argument regarding immortality’s endless tedium neglects the Christian claim regarding the reality of God as the very provider, and perhaps even the constitution, of this mortal life’s existential thickness, something that a notion of God’s intrinsic timeliness might well integrate within an eternalized temporal sphere. In any case, as has been indicated, the intuitions behind a belief in a domestic heaven are deeply rooted in pre-Christian yearnings and were, despite counteracting commitments within Christian theology, consistently held onto by believers over the centuries. While there is a simplistic way of imagining a domestic heaven in terms of a continued and unending temporal existence in a non-material mode, most popular Christian theologians and preachers who engaged this topic realized that there were metaphysical and experiential complexities at work in such a hope that entertained rich, rather than constricted, conceptualities. The Mercersburg Reformed theologian Henry Harbaugh was a crystalline example of such sophistication. His writing was scripturally ordered, philosophically aware, ecclesiastically ecumenical, and pastorally and existentially sensitive. In all, he wrote an extensive trilogy on heaven, the final and most popular volume of which, The Heavenly Home, laid out concretely the domestic frame of his interest: earthly loves and losses are the stuff of the created being, for eternity as much as within the ‘fleeting’ world of time. Harbaugh was able to engage traditional understandings of the beatific vision’s supratemporal subsumption of all shadows, ‘representations’, ‘reflections’, and – unlike the temporary hold of such sight by the disciples on Mt Tabor – the completely binding character of its apprehension of God.28 Yet scripture’s insistence on resurrected ‘bodies’, including ‘glorified’ ones, implied, for Harbaugh, some kind of enfigurated individual persistence. ‘Worship’ in heaven, as Revelation depicts it, must have some kind of ‘form’; Harbaugh concluded this to be a personal engagement and communication, as opposed to what he rejected as a view of divine union reducible to some ‘sublimated spiritualism’.29 Eternity, and its heavenly frame, is a reality in which time is complexly enfolded, rather than unravelled into now simple lines of display, largely because of the nature of the God who has created all. A domestic heaven, with its embodied encounters and engagements, is thus not less, but more experientially, thick than the temporal world of which it is so difficult to make sense, yet within which humans instantiate the infinite value of their created existence. Harbaugh’s discussions are unrelentingly concrete, pastoral, and scriptural, even as they allude to difficult concepts underlying them. And these concepts, while somewhat protean, have nonetheless held the attention of more contemporary thinkers. In the wake, particularly, of Karl Barth’s trinitarian re-centring of theology, writers as diverse as Robert Jenson and Jürgen Moltmann have presented often complex descriptions of temporal-like experience as somehow

Harbaugh, The Heavenly Home, 291. Harbaugh, The Heavenly Home, 300.

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intrinsic to God’s life.30 For Barth, God’s ‘eternity’, given in the divine trinitarian reality, has its own sui generis beginning, middle, and end, which, in the Incarnation, enters into the temporally desiccated reaches of contingency and pulls them upward, but only because their edges are now taken on by Christ. This non-Hegelian trinitarian framework for understanding eternity and its relationship with created temporality has proven widely influential since it seemed to provide a way to conceive of articulated created ‘times’ (for Jenson, the order of ‘whither’ and ‘whence’, exclusive of ‘before’ and ‘after’, within the Trinity) as somehow coherent with God’s own being.31 In Barth’s case, he did not address these particularities as explicitly as did someone like Moltmann, who tended to include phenomenological pastoral history in his thinking in a way that could engage, for instance, the ‘incompletion’ of young lives cut short.32 But Barth’s placing of history, viewed in terms of temporal-like ordering, within the ambit of divine life proved groundbreaking in systematic terms. There are two things worth noting about these post-Barthian theological presentations. First, although none of them ever explicitly asserts the particulars of created time as somehow definitively established in eternity, in the manner of the block-time theorists, the implication is that temporal specifics lie within reach of either the Trinity’s own self-differentiating life or within the Incarnation’s assumption of their details. At the centre of post-Barthian views is the timely (as distinct from a simply temporal) God, whose nature is historically sensitive in its essence. Second, the difficult resolution of these theologians’ various claims, within their own visions or among them – that is, their imperviousness to easy systematization – is bound to the scriptural tethering of their arguments. Just at the point where divine abstractions – Trinity, totus Christus, God’s self-contraction – threaten to gobble up Harbaugh’s children, scriptural assertions of judgement, loss, exhilaration, voices cast between the living and dead, complaint and incomprehension come in and drive the theologian to retrace and reframe the picture. Within the framework of this chapter’s discussion, it could be said that while the abstractions themselves have no clear explanatory capacity for the reality of dead children, they remain open to such explanations to the degree that they can function within the register of scriptural concreta. Dives and Lazarus (Lk. 16.19–31), the peoples populating the New Jerusalem, both ‘small and great’ (i.e. young and old; Rev. 11.18), the figurated contours of Israel’s own history that mould even the names of heaven’s forms (Rev. 21.12) – all these texts, and their wide-but-narratively-

The trinitarian tradition that Barth enlivened was less interested in the logical problems associated with divine– human (eternal–temporal) interaction, than it was with the ways of conceptualizing the basic scriptural and especially Nicene and Chalcedonian claims, complicated enough on their own terms. In this, their discussions have little directly to do with the discussions of analytic theologians like Eleonore Stump or Ryan Mullins. Barth’s treatment of eternity and time comes at the end of his long examination of God’s ‘perfections’. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. T. H. L. Parker et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 608–40. But there are obviously other texts that inform his discussion in important ways. A lucid presentation of Barth’s views is George Hunsinger, ‘Mysterium Trinitatis: Karl Barth’s Conception of Eternity’, in Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 186–209. 31 Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Volume 2: The Works of God (New York: Oxford University Press), 29–35, 338–68. 32 Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1996), 279– 308. Moltmann’s discussion of ‘incomplete lives’ (i.e. the ‘untimely dead’) is in Moltmann, The Coming of God, 116–18. But Barth did in fact grapple with this in a very personal way. See the sermon he preached at the funeral of his youngest son, Matthias, who died in a climbing accident at age twenty, in Karl Barth, ‘Matthias Barth’, in This Incomplete One: Words Occasioned by the Death of a Young Person, ed. Michael D. Bush (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006), 9–20. 30

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specific referents, work to thicken the texture of creation’s consummation. If, in Jenson’s phrase, the ‘great transformation’ of heaven marks ‘the eternal event of the interpretation of all lives by the life of Jesus’,33 this is because, as the resolved tradition of the Holy Tooth intuited (and Barth too!), the entire gamut of temporal experience, not generically but quite specifically – each life itself, each moment and encountered object in this or that person’s durational being – is, in the incarnate flesh of Christ, revealed in its eternal and divinely configurated condition. It could be said, then, that ‘restored and enjoyed time’ is a framework for eternity’s encompassing reality that is, in the end, scripturally defined, perhaps exhaustively so. Any conception of temporality, therefore, that might undergird the framework will have to include a metaphysics of scripture within it in a logically prior way. Certainly, it was the complexity of scriptural reference with respect to the human experience of love and loss as bound to the creating God that happily wrenched human hope, for early Christians, from the confused gropings of antique Greek and Roman existential fears. And it was the fecund character of scriptural demand that was able to meet such existential intuitions with a range of possible conceptual categories that could sustain that demand’s cognitive plausibility through these intuitions’ simultaneous assertion rather than resolution. When Harbaugh, for instance, attempted to describe the condition of dead infants in heaven, he juxtaposed several views, at least implied by scripture, of their perfection: resurrected children would be ‘perfect’ in their temporal (i.e. limited) form of infant human personhood; they would thus also be ‘perfect’ in their relational engagement with parents, siblings, and friends; they would also be ‘perfect’ in the process of their learning wisdom – taught, perhaps by angels! – and thus in their growth in and enjoyment of the beatific vision. Here, temporal history – including the children’s young experiences, early sufferings, and death – is carried along into eternity, remembered and refashioned in its contextual richness, as well as transformed in its possibilities and promises. The temporal slices of the block remain; but they are experientially multiplied and given infinitely new configurations of proliferated continuity. In brief, heaven appears as a collection of time-modes that can be enjoyed variously: all the possible and thus divinely real modes of being are given to each creature and to all of them together in their perfection. This might include developments taken in diverse directions; sufferings experienced, and losses mounted; but, in their experience, integrated into all the possible forms of perfection. Children as children, awaiting and hoping; children as grown; children as learning; children as wise adults – but who were once children in their hopes, fears, and limitations. If it is possible to speak of a dynamic block-time theory traversed by manifold strands of continuity (experienced narrative), this traditional outlook, pulled by the variegated scriptural pictures of terrestrial experience and divine order, encapsulates it.

God’s timeliness and the enscriptured Christ The heaven that is described in terms of restored and enjoyed time is, probably, the most historically stable Christian perspective within which the time–eternity nexus has been

Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:350.

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explored and assumed, trading on the continuity of distinctive personal identity from ‘life’ to ‘afterlife’. More particularly, this perspective on time and eternity presupposes two truths around which any conceptual analysis of the nexus must be pursued: first, the timely God, who is creator of creatures whose variegated temporal extension and limitation are essential to their being; and second, the juxtaposed diversity of perfected temporalities, to which each creature is given by God, which define divine timeliness precisely through their articulated forms that must adhere to the demands of scriptural enunciation. At the explanatory centre of the relationship between God and the perfected fund of created forms has, for the Christian tradition, stood the creating Word: all things are made ‘by’ and ‘for’ the Word, who is their ‘head’, and in the Word all things are finally ‘gathered’ as their ‘life’ (Colossians 1 and 2; Eph. 1.10; Jn 1.3-4). The Word, in turn, having lived a human life within the world, divinely depicted within the scriptures that are the Word’s own speech, stands as an antitype to all things and to all time. Christian theologians took up images of microcosm and macrocosm, or of the Two Books of Scripture and Nature, and related these in various ways as a means of representing this christological ordering of time and eternity, but the point was usually the same: temporal form has its origins, comprehension, and resolution in Christ.34 There were pantheistic and panentheistic dangers lurking in such a construal, like those of John Scottus Eriugena.35 Rather than go this route, the Word’s gathering of created form was usually articulated less in terms of being than in terms of divine purpose and will, or of divine ‘ideas’. Because this creative purpose was associated pre-eminently with the Word, its expression was viewed primarily in scriptural terms. Scripture constitutes the communicated realities of the Incarnate Christ in all his temporal modes or conditions (as seventeenth-century writers were wont to say), from creation to consummation, from First to Second Adam, from Eve to Mary, Abraham to Paul, Israel to the New Jerusalem. Within scripture’s verbal display of the Son’s existence, received from the Father and shared through the Spirit, lies every birth, every tooth and breast, and every hunger and illness; every hope and every loss; and every untimely death and restored joy. Perhaps even every heaven and every hell.36 The traditional view of Christ as mediator between eternity and time, which continues through Barth, assumes that this single temporal life of the Incarnate One contains all the lives of every creature in their perfected form, a transcendent reality that a creature might glimpse ‘in Him’, either on earth or, more extensively, in heaven.

While the microcosm–macrocosm relationship is often associated mostly with the Neoplatonic strand of Christian theology, it was much more broadly embedded within Christian culture over the centuries not least through popular medicine and natural science, which assumed a correspondence theory of physical life and health between human form and larger created and uncreated entities. See Rudolf Allers, ‘Microcosmus: From Anaximandros to Paracelsus’, Traditio 2 (1944): 319–407. The image is also at work, in a different context, in the tradition of the Two Books, of Nature and of Scripture, that pervades medieval and early modern natural philosophy. This, in turn, is applied christologically, in terms of the creation, scripture, and Christ. On this last, especially devotional aspect of the literal ‘mirroring’ of all reality in Christ and through the scriptures, see the seventeenth-century example of the Jesuit Jan David, in Brusati, Enenkel, and Melion, ‘Introduction’, 22–37. 35 See Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The conclusion, pp. 262–9, helpfully locates Eriugena within the tradition here presented. 36 The question of Hell raises other issues that cannot be treated here, including that of annihilation. But one understanding of Hell might well be comprehended by such block theory of enscriptured and even christologically assumed created reality. Hell too, if it belongs to God, might well be ‘perfected’, and every perfect creature tied to its purity. 34

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According to this tradition of Christic cosmology, the ‘block’ that constitutes created reality, just because it is assumed by Christ, is therefore always scripturally indexed. Bound to the actual being of Christ, this scripturally indexed block provides both a dynamism and experiential coherence to the metaphysics of time that the unnuanced ‘perfected time’ model generally lacks. The venerable Catholic and Protestant practices of the Bible’s figural interpretation, wherein Christ stands as an antitype to the breadth of Israel’s history in the world, presume some version of this metaphysics, even if it is mostly tacit in its force.37 From the perspective of a theology of time and eternity, temporal reality, in this case, finds itself at any given point and possibility to be a mode of scriptural enunciation, expressive of the eternal Christ. All times (and spaces) are ‘in’ scripture, whose breadth and unity are held by God in the Word’s creative self-offering to and within time. Every ‘time’ or place conforms to – is, christologically, ‘in accordance with’ – scripture somehow. That is historical experience’s definitive perfection, and in time this perfection is apprehended more through scriptural hearing than in mystical participation in God’s life. The reading of scripture is itself, thus, the revelation of temporality’s true nature because it unveils the enfolded life of the Word. Yet this enunciatory revelation is, as in Jenson’s perspective, itself always an ongoing story of one kind or another, which, in the divine Wisdom, includes within it all stories given over in scripture’s treasury (Col. 2.3). Heaven – or the eternity in which creatures might have some share – would thus be the complete explication of all created scriptural referents in their variegated narratives – perhaps even, as noted, the perfection of hell – infinite in their possibility and hence in their enactment. Whether this vision can overcome the conundrum of freedom and determinism that haunts all block-theories of time, it can at least so elaborate them as to find, or be found within, an extravagantly generative divine freedom that can overcome that conundrum’s burden. When every child (or adult) is provided by God such an infinite range of scriptural referents as Christ supplies, their experienced spectacle, in even the stories of their love and loss before God (Exod. 1.15–2.10; Mt. 2.13-19) now shared with all the saints, supplies the created glimmerings of divine glorification. This chapter will conclude with a typical example of how this vision of time and eternity shaped a consistent outlook of consolatio. The seventeenth-century Puritan minister James Janeway wrote a classic work of devotional biography for children, A Token for Children (1671), made up of moralistic accounts of the faithful deaths of young girls and boys. The volume was repeatedly expanded and widely read well into the nineteenth century. It is filled with the testimonies of short lives ‘interpreted’ by the scriptures – one might say, by Christ – which are meant to coordinate the experiences of temporal existence with eternity. As Janeway recounts the experience of one precocious five-year-old raised by a single mother: His good mother died, which went very near his heart, for he greatly honoured his mother. After the death of his mother, he would often repeat some of the promises that are made unto fatherless children, especially that in Exod. xxii. Thou shalt not afflict any widow, or the fatherless child; if thou afflict them in any wise, and they cry at all unto me,

See Ephraim Radner, Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2016), 17–82. 37

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I will surely hear their cry. These words he would often repeat with tears, and say, I am fatherless and motherless upon earth, yet, if any wrong me, I have a father in heaven who will take my part; and to him I commit myself, and in him is all my trust.38 Shortly thereafter, this anonymous child ‘died sweetly in the faith of Jesus’. The nature of this short life, like all lives, is thus ‘hid in Christ’ (Col. 3.3), the Gospel account of whose own life ‘all the books of the world cannot contain’ (Jn 21.25). These words articulate an evangelical phrase that concisely summarizes the nature of all time in its relation to God.

Further reading Baron, Sam and Kristie Miller. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics II.1. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance. Translated by T. H. L. Parker, W. B. Johnston, Harold Knight, and J. L. M. Haire. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957. Boethius. ‘Consolation of Philosophy’. In Theological Tractates: The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand, 128–411. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Harbaugh, Henry. The Heavenly Home; Or, The Employments and Enjoyments of the Saints in Heaven. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1853. Radner, Ephraim. Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2016.

James Janeway, A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (New York: Whiting & Watson, 1811), 55. 38

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CHAPTER 29 PROVIDENCE AND PROCESS

Thomas Jay Oord

Most Christian theologies assume that God is essentially timeless. By ‘essentially timeless’, such theologies assume that God does not experience relationships with others moment by moment. Many theologians assume God ‘sees’ history – beginning to end – from an eternal ‘now’, without engaging in giving and receiving relations with creation.1 These theologians offer diverse theories for how the timeless God acts, but each theory shares the view that God is fundamentally nontemporal. The timeless God is ‘outside’, ‘beyond’, or ‘above’ time.2 Open and relational theologies believe God experiences time sequentially – moment by moment – in relation with others. God’s experience is in process. God experienced the actual past, experiences in the present, and faces an open yet-to-be-experienced future. God’s experience is essentially timefull, not timeless, pantemporal, not nontemporal. Some open and relational theologies say that God always experiences in Trinity, as divine members everlastingly give and receive love.3 Others say God always relates timefully with creation, never having existed without creaturely others.4 Some think God relates moment by moment, both in Trinity and with creation.5 This chapter proposes that the idea that God everlastingly experiences time makes a difference for the doctrine of providence. The implications of thinking that God experiences moment by moment are vast, so exploring all of them is not possible in one chapter. The chapter will, however, point to general characteristics of God-in-process views and explore what these characteristics mean for accounts of providence. It will also explore a specific view which will be called ‘essential kenosis’. Finally, this chapter argues that open and relational theologies make better sense of the biblical witness, of personal experiences, and of the world that science explores. It also argues that such theologies make better sense of the idea that love is God’s providential mode of operation.

R. T. Mullins offers a powerful set of arguments against a timeless God in The End of a Timeless God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2 Representatives of this view vary; among the most prominent are Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus. See Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. V. E. Watts (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1969), bk. 5, chap. 6; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), I, Q. 10 and 14; John Duns Scotus, God and Creatures, trans. Fexis Alluntis and Allan Wolter (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1975). 3 Clark Pinnock makes this argument in Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001). 4 David Ray Griffin’s approach amounts to this in his essay, ‘A Naturalistic Trinity’, in Trinity in Process, ed. Joseph Bracken and Marjorie H. Suchocki (New York: Continuum, 1997), 23–40. 5 See Thomas Jay Oord, The Nature of Love: A Theology (St Louis: Chalice Press, 2010), chap. 5. 1

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General characteristics Open and relational theologies vary. No set of ideas is embraced by all who accept the label, but family resemblances can be identified. These resemblances shape a view of providence different from theologies that assume God is essentially timeless. An omniscient God experiences Open and relational views of providence take the reality of time seriously. Not only is existence fundamentally in process, but God also experiences the processes of time. The living and loving creator everlastingly relates with others moment by moment. God-in-process views argue that God faces an undetermined future. That’s the meaning of ‘open’ in the label ‘open and relational theologies’. An undetermined future implies that God cannot now know with certainty all that will occur. God doesn’t possess exhaustive foreknowledge, say open theists.6 Such knowledge would only be possible, argue advocates of this view, if the future were settled, fixed, and complete. Lack of foreknowledge doesn’t mean that God’s knowledge is limited. The future does not yet exist to be known, so it does not provide information anyone could know. The future is inherently unknowable because not yet actual. Open and relational theologians believe God is omniscient, however, because God knows all that is knowable. God knows the completed past, the unfolding present, and the possibilities for the future. This view of God’s omniscience and relation to time better describes how most Christians relate to God. Christian piety and scripture assume God gives and receives in an ongoing relationship with creation. Petitionary prayer makes better sense, for instance, if the future is open and not yet decided. It makes little sense to ask God to do something if the future is already settled and God is timelessly unresponsive. God as impassible/immutable and passible/mutable Many of the most influential Christian theologies argue that God is unaffected by creation. God is ‘impassible’, to use the ancient language.7 By contrast, open and relational theologies argue that creatures affect God because God is passible. Many today use ‘relational’ to describe the God influenced by creatures.8 This view fits biblical accounts that portray

See Clark H. Pinnock et al., The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1994); John E. Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998). 7 See Thomas Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 6, Art. 2; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 13–14; Anselm, Proslogium, trans. Sidney N. Deane (La Salle: Open Court, 1951), 13–14. 8 See Bradley S. Artson, God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology (Woodstock: Jewish Lights, 2013); Joseph A. Bracken, Does God Roll Dice? Divine Providence for a World in the Making (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2012); Philip Clayton, Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, and Divine Action (Philadelphia: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2008); Monica A. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008); Bruce Epperly, Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2011); Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008); Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1993). 6

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God responding to creation and feeling emotions (e.g. anger, sadness, joy) in light of what creatures do.9 The God whom creatures influence changes as a result of such influence. Divine experience is mutable, dynamic, or interactive. God may even change plans – repent – in light of what creatures do. In fact, over forty biblical passages say that God ‘repents’.10 The idea that God interacts with creation corresponds well with the covenants reported in Christian scripture. God’s covenant and future decisions are affected by what people do in response. For instance, the Lord says, ‘If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land’ (2 Chron. 7.14). God’s future actions depend, in part, on how creatures respond. Most open and relational thinkers distinguish between God’s changing experience and unchanging nature. Some call this distinction ‘divine dipolarity’, a notion first espoused by Alfred North Whitehead and then later developed by Charles Hartshorne and others.11 In this chapter, this is called God’s essence/experience binate. The common point is that God’s essence is impassible and immutable as eternally constant.12 But God’s experience is passible and mutable moment by moment. Statements about an unchanging God (e.g. ‘I am the Lord who does not change’; Mal. 3.6) can be understood in light of the immutable divine essence. But creatures and creation also influence the ongoing divine life. Biblical passages describing God repenting, responding, expressing emotion, feeling compassion, or making covenants are understood in light of God’s mutable experience. The phrase ‘God in process’ refers to ongoing divine experiences and not to the unchanging divine essence. God and creatures have genuine but limited freedom Some theologies deny that creatures have genuine (libertarian) freedom. Theologies that adopt divine determinism explicitly reject creaturely freedom. They assume that a sovereign God controls all things.13 Other theologies argue that humans are free, and yet somehow God simultaneously controls them.14 Open and relational theologies argue that divine determinism and this alleged control/freedom compatibilism make no sense.

For an argument for strong divine possibility, see Thomas Jay Oord, ‘Strong Passibility’, in Divine Impassibility: Four Views of God’s Emotions and Suffering, ed. Robert Matz (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 129–52. 10 See Terence E. Fretheim, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984). 11 See Donald W. Viney and George W. Shields, The Mind of Charles Hartshorne: A Critical Examination (Anoka: Process Century Press, 2020). 12 See Thomas Jay Oord and Wm. Andrew Schwartz, ‘Panentheism and Panexperientialism for Open and Relational Theology’, in Panentheism and Panpsychism: Philosophy of Religion Meets Philosophy of Mind, ed. Godehard Brüntrup, Benedikt P.Göcke, and Ludwig Jaskolla (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 231–51. 13 John Piper and R. C. Sproul are contemporary theologians who explicitly identify with this perspective. See, for example, R. C. Sproul, Chosen by God (Carol Stream: Tyndale House Publishers, 1994). 14 Scholars argue over whether theologians are hard or soft determinists. A soft determinist thinks it is compatible to say God sovereignly controls all and yet at least some creatures have freedom. For a defence of this view, see Donald A. Carson, Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility: Biblical Perspectives in Tension (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2002). 9

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Open and relational theologies affirm that humans express genuine, but limited, freedom. Various biological, environmental, historical, epistemological, and other factors limit creatures. But humans freely choose in each moment among limited options arising from and suitable to their circumstances. Humans are not entirely controlled by God, atoms, genes, neurons, or any environmental factors. Some open and relational theologies assume other creatures also express genuine, but limited, freedom. Even the least complex creatures have agency, self-organization, or spontaneity. Some God-in-process advocates embrace panpsychism, which affirms responsiveness in even the smallest entities of existence.15 But open and relational theologies differ among themselves about how far down the complexity scale creaturely agency goes.16 Open and relational theologies assume God is not free to do some things. In addition to being unable to do the illogical, the divine nature prevents God from acting in other ways. God is not free to stop existing, for instance, because God exists necessarily (a se). God is not free to stop loving because God cannot contradict the divine nature. And so on. Some open and relational theologies argue that God’s freedom in relation to creation became constrained once God created the universe ex nihilo.17 Others say God’s freedom has always been constrained because God has always been creating and relating to uncontrollable creatures.18 In either case, God-in-process advocates argue that God has genuine, but limited, freedom. Whatever one means by ‘divine sovereignty’, God’s power must be understood in light of God’s nature of love, metaphysical laws, and/or what is logical. God is not culpable for evil Open and relational theologies think about God’s action in relation to evil differently from the way of most timeless God theologies. God-in-process advocates claim that divine power should be understood in light of God’s love. Because God does not predetermine or foreknow, God neither causes nor foresees all evil. Process theology is best known among open and relational theologies for arguing that God’s power is inherently limited. Some process theologians argue these limitations come from the God–world relationship; others argue that they arise from God’s relation to creativity; still others argue that metaphysical laws constrain God.19 The strength of such claims is hard to

In addition to Whitehead and Hartshorne, see especially David Ray Griffin, Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind–Body Problem (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2008). 16 Philip Clayton argues for a strong emergentist position which says that at some point in the evolutionary history mentality emerged from non-mental entities. See Philip Clayton, ‘Conceptual Foundations of Emergence Theory’, in The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion, ed. Philip Clayton and Paul Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–31. 17 See Philip Clayton, ‘Creation ex Nihilo and Intensifying the Vulnerability of God’, in Theologies of Creation: Creatio ex Nihilo and Its New Rivals, ed. Thomas Jay Oord (New York: Routledge, 2014), 17–30. 18 See Thomas Jay Oord, ‘God Always Creates Out of Creation in Love’, in Theologies of Creation: Creatio ex Nihilo and Its New Rivals, ed. Thomas Jay Oord (New York: Routledge, 2014), 109–21. 19 David Ray Griffin argues that God is constrained by metaphysical laws. See David Ray Griffin, God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), 298. Alfred North Whitehead argues that God is limited by being ‘in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical ground, which is the creative advance into novelty’. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 349. Charles Hartshorne argues for the view that the God–world relationship constrains God. Charles Hartshorne, ‘Is Whitehead’s God the God of Religion?’, Ethics 53, no. 3 (1943): 219–27. 15

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overemphasize: the God process theology describes cannot coerce and is therefore not culpable for failing to prevent genuine evil. God does not cause or allow evil and cannot singlehandedly prevent it.20 Other open and relational theologies argue that God voluntarily self-limits. This means that God ‘allows’ or ‘permits’ evil. John Polkinghorne advocates this approach: ‘God does not will the act of a murderer or the destructive force of an earthquake but allows both to happen in a world in which divine power is deliberately self-limited to allow causal space for creatures.’21 Some open and relational theologians believe God made a promise at creation never to intervene. Others say once creation exists, God’s power becomes limited. ‘Not even once’, says Philip Clayton, has God controlled creation since creating from nothing.22 Such claims partly answer questions of evil because they reject the idea that evil is pre-decided.23 But divine self-limitation theologies are not as strong as process theology when it comes to solving the problem of evil. Some survivors wonder why the voluntarily self-limited God does not occasionally un-self-limit, in the name of love, to prevent their suffering. God-in-process views vary in their understanding of demons and demonic. Some reject the idea that demons as spiritual beings exist, but they acknowledge that non-agential principalities and powers can be demonic. When accounting for what is bad in the world, these theologians insist that systemic evil is not overlooked.24 Others embrace demons and a devil as ontological beings. These theologies blame at least some disorder, tragedy, and evil on the activity of these destructive agents.25 Whether the demonic involves ontological agents or systemic evil (or both), open and relational theologies seek to offer the best explanation for why evil occurs and a loving God doesn’t singlehandedly prevent it. God continually creates Open and relational theologies affirm God as creator. God not only created in the past, but God also creates in the present: God continually creates (creatio continua). Creation depends moment by moment upon divine creativity. God also empowers creatures to co-create alongside their creator as created co-creators. This view corresponds with biblical claims about God calling creation to create (Genesis 1) and scientific views that speak of the emergence of new species in evolutionary history. Open and relational theologies differ on whether God ever creates from a ‘blank slate’; i.e. out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo). Although the view isn’t explicitly stated in scripture, some open and relational theologies affirm it for metaphysical reasons. Creatio ex nihilo strongly

See Thomas Jay Oord, God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils (Grasmere: SacraSage Press, 2019). 21 John C. Polkinghorne, ‘Kenotic Creation and Divine Action’, in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John C. Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001), 102. 22 Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp, The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 66. 23 See Sanders, The God Who Risks. 24 See Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way. 25 See Gregory A. Boyd, Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2001). 20

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implies that creation depends upon God and differs from God in crucial ways. Other Godin-process theologies say God never faced a completely blank slate.26 Consequently, God everlastingly creates. Both those who accept creatio ex nihilo and those who reject it, however, affirm with contemporary science that this universe began with a big bang roughly 13.8 billion years ago. And they affirm with scripture that God is creator. The idea that God continually creates in time corresponds with the general theory of evolution. Most biologists say new species emerged slowly over a long period, thanks to various forces and factors. Open and relational theologies agree, but they also claim that God acts as a factor in the evolutionary process. Because the creator is noncoercive and creatures co-create, random genetic mutations, natural selection, creaturely self-organization, evolutionary dead ends, and natural evils are all compatible with God’s uncontrolling creating. Many open and relational theologies embrace panentheism, which says all creation is in God.27 Open and relational theologies differ among themselves, however, about what panentheism means. Some argue that all creation is in God’s experience, in the sense that all things make a difference to God’s ongoing life of love. Others argue that panentheism emphasizes the immanence of God as present directly to all creation. Still others understand panentheism as suggesting the finite exists within the infinite.28 God-in-process arguments offer a methodological advantage for thinking about theology and science. According to it, efforts to understand existence require both scientific and theological contributions. Any scientific theory claiming to explain reality fully without reference to God is necessarily false. Any theology claiming to explain reality fully without reference to nature is necessarily false. Classic supernaturalism (God alone) and naturalism (nature alone) are false. Both science and theology are needed to make sense of life.29 God’s actions are analogous to creaturely actions Views of providence that suggest God is timefull rather than timeless avoid two problematic ways of discussing divine action. Avoided at one extreme is absolute anthropomorphism, which argues that God’s actions are exactly like creaturely actions. Avoided at the other extreme is absolute apophaticism, which argues that God’s actions are entirely unlike creaturely actions. No open and relational theologians affirm these extremes. God-in-process views affirm diverse

See essays by Catherine Keller, Michael Lodahl, Thomas Jay Oord, Marit Trelstad, and Michael Zbaraschuk, in Theologies of Creation: Creatio ex Nihilo and Its New Rivals, ed. Thomas Jay Oord (New York: Routledge, 2014). 27 See Ian G. Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science (London: SCM Press, 1990); Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke, eds., In Whom We Live and Move and Have our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004); John B. Cobb Jr., God and the World (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2000); Andrew M. Davis and Philip Clayton, eds, How I Found God in Everyone and Everywhere: An Anthology of Spiritual Memoirs (Rhinebeck: Monkfish, 2018); Oord and Schwartz, ‘Panentheism and Panexperientialism for Open and Relational Theology’, 231–51; Keith Ward, Divine Action: Examining God’s Role in an Open and Emergent Universe (West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press, 2007). 28 On the various meanings of panentheism, see Benedikt P. Göcke, ‘Panentheism and Classical Theism’, Sophia 52, no. 1 (2013): 61–75; Grace Jantzen, God’s World, God’s Body (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984); R. T. Mullins, ‘The Difficulty with Demarcating Panentheism’, Sophia 55, no. 3 (2016): 325–46; Gregory R. Peterson, ‘Whither Panentheism?’, Zygon 36, no. 3 (2001): 395–405. 29 See David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 26

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claims about divine transcendence and immanence; God is different from but also similar to creatures. Open and relational theologies develop schemes for describing God’s action. Some rely primarily upon philosophical ideas.30 Others draw from biblical language.31 Some draw primarily from scientific theories or theological traditions.32 Others appeal to personal experience and bodily metaphors.33 Most draw from multiple sources. No language can provide the full truth about God, of course. But theologies in this tradition assume that humans have partial knowledge of the God present to and active in all creation. At least in some ways, God’s actions are analogous to creaturely actions. For instance, both God and creatures act causally, moment by moment, in light of a completed past and an open future. They act as efficient (but not sufficient) causes. Affirming such action proves crucial for making sense of claims about God acting in the world. Analogies also help us to understand God’s loving action in the experiences of ordinary believers. After all, it makes no sense to say ‘God loves the world’, or ‘God loves you’, if creaturely love and divine love are entirely disanalogous. Of course, God’s actions differ from creaturely actions in some ways. God acts as an omnipresent agent, for instance, whereas creatures are localized. God has always been acting, whereas every creature and world had a beginning. God always acts to promote well-being, beauty, and truth. Creatures do not always act to promote these goods. God acts from perfect knowledge of all that’s knowable. Creatures act in light of the limited knowledge available at any moment. And so on. God has plans but no blueprint Many timeless theologies assume divine providence follows a foreordained and foreknown plan. The God outside time predetermined creation’s current events and future outcomes. Or this God foreknows – in some way mysterious to humans – precisely how history plays out. Because this God either foreordains or foreknows every occurrence, classical theologies typically think of providence as a detailed divine blueprint portraying all events in advance. Theologies that advance the claim that God and creation are in process deny God foreordains or foreknows. The future is open, and the present becomes what a timefull God and creation decide to make of it. An inherently uncontrolling God cannot guarantee or foreknow all outcomes. The God of open and relational theology has plans and desires, however. God leads creation towards fulfilling them. This is not the God of deism watching from a distance, nor an aloof deity.

See Viney and Shields, The Mind of Charles Hartshorne; Keith Ward, The Christian Idea of God: A Philosophical Foundation for Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 31 See Terence E. Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005); Terence E. Fretheim, Exodus (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991). In addition to Fretheim, biblical scholars whose work is especially congenial to open and relational theologies include William A. Beardslee, Michael Brown, William P. Brown, Walter Brueggemann, C. S. Cowles, Ronald Farmer, John Goldingay, J. Gerald Janzen, George Lyons, David J. Lull, Richard Middleton, Russell Pregeant, Stephen Riley, Eric Seibert, Karen Winslow, and William Yarchin. 32 See Thomas Jay Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015), chap. 5. 33 See Karen Baker-Fletcher, Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective (St Louis: Chalice Press, 2006); Jantzen, God’s World, God’s Body. 30

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This God makes plans for love to win and empowers creatures to cooperate in fulfilling those plans. God works in each situation to call, persuade, or command creatures to choose well-being. Instead of a blueprint, God-in-process models might think of providence as an improvisational play. The play has a Director and general direction, but creaturely actors play essential roles in deciding how the plot unfolds. No one controls the play. God-in-process models might also think of providence like a jazz session. Each musician contributes, and there is a general movement towards the possibility of beautiful art, but the artists determine together how the music develops. No one controls the music. These models might also think of providence as a family. A perfectly loving parent nurtures and instructs children trying to direct the entire family towards well-being. But the family’s health and vitality depend on the decisions of all members, not just those of the parent. No one controls the family.

God acts with the end in mind Open and relational theologies embrace diverse eschatologies, but their views contrast with those theologies that assume that God is timeless. If the future is not yet settled, divine providence cannot proceed according to a preset eschatological scheme. Divine providence is better understood as God’s moment-by-moment love in relation to creation and a yet-to-bedetermined future. Open and relational theologies describe a God motivated by persuasive love. God imagines a better future and calls creation to embrace the best in each moment, depending on what is possible. Those who embrace love cooperate with God’s work to redeem all creation, and their cooperation promotes overall well-being. Those who fail to cooperate reap the natural negative consequences of saying no to the well-being God offers. Their lack of cooperation negatively affects others too. If God foreordains and foreknows all, say God-in-process advocates, the future must already be settled, complete, and fixed. But if the future is complete, creaturely decisions cannot be made freely in relation to possible futures. There is only one way that things can play out. And that one way has already been settled. Without genuine creaturely freedom, it is hard to imagine how creatures are morally or socially responsible. And without social and moral responsibility, it is difficult to see how creatures ultimately matter. In short, God-outside-of-time views are difficult to reconcile with the deep intuition that what happens in individuals’ own lives or history makes an ultimate difference. If God is timeless, it is difficult to believe humans matter. But if creatures make a real difference in how history unfolds, their lives count. Open and relational theologies take seriously, therefore, both the ongoingness of time and genuine freedom of creatures. They see the ultimate redemption of free creatures and perhaps all creation as a cooperative endeavour between God and creation.34 God-in-process

See Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then (Philadelphia: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2004); Richard Rice, The Future of Open Theism: From Antecedents to Opportunities (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020); Marjorie H. Suchocki, The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2005). 34

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views reject the idea that God stands outside the flow of history. And they reject views that say or assume God has already determined the eschatological end. God’s relentless love continues after individuals die, and God never stops inviting creatures to experience abundant life.

The priority of love Thus far, this chapter has painted with broad brushstrokes a picture of providence that most open and relational theologies embrace. It has highlighted how God-in-time, timefull God, or God-in-process views differ from God-outside-time or timeless-God views. Along the way, it has noted differences among theologies under the open and relational umbrella. It now turns to a specific form of open and relational theology called in this chapter ‘essential kenosis’. Most open and relational theologies prioritize love in articulating God’s providence. God’s nature is love, and love motivates God to create, relate, and redeem. God desires a full-orbed, multifaceted, encompassing matrix of love, which Jesus called the basilea theou/ouranos (reign of God/heaven). Put another way, God wants a loving civilization on earth as it is in heaven. Creatures play an essential role in fulfilling God’s desires of love. Before the twentieth century, kenotic theologies were primarily oriented around discussions of what attributes Christ set aside when becoming incarnate in Jesus the Nazarene. Today, the discussion orients primarily around how Jesus’ love reveals who God is. Jesus’ kenosis discloses that God expresses kenotic love. The Apostle Paul used an ancient hymn to describe kenosis. He said Jesus’ self-giving, selfemptying, or self-denying love is kenotic. Jesus took the form of a servant and endured death on the cross. God now works in individuals to encourage them to desire and cooperate with the divine work of love (Phil. 2). Many theologians think kenosis is an entirely free divine act.35 God voluntarily self-limits, they say, to self-empty, self-give, and others-empower. Jürgen Moltmann calls this divine ‘withdrawal’, appealing to the Jewish idea of tzimtzum, God’s self-limitation for the other.36 Voluntary kenosis theologies argue that love motivates God to set aside control freely and to allow creation to be and act with relative independence. But for God, kenotic love is contingent rather than necessary. The idea that kenosis means God voluntarily self-limits has problems.37 Voluntary divine self-limitation cannot account well for genuine evil. A God who freely chooses not to control – when controlling is possible – is culpable for failing to prevent evil. This God is not doing all that can be done. If God is perfectly loving, God ought occasionally to become un-self-limited, in the name of love, to end pointless pain. The God who voluntarily self-limits is culpable.

See, especially, Polkinghorne, ‘Kenotic Creation and Divine Action’, 90–106. See Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1985), 86. 37 See Anna Case-Winters, Reconstructing a Christian Theology of Nature: Down to Earth (London: Routledge, 2016), chap. 7; Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God, chap. 7; Oord, The Nature of Love, chap. 5. 35 36

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Evil and essential kenosis Essential kenosis argues that God necessarily self-gives and others-empowers. God doesn’t freely choose to self-limit; self-giving and others-empowering love are what God does by nature. This means that the essentially kenotic God cannot control actors and factors that cause genuine evil. God’s love is uncontrolling. Essential kenosis makes a unique claim about God and love. It suggests that self-giving and others-empowering love comes logically first in God’s nature. Love comes prior to choice or sovereignty, for instance, so God must love and cannot control others. And because God ‘cannot deny himself ’, to quote the Apostle Paul, God always expresses uncontrolling love for creatures and for creation. Constraints to divine power that essential kenosis describes derive from God’s nature. External forces and factors – for example, principalities and powers, metaphysical laws, creativity, laws of nature – do not constrain God. God is not externally limited. But God is also not voluntarily self-limited. God doesn’t make a free choice to love rather than control others. Instead, God’s nature of love always and necessarily shapes divine power. Because God loves everyone and everything, God cannot control anyone or anything. The implications of essential kenosis may seem obvious for explaining the evil creaturely freedom causes. The God of uncontrolling love cannot control free creatures who use freedom for evil ends. To do so, God would have to set aside love and ‘deny himself ’, which God cannot do. Uncontrolling love cannot control free creatures. Essential kenosis is also important for making sense of other issues relevant to evil and providence. Consider evil in relation to the so-called ‘laws of nature’. Theologians wonder whether God imposes law-like regularities in creation and whether God can withdraw or overcome those laws.38 If God can, God would be culpable for failing to suspend the laws of nature, at times, to prevent genuine evil. Other theologians deny that law-like regularities are divinely imposed.39 God is subject to some external standard, they argue, and this transcendent norm imposes regularities upon God and creation. Consequently, God cannot suspend the laws of nature to prevent evil. Essential kenosis offers a third view of God’s relation to the laws of nature. It proposes that the law-like regularities in creation derive from God’s nature of love. As God acts lovingly at all levels of existence, the regularities observed in creation emerge naturally. In this view, God neither freely imposes law-like regularities nor is God subject to some external standard. The regularities of existence arise naturally from God’s omnipresent and relentless love for all creatures, great and small. And God cannot interrupt those regularities because to do so would require denying God’s own love. Or consider how essential kenosis helps make sense of the evil caused by chance and randomness. Timeless God theologies argue that chance and randomness are not chance and random at all from God’s perspective. Nothing surprises a timeless God, because all that occurs is part of the timeless blueprint. This means that evils that come through accidents, misfortunes, and calamities were at least foreknown by God, if not also foreordained.

See Robin Collins, ‘God and the Laws of Nature’, Philo 20, no. 2 (2009): 142–71; Jimmy H. Davis and Harry L. Poe, Chance or Dance? An Evaluation of Design (West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008); Arthur Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming – Natural, Divine, and Human (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). 39 See Whitehead, Process and Reality, 349. 38

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By contrast, essential kenosis says God is essentially uncontrolling at all levels of existence. The moment-by-moment creative action of God and creaturely responses make chance and random events possible. God cannot prevent such chance and random events that cause evil, because creating and empowering others – at all levels of existence – is a necessary aspect of God’s uncontrolling love. Consider too how essential kenosis helps us understand evil caused by non-human actors and forces. These evils may arise at genetic, cellular, organismic, insect, or animal levels of existence. They may come from systems, structures, or social relationships in creation. Think of severe congenital disabilities, random genetic mutations that cause harm, plagues, natural disasters, unnecessary predation, corrupt political systems, unjust social systems, and more. Because God loves all creation, great and small, and divine love is uncontrolling, God cannot cause or prevent natural or social evils. God’s empowering allows spontaneity, self-organization, agency, or action throughout creation. But God’s uncontrolling love cannot control any nonhuman actors and forces. God calls all creatures to respond in love, but sometimes creatures at various levels of complexity do not respond well to this call. And sometimes systems oppress in ways God cannot singlehandedly thwart.40 We might summarize essential kenosis by saying it extends the idea that God cannot control free creatures to every level of creation – from the most complex to the least. It doesn’t require one, however, to believe that worms, amoeba, cells, or quarks have free will. It merely says that creaturely self-causation in various forms occurs at all levels of reality. In love, God acts to make self-causation possible for all. This self-causation – whether used positively or negatively – has relational effects on God and others. Miracles and essential kenosis Essential kenosis accounts well for why God does not prevent evil at any level of existence. It argues that God cannot prevent evil singlehandedly because uncontrolling love comes logically first in God’s nature. But what about the good that can be seen in the world? To what extent should God be credited for what is good, life-affirming, and beautiful? Like most theologies, essential kenosis suggests that God is the source of love, beauty, and goodness. All creation depends upon God’s moment-by-moment inspiration and empowerment. When creatures at whatever level of complexity respond well to God’s invitation, they express love. Creatures can love because God first loves them. A special case of positive events, however, deserves attention: miracles. Some believers point to miraculous events – signs and wonders – recorded in the Bible and occurring today as evidence that God works providentially. If God cannot control creatures and creation, how do miracles occur? Essential kenosis affirms miracles. The account of the miraculous it provides overcomes the problem of selective miracles. That problem asks why miracles – including healings – occur so infrequently, even though people ask God for them. Wouldn’t a loving God who wants healing and wholeness answer prayers for miracles?

See Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (Grasmere: SacraSage, 2023).

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While Christians often talk about miracles, no consensus exists about how to define them. Some speak of miracles as supernatural acts or as divine interventions.41 Both ‘supernatural’ and ‘intervention’ have problematic implications, however. They assume that nature is a closed causal system into which God enters. But an omnipresent God who constantly interacts with creation – a view essential kenosis and other theologies assume – need not intervene. A better sense of miracles is made by thinking that they occur when God acts and creatures respond appropriately, or the inanimate conditions in creation are properly aligned. In other words, God does not bring about miracles singlehandedly. These good and surprising events occur as God acts alongside creaturely others or the structures of creation. Miracles occur when God and creation work in tandem. Saying that miracles require creaturely cooperation or proper creaturely conditions accords with diverse biblical claims about miracles. Time and again, Jesus mentioned the cooperative faith of those who were healed: ‘Your faith has made you well’ (Mk 5.34). When he returns to his hometown of Nazareth, scripture says that Jesus cannot do miracles because the Nazarenes lacked cooperative faith. In fact, no miracle account in the Bible explicitly says creaturely actors or factors were uninvolved and that God alone did a miracle. An essential kenosis account of miracles solves the problem of selective miracles. God doesn’t pick and choose to singlehandedly heal some and not others. God cannot do miracles singlehandedly, so the lack of miracles is not a decision on God’s part. And the blame should not be on the victim who faithfully cooperates but whose bodily cells, organs, or members do not. Many people consciously cooperate with God’s healing work, but their bodies do not cooperate, or the conditions may not be conducive to the miracle God wants. Eschatology and essential kenosis Noted earlier are problems inherent in eschatological views that assume God is timeless. A timeless God foreordains or foreknows all that occurs in the future. But foreknowledge is only possible if the future is in some sense settled or decided. And a settled future seems incompatible with the idea that creaturely life matters. But if God never controls, Christians may wonder what hope essential kenosis eschatology provides. Essential kenosis offers a relentless love view of eschatology. It says God relies upon uncontrolling love to redeem and heal. The God envisioned in this theological perspective sends no one to eternal hell nor singlehandedly forces anyone to experience heavenly bliss. God continually invites, calls, woos, and persuades all creatures capable of response to enjoy love in the afterlife. God never gives up on anyone: divine love is relentless. The relentless love scheme offers afterlife guarantees that other eschatologies cannot. It guarantees that God never gives up offering salvation. It guarantees that those who accept God’s offer will enjoy the natural positive consequences – abundant life – that come from living in love. It guarantees that those who reject God’s invitation will endure the natural negative consequences of rejecting love. And the relentless love view of eschatology guarantees that

See Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 101–2. 41

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those who consistently cooperate with divine love become more and more like the greatest lover of them all: Jesus. The relentless love view cannot guarantee that all will enjoy afterlife bliss. Such a guarantee is only possible if God controls all. Essential kenosis offers the realistic hope that God’s love – which is everlasting and never gives up – will eventually persuade all to accept redemption. The relentless love view affirms a hopeful universalism based upon God’s uncontrolling and never-ending love.

Conclusion Views of providence assuming that God experiences time offer advantages over views assuming that God is essentially timeless. They fit well with scripture, scientific assumptions, and personal experience. Open and relational theologies affirm God’s omniscience, divine passibility, creaturely freedom, divine plans, eschatologies, and more. These affirmations differ from the views proposed by timeless God theologies. God-in-process views privilege divine love and the possibility of creaturely love in response. The essential kenosis view of providence claims that God’s love is essentially uncontrolling. Because this position rethinks divine power such that God cannot control, it solves the problem of evil by saying that God cannot prevent evil singlehandedly. And yet it affirms miracles and offers a hopeful eschatological vision. The God of essential kenosis relates with others moment by moment and guides creation through uncontrolling love.

Further reading Cobb, John B., Jr. God and the World. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2000. Griffin, David Ray. Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2008. Mullins, R. T. The End of a Timeless God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Oord, Thomas Jay. The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence. Grasmere: SacraSage, 2023. Pinnock, Clark H., Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, and David Basinger. The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1994. Sanders, John E. The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence. Rev. edn. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2007.

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CHAPTER 30 PANTHEISM AND PANENTHEISM

Mariusz Tabaczek

Introduction Apart from ancient dualism and Gnosticism, there are at least two other prominent theological positions that classical theism has confronted throughout the entire history of its development – pantheism and panentheism.1 Their allure continues today. Pantheism grounds modern versions of the nature-centred spirituality embraced by those who distance themselves from the institutional religions in the west.2 Panentheism became predominant among the followers of the recent anthropological and existentialist turn in theology, which leans towards portraying God as changing and being affected in relation to his creatures. The concerns of this chapter are to introduce and analyse pantheistic and panentheistic references to the doctrine of creation and to appraise such in light of more classic formulations of the doctrine.

Strict pantheism Pantheism (Gk. πᾶν pân = ‘all’, and θεός Theós = ‘God’) is commonly understood as the idea that the universe as a whole is identical to God. This means that there exists nothing outside God and that God cannot be considered distinct from the universe. Although this definition uses the familiar terms ‘universe’ and ‘God’, it does not simply put them together as logically equivalent ((x) x is universe ⇔ x is God) but rather redefines them. In other words, strict

Although both terms are relatively recent – ‘pantheism’ was coined in 1709 by Jacques Fay (in a critical response to John Toland who used the adjective ‘pantheist’ in 1705) while ‘panentheism’ was introduced in 1828 by Karl Krause – the basic ideas standing behind them had numerous proponents in the long history of religious thought. In the case of pantheism, they arguably go back as early as pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, and in the case of panentheism, to the religious traditions of Ancient Egypt, Hinduism, and Taoism. See John Toland, Socinianism Truly Stated; Being an Example of Fair Dealing in all Theological Controversies, to which is prefixt, Indifference in Disputes: Recommended by a Pantheist to an Orthodox Friend (London: n.p., 1705); Jacques de la Fay, Defensio Religionis, Nec Non Mosis Et Gentis Judaicae, Contra duas Dissertationes Joh. Tolandi, quarum una inscribitur Adeisidaemon, altera verò Antiquitates Judaicae (Ultrajecti: Apud Guilielmum Broedelet, 1709); Karl C. F. Krause, Vorlesungen über das System der Philosophie (Göttingen: In Commission der Dietrich’schen Buchhandlung, 1828). 2 Pantheistic ideas often ground modern ecological ethics and its desire to be free from the kinds of anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, and ‘supernatural fiction’ sometimes associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Such ideas are also present in literature (e.g. Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth), as well as in popular culture (e.g. films such as Star Wars, The Lion King, Avatar). See Harold W. Wood Jr., ‘Modern Pantheism as an Approach to Environmental Ethics’, Environmental Ethics 7, no. 2 (1985): 151–63; Michael P. Levine, ‘Pantheism, Ethics and Ecology’, Environmental Values 3, no. 2 (1994): 121–38; John W. Grula, ‘Pantheism Reconstructed: Ecotheology as a Successor to the Judeo-Christian, Enlightenment, and Postmodernist Paradigms’, Zygon 43, no. 1 (2008): 159–80. 1

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pantheism means something different by ‘God’ and ‘the universe’ from that presupposed in non-pantheistic meanings of these terms. On the one hand, strict pantheism champions a non-theistic notion of divinity, leaving behind the classical understanding of God as immutable, omnipotent, omniscient, personalistic, and other.3 On the other hand, it speaks of the unity of the cosmos as all-inclusiveness that goes beyond the mereological sum of parts of the universe and proclaims it to be divine in its totality. A strict pantheist might thus conclude that since God (understood in a theistic sense) does not really exist, questions about how God interacts with the world, or whether God can do so, are simply irrelevant.4 Since divine unity is not ontologically transcendent, it is not independent of the universe and, consequently, it is argued, cannot be creative. Even if the unity is not modelled ontologically (e.g. equated with substance monism) but rather defined in terms of a unifying force, principle, or plan, it is not creative in the classical meaning of the term, where both the original creative act (creatio ex nihilo) and the continued existence of all that is (conservatio) presuppose a transcendent and personal God.5 So Michael Levine: ‘Pantheists view this assumption about creation, along with the theistic concept of deity generally, as anthropocentric and anthropomorphic. This is what is most unacceptable to the pantheist. Whether the anthropomorphism relates to a creation doctrine or to doctrines of sin, grace and salvation, its rejection is central to a non-anthropocentric pantheistic world-view.’6

Moderate pantheism Strict pantheism is usually attributed to Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), who introduced radical substance monism and described all that is as God-or-Nature (Deus sive Natura). Spinoza considers finite things not as parts but rather as modes (properties) of the One substance. At the same time, however, Spinoza distinguishes between nature as active or creative (natura naturans) and nature as a passive product (natura naturata). Insofar as he identifies God

Even if impersonal, the divine Unity might still be thought of as rational or minded, but it is dubious whether it is conceivable as such apart from being a person. See Gustav Fechner, Religion of a Scientist (New York: Pantheon Books, 1946); Timothy Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Fechner suggests that all organized matter possesses its own inner life or soul, and Sprigge speaks of reality as consisting in streams of experience included in a single all-embracing experience, which may be called ‘God’ or ‘the Absolute’. 4 At the same time, however, pantheistic denial of ontological transcendence (in a theistic sense) need not entail the denial of epistemological transcendence. One could argue that there are things about the divine Unity that are not known and possibly cannot be known. 5 The idea of the divine Unity interpreted in terms of an ordering principle – material (one of the elements) or immaterial (e.g. Anaximander’s apeiron) – goes back to Eleatics. However, one should be careful with reading pantheistic doctrines back into those ‘unsophisticated texts in which the concept of the divine remains unclarified’, taking account that pantheism ‘is a doctrine that usually occurs in a religious and philosophical context in which there are already tolerably clear conceptions of God and the universe and the question has arisen of how these two conceptions are related’. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Pantheism’, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 31. 6 Michael P. Levine, Pantheism: A Non-Theistic Concept of Deity (London: Routledge, 1994), 194. 3

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with the former rather than the latter aspect of nature, he is inspired to speak of God as the universal, immanent, and sustaining cause of the universe.7 This departure from strict pantheism becomes even more apparent once one realizes that many pantheists define the universe–God identity in terms of the identity of the origin of all that is rather than in reference to a rigorous substance unity. Plotinus’ universe, for instance, comprises a hierarchy of (creative?) emanations from the ‘One’, which makes God too transcendent for his doctrine to count as strictly pantheistic. John Scottus Eriugena (c. 800–c. 877) offers another version of the emanationist scheme. He considers creation as a kind of divine self-manifestation that has its beginning and end in God, who is at the same time both the ‘essence of all things’ (essentia omnium) and the ‘form of all things’ (forma omnium). According to Eriugena, it is precisely God’s transcendence that makes it possible for creatures to be within God and yet to remain other than God. This move highlights the relationship between transcendence and immanence. The divine immanence in the world is also the immanence of creatures within the divine. There is a radical unity here: ‘It follows that we ought not to understand God and the creature as two things distinct from one another, but as one and the same. For both the creature, by subsisting, is in God; and God, by manifesting himself, in a marvellous and ineffable manner creates himself in the creature.’8 Following Eriugena’s argument, God is that into which everything created has returned. Another group of pantheists define the identity of the universe and God teleologically. Within the circles of German idealism, Johann Fichte (1762–1814) claimed that the divine – that is, the Infinite and Absolute Ego or God – cannot be personal and could not have been an external creator of the universe (he scorned the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo as unintelligible). At the same time, however, while identifying God with the universe, Fichte seems to acknowledge an ontological transcendence of God when saying that the universe is nothing but the material through which the Ego posits itself as non-Ego, to achieve a synthesis (moral order) of Ego and non-Ego.9 In a similar vein, Friedrich Schelling (1775– 1854) spoke about the eternal and immutable God who, as ‘the highest personality’, develops in and through the world so that it is only in the last days that ‘God will indeed be all in all, and pantheism will be true’.10 Georg Hegel (1770–1831) likewise argued that the Absolute Idea (Spirit) pre-exists its finite manifestations, even if only logically, and receives its full embodiment only at the end of history.11

See Baruch Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 97 (I, P16): ‘From the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes, (i.e. everything that can fall under an infinite intellect).’ It is also important that Spinoza speaks of God as ‘divine intellect’ (p. 139 [II, P40]), all knowing and capable of loving both himself and us, insofar as we are part of his perfection. 8 John Scottus Eriugena, De divisione naturae libri quinque div desiderati (Oxford: Theatro Sheldoniano, 1681), III.678c. 9 See Johann G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: Apple Century Crofts, 1970); Johann G. Fichte, ‘On the Foundation of Our Belief in a Divine Government of the World’, in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Patrick L. Gardiner, trans. Paul Edwards (New York: Free Press, 1969), 19–26. 10 Friedrich W. J. Schelling, ‘Stuttgarten Privatvorlesungen’, in Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1860), 7:484. 11 See Georg W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition, The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 7

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This top-down approach of German idealists is supplemented by the bottom-up view of the Australian-born British emergentist Samuel Alexander (1859–1938), who considered the universe as evolving steadily up to the point at which it will ‘attain deity’; that is, a still unknown but superior (transcendent?) quality that will emerge at the end of time. He adds that ‘empirical as deity is, the infinity of [God’s] distinctive character separates him from all finites’, again preventing one from considering his position as strictly pantheistic.12

Panentheism: The logic of identity These moderate and modified types of pantheism, more popular than its strict version, reject the view that God is strictly independent of the universe while leaving open the question regarding the logic of the resemblance and likeness between the two. Nature may be explained as being a proper part of God or as overlapping in some ways with the divine. So defined, moderate pantheism is usually regarded as close, if not equal, to panentheism, which assumes that God includes but is not exhausted by the universe (Gk. πᾶν pân = ‘all’, ἐν en = ‘in’, and Θεός Theós = ‘God’). Characterized as grounded in the logic of relative or dialectic identity (i.e. identity-indifference), panentheism is said to properly describe the position of Eriugena (mentioned earlier), of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) (with his doctrine of the ‘coincidence of opposites’13), and even that of Spinoza who explains how the two co-referring attributes of ‘thought’ and ‘extension’ by which one considers the One substance as either God or Nature are at the same time irreducibly different and incommensurable.14 Moreover, the three representatives of German idealism mentioned earlier (Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel) are also commonly classified as panentheists, which shows that the boundaries of demarcation between divine immanentism, pantheism, and panentheism are vague and porous. Apart from the authors mentioned here, panentheism has been attributed to many representatives of philosophical, systematic, and mystical theology across various religious traditions.15 Considered a contemporary theological position, it is usually grounded in the expressivist philosophy of German idealism or the dipolar notion of God within Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy.16 Since it is a type of theism, panentheism addresses

Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity (London: Macmillan Co., 1920), 2:358. See Nicholas of Cusa, Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Nicholas of Cusa. Volume 1: De docta ignorantia, trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 2001), 1.2, 2.1. 14 See Spinoza, Ethics, I, P10n; II, P1; II, P2. 15 John Cooper offers an excellent presentation in his Panentheism – The Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to the Present (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006). See also Michael W. Brierley, ‘Naming a Quiet Revolution: The Panentheistic Turn in Modern Theology’, in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur R. Peacocke (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 1–15; Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese, eds, Philosophers Speak of God (New York: Humanity Books, 2000). 16 See Niels H. Gregersen, ‘Three Varieties of Panentheism’, in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur R. Peacocke (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 19–35. 12 13

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several issues directly related to the doctrine of creation. These will now be considered more closely.

Panentheism: Creation as emanation versus creatio ex nihilo On the one hand, panentheism is often associated with the emanationist view of creation, where contingent entities flowing from God are believed to carry traces of divinity. Apart from Plotinus (204–70) and Eriugena, this notion goes back to Plato (429?–347 bce) and his conviction that all Ideas form a coherent and ultimately unified system because they derive from the Good, which is the Form of all Forms.17 It was developed in its Neoplatonic form by Pseudo-Dionysius (fl. c. 500), who describes the world as the natural and free overflow of God’s superabundant intellect, goodness, and love;18 and in the Middle Ages by Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1328), for whom creation is an expression of the eternal triune God,19 and Nicolas of Cusa, who saw the universe as ‘unfolding’ and being ‘enfolded’ in God.20 The same emanationist scheme was later embraced by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who argued that all things inexorably emanate from the divine One according to the dialectical pattern of opposition and unification.21 More recently, the scheme has been defended by Jürgen Moltmann and comprised by Sallie McFague in combination with the ‘procreative model’ and against the ‘production model’ of Genesis 1.22 On the other hand, Christian panentheists are aware of the tradition of creatio ex nihilo and offer various interpretations of the doctrine. Advocates of process theology tend to criticize it. Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) boldly states that ‘God and the World stand over against each other’, hence ‘God does not create the world, he saves it’.23 Charles Hartshorne (1897– 2000) questions and rejects the strict supernaturalism of creatio ex nihilo, which he judges as a convenient fiction invented in the last centuries before Christ to exalt divine power. He thinks it amounts to believing in magic, for it has ‘no noncontroversial analogous phenomenon whatsoever . . . no basis in well attested human experience’.24 He thus considers the proposition ‘something exists’ to be a necessary truth in process thought and claims that non-being is indistinguishable from pure chaos.25 This view is shared by David Griffin, who states that the

See Plato, Republic, trans. Francis Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), 597. See Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names and The Mystical Theology (London: Macmillan, 1920), 7. 19 See Meister Eckhart, ‘Expositio Libri Genesis’, in Meister Eckhart: Studienausgabe der Lateinischen Werke: Band 1 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2016), 1:1, sect. 7. 20 See Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia, 2.3.107. 21 See Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, ed. and trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–17. 22 See Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 113: ‘It is therefore wrong to polemicize continually against the neo-Platonic doctrine of emanation in considering the Christian doctrine of creation’. Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 153: ‘God bodies forth the universe, which is enlivened and empowered by its source’. 23 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. David R. Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1979), 346, 348. 24 See Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 58. 25 See Charles Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (La Salle: Open Court Publishing Company, 1970), 284. 17 18

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Bible affirms a doctrine of creation out of chaos, that is, creatio ex hyle (primordial matter) understood as ‘no-thing’ or relative nothingness with ‘no enduring individuals sustaining a character through time’. He speaks about a ‘chaos of events’ which did have some degree of self-determination and causal influence upon subsequent events prior to God’s creative act.26 Other panentheists defend the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and seek to incorporate it into their theology. Among those engaged in science–theology dialogue, Arthur Peacocke (1924– 2006) argues that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is ‘essential to the doctrine of God as Creator, as the one source of being of all-that-is’. At the same time, however, he thinks the doctrine may establish ‘a distinct gap between the Creator and what is created’.27 Hence, he affirms it with a modern version of the emanationist model that judges creation not as ‘part of God, nor broken off him’ but rather as ‘born out of Him’.28 This, he claims, avoids the danger of regarding the world as being of ‘the same “substance”, or mode of being, as God’. He notes the uneasiness of the juxtaposition of both views and the difficulty in providing a unified picture of creation.29 Philip Clayton sides with Peacocke in affirming creatio ex nihilo, which he thinks conveys Christian belief that ‘there has not always been a world, and hence that the world is not co-eternal with God’.30 Yet, Clayton also speaks of ‘God, who produces the conditions for the entire physical universe out of himself’, which brings a peculiar interpretation of creatio ex nihilo developed by some panentheists.31 Those trying to bring the panentheist metaphor of the universe being ‘in’ God to a logical conclusion claim that creatio ex nihilo means creation ‘from God himself ’. This notion goes back to Eriugena, who identified ‘nothing’ out of which creation was made with ‘the Superessential Good’ and spoke of God who moves in creation ‘from nothing to something’ (ex nihilo in aliquid).32 Following Eriugena, the German mystic Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) was one of the first to speak of God as a ‘pregnant mother (genetrix or fruitful bearing womb of eternity)’ who births the world.33 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) saw God as ‘the self-subsistent unity, at the pole of being: and as a necessary consequence, surrounding it on the circumference, the multiple – the pure multiple . . . or creatable nil, which is nothing . . . a possibility of being, a prayer for being’.34 Paul Tillich develops the same idea in a contemporary setting and suggests

David R. Griffin, ‘Panentheism: A Postmodern Revelation’, in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur R. Peacocke (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 36–40, 42–3. See also Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003). 27 Arthur R. Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming – Natural, Divine, and Human (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 169. 28 Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age, 169. 29 Peacocke also discusses the view of creation modelled as an aesthetic activity, yet he does not seem to address the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in his interpretation of this model. See Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age, 170–7. 30 Philip Clayton, ‘Open Panentheism and “Creatio Ex Nihilo”’, Process Studies 37, no. 1 (2008): 166. 31 Philip Clayton, God and Contemporary Science (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997), 23. Italics mine. 32 Eriugena, De divisione naturae, III.19. 33 Jakub Böhme, ‘A Letter to an Inquirer’, in Essential Readings, ed. Robin Waterfield (Wellingborough: Aquarian, 1989), 64. See also Grace M. Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Gloria Schaab, ‘Midwifery as a Model for Environmental Ethics: Expanding Arthur Peacocke’s Models of Man–in–Creation’, Zygon 42, no. 2 (2007): 487–98. 34 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, ‘My Fundamental Vision (1948)’, in Toward the Future, trans. René Hague (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 194. 26

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distinguishing between ouk on, a complete absence of being, and me on, the non-being full of potential for being. He thus states that creatio ex nihilo means that God naturally creates the world from me on in himself.35 Panentheism: Creation as a necessary act of God’s kenosis Once one envisions the created universe as being ‘in’ God, one needs to acknowledge that this may introduce a change in the Creator himself. ‘The most excellent being changes’, says Hartshorne; and he ‘would not have been the same without the world’, adds Clayton.36 Moreover, the change in question means God’s kenosis. Hence, Moltmann appeals to the kabbalist notion of tzimtzum and says that the ‘nothing’ of creatio ex nihilo is the consequence of God’s selflimitation and self-negation: ‘God makes room for his creation by withdrawing his presence . . . a partial negation of the divine Being.’ Nothingness is for him ‘the non-being of the Creator’. In other words, ‘It is only God’s withdrawal into himself which gives that nihil the space in which God then becomes creatively active’.37 Other panentheists (e.g. Hartshorne, Peacocke, Joseph Bracken, Griffin, John Cobb) share Moltmann’s view and speak more specifically of the self-limitation of God’s immutability, omnipotence, omniscience, impassibility, and eternity in creation.38 This idea of the kenotic aspect of divine creation goes back to Nicolas of Cusa, who saw it as a ‘contraction’, a specification, or self-delimitation of the Absolute (Maximum). Some panentheists go so far as to say that creation is, in fact, a ‘leap’ or ‘fall’ from God. Formulated by Böhme, this idea recurs in Schelling’s assertion that creation is a ‘distancing’ from the absolute, ‘a Fall – a defection – from God. . . . [T]his is sin’.39 Tillich adds that human self-actualization is ‘the point at which creation and the fall [sic] coincide’.40 Moltmann asserts, after Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), that the existence of God inevitably involves tragic suffering and evil as well as goodness, love, and ultimate triumph. Hence, the divine Being includes negativity (Non-being) and pain.41

See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), 1:252–4; Philip Sherard, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 238–9. 36 Hartshorne and Reese, Philosophers Speak of God, 10; Clayton, God and Contemporary Science, 93. See also Nicholas A. Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 29: ‘Creation of the world cannot be deduced from the Absolute which is perfectly self-sufficient. Creation of the world implies movement in God, it is a dramatic event in the Divine life’. 37 Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 87, 109. ‘The nihil in which God creates his creation is God-forsakenness, hell, absolute death; and it is against the threat of this that he maintains his creation in life’. Moltmann, God in Creation, 87–8. See also Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 59: ‘For God, creation means self-limitation, the withdrawal of himself, that is to say self-humiliation’. 38 See, for example, Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 122, 138, 142; Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age, 121–34. 39 Friedrich W. J. Schelling, ‘System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere’, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1856–61), 6:552. The English citation appears in Thomas O’Meara, ‘“Christianity Is the Future of Paganism”: Schelling’s Philosophy of Religion, 1826–1854’, in Meaning, Truth, and God, ed. Leroy Rounder (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 235n18. 40 Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:255–6. 41 According to Berdyaev, since the world as the realization of God includes humans, whose exercise of freedom inevitably causes evil, there is ‘the presence of tragic conflict in God’. Nicolai Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937), 29. See Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 42–7. 35

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For many panentheists, this change in God which is creation was necessary. Apart from Clayton asserting that ‘both the creation of the universe and the details concerning how it was created involved free divine decisions’,42 and Böhme, Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Rahner and Moltmann who spoke of the supreme necessity and supreme freedom of God’s creative act dialectically, there are other advocates of panentheism asserting that creation was inevitable and that God’s sovereignty does not include the freedom whether to create the universe or otherwise. So Friedrich Schleiermacher: ‘For if He wills Himself, He wills Himself as Creator and Sustainer, so that in willing Himself, willing the world is already included.’43 In other words, God’s creative act is not a sovereign choice but rather a necessary aspect of the divine nature, which cannot be conceived apart from the world.44 This view finds grounding and support in the writings of German idealists, Tillich, William Temple, John Macquarrie, Keith Ward, and others.

Panentheism: The universe in God – creatio continua Having said that God creates from within himself, panentheists emphasize that the universe must be thus ‘in’ God, who nonetheless transcends it. One of the biggest challenges they face is providing a precise meaning of the pan-en-theistic ‘in’.45 Many see the universe as God’s body (an analogy of a mind–body metaphor).46 Clayton speaks of ‘God as coextensive with the world’ and of finite space as being ‘contained within absolute space’.47 Whitehead suggests that God, while distinct from the world, ‘must include in himself a synthesis of the total universe’.48 And Hartshorne asserts: ‘The mere essence of God contains no universe. We are truly “outside” the divine essence, though inside God.’49 Trying to avoid both dualism and supernaturalism, Griffin claims that God and the universe are numerically distinct while ontologically the same. He speculates that God and events in the world interact through a non-sensory perception.50 Similarly, Peacocke speaks about an ‘interface’ between God and the totality of the world (= all-that-is). What passes across this ‘interface’, adds Peacocke, ‘may perhaps be conceived of as something like a flow of information – a pattern-forming influence’, which does not ‘involve

Clayton, ‘Open Panentheism and “Creatio Ex Nihilo”’, 166. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, trans. D. M. Baillie et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), 217. 44 So Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 99: ‘If God is love, then he does not merely emanate, flow out of himself; he also expects and needs love: his world is intended to be his home.’ 45 See Philip Clayton, ‘Panentheism Today: A Constructive Systematic Evaluation’, in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur R. Peacocke (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 254–5; Michael W. Brierley, ‘The Potential of Panentheism for Dialogue between Science and Religion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 636–41. 46 See, for example, Arthur R. Peacocke, ‘Articulating God’s Presence in and to the World Unveiled by the Sciences’, in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur R. Peacocke (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 150–1. 47 Clayton, God and Contemporary Science, 90. 48 Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 98. 49 Hartshorne and Reese, Philosophers Speak of God, 22. 50 Griffin, ‘Panentheism’, 44–5. 42 43

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matter or energy (or forces)’.51 Moltmann uses the concept of perichoresis (the traditional doctrinal term describing the mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Trinity) to describe the relationship of mutual interpenetration of God and the universe. He claims that synthesizing God’s self-negation and creativity constitutes ‘time in his eternity, finitude in his infinity, space in his omnipresence, and freedom in his selfless love’.52 This emphasis on the universe’s presence in God inspires panentheists to speak about creatio continua, defined as an ongoing creative action of God. Clayton distinguishes it from the first creation ex nihilo and says that ‘it connotes that God uses indirect means to bring about creative purposes within the world’.53 Peacocke, similarly, speaks of God continuously creating through the processes of the natural order, working from inside the universe. He thinks ‘creation goes on all the time and is not just a one-off event’.54 He joins other advocates of panentheism and stresses that God gives a co-creative role to nature, allowing the creatures to participate in his own creative activity: ‘God is creating at every moment of the world’s existence through perpetually giving creativity to the very stuff of the world’.55

Rejection of creation in strict pantheism: A critical evaluation In an attempt to evaluate the position of strict pantheism, it must be emphasized that both its principal assumptions, that is, the unity of the universe and its divinity, have been questioned. Following Aristotle, it is argued here that the unity of the entire universe cannot be derived from the concept of membership of the same class.56 Nor is it of a logical character to so argue (as did Spinoza57), as this omits the contingent aspect of nature. Its definition, in terms of an overall purpose manifest in the pattern of events (see Fichte and Hegel), does not find vindication in facts either. Concerning the divine character of the unity of all that is, it does not seem to find a plausible and sufficient grounding in the infinity and eternity of the universe, as these attributes are not predicated on it in the same way that theists ascribe them to the Creator God. It is doubtful that the numinous experience of awe and wonder, a deep ‘reverence for’, and a sense of ‘identity with’ the world (a sort of religious experience of mysterium tremendum et fascinans) justifies classifying the unity of the universe as divine.58

Arthur R. Peacocke, ‘Emergence, Mind, and Divine Action: The Hierarchy of the Sciences in Relation to the Human Mind-Brain-Body’, in The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion, ed. Philip Clayton and Paul Davies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 274–5. See also Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age, 161, 164. 52 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 109. 53 Clayton, God and Contemporary Science, 23–24. 54 Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age, 170. See also Peacocke, ‘Articulating God’s Presence’, 147–51. 55 Peacocke, ‘Articulating God’s Presence’, 144. See also Philip Clayton, ‘Kenotic Trinitarian Panentheism’, Dialog 44, no. 3 (2005): 252; Paul Davies, ‘Teleology without Teleology: Purpose through Emergent Complexity’, in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur R. Peacocke (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 104. 56 See Aristotle, ‘Metaphysica (Metaphysics)’, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, trans. W. D. Ross (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 21–2 (III, 3, 998b): ‘It is not possible that either unity or being should be a single genus of things.’ 57 See Spinoza, Ethics, 93–102 (I, P13–23). 58 See MacIntyre, ‘Pantheism’, 34–5. 51

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Having rejected entirely the classical theistic notion of creation, strict pantheists seemingly need to accept the universe’s existence, its order, and its divine unity as brute facts and consider such realities to be perpetual. While this allows them to avoid an array of difficulties faced by theistic doctrines – including questions about the beginning of time and space, the possibility of creation ex nihilo, God’s freedom in creating, and the origin of evil, among others – their answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing is rather puzzling and hardly satisfying. It tends to trivialize and ignore this pivotal philosophical and theological query rather than confront it. Moreover, speaking of evil, strict pantheism cannot assure humanity that evil will not prevail, making the pantheistic view of the future rather despairing. For even if its notion of salvation assumes perpetual existence within the divine unity in a nonpersonal sense, strict pantheism does not motivate one to actively resist suffering and injustice encountered in the world. Nevertheless, despite such criticisms, strict pantheism remains the most prevalent and attractive non-theistic and naturalistic concept of divinity due to its simplicity and departure from organized and formal religions.

Creation in panentheism: A critical evaluation Whether considered descending from or merely related to moderate pantheism, panentheism, for its part, brought a radical shift in theology. Embraced by many contemporary thinkers, this ‘quiet revolution . . . subverts the priorities of classical theism, and thereby undercuts its edifice and structure. It challenges classical theism’s imperium, and places the doctrine of God in ferment’.59 What panentheists judge to be the main advantage of their position is its replacing the static and distant God of classical theism with a God who actively responds, is engaged, and remains in a reciprocal relationship with the universe. They claim it takes what is best from both classical theism and pantheism, avoiding their weaknesses, that is, overemphasizing either God’s transcendence or immanence. Panentheists have successfully addressed the cognitive drama of the modern person who, when reflecting upon the mystery of the world, tends to narrow the horizon of being by assigning divine features to reality that are ontologically unspecified and impermanent.60 At the same time, however, approaching panentheism from the perspective of classical theism, one cannot leave it unchallenged at several crucial points. Most importantly, there is the problem of the imprecision of interpretations of the pan-en-theistic ‘in’. Despite assurances that it should not be understood ‘in any locative sense’,61 panentheistic rhetoric appears to fall prey to ‘mereologization’ and ‘spatialization’ of ontological and theological discourse.62 Moreover,

Brierley, ‘Naming’, 4. As an example of the presentation of the classical theism’s view of creation theology, see José Morales, Creation Theology (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001). 60 See Mariusz Tabaczek, Divine Action and Emergence: An Alternative to Panentheism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), chap. 4. This aspect of my evaluation of panentheism is inspired by one offered by the Polish philosopher of religion Jacek Wojtysiak in his ‘Panenteizm’, in Filozofia Boga. Część II: Odkrywanie Boga, ed. Stanisław Janeczek and Anna Starościc (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2017), 7:519–20. 61 Peacocke, ‘Articulating God’s Presence’, 145. 62 See Wojtysiak, ‘Panenteizm’, 509; Brierley, ‘The Potential of Panentheism for Dialogue between Science and Religion’, 636–41. 59

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as others have noted, it remains difficult to see how panentheism manages to avoid collapsing into pantheism and whether it does succeed in properly describing God’s transcendence and immanence.63 Concerning the doctrine of creation, although I side with panentheists defending the notion of creatio ex nihilo, I contest the position of those who claim that God creates from within himself. Reflecting upon the emanationist aspect of the creative act, classical theism emphasizes that creatures are not of the same substance as God.64 Sharing the likeness to divine essence, they are not and cannot be ‘in’ God. Moreover, the same tradition of classical theism perceives creation predominantly as an expression of divine love which does not introduce any change in or limitation to God.65 I side with the tradition here, defending the notion of the God–universe relationship understood as neither a reciprocity nor an interdependence. As Aquinas has it: ‘[I]t is manifest that creatures are really related to God Himself; whereas in God there is no real relation to creatures, but a relation only in idea, inasmuch as creatures are referred to Him.’66 Concerning creatio continua, I reject the panentheistic idea of God sharing his creative power with creatures. Because creation requires an infinite power, one must acknowledge that only God can create.67 Consequently, I suggest describing the processes of change in the created universe as attending to God’s governance. As such, they must be distinguished from both creatio ex nihilo and its continuation – conservatio a nihilo. Finally, panentheists – indeed, along with all theists – must answer the challenge arising from their account of the origins of evil, which Peacocke and others seem to find as ‘internal to God’s own self ’, so making God suffer with the world on the way of overcoming it.68 Although existentially and emotionally attractive, such a position makes God responsible for evil and so questions God’s benevolence. Despite such problems, panentheism continues to be one of the most popular versions of theism within the circles of contemporary philosophical and systematic theology. Critical

See Richard T. Mullins, ‘The Difficulty with Demarcating Panentheism’, Sophia 55, no. 3 (2016): 325–46; Michael J. Dodds, Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 164–8; Cooper, Panentheism, 328–30; Mikael Leidenhag, ‘Is Panentheism Naturalistic? How Panentheistic Conceptions of Divine Action Imply Dualism’, Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2014): 215, 219–20. 64 Aquinas states that the difference between God and creatures is such that God cannot, in fact, be classified with them within the same ontological category. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), I, Q. 3, Art. 5. See also Christopher Shields and Robert Pasnau, The Philosophy of Aquinas, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 79–80, 84, 154. 65 See Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 45, Art. 3; John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 579–85; Jeffrey E. Brower, Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material World: Change, Hylomorphism, and Material Objects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 60–1. 66 Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 13, Art. 7. For examples of a contemporary explanation and defense of this view, see Dodds, Unlocking Divine Action, 169–74; Brian J. Shanley, The Thomist Tradition (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 59. 67 See Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 45, Art. 5. Aquinas states, ‘[I]t is impossible for any creature to create, either by its own power or instrumentally – that is, ministerially.’ 68 Peacocke, ‘Articulating God’s Presence’, 151. 63

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debate, conversation, and dialogue among proponents of classical theism, panentheism, and pantheism, including their views concerning the doctrine of creation, continue.

Further reading Clayton, Philip and Arthur R. Peacocke, eds. In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004. Cooper, John W. Panentheism – The Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to the Present. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006. Corrington, Robert S. Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. Levine, Michael P. Pantheism: A Non-Theistic Concept of Deity. London: Routledge, 1994. Moltmann, Jürgen. God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Tabaczek, Mariusz. ‘The Image of God in Western (Christian) Panentheism: A Critical Evaluation from the Point of View of Classical Theism’. Sophia 61, no. 3 (2022): 611–42.

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CHAPTER 31 LOVE AND LAW

Ulrik Nissen

‘[N]ature teaches – as does love – that I should do what I would like to have done to me.’1 These are the words of the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer Martin Luther in his ‘On Secular Authority’. The aim of his point is as simple as it is challenging today. The law of nature permeates creation and is full of divine love. Love and law are intertwined and inseparable. For the secular authority, this also means that even the political law is to be understood and used in the light of love. Consequently, when Luther reflects on restitution, in the third part of this treatise, he emphasizes that this must be done from the law of love, as the essence of the law is love. Luther’s understanding of the relation between love and law holds similarities with Saint Paul’s understanding of the law as good. The law is an expression of God’s care for his people. God shows his love for the people of Israel with the law as a guardian for Abram’s offspring, as Paul argues in Gal. 3.15-22. The present chapter is titled ‘Love and Law’ – not the other way around. This is significant. For a Lutheran mind, the opposite could have been the right order considering the role of law. Luther (and the Lutheran tradition) distinguishes between three uses of the law: the political use, the theological use, and the pedagogical use. The first use of the law has as its purpose the upholding of the political order; the second use of the law concerns the way that the law leads the sinner to Christ; and the third use of the law is a teaching for Christians about how to orient their lives. For the first two uses of the law, it is a precondition that the law precedes the gospel. Only after the gospel is heard and a living faith finds root in the justified sinner can Christian love follow and begin to grow as fruits of the tree. For the third use of the law, there is proper instruction for the Christian about what the law teaches.2 Thus, for a Lutheran theology, the order is law and love (or law and gospel). For Luther’s contemporary, John Calvin, it is slightly different, however. He understands the law in light of the covenant and thereby as an expression of the love behind this covenant and the promise to Abram (Genesis 12). Therefore, he also finds a delight in the law.3 A similar understanding is present in the twentieth-century Reformed theologian Karl Barth, for whom it is important to emphasize that the law is part of the Christian life, or, to put it more precisely, one only knows the law in the light of how God reveals himself to human beings through Christ. Thus, in an essay from 1935 entitled ‘Gospel and Law’, Barth argues that already in the

Martin Luther, ‘On Secular Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed, 1523’, in The Annnotated Luther, Volume 5: Christian Life in the World, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand, Kirsi I. Stjerna, and Timothy J. Wengert, trans. James M. Estes (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 128. 2 See, for example, ‘Formula of Concord (1577)’, in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, trans. Charles Arand (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 481–660. 3 See John Calvin, ‘Psalm CXIX’, in Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. James Anderson (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1949), 4:398–494. 1

Love and Law

Old Testament, God’s promise to Abram precedes the law.4 The law, therefore, is an expression of God’s love and points forward to Christ. Because Christ is the fulfilment and end (telos) of the law, in Jesus Christ one also sees the grace of God in the law. This, for Barth, also implies that all theology must take its starting point in the revelation of Christ. It is the revelation of God through Jesus Christ that is the condition for Christian theology and, therefore, also for the understanding of the law. In the light of the gospel, one can come to a proper Christian understanding of the law. Even if there is a discussion on how to understand the law and what the proper order is between love and law, Luther, Calvin, and Barth share the understanding that the law is also an expression of God’s love and of God’s care for creation. Creation is permeated by God’s law and is thereby surrounded by God’s love.

What are ‘love’ and ‘law’? The concepts of ‘love’ and ‘law’ have been understood in many different ways within the Bible and various Christian traditions, philosophies, and experiences. One of the important distinctions in relation to love is the one found in the classical work on the difference between eros and agape, written by the Swedish theologian Anders Nygren: Eros och Agape (Agape and Eros).5 Nygren argued that these two different kinds of love have different motivations. Eros is driven by the desire to possess, whereas agape is characterized by an unselfish, sacrificial will to give oneself for the other. The differences between these two motifs also implied, for Nygren, that he found the former in the ancient traditions competing with Christianity, whereas the latter was characteristic of the Christianity of the New Testament and which was re-established with the Lutheran Reformation. Nygren’s thesis has been disputed with regard to its methodology and the typological summary of these two different kinds of love. At the same time, his study has also had a significant influence. One comprehensive study of Nygren and Christian love is the work by Gene Outka and published as Agape: An Ethical Analysis.6 Outka analyses the agape motif in theological writings from around 1930 to the early 1970s, and focuses on the ethical issues of self-love, justice, subsidiary moral rules, the virtue of the moral agent, and how human agape can be justified today. Outka’s approach is primarily analytical, but in the concluding chapter, he outlines a revisited concept of agape. In his outline of agapeistic Christian love, he explores the emerging features of agape that have appeared as common. The first of these is agape as equal regard. A central characteristic of this pattern is that agape is ‘an active concern for the neighbor’s wellbeing independent of particular actions of the other’.7 Agape is first and

Karl Barth, ‘Gospel and Law’, in Community, State, and Church: Three Essays by Karl Barth with an Introduction by David Haddorff, ed. David Haddorff, trans. A. M. Hall (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 71–100. 5 Anders Nygren, Den Kristna Kärlekstanken genom Tiderna: Eros och Agape (Stockholm: Svenska Kyrkans Diakonistyrelses Bokförlag, 1930). 6 Gene H. Outka, Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). See also Frederick V. Simmons and Brian C. Sorrells, eds, Love and Christian Ethics: Tradition, Theory, and Society (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016). 7 Outka, Agape, 260. 4

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foremost ‘other-regarding’; its primary concern is the other. This is an understanding of the agapeistic love that holds wide implications for Christian love today. Outka does not take the step to ask what this implies in relation to creation. But if Christian love is primarily ‘otherregarding’, without any prior deliberations on capacities or criteria of the other, it broadens this concept and leads to the question of how love can shape the moral response of the Christian to other created beings more broadly. This brief overview of different approaches to love serves as the background for the present chapter, where the aim is to reflect, first, on the question of how divine love finds its reflection in the Christian moral life as an agapeistic love. Is God’s love as it is known in the act of creation an expression of a love mirrored in love as agape? This leads one to ponder how it can be claimed that creation is permeated with love and, at the same time, is the source of a call to love. That leads to the question: what does one mean by ‘law’? One of the classical references on law is Thomas Aquinas’ text in his Summa Theologiae, wherein he differentiates between the eternal law, natural law, human law, and divine law. The eternal law reflects God’s mind, and the universe is governed accordingly. Natural law is what Aquinas names as the ‘participation of the eternal law in [or by] the rational creature’.8 Human law is a dictate of practical reason for specific temporal arrangements derived from natural law. Finally, divine law is the law that is revealed and guides humankind to eternal happiness. Here, in this present chapter, the concern is natural law. The law of nature permeates creation and, according to the classical view represented by Aquinas, also governs all created beings – including plants, non-human animals, and human beings. It is a law that sustains creation and is, as such, an expression of God’s care for creation. In the Roman Catholic tradition, this love and care for creation are developed more extensively in the encyclical letter from 2015 – Laudato Si’.9 The focus on natural law in the present chapter regards it as the law of creation. The chapter will reflect on how this law can be seen as an expression of God’s love for and benevolence to creation – and, thereby, how this law can also be regarded as a law of love.

Love is the fulfilling of the law Barth’s understanding of the law implies that the law is an expression of God’s benevolence. This is an understanding of the law that one also finds in the New Testament, which the New Perspective on Paul’s Jewish background has also emphasized.10 In his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul sums up the demands of the Mosaic law in the commandment to love one’s neighbour. For, as he says, love is the fulfilling of the law:

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), I, Q. 91. 9 See Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015). 10 This new reading of Paul was initiated by E. P. Sanders in the late 1970s, but it was James Dunn who phrased this term in an essay, in 1983. For a collection of his essays, see James Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, rev. edn (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008). More recently, this approach has been further advanced by biblical scholars in a reading of ‘Paul within Judaism’. 8

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Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; you shall not murder; you shall not steal; you shall not covet’, and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself ’. Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. (Rom. 13.8-10) Although, in, for example, his letter to the Galatians, Paul states that under the law there is no righteousness, other passages in the same letter suggest a more positive appraisal of the law as good. In one such passage, Paul reflects on the promise to Abram and the law given 430 years later. The promise stands before and after the law. The purpose of the law was to protect Abram’s offspring from their transgressions. The law was given to keep Israel’s people safe until Christ came (Gal. 3.19-24). So understood, the law is an expression of God’s love and care for God’s people. There is a similar understanding of the close relationship between love and law in the Gospels when Jesus summarizes the Mosaic law. When challenged by the Pharisees and asked which of the commandments of the law is the greatest, Jesus responds by quoting the commandment to love God and neighbour from Deut. 6.5 and Lev. 19.18: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself ’. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. (Mt. 22.37-40) Whereas these passages from the New Testament show how the essence or the summary of the law is love (both God’s love and love as a commandment), it is a significant theme throughout the Bible that God’s acts of love also precede the law. The paradigmatic example is the Ten Commandments. The preamble of the commandments refers to God bringing the people of Israel out of Egypt. It is because of this saving act of God that the people of Israel are called to have no other Gods than the One who has saved them: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me’ (Exod. 20.2-3). That God’s acts of love constitute the precondition for the call to live accordingly is a biblical theme also found in the New Testament. In the First Letter of John, the commandment to love is tied so closely to the love that Christians have been shown in Christ that the author can say that Christians can love because of this love: ‘We love because he first loved us’ (1 Jn 4.19). It is because God loves his people and has shown this love in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection that God calls his people to live a life bearing witness to this love. In this light of the law as love, one can also understand some of the most radical expressions of the law in the New Testament. This is the case, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus calls his disciples to love their enemies: You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy’. But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who 401

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love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Mt. 5.43-48) Here, Jesus calls his hearers to an even more distinct love than simply to love their neighbour, as this is a kind of love which could be called ordinary. Instead, those present to hear his words are called to an extraordinary love, and in this love for their enemies to be perfect and thereby bear witness to their heavenly father. However, once again, it is important to note that this is a call to love for enemies addressed to the disciples already sitting around Jesus (Mt. 5.1). The fellowship and the community around Jesus precede this extraordinary call. It is within this fellowship of the disciples loving and following Jesus that they are met with this call. This theme of community and love preceding the law as an expression of God’s will is already found in the creation accounts.

The law known through Christ The German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, argued along lines similar to Barth, emphasizing Christ as the key to understanding creation. According to Bonhoeffer, one can never understand creation per se, but always has to understand it from Christ: ‘Only in the middle, as those who live from Christ, do we know about the beginning.’11 One does not know about the beginning in an abstract way but concretely from how God’s love has been revealed in Christ. In the collection of his lectures on Genesis 1–3, given in 1933 and first published in 1937 as Schöpfung und Fall (Creation and Fall), Bonhoeffer, from the very first passages in which he gives an exposition of Genesis chapter 1, emphasizes God’s love. He explains how God creates out of freedom and that this is an expression of the gospel: ‘That God is in the beginning and will be in the end, that God exists in freedom over the world and that God makes this known to us – that is compassion, grace, forgiveness, and comfort.’12 This also implies that God is deeply related to earth as both Lord and the one who loves earth: ‘[T]he Creator is the Lord, the one who brings about the wholly new, the strange, inconceivable work of God’s dominion and love.’13 When God looks at the world, he finds delight in it. The created world is good and pleasing to God. So Bonhoeffer: The whole Bible is concerned to teach that the work that has been done, the state of things, the embodiment of the will, the world, is good, that God’s kingdom is on earth, that God’s will is done on earth. Because the world is God’s world, it is good. God, the Creator and Lord of the world, wills a good world, a good work.14

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Douglas S. Bax (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 62. 12 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 36. 13 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 36. 14 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 46. 11

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Bonhoeffer proceeds to argue that this also implies an important difference between creatio continua and the way God upholds creation. The former continuously wrests the world out of nothingness in a continuous return of creation to nothingness. Hereby God’s freedom as creator is negated, as his creatorship becomes completely arbitrary. Instead, the upholding of creation implies that the created world is affirmed in its being because God finds delight in it. The created world is kept in place by God’s attention; God sees that it is good and upholds that work in being. Another way to express this Bonhoefferian view is that the world is surrounded by God’s love. God’s love for earth sustains the claim that Christians are also called to show the same kind of love. In an earlier text from 1929, Bonhoeffer uses the metaphor of a child’s relationship with their mother to describe this intimate relationship with the earth. With reference to the ancient myth about Antaneus, whose power depended on his contact with the earth, Bonhoeffer argues that those who abandon the world will lose all the eternal and mysterious powers that sustain them. He emphasizes this connection with the earth to stress the concreteness of the moral life. In the concrete situations of everyday life, one encounters the call to bear responsibility. This also implies an emphasis on being bound to the earth as if it were the human creature’s mother: ‘The earth remains our mother just as God remains our father, and only those who remain true to the mother are placed by her into the father’s arms. Earth and its distress – that is the Christian’s Song of Songs.’15 With the image of the human’s relationship to the earth as to a mother, and by the reference to the Hebrew Bible’s Song of Songs, Bonhoeffer implies that for the Christian, the relationship to the earth is characterized by love. It is an intimate relationship both in terms of human origins and human desires. This intimacy is also found in Bonhoeffer’s lectures on Genesis. Just as God loves and finds delight in creation, God loves the human being created in his image. When the human being is created, God sets the human being free and surrounds the human being with a yearning love.16 This love also finds its expression in the likeness between God and the human being. As the human being is created in the image of God, the human being is called to be free for God. In this loving and life-giving relationship with God, the image of God finds its freedom. So Bonhoeffer: Because God in Christ is free for humankind, because God does not keep God’s freedom to God’s self, we can think of freedom only as a ‘being free for . . .’. For us in the middle who exist through Christ’s resurrection, the fact that God is free means nothing else than that we are free for God. The freedom of the Creator demonstrates itself by allowing us to be free, free for the Creator. That, however, means nothing else than that the Creator’s image is created on earth. The paradox of created freedom remains undiminished.17 Bonhoeffer keeps this theme throughout his life, of a deep love permeating creation and showing itself in the Christian life. In the last phase of his life, in one of his prison letters to his

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic’, in Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928–1931, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 378. 16 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 78. 17 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 63. 15

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friend, Eberhard Bethge, about the romantic love between Eberhard and his fiancée, Renate Schleicher, Bonhoeffer describes the creature’s love for God with a metaphor from polyphonic music as the cantus firmus behind and underneath all other earthly loves: ‘God, the Eternal, wants to be loved with our whole heart, not to the detriment of earthly love or to diminish it, but as a sort of cantus firmus to which the other voices of life resound in counterpoint.’18 As long as the love for God is clear and distinct, all other kinds of love can develop mightily as counterpoints. With a reference to the Council of Chalcedon and its formulation of the two natures of Christ as ‘undivided and yet distinct’, Bonhoeffer ponders if this is also how the Christian life is. The human creature’s love for God can be seen as the counterpoint to which Christian life, in its diversity, resonates. Thereby, Christian life is viewed as a polyphony of life with love for God as its contrapuntal voice. Responding with love The different approaches to the relationship between love and law that have been considered in this chapter all presume knowledge of the law. The law is given with creation as a law of nature. In a classical reference from Romans, the Apostle Paul writes about the law that the Gentiles follow by nature: For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them. (Rom. 2.14-15) When Paul expresses that this law is ‘written on their hearts’, he seems to be using the ‘heart’ as an expression of the centre of the human being. This suggests that the law of nature is engraved deeply in human beings. As such, it is an expression of the law of creation known to all humankind by their very nature. Later on, in the same letter, Paul broadens this understanding and writes about the groaning of creation and of how all creation longs for the future glory. All creation exists in a life-giving relationship with God (see Rom. 8.18-23). This also implies that it is both within and from creation as a whole that one knows the law. From the lilies of the field to the trees of the forest, and from the companion pet to the koala as an endangered species, one lives among fellow creatures who reveal the law’s demands to humans. In the encounter with all living beings, humans are met with the demand to take care of the lives of other creatures and help them sustain their lives and flourish. The law of creation calls for such moral response. Here, humans meet the ethical demand that calls for a moral response as an act of responsible freedom. By around the mid-twentieth century, however, the concept of the law of nature had fallen into disrepute in Protestant ethics.19 One articulated problem concerned the

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘To Eberhard Bethge, May 20, 1944’, in Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best, Lisa E. Dahill, Reinhard Krauss, and Nancy Lukens (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 394. 19 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Scott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 171. 18

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understanding of ‘the natural’ and whether this was to be understood in its own right, as somewhat separate from God’s continuous work in creation. For Bonhoeffer, natural life must always be understood as a relationship of responsibility before God, a responsive relationship. Therefore, he is also critical of the idea of ‘orders of creation’, which could be interpreted as orders separate from God’s upholding of creation. Instead, Bonhoeffer introduces what he calls ‘orders of preservation’ and argues that such find their end and meaning through Christ: ‘All orders of our fallen world are God’s orders of preservation that uphold and preserve us for Christ. They are not orders of creation but orders of preservation. They have no value in themselves; instead they find their end and meaning only through Christ.’20 Bonhoeffer’s christological interpretation of creation implies that the love and law of creation find their expression in Christ. It is in and through Christ that one knows the true meaning of the law of creation. Through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, one comes to a deeper understanding of the law of love that permeates all of creation. This is also where one can return to the agapeistic love. It is through Christ that one understands a love that is simply defined by love itself. The Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard discusses this love in The Works of Love (1847) by comparing erotic love and the love that characterizes friendship. Comparing these two expressions of love, Kierkegaard discerns the distinctive nature of Christian neighbourly love. He formulates it succinctly in Section II C, where he reflects on the commandment to love the neighbour: Erotic love [Elskov] is defined by the object; friendship is defined by the object; only love for the neighbor is defined by love [Kjerlighed]. In other words, since the neighbor is every human being, unconditionally every human being, all dissimilarities are indeed removed from the object, and therefore this love is recognizable precisely by this, that its object is without any of the more precise specifications of dissimilarity, which means that this love is recognizable only by love.21 The agapeistic love knows nothing else than simply loving the neighbour. It is neither concerned with its own desire nor with any conditions of ‘the other’. It is an unconditional and self-giving love that sets the other before oneself. From a Bonhoefferian approach, one could say that this kind of sacrificial love is exemplified in Jesus Christ. This also implies that the will of God is closely tied to God’s love, as one knows it in light of the vicarious representative action of Christ, in whom the law is fulfilled. In Greek, the word used is telos (Rom. 10.4), which means both that the law in a certain sense has come to an end and also that the law finds its full expression in Christ. Human beings know the law through Christ. Paul also uses the expression nomos tou Kristou (Gal. 6.2), which means ‘the law of Christ’. By carrying one another’s burdens, one fulfils the law of Christ. Care for each other is an expression of a life which is formed by and bears witness to Christ.

Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 140. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 66. 20 21

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These reflections on Christ formation and the order of love and law also lead to an emphasis on understanding, receiving, and rejoicing in the law in the light of God’s love as it has been revealed to humanity in Christ. God’s love sheds light on the law. Human creatures can know the law of creation as a law of love because they understand it in the light of God’s beneficence as it is revealed to humanity in Christ. This was part of Barth’s claim in his essay on ‘Gospel and Law’, and, as has already been noted, Bonhoeffer follows him with his emphasis on Christ as the key to humanity’s understanding of creation. However, claiming that the law of creation, or of nature, is a law of love is only a tentative starting point. What this implies about contemporary challenges such as climate change, economic justice, migration, and other pressing concerns lies beyond the scope of the present chapter. But if the law of nature is essentially a law of love, an indispensable question for these current pressing issues is: How are they to be considered in the light of the law of love that permeates, sustains, orients, and makes free all creation?

Further reading Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3. Edited by John W. de Gruchy. Translated by Douglas Stephen Bax. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. Edited by Clifford J. Green. Translated by Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Scott. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. Kierkegaard, Søren. Works of Love. Edited by Howard Vincent Hong and Edna Hatlestad Hong. Translated by Howard Vincent Hong and Edna Hatlestad Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. Translated by Philip S. Watson. London: SPCK, 1953. Outka, Gene H. Agape: An Ethical Analysis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. Simmons, Frederick V. and Brian C. Sorrells, eds. Love and Christian Ethics: Tradition, Theory, and Society. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016.

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CHAPTER 32 LOVE AND JUSTICE THE PRIMACY OF THE CREATOR, THE GOODNESS OF THE CREATION Timothy P. Jackson

Introduction: The prior issue A doctrine of creation presupposes both creatures and a creator. When questions of justice (dikē) are directed at human creatures and their creator, the familiar inquiries of anthropodicy (asking whether humanity is just or justified) and theodicy (asking whether God is just or justified) are raised. When love (agapē) is the issue, the somewhat less well-known enterprises of what might be called ‘anthroagapics’ (asking whether humanity is loving) and ‘theoagapics’ (asking whether God is loving) are raised. The prior issue, however, is whether creatures and a creator exist as such, or whether the universe is somehow uncaused or autogenic. In light of modern science, can one any longer hold a doctrine of creation? The objects and nature of love and justice will vary depending on how this question is answered. Thus, this chapter begins with a discussion about how contemporary physics and biology construe being and minds, values and wills. It proceeds to consider possible implications for ethics, attempting to ground love1 and justice in a tenable doctrine of creation. It does so via a dialogue with several philosophers, theologians, physicists, and biologists, especially Stuart Kauffman. The thesis advanced here, with a nod to Plato, is that the natural world and its life are not their own sufficient reason; thus, one should appreciate God as the ordering source of existence.2 Judaism and Christianity share this cosmogonic view and emphasize that fellow human beings are to be loved as codependents on a divine Reality. If humans and the universe generally are self-producing, there might be autochthonic justice, but there would be no agapic love. Agapē is the creativity of the creator, a supernatural virtue that bestows worth, made possible and necessary by a transcendent Good. As such, love has both priority and apriority, coming first and before all creaturely experience and being the end or purpose of that experience. As the appraisal of merit and demerit or the keeping of contracts, justice is important but secondary. More specifically, agapē involves three interpersonal features: (i) unconditional commitment to the good of the other; (ii) equal regard for the well-being of the other; and (iii) passionate service open to self-sacrifice for the sake of the other. These attitudes and behaviours reflect divine holiness as depicted in the Bible and revealed in the life, death, and teachings of Jesus Christ. Justice, by contrast, distributes rewards and punishments and keeps promises based on

Unless otherwise noted, ‘love’ refers to agapē rather than eros, philia, storge, or amor sui. See Plato, Timaeus, 31a–c.

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contingent past performances or pledges.3 Neither love nor justice, both human and divine, can be understood without a theistic account of creation.

Created being, and finite and infinite minds ‘Esse is percipi’ Bishop Berkeley’s principle ‘esse is percipi’ – ‘to be is to be perceived’4 – seems anticipatory of modern physics and its postulation of the dependence of determinate being on mind or consciousness. According to quantum mechanics, there is no substantive empirical reality until it is observed or measured by intelligence. Once this fact is accepted, a simple argument for the existence of a creator God suggests itself. If we assume that stars, planets, and galaxies were real long before sentient creaturely life appeared in the universe, then who was observing these realities? For God’s existence to come to one’s mind, must not one’s existence have come from God’s mind? A long line of Christian scientists, from Asa Gray to Simon Conway Morris, believe that the Deity designed nature’s laws such that life’s processes would be teleological and cast up intelligence, including the capacity for love and justice. Orthodox Jews and Christians affirm some version of intelligent design and thereby reject reductive materialism that construes the universe as a closed, necessitated system of matter in motion. Perhaps the most cogent challenge to such materialism comes from quantum mechanics and its claims about consciousness and indeterminacy.5 Psychophysical reductionism has not succeeded in explaining the human mind, so there is good reason to suppose that contemporary physics and biology are radically incomplete, if not palpably mistaken.6 The more ambitious theistic claim treated in this chapter argues, first, that consciousness and intentionality are not merely epiphenomenal to matter, including brain states, thus that they are not causally impotent. More importantly, second, it contends that some form of infinite mind must have been present before finite minds evolved; otherwise, the universe of stars and planets, atoms and energy, would not have been real, and evolution could not have happened. There is still the idea of how life first arose – how physics and chemistry became biology and sociology7 – but the quiddity of the natural elements must have been preceded by a supernatural mind capable of creating and perceiving purposeful organisms. Only mind can make specified information, which is to say that only mind can make other minds.

See Timothy P. Jackson, The Priority of Love: Christian Charity and Social Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Timothy P. Jackson, Political Agape: Christian Love and Liberal Democracy (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015). 4 George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), 24. 5 See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 6 See Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 7 For a snapshot of the literature, see Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). 3

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Against occasionalism and mechanism Stuart Kauffman, medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher, contends that life does ‘not need special intervention by a Creator God’ and that it is ‘a natural, emergent expression of the routine creativity of the universe’.8 Kauffman’s position is a contemporary version of Democritus’, the ‘laughing philosopher’ of antiquity who recommended cheerfulness in the face of a purposeless universe and argued that ordered reality is a function of atoms self-sorting in eternal vortices.9 Kauffman, as did Democritus, rejects a supernatural designer of the physical world, but his argument is not against all forms of ‘Intelligent Design’. His reasoning is only telling against a form of theological occasionalism, which holds that God directly and repeatedly intervenes to change the genetic make-up of creatures to generate new species with distinct morphological and/or psychological properties. Some are drawn to such occasionalism because Galilean and Newtonian science implausibly depicts the evolution of complex and intelligent forms of life as the result of utterly blind and mechanical processes unfolding across vast amounts of time.10 How, they ask, can random mutation and natural selection alone cast up structures that are ‘irreducibly complex’, such as the eye? An irreducibly complex organic system defies construction on a gradual, incremental basis because the absence of a single element in the interactive system would mean the nonfunctionality of the whole. Small cumulative and undirected changes cannot cobble together a working innovation, no matter how long the time span is. Moreover, almost all mutations are harmful to their bearers, and natural selection itself presupposes rather than explains the specified information encoded in RNA and DNA. Or so the argument goes.11 The Judeo-Christian Deity need not be conceived as an occasionalist. While a theist holding to a doctrine of creation by definition affirms some form of teleology in the natural order, the ‘design’ behind irreducible complexity can be located in the laws of nature and the dynamics of life structured as intrinsically purposeful. On this account, God is like an office manager who lays down general principles and gives workers the materials to carry out the manager’s orders but who gives individuals some leeway in how they achieve the manager’s ends. Several of Charles Darwin’s contemporaries – Harvard botanist Asa Gray, for example – readily accepted evolution as the mechanism for producing species but continued to see God as the intelligent designer of the laws of evolution itself. Even Darwin conceded at times that nature and its laws were divinely designed. What divided Gray and Darwin was whether any specific result of evolution is planned. Darwin held that the specific results of evolution were unplanned/undesigned, thus his denial of what he called ‘creationism’, while Gray argued that evolution was guided in and through channels pre-ordained by God.12 A theistic response to Kauffman helps one see, in effect, that

Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 59. 9 Great World System and Little World System were attributed to Democritus in antiquity, but they are no longer extant. 10 See Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperCollins, 2013). Meyer would dispute the label ‘occasionalist’, however. 11 See Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 2006), 39–45. 12 Darwin explicitly rejected Gray’s argument at the end of his Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (London: J. Murray, 1868). Like Gray, Paul Davies has concluded that ‘we are truly meant to be here’. Paul C. W. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 232. See also Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010), 165. 8

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there is a third way between a scientific reductionism that insists that the only reality is blind matter in arbitrary motion (which is bad faith) and a theological occasionalism that insists that God intervenes in every moment of evolutionary history (which is bad science). To repeat, the failure of theological occasionalism does not amount to the death of ‘the creator God’. One can reject constant divine ad hoc tinkering in nature and culture but still believe in both a creator and emergent evolution. Emergence in evolution is the appearance of a complex system (such as a living organism) in which the whole has properties not attributable to and not deterministically predictable based upon its individual parts. The system is dynamic and self-organizing over time, and no antecedent state of the system necessitates all subsequent states. Thus there is genuine open-endedness to the process. If God directly controlled every aspect of biology and history, a fatalism would render human freedom an illusion. Moreover, God would be fallible and even evil, for evolution is full of dead ends and false starts, and time is riddled with cruelty and injustice. Rejecting occasionalism, however, does not leave one with mere Deism. God is closer to human psyches than human persons are to themselves, and one need not doubt that God can communicate with and move persons in every moment if persons are open to this. But such ‘inspiration’ by the Spirit is not tantamount to altering human biology. Only an omnipotent and necessary being could make a universe in which there is genuine freedom and emergent finite minds, and that being is closer to the biblical God than what theological occasionalism affirms and what Kauffman denies. One might insist that ‘the laws of physics are constant and necessitating throughout the universe’, but Kauffman and Giuseppe Longo have insightfully argued that ‘no laws entail the becoming of the biosphere, or econosphere, or human culture or history’.13 There is genuine contingency in how life and society evolve across the aeons. Here one faces, nonetheless, a deep interpretive challenge. Simon Conway Morris makes a strong case that once life is present, intelligence of some kind will eventually evolve.14 It is all but ‘inevitable’, to use his term. Kauffman, on the other hand, maintains equally forcefully that ‘the evolution of the biosphere is radically often unprestatable and unpredictable’.15 Both agree that Stephen Jay Gould understates the directionality of evolution, comparing it to a stupefied drunk staggering aimlessly down the street.16 But how to avoid overstating it or stating it paradoxically? If no laws entail the becoming of the biosphere, mustn’t one say, a fortiori, that no laws entail the being of the biosphere? Isn’t the dawn of life also ‘unpredictable’, even a sort of uncaused surd? The challenge for the theist is to acknowledge real open-endedness to evolution without seeing it as arbitrary and without purpose or direction. The Genesis account of the creation of life as an intentional act of a divine mind might be false, but it is incompatible with a closed materialistic system governed by blind fate. If Kauffman’s account of emergent evolution ultimately entails such a system, it is obviously incompatible with Jewish and Christian theism. In contrast, emergent evolution can be seen as God’s means of bringing the imago Dei into

Stuart Kauffman, ‘Living the Well Discovered Life’, NPR, 19 December 2011, https://www​.npr​.org​/sections​/13​.7​/2011​ /12​/19​/143952941​/living​-the​-well​-discovered​-life. 14 See Simon C. Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 15 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 133. 16 See Stephen J. Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony Books, 1996), 149–51. 13

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being over time. Further, one need not deny that the human body and mind evolved together;17 the alternative is a very unbiblical Cartesian dualism.18 The imago, associated with the agapic love that created the cosmos,19 need not have appeared in a bi-pedal mammalian species. But the salient question is, ‘Was its appearance utterly random?’ The dawn of life may not be fully predictable, but this is not synonymous with its being uncaused by intelligence. Why is there something rather than nothing? and ‘Reinventing the Sacred’ In any case, the deepest mystery is not ‘Why is there biological life?’ or even ‘Why are there intelligent minds?’ but, rather, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ ‘Where did the classical world come from?’ as Kauffman asks.20 One may hold that the universe is eternal, without beginning or end, cyclic and uncreated – in which case there is no ‘why’.21 (This general position is as old as Lucretius’ De rerum natura, c. 60 bce.) Conversely, classical Big Bang theory posits a beginning to time and space, and the law of entropy and the Big Rip theory suggest that there will be an end. But what commenced the whole contingent process? Can finite creativity create itself infinitely? How one answers these questions is crucial to one’s moral and religious attitude towards existence. If there is no rhyme or reason behind the physical world and its laws – no First Cause – then cosmic questions of love and justice do not arise. There is no creator to love and thank, and the issue of whether the universe and its inhabitants are justified as such is a nonstarter. The universe and its processes (including biological ‘evolution’) is a surd that merely is, without ultimate purpose or explanation. If anything is ‘sacred’, it is because humans have invented it, not because it is a gift from a wise and benevolent Deity. For a theist who affirms a loving and just creator, in contrast, the sacred is something discovered (with the meticulous labour of scientists and others who attend to reality), not invented. The sacred is the inviolable, what is not to be reduced to a mere means, whereas what is invented is virtually, by definition, what is instrumental to some further human end. Humans don’t invent the sacred; it invents humans. And one can’t re-invent what one did not invent in the first place.

Created value and finite and infinite wills Charles Sanders Peirce and Kauffman on freedom and necessity It is presumed in what follows that the only plausible account of universal origins, as Bishop Berkeley realized, is some form of classical theism in which the spatiotemporal world

In support, see Frans B. M. de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Frans B. M. de Waal, Our Inner Ape: The Best and Worst of Human Nature (London: Granta Books, 2005). 18 See Peter F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 1959). 19 See Timothy P. Jackson, ‘Evolution, Agape, and the Image of God: A Reply to Various Naturalists’, in Love and Christian Ethics: Tradition, Theory, and Society, ed. Frederick V. Simmons and Brian C. Sorrells (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016), 226–49. 20 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 205. 21 See Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang (New York: Broadway Books, 2007). 17

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depends upon an eternal consciousness for its being. This first cause and primal perceiver is typically identified as the creator, God. As Thomas Aquinas maintained, no human mind can fully comprehend the divine mind, but one can determine rationally that God must exist.22 Otherwise, nothing would exist. The chief challenge for theists is not to prove that a creator is but rather to affirm that God is just and loving and/or that God’s creation is just and loving. Ontological questions about being and finite and infinite minds must be related to axiological questions of value and finite and infinite wills. In particular, one must consider freedom and necessity as possible aspects of the world and its causes.23 In unpublished and undated notes on evolution, Charles Sanders Peirce noted: I have always suspected that Darwin must have been influenced by [Thomas] Malthus and the political economists. . . . The study of political economy is apt to betray men into a generalization which is extremely doubtful and certainly most repugnant to our higher instincts, namely that the greatest agency of civilization, is greed and all that ministers to it. The odious character of this generalization, and mind that in saying that it is odious to an unsophisticated mind I am not saying that it is certainly false, for states of things we detest may be true for all that, I say that what masks this odious character is that [sic] some of the chief virtues which serve largely, if not mainly as ministers to greed, such as prudence, caution, self-denial, etc.24 Darwin did indeed read Malthus, and Professor Peirce’s other writings reveal that the economists’ ‘odious generalization’ is at least contestable. He helps one avoid, that is, the very reductionism in both biology and economics that would blind one to the dynamism of creation. For Peirce and Kauffman, natural selection is not the only process at work in evolution, and hard-wired greed is not the only engine driving social history. Peirce’s and Kauffman’s analyses of dynamic systems and change contain insights undeveloped in the contemporary debate over God, evolution, and agapē. One still needs to distinguish, as Peirce puts it, between ‘tychastic evolution’ (fortuitous variation), ‘anancastic evolution’ (mechanical necessity), and ‘agapastic evolution’ (creative love). The key to strong agapism is ‘developmental teleology’:25 genuine spontaneity unfolding towards an intelligible end, or what Carl Hausman termed ‘a growth of purposes, not a growth of ideas in accord with purposes’.26 This last notion involves what Kauffman calls ‘the expanding adjacent possible of

See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), I, Q. 2. 23 See Stuart Kauffman, ‘Answering Descartes: Beyond Turing’, in The Once and Future Turing: Computing the World, ed. S. Barry Cooper and Andrew Hodges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 164; Stuart Kauffman, ‘The End of a Physics Worldview: Heraclitus and the Watershed of Life’, NPR, 8 August 2011, https://www​.npr​.org​/sections​ /13​.7​/2011​/08​/08​/139006531​/the​-end​-of​-a​-physics​-worldview​-heraclitus​-and​-the​-watershed​-of​-life. 24 Charles S. Peirce, MS 954, Box 56, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 2–4. 25 See Charles S. Peirce, ‘Evolutionary Love’, in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 364; Charles S. Peirce, ‘The Law of Mind’, in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 350. 26 Carl R. Hausman, ‘Eros and Agape in Creative Evolution: A Peircean Insight’, Process Studies 4, no. 1 (1975): 12. 22

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the evolving biosphere’, wherein ‘without selection accomplishing it, evolution creates its own possibilities of future evolution!’27 Only if consciousness is ontologically real and not merely epiphenomenal to physical brain states can there be the spontaneity and self-giving that distinguishes agapē from eros, free will from mere ‘happenings’ of instinct and appetite. Stated differently, the game theoretic advantage of an individual is different from the evolution of an entire system towards charity, and one cannot derive the latter from the former. Just as one cannot reduce biology to Newtonian physics, one cannot reduce ethics to Darwinian biology. Early game theorists often wanted a social system to evolve to the maximal utility via self-interested purposes already in place among the participants, when in reality, this only happens when someone is willing to let go of self-interest and act for the emergent common good out of robust benevolence. Goodness only arises, that is, when a ‘player’ consciously embraces a new and wider purpose than previously held or implied by the initial objectives of the ‘game’. Kauffman’s and Peirce’s insights illustrate the limits of a purely consequentialist analysis of ‘altruism’ and ‘cooperation’. Their analysis blinds one to the motives with which a player may intentionally set about to transform a game, its rules, and its other players. A strong agapist, for instance, may accept losses in the prisoner’s dilemma and ultimatum game,28 not because one is looking for a return or enhanced reputation among others (‘indirect reciprocity’) but to convert the defectors for their own sake. A strong agapist may punish, but this will be chiefly motivated by the need of the malefactor for retribution and Reformation. The true altruist would sacrificially call the selfish out of the manipulative system they seek to dominate, and this can only seem either irrational or diabolical to a pure consequentialist. Only comparatively recently has the Peircean dimension of normative strategies unfolding (even changing) over time begun to be understood by game theorists, in part as a result of structuring probability into the mix across multiple iterations of the prisoners’ dilemma.29 The critical question, even so, is whether the teleology at work is cause or effect. Does self-sacrifice arise as a result of selfinterested competition, in which case it represents a novel or even deceptive strategy to ‘win’, or does self-sacrifice emerge despite such competition, in which case it represents a purposeful redefinition of ‘winning’? Referring to the Gospel of John, Peirce opted for a more radical third possibility: sacrifice and sympathy do not appear despite competition; rather, they are prior to and responsible for competition even as they constrain it.30 Peirce, that is, construed agapē as the cause of evolution rather than its effect, in which case agapē transcends ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ altogether. Agapē creates competition, that is, but it also limits and transforms it. Indeed, Peirce conceived of agapē as not only creative human love but also as the kenotic love of God generative of all

Stuart A. Kauffman, A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 117, 139. 28 The prisoner’s dilemma is a scenario from game theory that illustrates why two rational people would decline to cooperate even if it could be in their better interest to do so. See Steven Kuhn, ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive, accessed 28 November 2021, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/entries​/prisoner​ -dilemma. 29 See Martin A. Nowak and Karl Sigmund, ‘Evolution of Indirect Reciprocity’, Nature 437 (2005): 1291–8; Martin A. Nowak and Karl Sigmund, ‘Evolutionary Dynamics of Biological Games’, Science 303 (2004): 763–99. 30 See Peirce, ‘Evolutionary Love’, 361–5. 27

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reality, including justice as giving persons their due. Such love made the world, and it permits creatures in the world to be real and free but of no necessary benefit to the creator. That’s true altruism! This brings one squarely before the question of God and the sacred. In Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman resists materialism and determinism, but his title is self-defeating since ‘the sacred’ is precisely not something human creatures invent but something they discover. Or, better still, the sacred is what invents creatures gratuitously and unpredictably. Only such a reality can (re-) enchant the human creature and ‘break the Galilean spell’, thus taking one beyond modernity.31 It remains an open question whether the sacred is exclusively an emergent property of nature or also something supernatural, and there appears to be no strictly ‘scientific’ way to settle this dispute. Intuitively, nevertheless, there is no strictly naturalistic way to explain from where nature and its laws come. Peirce believed in a transcendent creator, while Kauffman does not, but Peirce was not a typical theist. He worried about the theodicy problem, and he judged that ‘the only solution of the problem of evil is to recognize that the Supreme Love embraces hate as a finite variety of itself, and that sin is a creation of God, and as such, is good in certain stage[s] of development. God delights in evil’.32 Admittedly, Peirce did not publish these troubling thoughts, but one may still be compelled to say that this sort of felix culpa view undermines God’s goodness. One can understand God’s tolerating hatred and suffering for a higher purpose – rather like a parent encouraging a toddler to walk on their own, even while knowing that the child will fall and skin their knees and throw a tantrum in the process – but one cannot fathom God’s enjoying or willing evil for its own sake. Such a Designer would be unworthy of worship. Here, Peirce failed to distinguish between what Kauffman calls ‘function’ and ‘causal consequence’.33 To think that God delights in evil is like thinking that the heart’s function is to make sounds that a stethoscope can pick up. A doctor may be able to use those sounds to diagnose and treat disease; in that sense, they may ‘delight’ in them. But, as Kauffman emphasizes, the heart’s function is to pump blood, not to shake the pericardial sac, and a healthy pump is what the doctor values, not heart murmurs. Correlatively, evil may be a consequence of divine creation, the way a shadow is the product of sunlight, but the purpose of creation is emergent goodness. Put otherwise, God relishes evolving creatures that can freely love him and their neighbours. This is the final cause of the world. Evolution, ethics, and necessary being/first cause, again Returning to the larger biosphere, Kauffman avers that ‘the biosphere constructs itself, evolves, and has persisted for 3.8 billion years’.34 Yes, but, to repeat, one can’t extend the process to infinity on either end. Emergence itself can’t be explained as emergent. As Kauffman details, a screwdriver has many unpredictable uses: A may borrow it from B to jam open a door; B may have borrowed it from C to open a paint can; C may have borrowed it from D to

Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 141, Charles S. Peirce, MS 890, Box 54, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 1–2. 33 See Kauffman, A World Beyond Physics, 13–15, 115–17, 126–7. 34 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 173. 31 32

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drive in a screw, and so on. But one more ‘turn of the screw’ is called for. For all its emergent utility, somebody must have invented/made the tool in the first place. And the borrowing – the ‘invasion of the adjacent possible’35 – can’t keep going back forever; someone must be the original owner. This owner is ‘the agapic necessary’, to whom human creatures can be grateful for the sequential yet spontaneous loans. For Kauffman, evolution sounds like the (ethical) First Cause: ‘the very first source of hominid morality is evolution itself ’.36 It was granted above that the human mind and body evolved together, so it can be agreed that, properly understood, ‘evolution is not the enemy of ethics but one of its bases’.37 But, once more, it is crucial to discriminate means and ends. Evolution is the means to morality as an end. When Kauffman (and others) write that ‘morality has offered a selective advantage to groups’,38 he seems to reverse this proposition. He makes it difficult not to instrumentalize morality and see it as the means to the evolutionary end of survival. The obvious next question is: ‘And what if morality ceases to benefit my group and/ or my kin?’ Kauffman partially saves the day by allowing that ‘ethical and moral reasoning goes far beyond what can be accounted for by evolutionary arguments’.39 When he proceeds to deny a summum bonum or a creator God, however, he gives the game away. Either one cannot evaluate humanity’s moral ends, or evolution slips into the role of a meta-value that settles all disputes. Kauffman argues, falsely, that ‘between the moral ends in themselves, we have no way of assessing their relative moral importance’.40 Persons weigh ends and actions all the time. This is done fallibly and without algorithmic precision. But something functions as the dominant value – money, reproductive success, fame, justice, love, and so on. One can prefer agapic love, but the main thing needful is to avoid valourizing evolution as being itself God. Some philosophers worry that endorsing a highest good will lead ineluctably to ‘ethical totalitarianism’, but this does not follow. A summum bonum is not the same as a solum bonum, and freedom of conscience and voluntary cooperation may be among one’s dearest axiological priorities. Kauffman writes about ‘the evolution of morality’, saying that ‘God’s law obviously accepted slavery 4,500 years ago’.41 A moral realist will be unpersuaded by this contention. One’s conception of morality evolves, even as one may have a more-or-less faithful conception of God’s will, but slavery has always been wrong and despised by God. If, literally, morality itself evolves, then it was once right to slaughter infants, rape and degrade women, and torture and behead strangers. And a Deity who can’t decide whose or how many eyes to take is a Dr Strangelove: intermittently advising the President, heiling der Führer, and strangling himself. Kauffman doesn’t want to invoke ‘a blind moral relativism’,42 but the habit of anthropocentrism tempts him to blur the distinction between seeming and being.

Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 133. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 262. 37 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 266. Emphasis added. 38 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 262. 39 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 262. 40 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 267. 41 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 268. 42 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 271. 35 36

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Roger Penrose concludes that there is some fundamental principle of reality, some ‘undiscovered new theory’, without which one’s picture of the universe (and of oneself) does not make sense.43 And Kauffman himself writes that ‘how the mind is able to generate the array of meanings and doings it does is beyond current theory. . . . There appear to be missing principles of coevolutionary assembly for the biosphere, the human economy and civilization, and even evolving human law’.44 A believer in creation wagers that these principles will turn out to be ‘supernatural’ rather than ‘natural’ since the first cause of nature cannot be nature (or one’s own mind) itself.

Ethical implications for love and justice The limits of merit and demerit What are the ethical implications of all this? Self-organization and emergent complexity are scientific analogues of what moral theologians call ‘grace’, even as natural selection and fitness are associated with ‘merit and demerit’. What is puzzling is that Kauffman deftly details ‘the limits to selection’,45 but he does not draw the correlative moral conclusion: the limits to merit and demerit. In talking about evolution and ethics, Kauffman and virtually all game theorists emphasize the importance of ‘fairness’ or ‘justice’ in competitive environments of scarcity. Fairness or justice is all about appraisal – rewarding merit, punishing demerit, and keeping contracts – but this is far from the whole of the moral life. As the bestowal of worth, agapic love is more fundamental.46 Prisoner’s Dilemma scenarios presume that competition for reproductive success is the only game in town, so the best one can do ethically is a kind of enlightened self-interest that admits the need for self-restraint in evaluating a situation. ‘Generous tit-for-tat’ emerges as an evolutionary stable strategy in a survival game of multiple iterations, but the end is genetic prudence in a world governed by natural selection. Even if one speaks oxymoronically of ‘reciprocal altruism’,47 this lets the tail of selection wag the dog of organization. (An altruism premised on repayment for mutual advantage is not genuine altruism.) In reality, the priority of self-organization should move one to highlight what Judaism calls ’hesed and what Christianity calls agapē. Humans all live and subsequently evolve because they have been the beneficiaries of steadfast love, unmerited favour, organization given freely. Gratitude and compassion are the highest moral virtues, not self-interest or pragmatic cooperation.

Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xxii. 44 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 143, 177. 45 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 183. 46 The language of ‘appraisal’ and ‘bestowal’ is taken from Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, Volume 1: Plato to Luther (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009); Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, Volume 2: Courtly and Romantic (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009); Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, Volume 3: The Modern World (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009). 47 See Robert L. Trivers, ‘The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism’, The Quarterly Review of Biology 46, no. 1 (1971): 35–57. 43

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Dignity and sanctity What if Plato was right that the original moral reality, the highest ethical platform, is not perceived via competition in the present but via a recollection of the past, not in the history of natural selection but in the prehistory of emergent complexity? Plato described pre-natal awareness of the forms, including the form of the Good,48 while Kauffman describes autocatalytic systems and order, but both point to the meta-value of grace. Dwelling on natural selection, in contrast, is a mode of works righteousness. Again, natural selection requires complex order on which to work, even as agents with dignity grow out of patients with sanctity. A just respect for dignity means rewarding the merits and punishing the demerits of autonomous actors, but a loving honouring of sanctity means caring for the needs and potentials of inviolable fellow creatures.49 The Latin term ‘dignitas’ means ‘a being worthy, worth, worthiness, merit, desert’, while ‘sanctitas’ means ‘inviolability, sacredness, sanctity’.50 Though both Latin words and their English cognates have subsequently been used interchangeably, ‘dignitas’ was initially at home in political and economic spheres, referring to the grandeur and authority of a particular office or station, while ‘sanctitas’ originally had ethico-religious overtones, referring to moral purity or holiness, especially when these were seen as divine gifts. Immanuel Kant sought to universalize dignity by basing it on autonomous agency,51 but such agency is not, in fact, a universal human attribute: think of foetuses and the mentally less abled. The more Englishspeaking literature accents rational agency as the singular human station, the more the very idea of sanctity will seem quaint or absurd and the more it will wither in relation to dignity. When this occurs, dignity cannot help but be identified with social elites, those with power and prestige, and those outside of these elites will, in turn, seem worthless or burdensome. Indeed, this will be called ‘justice’ or ‘survival of the fittest’. One can applaud Kauffman’s basic effort to recapture sanctity, but he has not adequately disentangled it from dignity. His insight into autocatalytic systems and the wonder of natural ordering should make him an exponent of the prophetic (like Isaiah, Amos, and Jesus) rather than a mere fan of the economic (like Charles Le Gendre, Herbert Spencer, and Milton Friedman). Mutation and selection have their proper places in evolutionary theory, as do prudence and fairness in moral theory, but they are insufficient or even primary. Kauffman emphasizes that conventional wisdom often reduces biological evolution to random-mutation-cum-naturalselection; this chapter has argued that conventional wisdom often reduces liberal democracy to justice-cum-keeping-contracts. But the unconventional truth is that spontaneous organization comes first scientifically, even as charity comes first politically. Selection is not enough, and

See Plato, Phaedo, 65d, 72e–78b. See Jackson, Political Agape, chap. 2. 50 Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, ‘dignĭtas’, in A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary: Revised, Enlarged, and in Great Part Rewritten (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1945), 577; Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, ‘sanctĭtas’, in A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary: Revised, Enlarged, and in Great Part Rewritten (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1945), 1626. 51 See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43–4. 48 49

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justice is not enough; indeed, they are parasitic upon self-organization and charity, respectively. But how is one to understand charity and its origin? Charity (’hesed, agapē) can be equated with the creative kenosis of the divine mind. But as gratuitous concern for the well-being of another, charity is not cast up by natural selection and chance; rather, it is their necessary condition. Whether or not God loved the universe into being, as the Hebrew prophets (and I) believe, every human being lives by a care they did not earn, either as individuals or as a species. A generative love has priority, hence the reference to ‘the agapic necessary’. An ethic based on selection alone must lead to Social Darwinism, while an appreciation of the priority of spontaneous organization can lead to prophetic love of neighbour. Gratitude for the giftedness of life can move one to care for the weak and vulnerable – true altruism – but fair economies of exchange never will. If selection were the sole engine driving evolution, both biologically and culturally, then it would be more candid simply to admit that altruism is non-existent, that even ‘fairness’ is a social convention humans accept for fear of retaliation. If one had the Ring of Gyges, for instance, one would not be fair in a purely ‘Darwinian’ world. One would see that, quite generally, ‘morality is a collective illusion foisted on us by our genes’.52 Kauffman is paving the way, scientifically, for a return to the prophetic – to what one might call ‘Good Friday and Passover values’. When he emphasizes ‘the economic’ and ‘fairness’, however, he obscures this fact. One can support the free and competitive market, but it is not the summum bonum. A recognition of spontaneous order and sanctity allows one to transcend the interest-based rights of economic justice in favour of the need-fulfilling duties of neighbour love. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is neither the first nor the only game in town. And the same goes for justice/fairness/capitalism. Love and justice are no more in conflict than are self-organization and selection,53 but they are distinct, and the former member of each pair has primacy. No end of villainy is caused when one forgets this. The Pauline–Augustinian spell In addition to the Galilean–Newtonian spell, the Pauline–Augustinian spell also needs to be broken. Or so strong agapists believe. The scientists and the theologians alluded to in the adjectives here were towering geniuses who revolutionized their (and our) worlds, and one can only be grateful for much of what they have bequeathed. But they all sought to reduce phenomena to deterministic precision, leaving devastating social effects. Newton saw all of reality as matter in motion, with physical laws governing a closed and necessitated causal system. This helped make modern science possible, but it privileged objects over minds and left free agents with dubious ontological status over against blind events. (In the wake of Newton, even so great a mind as Kant’s had to bifurcate reason into ‘pure’ and ‘practical’ varieties and leave them both more or less alienated from religious faith.) Similarly, Saint

Michael Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 253. See also Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 53 Cf. Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 188. 52

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Augustine saw all of reality as creatures predestined by God, with the divine will governing a closed and necessitated causal system. This helped make pre-modern theology possible, but it privileged God’s power over God’s goodness and left faith with a dubious ontological status over against grace. Can anyone doubt that Newtonian mechanism has inclined persons to instrumentalize the natural world and each other, even as Augustinian predestinarianism has inclined persons to draw invidious contrasts between ‘the elect’ and ‘the damned’? Both lead to immense cruelty and suffering, and both are incompatible with liberal democracy and genuine love and justice. The classical view of science is literally demented: mind (mente) as such has no place, especially as mind entails intentionality and agency. The mind adds nothing to reality and cannot causally alter it. Consciousness is fully reducible to brain states, for instance, and free will is an illusion or a misnomer. All that exists for Newton are objects, events, and the forces that determine them, so mind is, at most, an epiphenomenon of physical complexity without real substance. Prior physical states necessitate subsequent ones, so the idea of ‘a free action by a moral agent’ is a non-starter. Both action and passion are rendered nonsensical: there is no room for true contingency and personal responsibility in the classical physical picture. One classical view of theology is quite heartless: finite intentionality and agency are either utterly non-existent or ultimately irrelevant. No human thought, word, emotion, or deed – however heartfelt and responsive to grace – is germane to justification. Despite his desire to avoid fatalism, Augustine makes restoration of right relation to God entirely and irresistibly God’s doing. In turn, any sanctification or growth in virtue and good works is a chain reaction attributable to the Deity. In this way, action and passion are rendered nonsensical: one can neither act with nor react to God. In the end, some people are consigned to endless misery no matter what, and it is meaningless to feel compassion for them since they are God’s inexplicable ‘vessels of wrath’.54 Against the scientific backdrop, one can appreciate how revolutionary, even threatening, quantum theory is. (It is the equivalent in science to the Protestant Reformation in theology.) Quantum theory rejects both determinism and materialism. It demonstrates that even physical reality cannot be described without reference to consciousness. In fact, mind and matter form a continuum, rather like space and time. Even as energy and mass are interchangeable, so too are will and representation.55 Action at a distance and movement faster than the speed of light are characteristics of mind, and these must be not only possible but actual if free will, and thus love and justice, are to be real. For the purposes of this chapter, Jacob Arminius (1560–1609) is the true fruit of the Reformation in that he rejects both determinism and objectivism in religion. As Arminius noted, theological determinism makes God responsible for evil and reduces history to a colossal waste of effort on the Deity’s part. If God does it all without any genuine cooperation or acquiescence on humanity’s part, then God is the engineer of both natural calamity (e.g. the Lisbon earthquake) and moral abomination (e.g. the Shoah). Again, such a Being is unworthy of worship.

See Augustine, Grace and Free Will, chap. 41. A reference to Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818/19).

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Conclusion: ’Hesed and agapē For millennia, humans have attempted to discover the world’s origin and identity, but only comparatively recently has this enterprise been cut off from the transcendent. The ancient Greeks sought mediation between humans and the gods, and they found this in the divine gifts of geometry and philosophy. Over time, however, these and related disciplines became techniques for controlling things (and persons) rather than bridges to the truth of a First Cause. Forms of meditation, with ancillary practical applications, became primarily means of manipulation, such that science is now typically technology without love of the infinite. At best, this leaves one with psychology as therapy; at worst, it becomes the will to power and survival of the fittest. As Simone Weil observes: ‘In the indifference which, since the Renaissance, science has shown for the spiritual life, there seems to be something diabolic. It would be vain to try to remedy this by an attempt to maintain science in the realm of nature alone. It is false that science belongs wholly to that domain.’56 Ironically, despite his reductionism, Isaac Newton was perhaps the last great western genius for whom physics and mathematics were efforts to discern and celebrate the mind of God. The atomic bomb is the modern symbol of creatures, forgetful of the creator or pretending to be him, threatening creation itself. Environmental responsibility and respect for vulnerable and alien others demand that persons transcend both instrumental reason and prideful self-creation and rediscover wonder (aporia) before what persons do not invent. Agapē assumes that persons do not invent themselves or others and that persons cannot uninvent infirmity or mortality. One can debate whether Plato was a theist, but his Good was definitely not man-made. Judaic ’hesed (steadfast love) and Christian agapē (love of neighbour) look to the fragility and giftedness of creation as the tie that binds. Fragility and giftedness have a moral claim on human persons; they call for care and gratitude, respectively. Unless and until human beings can rediscover the charitable virtues, they won’t have sanctity enough to live and grow. Free agents do not emerge full-blown from the head of Zeus (or Darwin). One’s own ‘autonomy’ and a fairness that does justice to others only emerge after one receives and gives an unmerited favour. The incompatibility of ’hesed and agapē with a thoroughgoing naturalism does not falsify such naturalism with deductive certitude. The truth of humanity’s condition may simply mean that humanity’s highest aspirations and self-explanations are erroneous, that survival of the fittest is the singular value, and that the struggle of altruism against egotism is bogus. As William James says, however, ‘it feels like a real fight, – as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears’.57 ‘How can we marry humility with practical action?’, Kauffman asks.58 How can one ‘take responsibility’ for oneself and learn ‘care for one another’ justly and lovingly?59 The contention

Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks, ed. and trans. Elisabeth C. Geissbuhler (London: Ark, 1987), 171. 57 William James, ‘Is Life Worth Living?’, in The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longman Green and Co., 1907), 61. 58 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 277. 59 Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 287, 288. 56

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made in this chapter is that anthropodicy and anthroagapics depend on theoagapics. Less technically, one must perceive and act on three apparent truths: (i) that humans do not invent the sacred or the just, even as humans do not merely ‘choose’ to honour their neighbour as an optional philanthropy – that way lies hubris and paternalism, or worse;



(ii) that biological and cultural evolution are means to moral communion and not ends in themselves, lest humans end up worshipping natural selection and survival of the fittest; and (iii) that there is more than one way to envision creation, but practical wisdom requires a humble sense of dependence on the transcendent source of goodness. Again Weil: ‘In creating God renounces being all. He abandons a bit of being to what is other than Himself. Creation is renunciation by love.’60 Human beings may never fully succeed in embodying faith, hope, and love, but with the assistance of the Holy Spirit they can try to reflect in creation the kenotic will of the creator. Then justice will take care of itself.

Further reading Clayton, Philip and Jeffrey Schloss, eds. Evolution and Ethics: Human Morality in Biological and Religious Perspective. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004. Dembski, William A., Casey Luskin, and Joseph M. Holden, eds. The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. Eugene: Harvest House, 2001. Gould, Stephen J. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. New York: The Publishing Group, 1999. Kauffman, Stuart A. A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Meyer, Stephen C. Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. New York: HarperOne, 2021. Rosenblum, Bruce and Fred Kuttner. Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Simmons, Frederick V. and Brian C. Sorrells, eds. Love and Christian Ethics: Tradition, Theory, and Society. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016. Steinhardt, Paul J. and Neil Turok. Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang. New York: Broadway Books, 2007.

Weil, Intimations of Christianity, 183.

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CHAPTER 33 JUSTICE AND JOY

Andrew Shepherd

While differing in detail, there are strong similarities in the theological cosmologies of Ancient Near East (ANE) creation accounts. Common to many of these ancient narratives of origins is the contention that creation has been birthed through intra-divine violence: the chaos that threatens the stability of the world is overcome, and order is established, through divinely enacted bloodshed. The natural world is then composed of the material remnants of this divine cosmic violence, and humanity, conceived of as lowly slaves, is created to work tirelessly to follow the instructions and fulfil the wishes of rulers whose power and authority stems from these malevolent and fickle gods. In contrast to these mythological accounts founded upon ontologies of violence and belittling anthropologies, the accounts of creation contained in the Judeo-Christian scriptures offer a radically different vision. In the biblical narrative, the origins of the created order are not found in intra-divine violence but rather stem from the goodness and overflowing love of the creator God. The divine gods do not dwell in sanctuaries built with human hands, but rather the whole of creation belongs to God and is a temple in which God’s glory is manifested (see Ps. 24.1; Isa. 66.1-2). While other ANE accounts serve to legitimize a hierarchical and stratified social structure founded upon oppression and injustice, the biblical narrative offers a vision of the universalization and democratization of social power. All of humanity, not merely the divine rulers, are bearers of the image of God, created by God to care for and tend to God’s created temple of glory, which has its origins in divine joy and love. Human society is instituted not upon oppression and the exercise of coercive power, but rather, the foundation stones of creation are God’s justice (mišpāṭ) and righteousness (ṣeḏeq) (Ps. 89.14). What does it mean to conceive of creation as established upon the justice and righteousness of God and thus to view God’s work of creation as an activity of joy-filled justice-making?

Creation as a work of justice Conceiving God’s work of creation as an activity of justice is challenging in the contemporary world. Within the western legal tradition, the exercising of judgement in pursuing justice has tended to be conceived in abstract and disinterested terms. The classic image of the arbiter of justice within western culture is that of the blindfolded woman with scales in one hand and a sword in the other. This image originates in Lady Justice, Iustitia, the goddess of justice within Roman mythology, introduced by Emperor Augustus to the Roman pantheon around 13 bce. Accordingly, within the western cultural imagination, justice is often understood in nonemotional, theoretical terms and with an accompanying emphasis on the possible threat or actual reality of coercive, disciplinary violence. This conceptual difficulty is then compounded by the fact that, for many, their experience of ‘justice’ is one of blind disregard, violence, and oppression.

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This understanding and experienced reality, that order and justice are dependent upon a judgement being made by an ‘objective’, disinterested external party and established by the threat or exercising of coercive or punitive violence, is a feature too of ANE creation accounts.1 Adversarial combat and often gruesome imagery feature prominently in ANE mythological accounts as the primordial forces of chaos are subdued to establish the order necessary for the emergence of biological material life and, ultimately, of human society. For example, in the Babylonian creation epic, the Enūma Eliš, Tiamat, the sea-goddess, is the embodiment of primordial chaos. With her husband, Apsu, the god of groundwater, she produces offspring – a first generation of deities. Apsu, correctly fearing that these children are seeking to depose him and usurp his throne, engages in battle with them. He is defeated. Tiamat, enraged at the death of her husband, takes the form of a sea dragon and produces eleven fearsome monsters. She resumes the battle against her rebellious children but ultimately is slayed by the demi-god, Marduk. Having secured victory, Marduk assumes the status of ruler of the deities. Meanwhile, the dismembered body of Tiamat becomes the substance for the material world – her ribs composing the heavens and the earth, her eyes the source of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, her tail the Milky Way.2 This combative imagery – as sea serpents, the symbols of the forces of chaos, are subjugated – occurs also within the biblical text. In Psalm 74, influenced by ANE Sumerian laments, God’s work of salvation is portrayed as involving the establishment of order through the exercising of violence: Yet God my King is from of old, working salvation in the earth. You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan; you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness. You cut openings for springs and torrents; you dried up ever-flowing streams. (Ps. 74.12-15)

The understanding that justice requires disinterested objectivity is explicated in Rawls’ concept of the ‘veil of ignorance’. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 2 See Enūma Eliš, 4.138–44: 1

Half of her he set up and made as a cover, heaven. He stretched out the hide and assigned watchmen, And ordered them not to let her waters escape. He crossed heaven and inspected its firmament, He made a counterpart to Apsu, the dwelling of Nudimmud. The Lord measured the construction of Apsu, He founded the Great Sanctuary, the likeness of Esharra. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, eds, Context of Scripture, Volume 1: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 111. Cited in John H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011), 33.

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The same imagery is present in Isa. 27.1, where the prophet declares God’s redemptive judgement: ‘On that day the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.’ In these passages, the seas, and the mythic life-forces present within this watery chaos, are construed as foes. God triumphs by breaking and crushing the heads of these mythical antagonists and then further defiles these enemies, allowing wild creatures to feast on their carcasses and to mutilate their corpses. However, while combative and confrontational relationality appears in the Hebrew scriptures, such an understanding of justice is, arguably, the minor voice within the biblical canon. The pursuit of justice fundamentally involves the establishment of order and the instituting of frameworks and systems that create the conditions and contexts for the flourishing of common life. German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, offering a contemporary reiteration of Thomas Aquinas’ conception of justice, writes: ‘it is properly the mark of justice to establish order among things’.3 The creation account in Genesis 1 recounts precisely such an activity of establishing order. In the beginning, tōhû wābōhû, ‘the earth was void and vacuum’.4 The prerequisite requirement for life to emerge is the establishment of space and order within this ‘formless void and darkness’ (v. 2). Thus, integral to the work of creation is the establishment of justice through the activity of discriminating judgement. If life is to emerge from the ‘dark, watery mess’,5 then light needs to be distinguished from darkness, the waters of the heavens need to be separated from the waters covering the earth, and boundaries need to be fixed to keep seawaters in their place and to prevent them from submerging terra firma. Biblical scholars have long noted that the creation account in Genesis 1 follows a form-filling pattern. God establishes structured forms, and then life emerges and fills these structures. In contrast to the contemporaneous ANE accounts, within Genesis 1, this exercising of judgement and the establishing of just order does not require the employing of punitive power or violent subjugation. The divine work of creating an environment for life to emerge is fundamentally relational and collaborative. The Word and the Spirit brood over the waters brimming with possibilities and potentialities. Order is instituted by God’s decree,6 and life then emerges, evolving to fill the spaces established within the cosmic temple. Creation, therefore, is not a one-off event but rather a continuous process as creation responds to the creator’s call – exercising its own agency at the bequest of its creator.7 As William Brown notes: ‘God creates by verbal decree that is at once commanding and invitational.’8 Order is not imposed but invited. Justice is established not by conquest but through collaboration. The building of God’s

Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 44. 4 William P. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 34. 5 Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation, 36. 6 See Pss. 33.6, 9; 147.18; 148.5–6. 7 For a vivid depiction of creation as a choir brought into being and then responding harmoniously to the melody initiated by the creator, see C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 59–69. 8 Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation, 44. 3

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temple of glory is less the strict and slavish implementation of a master blueprint design and more a process of creative, constructive participation.9 This participatory and invitational accent has been a touchstone of several contemporary theological accounts of the doctrine of creation. Catherine Keller, John Caputo and Rosemary Radford Ruether offer postmodern, playful, theological interpretations of Genesis 1, suggesting the work of creation is not the establishing of order – which they believe necessitates the exercising of coercive power. Rather, like Brown, they conceive of the activity of creation as a ‘cooperative process’.10 However, in doing so, these deconstructive theologies reject the classical Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and ‘formlessness and emptiness’ is given ontological status. In such accounts, the work of creation is understood as creatio ex profundis, with the creator God working collaboratively with the watery chaos – conceived of as difference or the feminine – to establish the world of being.11 The metaphysical assumptions of such deconstructive theological readings of Genesis 1 are problematic. In requiring the overturning of the traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, such granting of ontological status to ‘nothingness’ has profound implications for doctrines of God and for soteriological and theodicean questions. Such theological accounts, in emphasizing the existence of a demiurge through which God creates, also rehearse historical interpretations that have previously been proffered and renounced as heterodox.12 The more nuanced version of the doctrine of creation advocated in this chapter consists of neither a simplistic fiat creationism nor a metaphysical reworking of the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Rather, creation involves two aspects. First: the forming of order by divine command, the establishing of the rhythm and pitch of the base-melody. Second: the emergent properties of life, responding to the creator’s invitation and filling the temple structures with responsive harmonies. While uncomfortable with an approach that grants ‘chaos’ an ontological status, there are, however, aspects of these playful, deconstructive reinterpretations of the doctrine of creation that are valuable. In particular, in focusing on the cooperative dynamic of the creative activity of God, these theological interpretations pay attention to an aspect of God’s relationship with creation that is often overlooked – joy.

Creation and joy Attention to the motif of joy within the biblical accounts deepens the understanding of creation as an activity of life-giving justice. The concept of God as a solemn and sombre creator–judge

The classic text offering an evolutionary theological cosmology is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (London: Collins, 1959). For a contemporary inheritor of Chardin’s mantle, see Philip Clayton, Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action, ed. Zachary Simpson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008). For an introduction to emergence theory, see Philip Clayton and Paul Davies, eds, The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 10 Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation, 44–5. 11 See John D. Caputo, ‘Before Creation: Derrida’s Memory of God’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 39, no. 3 (2006): 91–102; Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (London: SCM Press, 2002). 12 See Francis Watson, ‘In the Beginning: Irenaeus, Creation and the Environment’, in Ecological Hermeneutics: Biblical, Historical and Theological Perspectives, ed. David G. Horrell et al. (London: T&T Clark: 2010), 127–39. 9

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engaged in humourless and deliberative judgement from a distance is antithetical to biblical creation accounts. In Genesis 1, on seven occasions, God declares the ‘goodness’ of the creation that is coming into being. Far from being narcissistic or self-congratulatory ‘trumpet-blowing’, these evaluative affirmations are expressions of God’s joy and delight in witnessing the creation that, at divine command and invitation, is emerging. The dynamic of divine joy is best expressed in Psalm 104, which, recounting in poetic form the Genesis 1 creation account, ‘bursts at the seams with joy as it celebrates creation’s manifold nature’.13 The psalm evocatively conveys the relational involvement and dynamic of joy present as the creator, wrapped in garments of light, races around surveying the splendour of creation from cloud chariots blown by the wind (Ps. 104.2-3). This ontology of joy, the essence of the Triune God, permeates the fabric of the created order. God’s judgement distinguishes light from dark and separates the waters. The ‘watery chaos’14 submerging the mountains (v. 6) and threatening to drown life is funnelled ‘down to the valleys’ (v. 8). With the ‘watery chaos’ held behind boundaries, there is the life-space for freedom and fecundity to flourish. The psalm offers a profound vision of a myriad of species expressing their joy of existence in playfulness and through praise offered back to their creator. Creation brims with the joie de vivre, the joy of living. The waters are no longer threatening, but rather lifegiving as ‘springs gush forth’ (v. 10); ‘birds of the air . . . sing among the branches’ (v. 12); the land brings forth an abundance, feeding both cattle and humanity not merely with the necessary nutrition of grass and grain but also with the luxurious delights of oil and wine (vv. 14-15). The collaborative, playful, and joyful dynamic at work within creation is perhaps most clearly expressed in the description of YHWH’s engagement with the Leviathan (Ps. 104.2526). In Psalm 104, the Leviathan is not portrayed as a fear-inducing demi-goddess to be battled against, but rather simply as ‘God’s playmate’, cavorting in the waves.15 The Leviathan here does not take on metaphysical status – a primordial entity representative of difference or the feminine – but rather is relativized. Within the psalmist’s theological cosmology, the ‘waters of chaos’ are simply another habitat teeming with emergent life; the feared sea ‘monster’ is purely another of God’s creatures. Joy-filled justice-making and an invitation to participate within proscribed parameters rather than with coercive domination and control are the hallmarks of how God creates the conditions for the flourishing of life. Established upon the foundation stone of God’s joy-filled justice and confident in his lifegiving judgements, creation cannot help but rejoice. Trees of the fields clap their hands (Isa. 55.12); the sun, in joyous celebration, dances across the skies (Ps. 19.4b-6); and the human community is encouraged to join this festive celebration to the giver of life (Ps. 32.11). The integral relationship of justice and joy is powerfully expressed in Ps. 96.11-13. There, heavens, earth, and sea, and all the creatures within these habitats, are invited to respond joyfully at the promise of God’s righteous judgement: Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it.

Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation, 144. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation, 67. 15 Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation, 149. 13 14

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Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord; for he is coming, for he is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with his truth.

Christ as word of justice and joy-curator The psalmist’s prophetic hope that God’s righteous judgement will prevail, that God will judge the world according to truth and therefore establish true freedom and flourishing, is fulfilled in the entrance of the eternal Word into the world. In the incarnation, the eternal Word, through whom the cosmos was brought into being, enters creation as the enactment and actualization of divine justice and joy. The Synoptic Gospels recount an episode in which Jesus is with his disciples on a boat, sailing across the middle of the Sea of Galilee, when a storm arises.16 Jesus, asleep, is woken by the petrified disciples, who fear that the violent storm will sink the boat. And then Jesus, the creator incarnate in creation, gives the command: ‘Peace! Be still!’, and the winds and waves are calmed. Early hearers of these Gospels would have noted the allusions to the Genesis 1 creation account. The waters of chaos threaten to swamp the boat. The structural form that sustains the life of the community is threatened by forces beyond human control. Jesus exercises judgement by divine command and thereby demonstrates his dominion over creation. However, this dominion should not be conceived of as being imposed by coercive control. Indeed, immediately preceding this episode in Mark’s Gospel are the parables of the sower, the growing seed, and the mustard seed. Each of these parables draws attention to contingency and mystery, and also, critically, they highlight the importance of meaningful participation and appropriate response. Jesus stresses to hearers of these parables that they need to ‘listen’, ‘pay attention’, ‘hear the word and accept it’.17 Resonating with the Genesis 1 creation account, the kingdom of God, the establishment of a kingdom of justice and lifeflourishing shalom, does not come about through imposition by the divine ruler. Rather, it involves a collaborative, communal response to the invitation offered. Just as the non-human created order responds to the invitation from its creator to flourish and bring about a profusion of life, so too humanity is invited to make the same response. The telos of Jesus’ justice-making is not the establishment of dictatorial control but rather the re-institution and recapitulation of the structures that nurture freedom and otherness.18 The ultimate expression of justice is a community that celebrates together the shared gift of life. It is no surprise, therefore, that in the Gospel of John, Jesus, the eternal Word of God, performs his first miracle at the quintessence of communal celebration – a wedding. In turning water into wine, material realities become communal sacraments of joy, announcing to those ‘with eyes to see’ – and with taste buds to savour – that the judge whose word of truth brings joy is present in their midst.

Mk 8.35-40; Lk. 8.22-25; Mt. 8.23-27. Mk 4.9, 20, 23-24. 18 On the inherent relationship between freedom and otherness, see John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (London: T&T Clark, 2006). 16 17

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Imago Dei: Arbiter of justice, manifestation of joy Sketching out God’s ongoing activity of creation as one of mutual joy – the joy of the creator and the responsive joy-filled response of creation – is an important aspect of helping human beings grasp the depth of God’s love for the non-human elements of creation. Further, reflecting on the doctrine of creation through these motifs of justice and joy also has important implications for understanding what it means to be human and for understanding humanity’s place, role, and responsibilities within the created order. While in other ANE mythologies, humans are conceived of as playthings and slaves to the gods, in the Genesis 1 account, humanity is bestowed with the dignity, honour, and, most significantly, the ethical responsibility of being God’s image-bearer.19 In Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations, it was the ruling king who was identified as God’s image-bearer with the responsibility of establishing rule and order. Israel’s polemical creation account universalizes and democratizes this understanding of dominion (Gen. 1.26-29). John Walton notes: When the image of deity was attached to specific individuals – invariably kings – in either Assyria or Egypt, it endowed the king with divine sonship and enabled the king to function on behalf of the deity. That is, the ‘image of god’ operated within the political/ bureaucratic model in which the ruling function of deity was carried out on earth by the king. In Genesis, the functions assigned to humanity also have to do with ruling but at a different level. . . . Instead of ruling over people and kingdoms, as in Assyria and Egypt, all humanity in the Genesis account rules over its segment of the cosmos, subduing and ruling the world that people inhabit. In this respect, human beings are functioning on behalf of deity, in whose image they were created. Thus, the royal aspect of the image of God is maintained but located in a different arena.20 In the half-century since the publication of Lynn White Jr.’s well-known thesis,21 much has been written on how Gen. 1.26-29, particularly the key terms of ‘subdue’ (kavash) and ‘dominion’ (radah), should be interpreted. Within their original historico-cultural context, the terms clearly refer to the use of force and power. In the current ecologically aware age, characterized too by an increased consciousness of the abuse of power by elites, many view the biblical dominion imperative as deeply problematic. But do the ancient texts, so integral to the classical Christian tradition, offer no assistance in shaping imagination and, thus, contemporary ethical actions? Or worse, do the texts, as Lynn White Jr. contends, create the historico-cultural conditions for human ecological irresponsibility? Is the only option to discard these texts? It is my contention that placing the vocational and ethical imperative given to humanity – to subdue and exercise dominion – within the framing of the motifs of justice and joy is both instructive and constructive, particularly in this contemporary time of ecological crises. The biblical narrative conceives humanity as imago Dei, the earthly arbiters of what is just and right. The assertion that due to the damage wreaked upon creation, humanity should

See J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005). Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology, 176. 21 See Lynn White Jr., ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’, Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–7. 19 20

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simply cease to exercise this function is unrealistic and foolhardy. Humanity is not separate from but is part of creation. Human actions and inactions impact the broader community of creation,22 and it is impossible for human beings to detach themselves and absolve themselves of ethical responsibility. The appropriate and necessary response for humanity in light of the ecological chaos it has let loose is not to abdicate its vocational commission. Rather, following the biblical tradition, humanity is summoned to the practice of lament and repentance, and to a rededication to taking responsibility. What might such responsibility, the exercising of a dominion of justice and joy look like? Here, the thinking of medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, mediated by twentieth-century philosopher Josef Pieper, is helpful. Pieper, following Aquinas’ thought, posits that there are three fundamental aspects to the notion of justice. These are: (i) commutative justice (iustitia commutative) – reciprocal or mutually exchanged justice that orders the relation of the individual to other individuals; (ii) distributive justice (iustitia distributive) – which brings order to the relationships between the broader community and the individuals who constitute this community; and (iii) legal justice (iustitia legalis, iustitia generalis) – which orders the relationship of the individuals to the broader community.23 For Pieper, the cardinal virtue of justice is fundamentally to be understood as concerned with the ordering of relationships within the human community. Justice is grounded in ‘rights’ which stem from the personhood of humanity. Adhering to the assumptions of René Descartes and John Locke, Pieper believed these ‘rights’ only exist for a ‘spiritual being’ able to possess or be possessed as ‘property’.24 But is it de rigueur that justice be limited to only intrahuman relationality? The work of animal behaviouralists and anthropologists, and the growing engagement with Indigenous theories of knowledge over recent decades, has called into question the dualism of Cartesian epistemology and anthropocentric logic that has held sway within modern western theology. An ever-growing awareness of the depth of the inner life of other species, and of the fact that human beings share not only DNA but also many of the same experiences and emotions of other creatures, is reshaping and broadening the scope of theological ethics.25 In fact, following the trajectory of Aquinas’ and Pieper’s own logic enables the conceiving of justice as extending beyond intrahuman relations. Pieper assents with Aquinas: ‘It is through

Richard Bauckham, The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010). 23 Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 71. 24 Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 46–50. Pieper, limiting justice to the domain of humanity, writes: ‘For stones, plants and animals have also been created, yet we cannot say that they have their due in the strict sense of the word. For “being due” means something like belonging to or being the property of someone. A nonspiritual being, however, cannot properly have anything belonging to it; on the contrary it, itself, belongs to someone else, for instance, to man’ (p. 47). Later, to the posed question of whether he has a duty to fulfil a promise made to his dog, Pieper responds in the negative, stating: ‘nothing can be inalienably due to a brute; because the presumption of justice, as well as of injustice – namely, that a “right” in the full sense exists on the side of the other party – does not obtain’ (p. 49). Italics mine. 25 See Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005); Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). For an introduction to animal theology and theological ethics, see Celia E. Deane-Drummond and David L. Clough, eds, Creaturely Theology: On God, Humans, and Other Animals (London: SCM Press, 2009); David L. Clough, On Animals: Volume 1: Systematic Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2012); David L. Clough, On Animals: Volume 2: Theological Ethics (London: T&T Clark, 2018). 22

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creation that the created being first comes to have his [or her] rights.’26 For Pieper, ‘Man [sic] has inalienable rights because he is created a person by the act of God. . . . [S]omething is inalienably due to man because he is creatura.’27 And subsequently, citing Aquinas: ‘A thing is just not only because it is willed by God, but because it is a debt due to a created being by virtue of the relationship between creature and creature.’28 While the human responsibility to be arbiters and agents of justice stems from humanity’s vocational role as imago Dei, according to Pieper and Aquinas, the right to be the recipients of justice is grounded in humanity’s shared creaturehood. And critically, theologically, human persons share this creaturehood with all other created beings. Accordingly, human embeddedness in a vast, complex web of relationships of created living beings, whose existence stems from the loving justice of God, means that humanity’s ethical debts and obligations reach beyond the human world. Humans fulfil their mandate to exercise dominion by observing the obligations and servicing the debts they owe to fellow Homo sapiens and to the non-human world of creation. Pieper declares that the very nature of the human ethical task, the judgement of what humans owe to other creatures, has its origins and is expressed through the field of justice.29 For Pieper, ‘the total structure of ethics is revealed, as in a concave mirror, with clearer, sharper outline, in the structure of the act of justice’.30 As Orthodox monk Archimandrite Zacharias put it, the human vocation, what human beings have ‘been designed for’, is ‘to oversee the world with justice . . . to bring all creation to God’.31 The vocation of humanity, as imago Dei, is to be agents of justice. What does this ‘act of justice’ look like? What are the nature, character, and limits of justice enacted by humanity? It is to these questions that this chapter now turns.

Legal justice, the common good, and the particular For Aquinas, the development of moral virtue is a necessary part of human sanctification. However, in contrast to the cardinal virtues of fortitude and temperance, it is not one’s inner disposition that is the distinguishing mark of the virtue of justice but rather one’s external actions towards the other.32 While the moral virtues are ordered towards humanity’s private good,33 these virtues are directed towards a more universal good; namely, that of the common good, through legal justice. Aquinas writes:

Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 46, citing Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. II, Chap. 28. Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 51. 28 Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 52. 29 So Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 58: ‘in ethics the fundamental principle of duty, of what one ought to do, of the debitum, has its origin in the field of justice’. 30 Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 58. Pieper asserts: ‘every moral act has the structure of justice’ (p. 59). 31 Archimandrite Zacharias, The Hidden Man of the Heart (1 Peter 3:4): The Cultivation of the Heart in Orthodox Christian Anthropology (Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, 2007), 37. 32 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), II–II, Q. 57, Art. 1. For a concise introduction to Aquinas’ understanding of the virtue of justice, see Jean Porter, ‘The Virtue of Justice (IIa IIae, qq. 58–122)’, in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 272–86. 33 See Aquinas, ST, II–II, Q. 58, Art. 2, Ad 4. 26 27

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Now it is evident that all who are included in a community, stand in relation to that community as parts to a whole; while a part, as such, belongs to a whole, so that whatever is the good of a part can be directed to the good of the whole. It follows therefore that the good of any virtue, whether such virtue direct man [sic] in relation to himself, or in relation to certain other individual persons, is referable to the common good, to which justice directs: so that all acts of virtue can pertain to justice, in so far as it directs man to the common good. It is in this sense that justice is called a general virtue. And since it belongs to the law to direct to the common good, as stated above (I–II, Q. 90, A. 2), it follows that the justice which is in this way styled general, is called legal justice, because thereby man is in harmony with the law which directs the act of all the virtues to the common good.34 In Aquinas’ thought, legal justice is a general virtue; or, drawing on the temple metaphor previously employed, one could say that legal justice is an architectonic virtue. Nevertheless, the very nature of using law as the vehicle for enacting justice is, in itself, challenging. Focused on the common good, the general virtue of ‘legal justice’ requires the establishment of universal absolutes that can then be broadly applied through law. However, for the good of justice to be done requires more than obedience to ‘some abstract norm’.35 What is necessary is attention to the specificity and particularity of the individual. Pieper contends that to be just ‘means to recognize the other as other; it means to give acknowledgment even where one cannot love’.36 Pieper concludes that ‘if we consider more deeply, we will find that not only justice but every moral obligation has a personal character, the character of the commitment to the person to whom I am under an obligation’.37 This understanding of justice as concerned with the broader common good and yet requiring an acknowledgement of the particular otherness of the other is evident in recent developments in jurisprudence. Litigation claims and legislative declarations that took place in 2017 in a range of countries – the United States, India, Ecuador, Colombia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia – appear to signal a new normative order regarding the legal status of nature. In these situations, the claim for, or declaration of, legal personhood to bodies of water, mountains, and whole river ecosystems seeks to guarantee the rights of these non-human aspects of nature and, thus, human responsibilities and obligations to meet these rights.38

Aquinas, ST, II–II, Q. 58, Art. 5. See also Aquinas, ST, II–II, Q. 58, Art. 6. Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 58 36 Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 54. 37 Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 58. Pieper’s language comes strikingly close here to the thought of Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas – that human ethics is grounded upon the encounter with the other. Despite criticism of an implicit anthropocentrism, Levinas’ phenomenological thought is increasingly being applied to questions of environmental justice. See William Edelglass, James Hatley, and Christian Diehm, eds, Facing Nature: Levinas and Environmental Thought (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012); David Boothroyd, ‘Levinas on Ecology and Nature’, in The Oxford Handbook of Levinas, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 769–88. 38 See Catherine J. Iorns Magallanes, ‘From Rights to Responsibilities Using Legal Personhood and Guardianship for Rivers’, in ResponsAbility: Law and Governance for Living Well with the Earth, ed. Betsan Martin, Linda Te Aho, and Maria Humphries-Kil (London: Routledge, 2018), 216–39; Cristy Clark, Nia Emmanouil, John Page, and Alessandro Pelizzon, ‘Can You Hear the Rivers Sing: Legal Personhood, Ontology, and the Nitty-Gritty of Governance’, Ecology Law Quarterly 45, no. 4 (2018): 787–844. 34 35

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The limits of justice and the ongoing human vocation In the face of developing ecological crises, the new and evolving jurisprudence that gives legal status to nature is an encouraging development. How this legal justice (iustitia legalis, iustitia generalis) is outworked in the areas of commutative justice (iustitia commutative) and distributive justice (iustitia distributive) to ensure the common good of all creation are significant and complex questions. While poetically evocative to speak of reciprocity, to what extent is it truly possible theoretically and legally to conceive of human relationships with other individual non-human species or bodies of water, glaciers, mountains, and other life forms in commutative terms as contractual exchange?39 If non-human elements of nature are construed as having ‘personhood’ and therefore possessing ‘rights’ that need to be met, do these non-human ‘persons’ also have accompanying ‘duties’? Can a river be sued for bursting its banks and destroying human property? The ecological application of the principle of distributive justice is perhaps more promising. Ensuring the equitable distribution of ecological goods to ensure the well-being not merely of individuals but the overall health of the ecosystem system lends itself more easily to discussions of natural resource allocation (e.g. water takes/river flows) and questions of observing biophysical limits.40 Thus far, the new jurisprudence developments have been shaped by ontologies of nature rooted in Indigenous and Hindu thought, with biocentric and ecocentric philosophies being preferred to the perceived anthropocentrism of western thought. But what of a Christian ontology of nature that is grounded in a theocentric vision? Detailed discussion on the politicolegal applications of this broadened Thomistic conception of justice is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say, the Christian doctrine of creation, with an emphasis on humanity as an arbiter of justice mandated to exercise dominion for the common good of all creatures, does offer a moral foundation upon which such developing legal frameworks could be established. While Aquinas and Pieper are correct in recognizing legal justice as integral to the pursuit of the common good, there is, as just noted, a paradox that exists. The pursuit of justice entails the establishment of laws, yet the application of universal, general principles of law tends to conflate the particular and/or oversee the unique otherness of the other. Law, while essential, can never fully achieve justice. As Jacques Derrida observes: ‘justice is heterogeneous to the law to which it is yet so close, from which in truth it is indissociable’.41 Pieper acknowledges that any ‘state of equilibrium . . . is constantly thrown out of balance, and has constantly to be “restored” through an act of justice. . . . [T]he equality that characterizes justice cannot be final and definitely established at any one time, it cannot be arrested. It must, rather, be constantly re-established, “restored anew” (iterato)’.42 Just as the development of new legal frameworks is an ongoing task, so too, determining the nature of the obligations in one’s relationships with

On the metaphor of ecological reciprocity, see David Abram, ‘Reciprocity’, in Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, ed. Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodeman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 77–92. 40 Such discussions require a transdisciplinary approach, integrating philosophical ethical frameworks with scientific accounts of biophysical planetary limits. See Aldo Leopold, ‘The Land Ethic’, in A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 201–26; Johan Rockström et al., ‘Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009): 1–33. 41 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 27. 42 Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 79–80. 39

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other creatures and regarding what duties are owed to the habitats within which humans reside is an enduring activity requiring prudential wisdom. The ethical imperative as imago Dei to pursue and enact justice is an ongoing reality.

Human society and joy It was noted earlier in this chapter how justice and joy are paired in the divine activity of creation. Likewise, the same partnering is a necessary element of the development and application of the virtue of justice in the human vocation as imago Dei. As Pieper astutely observes, ‘fulfilling an obligation and doing what [humanity] is really obliged to do are not all that is necessary. Something more is required, something over and above, such as liberality, affabilitas, kindness, if [humanity’s] communal life is to remain human’.43 Aquinas posits that ‘as [humanity] could not live in society without truth, so likewise not without joy’.44 The growing sense of despair and disillusionment as the severity and enormity of the ecological challenges being faced become clearer underscores the importance of joy. That joy must exist as an accompaniment to the embodying and enacting of the virtue of justice is conveyed well by Jürgen Moltmann: Our social and political [and environmental] tasks, if we take them seriously, loom larger than life. Yet infinite responsibility destroys a human being because he is only [human] and not god. I have an idea that laughter is able to mediate between the infinite magnitude of our tasks and the limitations of our strength. Many people, who really get down to work, are saying – and rightly so: ‘Unless we do a lot of joking, we have to cry and cannot get anything done’.45 Here one must not settle for the artificial, manufactured happiness which often passes for joy. Rather, there is the need to rediscover that affective reality expressed in the psalms and which is shared with fellow creatures: the unadulterated ecstasy of the gift of existence. One’s role in God’s earthly temple is not confined to that of arbiter of justice but also entails the ministry of co-creation. Whether in the activities of botanizing or bird-watching, food collecting and cultivation, beverage brewing and building, artistic and music endeavours, one is privileged to be able to receive gratefully the elements of creation, and through the power of human imagination, is then able to articulate, design, compose, prepare, and construct gifts that can be offered back joyfully in praise and worship to the divine gift-giver. Conclusion The knowledge that God has established creation upon the foundations of justice (mišpāṭ) and righteousness (ṣeḏeq) (Ps. 89.14) – and the assurance that this foundation, regardless of the

Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, 111. Aquinas, ST, II–II, Q. 114, Art. 2. 45 Jürgen Moltmann, Theology and Joy, trans. Reinhard Ulrich (London: SCM Press, 1973), 46. 43 44

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contemporary chaos, cannot, ultimately, be shaken (Isa. 28.16-17; 1 Cor. 3.11) – should lead one, inexorably, to express joyful praise. Perhaps the zenith of this joyous responsiveness is the human experience of song, as one joins with the vast cosmic choir of creatures offering praise and worship to the creator God. While Ps. 96.11-13 offers a picture of non-human creation rejoicing at God’s righteous judgement of his people, the book of Revelation offers an apocalyptic and christological vision of this inextricable connection between the activities of justice-making and joyous praise. Written to others also facing ecological and political catastrophes and calamities, the text reminds its ancient and contemporary audience that the Lord God is both the beginning and the end (Rev. 1.8). Within God’s Temple, surrounding the throne of the slaughtered and yet conquering Lamb of God, all creation – human and non-human species – gather to bring their praise (Rev. 5.6-14). And as the seventh and culminating trumpet is blown, announcing God’s vindicating judgement and the eternal reign of Christ, cosmic voices burst into song declaring: ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever.’ The faithful then respond with their own song: ‘We give you thanks, Lord God Almighty, who are and who were, for you have taken your great power and begun to reign. The nations raged, but your wrath has come, and the time for judging the dead, for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints and all who fear your name, both small and great, and for destroying those who destroy the earth’. (Rev. 11.15-18) Such an eschatological and christological vision should shape our imagination and be the source of our hope as we seek, as imago Dei, to live lives of justice and joy. Further reading Bauckham, Richard. The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010. Brown, William P. The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Leopold, Aldo. ‘The Land Ethic’. In A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, 201–26. London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Moltmann, Jürgen. Theology and Joy. Translated by Reinhard Ulrich. London: SCM Press, 1973. Pieper, Josef. The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965.

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CHAPTER 34 METAPHYSICS AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

Jordan Wessling

Christians affirm that humans are morally responsible for much of what they do, even while the sovereign creator governs human affairs. However, Christian scripture and tradition are often underdetermined in the way in which they characterize both God’s sovereignty and the kind of responsible agency that humans possess. To provide theoretical understandings of these teachings, therefore, theologians often look to philosophy and to general theological considerations. Doing so has led theologians to propose compatibilist, non-competitivist, and incompatibilist accounts of the interrelation between God’s providential care and the kind of freedom or agency that allegedly grounds human moral responsibility. In this chapter, these three accounts are examined. It is argued that the incompatibilist option is preferable since it does not fall prey to a theological version of ‘the direct argument’ and because it fulfils various theological desiderata. Where appropriate, the chapter also underscores how these three understandings of the interconnection between human agency and divine governance pertain to the doctrine of creation more broadly.

Compatibilism According to classical Christian theology, God, freely and without external constraint, created the world from nothing. As such, God’s choice to create is the sole ultimate sufficient reason for why the world came to be. Some infer from this exalted conception of divinity that how God governs all creaturely events is analogous to creatio ex nihilo: just as a divine decision is the sole ultimate sufficient reason for the coming-to-be of the world, a free decision from God constitutes the sole ultimate sufficient reason for the occurrence of all the events within that world. Such theologians infer, in other words, that theological determinism is the case.1 This inference from creatio ex nihilo to theological determinism is prima facie reasonable given that biblical references to creation often also stress God’s sovereignty (e.g. Pss. 33.6-11; 89.8-11; Job 26.6-14; Isa. 45.7-9; Col. 1.15-20), and given that some biblical passages seem to indicate that God determines whatever comes to pass (e.g. Eph. 1.8-12). But if God determines all events within creation, then it follows that God determines the morally significant actions of humans (i.e. those actions for which humans can be morally praised or blamed). Recognizing this implication, some Christians affirm compatibilism. This is the doctrine that human moral responsibility, and the freedom that undergirds it, is compatible with determinism. The idea is not that this responsibility is compatible with just any kind of

For a recent statement of such an argument, see Heath White, Fate and Free Will: A Defense of Theological Determinism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Press, 2020), 61–76. 1

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determinism. Rather, in the theological context, the notion is that under certain conditions, or in a certain manner, God can determine what humans do without such divine action undermining human responsibility. Among philosophers, Christian and otherwise, accounts of the conditions under which determinism and human moral responsibility are compatible have grown considerably nuanced in recent decades to shield compatibilism from increasingly rigorous objections. Some theologians use these new insights to expound specifically theological forms of compatibilism that are not obviously crippled by perennial critiques. For example, Oliver Crisp has drawn from the philosopher Harry Frankfurt to provide one way of making sense of theological compatibilism, although Crisp does not unequivocally endorse the resulting view.2 The idea is that a person is morally responsible for a given action only if it comes from a desire that is correctly nested within hierarchically ordered features of the relevant person’s psychology, such as a desire that refers to another of the subject’s desires (e.g. the desire to be the kind of person that desires physical fitness). Such psychological nesting is thought to ensure that the relevant actions emanate from agents themselves rather than from some alien impulse or motivation. With this conception of responsibility in place, the theologian can say that humans are responsible for their actions determined by God, so long as this determinism ‘runs through’ human agents in the right way without bypassing the correct kind of hierarchically ordered psychological elements, among other conditions. Unfortunately, Christian theologians, as a rule, have chosen not to draw from contemporary philosophical work on freedom and moral responsibility in their own treatments of related matters, despite the escalating sophistication of this philosophical literature. Within the Christian tradition, compatibilism plausibly traces back to at least St Augustine of Hippo3 and has been variously articulated by Gottschalk of Orbais, Ulrich Zwingli, and Jonathan Edwards, among many others. Although compatibilism has been defended by several leading theologians, there are some reasons to suppose that the position is mistaken. This chapter considers but one reason: a theological version of the direct argument for the incompatibility between determinism and moral responsibility. The direct argument was originally developed by the philosopher Peter van Inwagen in his influential book An Essay on Free Will. Keeping with the concerns of much contemporary philosophical literature, van Inwagen contends that human moral responsibility is incompatible with terrestrial causal determinism, where the events of the past and laws of nature together ensure that, at any instant, there is exactly one physically possible future.4 However, the argument can be reconfigured to conclude that theological determinism is incompatible with human moral responsibility as well. Consider the following initial statement of the argument:

See Oliver Crisp, ‘Meticulous Providence’, in Divine Action and Providence: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019), 21–39. Other theologians who have chosen to engage the contemporary philosophical literature to articulate accounts of theological compatibilism include Jesse Couenhoven, Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ: Agency, Necessity, and Culpability in Augustinian Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), and Michael Patrick Preciado, A Reformed View of Freedom: The Compatibility of Guidance Control and Reformed Theology (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2019). 3 This is so, at least, according to Couenhoven in Stricken by Sin. 4 See Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 3. 2

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If every human choice is determined by God, then every human choice is the necessary consequence of divine determinism. But since no mere human is morally responsible for either God’s decision to determine the events of the world or for the fact that these events necessarily follow from that decision, no mere human is morally responsible for their actions either. Like its original basis proposed by van Inwagen, this theological version of the argument for incompatibilism about moral responsibility and determinism avoids two controversial claims typically invoked by incompatibilists (i.e. those that believe that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism, theological or otherwise). First, the theological version of the direct argument does not rely on the supposition that individuals are morally responsible for what they have done only if they could have done otherwise. Second, the argument does not rest on the assumption that if a person’s action is causally determined, then that person could not have done otherwise. Since compatibilists typically deny one or both of these claims, the theological version of the direct argument offers an intriguing way to contend for incompatibilism about moral responsibility and divine determinism that sidesteps many of the traditional battlegrounds between compatibilists and incompatibilists. The direct argument, in both its original and theological form, utilizes two rules of inference. To grasp the first of these rules, consider some proposition that is necessarily the case in the sense that to deny that proposition entails a contradiction, at least upon deeper analysis. A suitable example of such a necessarily true proposition is that a triangle is an enclosed geometric plane consisting of three angles (no more, no less) that add up to 180 degrees (no more, no less). That is just what a triangle essentially is; it contradicts the notion of a triangle to suppose that, for instance, a triangle might have four angles or add up to 93 degrees. Another example is that 49 × 18 = 882. It is simply impossible for 49 × 18 to equate to any other number. The first inference rule of the direct argument is sometimes called Rule A. According to Rule A, it may be inferred from the fact that some proposition is necessarily the case that no human could, in principle, be even partially morally responsible for the truth of that proposition. To return to the listed examples of propositions that are necessarily true, no human could, in principle, be even partially morally responsible (or otherwise responsible, for that matter) for the fact that 49 × 18 = 882, or that it is the nature of a triangle to be a geometric plane consisting of exactly three angles that add up to exactly 180 degrees. To be sure, a human can multiply numbers or can build a triangle, but no mere human can be morally responsible for the fact that 49 × 18 = 882 or for the fact that triangles have the noted features. Humans simply are not the kinds of beings that can be morally responsible for that which is necessarily true. Taken all together, then, Rule A can be stated succinctly as follows: From some fact or proposition that is necessarily the case, it may be inferred that no mere human is now or ever has been even partly morally responsible for the relevant fact or proposition that is necessarily the case. Van Inwagen, the originator of Rule A, notes that this rule seems ‘to be beyond dispute’.5 Those who think otherwise are invited to attempt to find one clear instance where a mere human is, has been, or could be morally responsible for the fact that some necessarily true proposition is the case.

Van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will, 184. For an updated defence of Rule A, see Roger Turner and Justin Capes, ‘Rule A’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99, no. 4 (2018): 580–95. 5

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The second inference rule that originally underlay the direct argument was called Rule B. This rule, however, has encountered several apparent counterexamples. Fortunately, there are reformulations of Rule B that circumvent these conceptual problems (though the details of this ongoing discussion cannot be summarized presently). One such reformulation comes from Justin Capes: ‘[I]f a person is not even partly morally responsible for any of the circumstances that led to a particular outcome, and if that person is not even partly morally responsible for the fact that those circumstances led to that particular outcome, then the person is not even partly morally responsible for the outcome in question either.’6 Call this Rule B*. Stated differently, Rule B* indicates that if an agent is in no way morally responsible for any fact that materially implies a specific outcome, nor for the fact that the obtaining of one or more of these facts materially implies this specific outcome, then it may be inferred that this agent also bears no moral responsibility for the outcome at issue. Although seemingly complex, the sensible idea behind Rule B* is that if an agent is not in any way morally responsible for factors that inevitably lead to a specific event, then this individual cannot be morally responsible for the event that transpires. There is simply ‘no space’, so to speak, in which this individual’s agency may be inserted that would render this person morally responsible for the relevant event. Consider two illustrations of Rule B*, beginning with a reflection upon the expansion of the universe. From the fact that someone bears no moral responsibility for any circumstance or cause that contributes to the expansion of the universe, nor for the fact that certain conditions imply or cause the expansion of the universe, it is safe to conclude that this individual bears no moral responsibility for the fact that the universe is expanding. Another example involves an unfortunate case where a boy named Theodore falls and breaks his arm. Is Theodore’s father responsible for this injury? Well, suppose that this father is not even partly morally responsible for any of the circumstances that led to the breaking of Theodore’s arm, nor for the fact these circumstances led to Theodore’s injury. If the father is not morally responsible for either of these conditions, then, in step with Rule B*, surely he is not to be blamed for the state of Theodore’s arm. Within the theological direct argument, Rule B* is central. It implies that compatibilism with respect to divine determinism and human moral responsibility is false. For this rule entails that if some human bears no moral responsibility whatsoever for either the fact that God chooses to determine each of their actions or for the fact that every one of their actions necessarily follows from this divine decision, then this human cannot be even partly morally responsible for the actions that inevitably result from God’s deterministic decision. But, by the very nature of the case, no mere human is in any way morally responsible for God’s decision to determine all human actions, nor for the fact that the divine will is necessarily efficacious. So, when these theses are conjoined with Rule B*, the incompatibilist conclusion follows. Rule B*, like its progenitor Rule B, is bound to be more controversial than Rule A. Unfortunately, this chapter cannot provide a thorough defence of Rule B*.7 Nevertheless, I

See Justin A. Capes, ‘Incompatibilism and the Transfer of Non-responsibility’, Philosophical Studies 173, no. 6 (2016): 1477–95 (especially p. 1484). This article may also be consulted for a discussion of apparent counterexamples to the original Rule B. 7 An extended defence of Rule B* can be found in Capes, ‘Incompatibilism and the Transfer of Non-responsibility’, 1477–95. For three thoughtful recent defences of Rule B, see Roger Turner, ‘Shabo on Logical Versions of the Direct Argument’, Philosophical Studies 173, no. 8 (2016): 2125–32; Roger Turner, ‘Truth and Moral Responsibility’, in New Advances in Causation, Agency, and Moral Responsibility, ed. Fabio Bacchini, Massimo Dell’Utri, and Stefano Caputo 6

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submit that it is at least reasonable to affirm Rule B*, even though the rule is not unassailable. After all, does it not ring true, at a gut level, that there is simply ‘no space’ in which the responsible agency of a mere human can be inserted when their actions are the inevitable result of conditions and implications that rest beyond their control, as Rule B* basically indicates? Perhaps my sense that this is so is due to my own incompatibilist sympathies. Nevertheless, even Michael McKenna, a leading defender of compatibilism, has, in effect, granted the intuition: ‘It is difficult to imagine how [Rule B] could be undermined’.8 Rule B* is perhaps more plausible still. In any case, in this chapter, the validity of Rule B* will be assumed. When this is done, it is found that the theological version of the direct argument poses a substantial challenge to theological compatibilism. With Rules A and B* accepted as true, consider the following fuller form of the theological direct argument in relation to a standard human agent named Joanie: If theological determinism is true, then each of Joanie’s actions is the necessary consequence of God’s decision to determine every event of creation. However, Joanie bears no moral responsibility whatsoever for this divine deterministic decision. By the very nature of the case, it is God’s infallible working that fundamentally explains what and when each human chooses (and why, more generally, the events of creation transpire as they do), and not vice versa. Nor is Joanie morally responsible for the fact that if God decides to determine every event of creation, including each of her actions, then every event must transpire in precise accordance with this divine decision. (Given divine omnipotence, this follows from an application of Rule A to Joanie’s case.) But if Joanie bears no moral responsibility for any fact that bears upon God’s choice to determine every event in creation (including each of her actions), nor for the fact that each of these events (including her actions) necessarily transpires in precise accordance with this divine decision, then it follows that Joanie bears no moral responsibility whatsoever for her actions that follow necessarily from God’s decision to determine every event within creation. (This follows from Rule B*.) In short, the facts of theological determinism preclude Joanie from being morally responsible for her behaviour when Rules A and B* are supposed to be true. But, of course, the problem generalizes to all human agents given comprehensive theological determinism. If this is so, theological compatibilism is mistaken.

Non-competitivism As has been seen, theological compatibilists affirm two theses that many Christians believe to be opposed to one another; namely, that God determines all creaturely events and that humans are free and morally responsible for much of what they do. This affirmation is predicated upon the rejection of incompatibilist accounts of human responsibility and the embrace of

(Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 214–30; and Ira M. Schnall and David Widerker, ‘The Direct Argument and the Burden of Proof ’, Analysis 72, no.1 (2012): 25–36. 8 Michael S. McKenna, ‘Source Incompatibilism, Ultimacy, and the Transfer of Non-responsibility’, American Philosophical Quarterly 38, no.1 (2001): 48.

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compatibilism instead. The rather commonsensical idea behind theological compatibilism seems to be that God’s total control of creation sets parameters on human action, closing the door on incompatibilist freedom altogether and leaving space only for compatibilist accounts of human freedom and responsibility. However, some maintain that this idea rests upon an anaemic doctrine of divine transcendence, where God is conceived to be but one cause among other terrestrial causes that contend for the production of various effects. It is argued that once such a view is jettisoned, what is sometimes called ‘non-competitivism’ about divine and human action can be affirmed: God can cause or determine each human action without compromising significant human freedom and corresponding moral responsibility, including most or even all forms of incompatibilist freedom. The claim that divine and human actions do not ‘compete’ is justified in two basic ways. One path to the non-competitivist conclusion comes by way of what might be called the ‘metalinguistic approach’. Here the focus is on how the interrelation between divine and human action should be conceptualized and spoken about. Another route to the non-competitivist destination is more straightforwardly metaphysical and so might be called the ‘metaphysical approach’. Advocates of the metaphysical approach to non-competitivism often provide (partial) metaphysical analyses of divine action, which purport to show that how God determines human action is no threat either to compatibilist or incompatibilist accounts of human responsibility. Both forms of non-competitivism have the apparent benefit of allowing theologians to uphold a comprehensive account of divine sovereignty, regardless of which theory of human freedom and responsibility seems philosophically fashionable at the time. Similarly, both of the non-competitivist approaches potentially save theologians from the complicated task of needing to provide detailed characterizations of the nature of human freedom, responsibility, and like notions. Unfortunately, though, neither form of non-competitivism succeeds if the theological version of the direct argument is sound. In this section, the focus is on Kathryn Tanner’s extraordinarily influential metalinguistic approach to non-competitivism; however, there is also some reason given for thinking that the results of the treatment of Tanner’s noncompetitivism generalize to all metaphysical approaches to this teaching as well. Tanner’s landmark defence of non-competitivism appears in God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment?9 The goal is to provide a conceptual framework according to which it is coherent to affirm two claims that Tanner believes to be theologically fundamental. The first is that God’s governance of creation is immediate and universally extensive in the sense that God founds the causality of human agents, and the inner workings of creation more generally, ‘directly and in toto – in power, exercise, manner of activity and effect’.10 Thus, she admits in another publication that those who subscribe to her non-competitivist paradigm ‘cannot deny that, given God’s infallible working, human beings must choose when and what God wills’.11 Nevertheless, the second claim that Tanner wishes to affirm is that humans are ‘free and therefore responsible for the character of their lives’.12 But rather than maintain that these

Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005). 10 Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, 86. 11 Kathryn E. Tanner, ‘Human Freedom, Human Sin, and God the Creator’, in The God Who Acts: Philosophical and Theological Explorations, ed. Thomas F. Tracy (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 127. 12 Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, 2. 9

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two claims can only be reconciled by opting for a compatibilist notion of human freedom and responsibility, she promises that her paradigm is consonant with ‘any philosophical account of the nature of human freedom short of the theological judgement that human freedom requires freedom from or with respect to God’.13 Tanner then attempts to demonstrate that this holds even with respect to libertarian freedom, a philosophical account that many take to be a form of incompatibilism.14 Importantly, Tanner’s paradigm is not intended as a metaphysical analysis of the interrelation between divine and human action. Rather, her objective is ‘to recast the “material mode” of a theologian’s statements about God and world into a “formal mode” whereby they express recommendations for talk about these matters. Statements about God and world become rules for discourse, proposals about what should be and should not be said’.15 The supposed benefit of recasting the relevant issue in terms of speech is that Christians who are willing to do this will find that ‘there are ruled relations among traditional forms of theological statements sufficient to provide internal coherence for Christian discourse’ concerning the comprehensive scope of God’s governance of the world along with genuine human agency.16 To formulate linguistic rules for the task at hand, Tanner turns to the doctrine of divine transcendence. She maintains that if God is to be genuinely transcendent, he must transcend all terrestrial contrasts, including contrasts that would lead to an either/or understanding of divine and human action.17 So, Christian theologians are urged to talk as if God is so mysteriously ‘other’ that God can be causally engaged in every aspect of creation without precluding creaturely causes, including those that spring from free human agency. It should be underscored that Tanner’s robust doctrine of transcendence is, for her and many of her followers, conceptually intertwined with the doctrine of creation. In short, the God who brings all things into existence is supremely unique and so radically confounds the normal canons of sense-making. Thus, commenting on Tanner’s non-competitivism, David Burrell writes that ‘creation is the very paradigm for any and all divine activity that we know of ’, including God’s governance of responsible humans.18 To help Christians speak appropriately about the interrelation between the agencies of creatures and creator, Tanner proposes two rules for Christian speech on this subject: Rule 1: ‘avoid both a simple univocal attribution of predicates to God and world and a simple contrast of divine and non-divine predicates.’ Rule 2: ‘avoid in talk about God’s creative agency all suggestions of limitation in scope or manner. The second rule prescribes talk of God’s creative agency as immediate and universally extensive.’19

Tanner, ‘Human Freedom, Human Sin, and God the Creator’, 111. See Tanner, ‘Human Freedom, Human Sin, and God the Creator’, 116n5, 117n6, 126. Libertarian freedom shall be discussed in the third section of this chapter. 15 Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, 12. 16 Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, 5. 17 Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, 45–6. 18 David B. Burrell, ‘Human Freedom in the Context of Creation’, in The God Who Acts: Philosophical and Theological Explorations, ed. Thomas F. Tracy (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 105. 19 Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, 47. 13 14

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With these rules in place, Tanner attempts to solve the often-presumed incompatibility between comprehensive divine governance and human responsibility. According to Rule 2, God is said to govern expansively every creaturely event, including the determination (in toto) of every action that responsible human agents perform. However, according to Rule 1, theologians must speak as if God exists, as it were, on a different plane of reality whose engagement with creation has no comparison. Indeed, theologians should speak as if God is so radically transcendent that he can cause all human actions in a manner that does not preclude human self-determination and responsibility. William Abraham objects to Tanner’s non-competitivism. He does so on the basis of the apparent fact that it relies upon a metaphysically ‘thick’ and controversial characterization of divine transcendence that is an instance of the very first-order, material commitments about God and creation that her non-competitivism is supposed to avoid.20 This is an issue that may be presently left aside, however. For Tanner’s non-competitivism faces a significant challenge even when one agrees to play, as much as possible, by her formal (or second-order) metalinguistic rules. This is because neither Tanner’s Rule 1 nor Rule 2 shields her non-competitivism from the theological rendition of the direct argument. To see this, recall the theological direct argument, which may be summarized as follows: If every choice of some (mere) human is determined (in toto) by God, then every choice of this human is the necessary consequence of God’s deterministic decision. But, certainly, this human is not morally responsible for either God’s decision to determine their actions or for the fact that these actions necessarily follow from that decision. Thus, supposing the validity of Rules A and B* of the direct argument, it follows that this human is not responsible for their actions either. The challenge applies mutatis mutandis to every human agent in Tanner’s schema. Notice that this version of the direct argument does not require the theologian to have nearly any, if any at all, insight into the mechanics of divine action. The argument, for instance, is compatible with the idea that God’s determining of events within creation is radically unlike any creaturely cause. In fact, causal language can be dropped altogether, and the theologian can confess total ignorance about how God implements the results of God’s decisions within creation. Instead, all that is required for the argument is that human actions necessarily follow from God’s choice to determine them – which is something that Tanner grants – as well as the validity of Rules A and B*. Hence, the theological version of the direct argument does not violate Tanner’s Rule 1 to ‘avoid both a simple univocal attribution of predicates to God and world and a simple contrast of divine and non-divine predicates’.21 Notice, also, that the theological version of the direct argument does not violate Tanner’s Rule 2, which ‘prescribes talk of God’s creative agency as immediate and universally extensive’.22 On the contrary, the argument takes this notion as a starting point and then moves to show that, even when it is agreed that God is a supremely unique cause (or perhaps not a causal agent in any sense that can be spelt out using terrestrial notions), such immediate and universal determination of each creaturely event has the unintended consequence of robbing humans of

William J. Abraham, Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume 1: Exploring and Evaluating the Debates (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 187–204. 21 Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, 47. 22 Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, 47. 20

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their moral responsibility. But many Christians would agree that the doctrine that humans are morally responsible for a good portion of their actions is more central and important than is the teaching that God determines all that comes to pass. For those who believe this, perhaps it is best to jettison the latter doctrine to allow the former to remain in good standing. The result is this: if the preceding claims about what is entailed by divine determinism are on target, then it seems theologically inapt, if not dishonest, to speak of God’s ‘unconditional and unlimited’ governance of creation while also speaking ‘of men and women who are free and therefore responsible for the character of their lives’.23 After all, if two sets of theological claims are necessarily incompatible, then talk about these claims as compatible will be, at root, incoherent. Yet Tanner’s entire non-competitivist project aims at avoiding theological incoherence. Significantly, though, if the theological form of the direct argument is sound, then it follows that the kind of divine governance promoted by Tanner is necessarily incompatible with human responsibility. So, Tanner’s metalinguistic non-competitivism, as it currently stands, fails as an account of divine governance and human moral responsibility. Advocates of her non-competitivism must therefore show that either Rule A or Rule B* of the direct argument is mistaken, or proffer and defend yet another non-competitivist rule that shows that the theological reformulation of the direct argument misses the mark. The results of this investigation into Tanner’s non-competitivism may be generalized. If the theological direct argument succeeds, the metaphysical approach to non-competitivism likely faces the same fate as the metalinguistic approach. For any relevant version of non-competitivism will need to include the notion that God determines all human events, and yet humans can be free in the libertarian sense and thereby morally responsible. But once divine determinism is affirmed, the theological direct argument can be used to show the irreconcilability of the two relevant theses. If that is right, both approaches to non-competitivism are problematic. Moreover, since the theological direct argument cuts equally against compatibilism and noncompetitivism, theologians have cause to look seriously at incompatibilism. Incompatibilism So far, this chapter has given reason to suppose that (mere) human moral responsibility is incompatible with divine determinism. From this, one might extrapolate that human free will is incompatible with such determinism as well since this freedom is usually thought to be necessary to ground moral responsibility. In that case, both human freedom and moral responsibility must be of the incompatibilist variety. Libertarianism is often understood as a form of incompatibilist freedom (as opposed to a mere indeterministic conception) that furnishes humans with moral responsibility. While there are several libertarian accounts available, agent-causal theories are the most plausible. Proponents of views of this sort maintain that free human agents are persistent substances that are the originators of their free decisions. So, while various environmental factors and psychological states certainly influence human behaviour, humans’ free choices must ultimately come from the agents themselves as a kind of uncaused cause or not wholly moved

Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, 1–2.

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mover. As such, a free action cannot be entirely causally fixed by factors beyond the agents’ control, whether the cause itself is deterministic or indeterministic. Richard Taylor articulates the intuition behind this condition well: If I believe that something not identical to myself was the cause of my behaviour – some event wholly external to myself, for instance, or even one internal to myself, such as a nerve impulse, volition, or whatnot – then I cannot regard the behaviour as being an act of mine, unless I further believed that I was the cause of that external or internal event.24 Hence, agent-causal libertarianism requires agents to be the ultimate source or explanation of their free actions. Although agent-causal libertarians agree that agents must be the ultimate sources of their free actions, they disagree about the precise conditions under which the relevant sourcehood is exemplified. Perhaps most significantly, libertarians are divided over whether a free act requires the relevant agent to possess the ability to choose more than one option in a particular circumstance, where all antecedent conditions remain the same. This is not the place to discuss the details of this debate. However, my sympathies lie with those libertarians who hold that a human can be responsible for an act only if the agent had alternative possibilities in the circumstance in which the act was intentionally performed, or if the agent’s responsibility for the act is derived from that agent’s performance of some prior intentional free act in which the agent enjoyed alternative possibilities. In this way, some libertarians add, an agent can be the ultimate source for actions that inevitably spring from one’s virtues or vices: by developing one’s character through a history of free choices, one sometimes, directly and indirectly, chooses who one shall become, and which actions naturally flow from one’s character. A fuller account of human moral responsibility would include much more than settling this dispute about alternative possibilities. For instance, one would need to specify the kinds of awareness or belief necessary for responsible action, as well as the kinds of motivational structures that render actions morally good or bad and better or worse. Presumably, one would also want to provide some account of how moral responsibility develops diachronically, particularly in the formation of virtues and vices. Additionally, there is the medieval debate about whether the intellect or will (or something else) is primary to human responsibility, where Thomas Aquinas sides with the former ‘intellectualist’ option and Duns Scotus with the latter ‘voluntarist’ selection.25 Such complications notwithstanding, many would agree with the basic statement that individuals are responsible for actions that they recognize as morally significant and perform intentionally when they are the ultimate source of these actions. It is left to the reader to refine this rudimentary understanding as seems fitting. The specifics about how best to articulate the details of human moral responsibility aside, there are some particularly theological reasons to hold that humans possess libertarian freedom and the morality responsibility it affords. Consider just a few such reasons. First, I would argue

Richard Taylor, Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Publishing, 1974), 55. On this debate between Aquinas and Scotus, see Thomas Williams, ‘The Libertarian Foundations of Scotus’s Moral Philosophy’, The Thomist 62, no. 2 (1998): 193–215; Colleen McCluskey, ‘Intellective Appetite and the Freedom of Human Action’, The Thomist 66, no. 3 (2002): 421–56. 24 25

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that a number of the early church fathers, who have been specifically influential in the Christian east and in various strands of the Wesleyan–Arminian tradition, held to agent-causal libertarian freedom in embryonic form (e.g. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, and John of Damascus). If so, this provides evidence that agent-causal libertarianism has been integral to at least one abiding segment of the Christian tradition. Second, and relatedly, it is reasonable to maintain that agent-causal libertarianism offers a foundation for conceiving human salvation in terms of the process of deification without precluding a rich kind of interpersonal engagement with God. For as the ultimate sources of their own actions, agent-causal libertarianism grants human agents the capacity to respond to God’s indwelling life incrementally and on their own terms, assimilating God’s life into theirs, analogous to how humans integrate virtues into their characters. Moreover, such human freedom enables God and the human to engage each other as ultimate sources of their actions and other-directed expressions of love, albeit in an asymmetrical manner. Conversely, if God is the sole ultimate source of every human action, then it seems as if the human agent is overcome, as God infuses the creature with his life and ‘programs’ exactly whom and how creatures shall love. Third, libertarianism accounts for the possibility that some humans will be damned. After all, if the God who loves each human ultimately controls those decisions pertaining to human salvation, then one would think that human damnation is simply impossible. However, if humans enjoy libertarian freedom over whether or not they are redeemed, then it is up to them whether they receive God’s offer to be united with him or whether they rebel now and in the age to come. Of course, many theologians would deny that human damnation is even possible. Still, presumably, some account of why human moral evil pervades God’s world would need to be provided. It is of no small benefit that agent-causal libertarianism readily accounts for this terrible reality. It has been noted that one motivation for both compatibilism and non-competitivism is creation from nothing. The God who spoke the world into existence, so the reasoning goes, determines all its processes and events, including those that encompass human action. By contrast, the incompatibilist libertarian might direct attention elsewhere. Rather than including human free action within the ordinary processes of the world, they might maintain that God endowed humans with the ability to transcend partially their given characters and circumstances and be the ultimate sources, or creators, of some of their actions. In this way, they bear a dim reflection of the creator, who is the paradigm and ultimate source of his actions. This is certainly not to suppose that God requires the ability to do evil to be truly good – since God, unlike the human, is not subject to a given character and environment that might together conspire to remove ultimate agential sourcehood from God. Rather, it is to affirm, with St Irenaeus, that God created humans ‘with free will from the beginning’ since ‘God is possessed of free will, in whose likeness [humanity] was created’.26

Further reading Baker, Lynn R. ‘Why Christians Should Not Be Libertarians: An Augustinian Challenge’. Faith and Philosophy 20, no. 4 (2003): 460–78.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.37.4.

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T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation Couenhoven, Jesse. Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ: Agency, Necessity, and Culpability in Augustinian Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Grant, W. Matthews. Free Will and God’s Universal Causality. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Muller, Richard A. Divine Will and Human Choice: Freedom, Contingency, and Necessity in Early Modern Reformed Thought. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017. Preciado, Michael P. A Reformed View of Freedom: The Compatibility of Guidance Control and Reformed Theology. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2019. Swinburne, Richard. Responsibility and Atonement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Tanner, Kathryn. God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. Timpe, Kevin. Free Will in Philosophical Theology. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.

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CHAPTER 35 PRINCIPALITIES AND POWERS

Joerg Rieger

‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’, reads Gen. 1.1, which is another way of saying that God created everything there is, at least initially. This statement has reminded people of the Jewish and Christian faiths who share this passage in their sacred writings, throughout its history of effects, of two things: that an earth created by God cannot be rejected as irrelevant; and that a heaven created by God must not be mistaken for ultimate reality. If heaven and earth are both created by God, they are, therefore, neither demonic nor divine. This is a key insight when dealing with the mysterious ‘principalities and powers’, a familiar terminology used in biblical (the King James Version) and theological traditions. Any theological statement can be seen in sharper relief when the relations of power shaping it consciously and unconsciously, both past and present, are investigated. This approach will guide this inquiry of creation with regard to what has been called ‘principalities and powers’. The point of this exercise is neither a simplistic rejection of power nor moral outrage that power would be shaping matters of faith; it is, rather, a deeper understanding of what is going on in theological discourse, what the alternatives might be, and the constructive development of a position that takes into account a so-called ‘theological surplus’,1 which points beyond the theological status quo by discovering what is going on between the lines, what has been repressed, and what really matters.

Creation, empire, and power Since the work of Gerhard von Rad, theologians have generally acknowledged that in the theological development of the history of Israel, the Exodus story preceded the creation narratives. That is to say that the theme of liberation from the Egyptian Empire provided the theological background and some of the theological context for the biblical creation stories. Theological accounts of God creating heaven and earth are, therefore, not disembodied speculations about the beginning of the world, as is often assumed. Rather, these theological accounts are linked with experiences of oppression and liberation, where power is actively negotiated. More specifically, many of the theological themes of God creating heaven and earth were generated in the context of the Babylonian exile of Judean people in the sixth century bce. Confronted with the narratives of the Babylonian Empire, including its theologies, the people in exile had to negotiate the question of power. Which gods are in charge? And what kind

On the notion of ‘theological surplus’, see Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 9, 15. 1

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of power do these gods manifest? Like many other creation myths, the Babylonian creation myth Enūma Eliš, dating from around 1250 bce, talked about the battle of the gods and how the world and its inhabitants emerged as afterthoughts, in service and bondage to the powers that be. The creation stories of the Hebrew Bible provide an alternative vision of creation to the dominant Babylonian ones: God creates a world where everything that God makes is good (Gen. 1.31), including human beings who serve creative purposes. And while the notion of human dominion over the earth (Gen. 1.28) has had catastrophic effects in the hands of dominant powers, it reads differently in the context of oppressed people fighting for their liberation, without needing to claim that all the problems of this terminology can be easily resolved. In sum, that the accounts in Genesis 1 about God’s creating emerged during the Babylonian exile makes all the difference. In this context, the dominant powers of empire are relativized in various ways: No matter how powerful they may be, they no longer have complete control over people’s lives. Moreover, definitions of power are transformed here as well: from violent battles of conquest to the pursuit of creative purposes that allow for agency of the creatures. Note that in the first creation story in Genesis 1, God creates in a unique way that does not resemble the classical hierarchies of empire. The Hebrew word for ‘making’ or ‘shaping’ (‫ ; ָבּרָא‬bārā) is used only of God,2 which means it is not borrowed from the agency of the dominant powers, like emperors or kings, as one might expect based on the long history of theology. Moreover, after every step, God observes the results of the divine making and only moves on after it looks like things have turned out well. Most importantly, it can be argued, God creates room for the creative agency and the power of the creatures. The Genesis story contains these passages: ‘And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky”’ (Gen. 1.20). ‘And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind”’ (Gen. 1.24). The waters and the earth, thus, become agents of creation as well. Unlike the powers of empire, which provide the context in which these passages were produced, God’s power is neither absolute nor totalitarian. Other biblical references to creation can also be read in an anti-imperial fashion when the flows of power are considered. The speculative-sounding beginning of the Gospel of John, for instance, talks about all things coming into being through a mysterious Word: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being’ (Jn 1.1-3a). What sounds like philosophical speculation about some otherworldly metaphysical ‘Word’ (λόγος; logos), however, becomes concrete when John notes that this ‘Word became flesh and lived among us’, embodying ‘grace and truth’ (Jn 1.14), as a light shining in the darkness, ‘and the darkness not overcoming it’ (Jn 1.4). The embodiment of the Word in Jesus, whose history of struggle against dominant powers (as recorded in the Gospel of John) has often been misinterpreted as anti-Semitic or as blindly dualistic, talks about creation in anti-imperial ways, reclaiming the light, grace, and truth that empires typically

See Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament (Berlin: Springer, 1962), 113. 2

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claim for themselves.3 That there is a struggle with darkness, which attempts to overcome light, is of interest not because of what has often been considered John’s metaphysical dualism but because of a power struggle that is anything but otherworldly, as the struggling Johannine community towards the end of the first century seeks to negotiate the dominant powers in politics, economics, and religion, in favour of alternative embodiments of a power that ‘became flesh and lived among us’.

Creation, the powers, and Paul The Apostle Paul’s critique of the Roman Empire has been reclaimed and further developed in recent decades, showing the radical edge of an apostle who was often considered to be categorically conservative. Paul’s clashes with the Roman Empire, which are sometimes ascribed to misunderstandings or to a few bad actors, need to be recognized for what they are: full-fledged disagreements about both God and the world that eventually lead to his execution. Paul’s clashes with the empire are experienced in the realities of ‘hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, [and] sword’ (Rom. 8.35),4 none of which are natural catastrophes but are imposed by imperial powers. When Paul asserts to the readers of his letter to the Romans that nothing ‘will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’, he lists those factors that seek to create such separation and experiences of oppression, both physical and metaphysical: death, life, angels, rulers, things present, things to come, powers, height, depth, and other things in creation (Rom. 8.38-39). For this radical Paul in 1 Corinthians and Romans (unlike for later Pauline texts), the origins of the powers are not all that important, as Neil Elliott has argued.5 Nevertheless, Paul makes it clear that they are creatures and not divine, ‘things in creation’ (Rom. 8.39). Furthermore, Paul’s interest is not in the appreciation or rehabilitation of dominant powers but rather in their destruction or neutralization.6 The relevant passages include 1 Cor. 2.6 (‘Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish’) and 1 Cor. 15.24 (‘Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power’). Whether these rulers and powers are envisioned as human or demonic has been disputed,7 but the point is the adversarial relationship: the dominant powers of empire, human and transhuman, present problems in the days of Paul, and he denounces them.

See Joerg Rieger, Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2018), chap. 5, for an anti-imperial interpretation of Jn 14.6. 4 Elliott’s translation may be more helpful than that of the NRSV, as Paul talks about the work of the heavens opposed to God through human processes, including ‘oppression, distress, persecution, starvation, destitution, peril, sword’ (Rom. 8.35-39). Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 122. 5 See Elliott, Liberating Paul, 121. 6 See Elliott, Liberating Paul, 122, reference to Walter Wink. 7 See Walter Wink, Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 40. 3

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Paul’s letter to the Colossians, whose Pauline authorship is disputed but not implausible, ties the powers more closely to divine creation. Talking about Christ, a passage in the first chapter of Colossians states: ‘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 – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together’ (Col. 1.15-17). As feminist Bible scholars have pointed out, this passage, which is undisputedly pre-Pauline, has its origins in an ancient hymn to wisdom.8 Mary Rose D’Angelo attempts a reconstruction of the text with feminine pronouns, identifying parallels to Genesis, Wisdom, and Proverbs.9 All these insights point to alternative views of power. It might be argued that there is no adversarial relation between creation and the powers in this passage, as the powers are claimed to have been created by Christ – or, in an earlier tradition, by personified Lady Wisdom. Yet, even though the reader of this passage might not be aware yet of an adversarial relation that is only brought up subsequently in the next chapter of the text, it is not hard to see where tensions might arise: There is always a possibility that the powers do not correspond to a non-imperial Christ, who is the ‘image of the invisible God’ and ‘the firstborn of all creation’, and there is always the possibility that they do not correspond to the embodiment of a non-patriarchal Lady Wisdom. A closer analysis of the powers of the Roman Empire at the time of the writing of Colossians, possibly written either under the reign of terror of Emperor Domitian or, if dated earlier, under Emperor Nero’s persecutions, serves as a reminder that the early Christians in Colossae must have been fully aware that the dominant powers meant trouble. Karl Barth’s classical interpretation that Colossians 1 refers to heavenly powers and Colossians 2 to demonic powers – while using the same Greek terms (ἀρχή and ἐξουσία, respectively) in each case – fails to take into account that not even heavenly powers are exempt from divine judgement.10 Eduard Schweizer, no theological radical, observes that in this passage even heaven is part of creation and, therefore, not an absolute place of bliss.11 In fact, parallel to what was noted earlier about Genesis 1, heaven itself is not divine but exists only because of God’s creative agency. As a result, it is impossible to interpret this famous passage as an endorsement of the powers that be, as if their creation in, through, and for Christ would prevent them from falling and, by default, exempt them from judgement.12 This allows the calling into question powers that many would consider benign, including the powers of charity and even – as the earlier Barth would have understood – the powers of spirituality and of religion. This interpretation is supported by Colossians 2, where Christ is called ‘the head of every ruler and authority’ (Col. 2.10), and where Christ is said to have ‘disarmed the rulers and

See the parallels in Prov. 8.22-31. Also, Angela Standhartinger, ‘Der Brief an die Gemeinde in Kolossä und die Erfindung der “Haustafel”’, in Kompendium Feministische Bibelauslegung, ed. Louise Schottroff and Marie-Theres Wacker (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998), 638. 9 See Mary Rose D’Angelo, ‘Colossians’, in Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Commentary, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 2:318. 10 See Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik III.3 (Zollikon-Zürich: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1950), 535. 11 See Eduard Schweizer, Der Brief an die Kolosser, 2nd edn (Zürich: Benziger Verlag, 1980), 61. 12 See also Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 34: ‘To assert with Col. 1.15-20 that God created the Powers does not imply that God endorses any particular Power at any given time’. 8

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authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it’ (Col. 2.15). This is, no doubt, a radical statement, and it is in some ways even stronger than the earlier Pauline approach, where the metaphor of triumphal procession is used more sparingly, as Elliott has pointed out.13 Powers that do not follow the spirit of Christ are defeated and exposed by Christ. The similarity to the triumphal processions of victorious Roman emperors, often noted by interpreters of this passage, does not have to mean that Christ turns into an emperor himself. As postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha have argued, mimicry is one of the ways in which the colonized imitate the power of the colonizers with a decisive difference and thereby undermine the dominant power.14 Angela Standhartinger notes the different theologies of the cross in Colossians 1 and 2.15 While in Colossians 1, 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), in Colossians 2, the cross of Christ is linked to triumph over the powers (see Col. 2.14). But perhaps these two perspectives are not contradictory after all, illustrating instead the complexity of challenging the powers: in both cases, the powers are challenged in fundamental ways. For those who experience the destructive powers of the empire in their own bodies, peace and reconciliation with the powers through the cross can never mean a truce or some affirmation that these powers are okay after all. This would have amounted to a repetition of the Pax Romana where ‘might makes right’, as the saying goes. The peace and the reconciliation of God, by contrast, require the disarmament of the powers by all means possible and an ultimate triumph of justice against injustice that sometimes comes through what looks like defeat.16 The letter to the Ephesians, which is widely agreed to be deutero Pauline, deals with similar dynamics. In the first chapter, Christ is located above all powers: ‘God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come’ (Eph. 1.20-21). In the final chapter, once again, there is a conflict between Christ and the powers, in which now not only the creator but also the creatures are engaged: ‘For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places’ (Eph. 6.12). Elliott caricaturizes what might be the most common misinterpretation of this passage when he envisions the ‘sigh of relief ’ of certain Christians who believe that their struggle is not against human beings.17 This is embodied in contemporary Christianity, when opposition against otherworldly powers – sometimes envisioned as occultic or demonic – replaces any opposition against dominant worldly powers, producing a troublesome vacuum. But the powers

See Elliott, Liberating Paul, 123. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85–92. 15 See Standhartinger, ‘Der Brief an die Gemeinde in Kolossä’, 638. 16 On the difference between the peace of God and the Pax Romana, see Klaus Wengst, Pax Romana and the Peace of Jesus Christ, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 3. Elliott distinguishes between Jesus’ death and resurrection: Jesus’ death is ‘the beginning of God’s final “war of liberation” against all the powers that hold creation in thrall through the instruments of earthly oppression’. Elliott, Liberating Paul, 123. In Elliott’s account, it is the resurrection that ultimately reveals the defeat of the powers. See Elliott, Liberating Paul, 124. 17 Elliott, Liberating Paul, 121. 13 14

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described in this passage of Ephesians cannot be limited to otherworldly forces, especially when it is considered that the early Christian communities were subject to abuse precisely by the dominant worldly powers of ‘this present darkness’ (i.e. the Roman Empire) that others might have accepted as normal. This is perhaps the most intriguing thing about the powers – they are often taken for granted and maybe not even perceived as unusual or problematic. Rudolf Schnackenburg’s remark that this belief in otherworldly demonic powers, fate, and a general fear of the world are the predominant emotional ground tones of the time18 fails to consider what is really at stake here: not unsurprising general cultural assumptions but specific struggles for liberation of organized communities of misfits, in solidarity against the dominant political, economic, cultural, and religious powers of the Roman Empire. Postcolonial readings of these texts, by scholars like Jin Young Choi and others, have opened new horizons and raised new questions, even though they have sometimes focused more on the influences of empire than on the emerging resistance to it.19 Both Elliott and Walter Wink have noted the difference between Colossians and Ephesians on the one hand, and the earlier Pauline text of 1 Cor. 15.24-26 on the other. The passage from 1 Corinthians sees the victory over the powers in the future; in Colossians and Ephesians, the victory seems to have already been won. While for the victims of the powers this victory is hard to envision, Wink notes that there is a sense in which ‘in Christ’s death God’s judgement over the powers has already been rendered’.20 This ‘cosmic victory’ is subsequently being made real in various ways, and Wink identifies what he calls a ‘process of demythologizing’, which already begins in Paul’s early work, when he emphasizes the reality of Christ in the here and now.21 Likewise, the later Pauline literature is not about the often suspected ‘pie in the sky’ but rather about actual experiences of a new reality: ‘Ephesians claim that a new existence has become possible within the old reality. Not fantasy but actual experience is what has minted these audacious claims.’22 In sum, the validity of the hope for whatever lies in the future is grounded in experiences of liberation from the powers in the here and now. Without such experiences, Christian hope might be false hope.

Taking the powers for granted A theological argument can now be made that reflection on the doctrine of creation and on principalities and powers are not accidental but require each other. The doctrine of creation appears in a new light when the context of empire – the primary embodiment of principalities

Schnackenburg speaks of the ‘vorherrschende Daseinsgefühl der damaligen Zeit’, a fear of the world, paralysing belief in fate, and fear of demons. Rudolf Schnackenburg, Der Brief and die Epheser (Zürich: Benziger Verlag, 1982), 281. 19 See, for example, Jin Young Choi, ‘A Decolonial Reading of Ephesians: For Resisting the Postcolonial Empire’, in Scripture and Resistance, ed. Jione Havea (Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019), 89–101. Choi provides references to the most recent studies. However, I would argue that Ephesians’ mimicking of dominant power is not necessarily turning the church into another empire, as Choi fears, but can also have subversive elements, along the lines of Bhabha’s notion of mimicry. 20 Wink, Naming the Powers, 62. 21 Wink, Naming the Powers, 62. 22 Wink, Naming the Powers, 64. 18

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and power in every age – is considered. Rather than speculation about origins, the doctrine of creation answers the question of who is, and who is not, in charge in heaven and earth, and it allows for a deeper critique of power, which is often still missing both in theology and in Christian practice. By the same token, reflections on principalities and powers are deepened when these entities no longer need to be taken for granted, which means that their ultimate legitimacy can be called into question. The biggest problem with principalities and powers, it seems, occurs precisely at the moment when they are taken for granted. This is not merely an analytical problem but also a theological one because dominant principalities and powers taken for granted shape images of God and people’s sense of what is and what is not ultimate. Under the conditions of the empires of old, whether the Egyptian, the Babylonian, or the Roman one, it must have been tempting for subdued subjects to assume that the dominant powers were ultimate because resistance could seem impossible. It is in such hopeless situations that a glimpse of alternative realities can become dangerous, which is why the powers that be must make sure to snuff it out. That seems to have been the challenge that early Christianity posed to the Roman Empire, which did not have to be too worried about religions that made peace with the dominant powers and its religions. The struggle of the Pauline community, then, is not against Judaism or any other religions in general but rather against specific religious justifications of the powers that be, rooted in a common approach to the doctrine of creation that endorses the dominant powers as put in place by God, typically found in imperial situations, including the present. One way of taking the powers for granted is to justify them explicitly. In the history of the United States of America, Benjamin Franklin made one of the famous theological cases for the dominant power of empire. His petition to Congress asking to begin its sessions with prayer started with these words: ‘I have lived, Sir, a long time; and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth – that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?’23 In 2003, then-vice-president Dick Cheney used the last sentence of this quote as the theme of a Christmas card.24 More recently, a person interviewed at the 2020 Republican Convention asserted that Donald Trump could never have been so successful unless he was chosen by God. While these statements may seem overly self-assured, this is one of the most basic consequences of a doctrine of creation that does not relativize the powers, concluding that whatever exists has been created by God and, therefore, must not be questioned. This is how many Christians in the United States justified voting for Donald Trump, a president who hardly embodies Christian values: without God’s help, they believed, he would not be in office. It is interesting, of course, that the same people are unlikely to have made similar claims for President Barack Obama, and that Vice President Cheney would hardly have claimed that the rise of other empires like the Chinese or the Russian happened with the aid of God. Similarly, those who reference Rom. 13.1 – that ‘there is no authority except from God, and

Cited in John R. Vile, The Constitutional Convention of 1787: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of America’s Founding (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 1:593. 24 Jeffrey F. Liss, ‘More to This Card than Season’s Greetings’, The Washington Post, 28 December 2003, https://www​ .washingtonpost​.com​/archive​/opinions​/2003​/12​/28​/more​-to​-this​-card​-than​-seasons​-greetings​/6d925ba5​-0e59​-47ed​ -9bbd​-41f68e54e1ef/. 23

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those authorities that exist have been instituted by God’ – generally only apply this passage to their own governments and not to the governments of rival nations. Another way of taking the powers for granted that may be even worse than explicit justification is failure to perceive the powers, because here the act of theological reflection is sidelined altogether. German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust gives expression to this when Goethe has the devil make this observation: ‘Den Teufel spürt das Völkchen nie, und wenn er sie beim Kragen hätte’ (‘people never feel the devil, even though he might grab them by the throat’).25 This is perhaps more of a problem today than ever before. In the ancient world, it would not have been too hard for slaves, for instance, to perceive the whips of their masters or for serfs to perceive the power of their overlords. In these relationships, the powers were embodied in specific individuals or entities who often claimed to be empowered by Godself. Under the conditions of present-day capitalism, however, with help from the misleading promises of the American Dream, it is more difficult to perceive the powers that control people’s lives. Capitalism suggests the freedom of people in the economy from overbearing powers – buyers and sellers appear to be equally free and supposedly can negotiate freely. This is sometimes linked to a related freedom of politics, where everyone is supposedly able to ‘make it’ and everyone is supposed to have an equal vote: ‘One person, one vote’ is the motto of modern democracies. The truth, of course, is that growing, but often invisible, power differentials distort the equilibrium not only of markets but also of the political process. Moreover, while workers are likely to perceive the power of their employers, they are less likely to perceive that which drives their employers – that which Goethe, in the above quote, calls ‘the devil’. Common critiques of ‘greedy CEOs’, for instance, tend to overlook that CEOs are not the ones who are making the rules – like the rule that corporations must serve the benefit of the stockholders rather than the workers. In fact, CEOs who would refuse to follow the rules of capitalist wealth accumulation, and therefore create trouble for the powers that be, can expect to be quickly replaced by others who follow the rules. Consequently, overlooking the structural nature of the powers that transcends individuals – an often-overlooked form of ‘transcendence’ – amounts to another way of endorsing them, as what they represent is now considered part of how the world has been created, naturally, physically, or metaphysically. Both these ways of taking the powers for granted prompt the need for an analysis of power in the study of theology in general and the study of the doctrine of creation in particular. When the analysis of power is either trivialized or lacking altogether, theological reflection is likely to end up supporting the status quo. This is not only true for those theologies that explicitly support the powers of empire; it is especially true for theologies that fail to consider the reality of principalities and powers and thus support them by default.

Analysing and overcoming the powers To discern how to deal with principalities and powers today, it might help to start on the ground floor, with principalities and powers that are accepted as given and taken for granted.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie Erster Teil (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1986), 61. Translation mine.

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In the ancient world, this may well have been the invisible realms of demons and angels, even though it would be misguided to think that ancient people were merely worried about powers that float in the air. After all, they were subjects to powerful masters whose power was visibly exercised. While the imagery of demons and angels still has some impact today, other equally invisible structures that are more commonly accepted as given and therefore taken for granted today need to be considered. Arguably, the most prominent example of such structures in our time is what has been elsewhere called the ‘postcolonial empire’.26 This empire is not based on visible political structures or deeded colonial possessions but is grounded in less visible transnational economic structures, which makes the theological discourse of principalities and powers more important than it has been in some time. Beginning with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s, even forty years later, her slogans that ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) to capitalism and that ‘capitalism is here to stay’ are still widely accepted. As has often been said, for many people, it is easier to envision the end of the world (or the end of creation as a whole) than the end of capitalism. The fall of Soviet-style communism in the 1990s has further contributed to such stances, as capitalism was quickly declared the sole winner on the global scene. In these examples, the place of principalities and powers that assume the place of Godself is occupied by capitalism – not only being intrinsic to creation but standing above it. Most Americans, more likely to take the economic status quo for granted than the political one, share these perspectives. A case in point was the hotly contested US presidential election in 2020, where major representatives of both political parties deeply disagreed on politics but were nevertheless in fundamental agreement that capitalism cannot be questioned and is here to stay. Nevertheless, even when principalities and powers are taken for granted, there is a fundamental difference between primordial principalities and powers and created principalities and powers. What is created can conceivably be decreated and recreated, but what is primordial cannot even be questioned. For this reason, it is imperative to follow the lead of the biblical authors discussed above and to conceive principalities and powers as part of created reality. Perceiving principalities and powers as created makes a fundamental difference, whether the discussion is about angels and demons or about contemporary neoliberal capitalism. The doctrine of creation, including the creation of principalities and powers, not only allows for but demands a fundamental critique of the status quo. This critique begins where whatever is thought of as principalities and powers is compared and contrasted with the power of God, and it concludes with a judgement of whether these principalities and powers conform to or contradict what is understood as the power of God. If the doctrine of creation finds its roots in the ancient narratives of Exodus and Exile, as demonstrated above, then the most fundamental theological pattern displayed in the creation stories amounts to a reversal of the classical assumption that divine power legitimizes empire. This leads to the fundamental problem of the doctrine of creation: the legitimization of dominant power. As Hannah Arendt observed, power requires legitimation based on stories of creation; by contrast, violence only requires justification by referring to an end that justifies

See Rieger, Christ and Empire, chap. 6. The postcolonial empire is the form that empires take after the great colonial powers in Europe, first Spain and Portugal, and then Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany, broke down and faded. 26

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the means.27 Religion typically provides such structures of legitimation, often in the form of a theism that envisions God analogous to, although greater than, the greatest powers of the age. This appears to be the logic of Anselm of Canterbury’s famous definition of God as ‘something than which nothing greater can be thought’.28 This kind of theism has reliably served as the legitimization of the powers that be through the ages. Based on Exodus and Exile, however, this theism needs to be called into question, demanding new explorations of the power of God. Catherine Keller raises an interesting question when she wonders whether American idolatry is playing God in the world or is imitating a false God. The more fundamental idolatry, following the logic of this question, may well be the confusion of God’s power with omnipotence. Arguably, there is a double idolatry at work here – believing in a false God and imitating this false God in the world. Keller references Alfred North Whitehead, who defines idolatry as shaping God in the image of imperial rulers, which is reflected, for instance, in the doctrine of ‘a transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys’.29 The solution, according to Keller, is provided by David Griffin’s distinction between the power of coercion and the power of persuasion. Questioning the power of coercion, including imperial omnipotence, is a valid first step when re-envisioning God’s power. While philosophical questions can lend support to this enterprise, Christian theology is more fundamentally indebted to the embodiment of power in Jesus, which does not resemble omnipotence, neither moving from the top down nor proceeding via unilateral violence. Rather than divesting from power altogether, as certain theologies of kenosis have argued, Jesus divests from dominant power and embodies the power of resistance and of organizing alternative ways of life.30 Nevertheless, the power of coercion is not the only problem; the power of persuasion has had its own problematic history, beginning with critics of the Latin American Conquest and early liberal theologies of the nineteenth century. Too often, persuasion simply meant that civilizations which considered themselves superior would communicate their view of the world to those whom they considered inferior in a more gentle fashion. The ‘Only Way’ of Bartolomé de Las Casas is one example, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s christology another. Schleiermacher, preferring Christ’s attractive power over coercive power, assumed that this would be how Christianity would naturally spread throughout the world.31 Keller’s advice to ‘let the hierarchical universe of unilateral and omnipotent sovereignty fade into a more wildly democratic cosmos of unpredictable and uncontrollable – but never unordered – interrelations’32 and the affirmation of God as a relational force, along with the views of Las Casas and Schleiermacher, are certainly preferable to the hierarchical status quos

Referenced in Catherine Keller, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 19–20. 28 Anselm, ‘Proslogion’, in Anselm: Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2007), 81. 29 Keller, God and Power, 29. 30 See Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Powers: Conflict, Covenant, and the Hope of the Poor (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011). 31 For in-depth interpretations of Las Casas and Schleiermacher along these lines, see Rieger, Christ and Empire, chaps. 4 and 5. 32 Keller, God and Power, 31. God, as relational force, is described as ‘lure to a self-organizing complexity, creating out of the chaos’. 27

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of empires past and present. But more is at stake in the rethinking of creation and principalities and powers in terms of resistance to empire. Even explicitly relational forces – friendships, companionships, communitarian relations, and other forms of attraction – fail to save the day when power differentials are too pronounced. Moreover, simply divesting from all power or rejecting it, as well-meaning liberal Christians have frequently suggested, creates other problems. Modern Roman Catholic theology, for instance, has tended to link power to concupiscence and sin, which needs to be overcome and abolished. Karl Rahner even talks about the eschatological hope of totale Entmachtung, total disempowerment.33 Such positions are unable to reclaim power in more constructive ways, which creates problems, especially for those whose flourishing and perhaps even whose survival depends on profoundly challenging and transforming principalities and powers. Theologians who are fairly comfortably situated in the middle class may not mind efforts to divest of power (or of other sources of energy) for a while, but without developing alternative power, the dominant powers of the executive class will pick up any slack and take over once again. No relationship will be safe from such takeovers. What would resistance look like in this context? Wink has suggested three steps: ‘Naming the Powers identifies our experiences of these pervasive forces that dominate our lives. Unmasking the Powers takes away their invisibility, and thus to coerce us unconsciously into doing their bidding. Engaging the Powers involves joining in God’s endeavor to bend them back to their divine purposes.’34 In my argument so far, naming and unmasking go hand in hand, together with a profound theological critique of idolatry, marking the beginning of resistance. But what might it mean to join God’s endeavour to ‘bend back’ the powers to their divine purposes? Judging from the earliest theological discourses on creation and power in the Babylonian exile and in the later deutero-Pauline work, resistance is always tied to communities and organized movements that refuse to surrender to the powers of empire. The agency of communities and movements keeps the powers in check and challenges them, and in certain cases, this agency can even lead to the defeat and the overturning of the powers. In the history of the United States, for instance, the powers of slavery were not merely challenged and reformed but also abolished, the constitutional limitation of voting rights to propertied white men was abolished, and Jim Crow laws that kept Blacks and whites separated were abolished. The same is true for the efforts of employers to put to work children and women without protection and to keep workers tethered to their work with almost no limits. None of these accomplishments of abolition would have been possible without movements that built power from the bottom up, including the abolitionist movement, the suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, and the labour movement. Movements of alternative power are the places where the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, the Judean exiles in Babylonia, and the early communities of Jesus and Paul can be assumed to have found new approaches to religion and power as well.35

Karl Rahner, ‘Theologie der Macht’, in Schriften zur Theologie. Bd. 4: Neuere Schriften (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1960), 490. See also Heinz-Horst Schrey, ‘Macht II’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), 21:656. 34 Wink, The Powers That Be, 34–5. 35 See my book series with Palgrave Macmillan Publishers, titled ‘New Approaches to Religion and Power’. 33

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Conclusions The theological patterns that emerge in the creation stories and in the discourse of principalities and powers are not the foundation or harmless amendments of prominent and recurring empire theologies but rather their reversal. As a result, these emerging theological patterns demand no less than the re-evaluation of everything. Many, if not most, cherished images of God and of God’s power are up for critical revision, as are images of the church, of salvation, and even of things to come. Moreover, the reversal of empire theologies does not end with theological discourse but impacts entire ways of life and what Wink has called ‘the domination system’, in which the various powers ‘are linked together in a bewilderingly complex network’.36 It is no accident that the invisible power of economic domination shapes ecclesial structures where donors often have the last word, shapes patriarchal families where males tend to rule supreme, and shapes political structures where campaign financing is only the tip of the iceberg. Overcoming the dominant powers and creating alternatives begins with the simple observation that neither heaven nor earth, neither principalities nor powers, are divine or primordial. This is the theological foundation of statements proclaiming that ‘another world is possible’, as the World Social Forums have kept reiterating over the years, although the shape of this world is still in the process of being developed for Christians in the following of the antiimperial power of Jesus, in conversation with anti-imperial power emerging in many other places.

Further reading Elliott, Neil. Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006. Horsley, Richard A. Jesus and the Powers: Conflict, Covenant, and the Hope of the Poor. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011. Keller, Catherine. God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. Rieger, Joerg. Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. Wink, Walter. The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

Wink, The Powers That Be, 36. The Powers hold each other in check and make sure that none of them can get out of the network of domination. In the Domination System, ‘unjust economic relations, oppressive political relations, biased race relations, patriarchal gender relations, hierarchical power relations’ all come together, maintained by the use of violence. Wink, The Powers That Be, 39. Of course, in postcolonial times, violence is not always required due to the invisibility to the powers that be. 36

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CHAPTER 36 VALUES AND DISVALUES IN CREATION

Christopher Southgate

Introduction: The ambiguity of creation The eminent naturalist Holmes Rolston III recounts the following incident: I was in Africa once and watched three lions stalk and kill a zebra. The three lionesses went different ways, slowly, hiding themselves in bushes. . . . After perhaps forty minutes’ stalk, the farthest lioness sprang out of the bushes. The zebra ran but ran in the direction of the closest lioness. She waited until it came near, then jumped at its rear, and took it down. Quickly, she was hanging on its neck. The zebra was still kicking. She held it about ten minutes until it stopped kicking.1 In other work, Rolston points to the ‘insurance pelican chick’ as an example of a successful evolutionary strategy in the white pelican: Females lay two eggs on open ground, the second about two days after the first, and parents by turns incubate them by wrapping a webbed foot over each egg. Few parents can raise two young; the earlier-hatched chick, more aggressive in grabbing food from its parent’s pouch, becomes progressively larger, attacking the smaller sibling, and the resulting abuse and starvation are the major cause of chick loss. So the second is reduced to a backup chick, surviving if the first is lost, or if the second is lucky. It has only one chance in ten of fledging. The second chick is often driven to the edge of the nest by its sibling, only to fall or wander out, whereupon it will not be allowed to return, seemingly unrecognized by its parents, a refusal that protects against adopting alien chicks and wasting parental care on unrelated genes.2 For the Christian theologian committed to the belief that, first, God has created all that exists out of absolutely nothing, and, second, God loves God’s creation, even at the level of care for an individual creature like a sparrow (Mt. 10.29), these instances of creaturely suffering must disturb. Yet more disturbing is the thought that creaturely lives like that of the insurance pelican chick, which seems to contain no flourishing, serve as part of a process – evolution by natural selection – presumably originated by God as creator, a process that preserves and refines adapted characteristics of a species.

Holmes Rolston III, Science and Religion: An Introduction for Youth (Nashville: Elm Hill, 2019), 33. Holmes Rolston III, Science and Religion: A Critical Survey (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006), 138.

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So there are ‘disvalues’ (in Rolston’s terms)3 in creation, and, crucially, they arise from the same processes that give rise to values. Remarkable values in the biological world include ingenious adaptation to environments, and many complex and beautiful strategies for being alive. I hold the following to be disvalues in creation: acute or chronic suffering in individuals with sufficient complexity of experience to suffer, and also extinction of species – the loss to the world of a whole way of being alive.4 (For the sake of conciseness, in this chapter I focus only on ‘evolutionary evil’, setting aside the harms caused to human beings by natural events in creation such as earthquakes.) If it is supposed that God desired particular outcomes in creation, such as the emergence of life from non-life, the evolution of a range of complex creatures and ecosystems, and eventually (among other outcomes) the evolution of the sorts of possibilities of intelligence, love, and spirituality that humans possess, that, in turn, intensifies the problem of theodicy associated with those processes and outcomes. It suggests a teleological dimension to creaturely suffering (and extinction). If those processes of complexification and refinement of creaturely characteristics formed part of the divine purpose, and they were driven at least in part by processes of competition and struggle, necessarily involving creaturely suffering, then it is hard to avoid a sense that that struggle, that suffering, was a means to divine ends. Evolutionary theodicies This problem of ‘evolutionary evil’ and the corresponding need to frame an evolutionary theodicy has received much attention in recent times.5 Some contributions take the traditional view that disvalues in nature may be traced back to a primal human sin. This view is now deeply problematic in terms of both chronology and the extent of influence of the emerging human species.6 Some scholars shift the emphasis away from creation to eschatology – only from the perspective of the end-times will the tension between value and disvalue be resolved.7 This is a very plausible move, though, notably, Rolston himself rejects it. Robin Attfield likewise sees no need to invoke eschatology to conclude that ‘we have no reason to believe that a world with

Holmes Rolston III, ‘Disvalues in Nature’, The Monist 75, no. 2 (1992): 250–78. See Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 124–32. 5 See, for example, Stanley P. Rosenberg et al., eds, Finding Ourselves After Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), part 3; ten essays in Zygon 53, no. 3 (2018); Bethany N. Sollereder, God, Evolution and Animal Suffering: Theodicy without a Fall (London: Routledge, 2019); John R. Schneider, Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 6 For a refutation of this view on scientific and also biblical grounds, see Sollereder, God, Evolution and Animal Suffering, chap. 2. 7 See Denis Edwards, ‘Every Sparrow that Falls: The Cost of Evolution and the Christ-Event’, Ecotheology 11, no. 1 (2006): 103–23; Robert J. Russell, ‘Southgate’s Compound Only-Way Evolutionary Theodicy: Deep Appreciation and Further Directions’, Zygon 53, no. 3 (2018): 711–26; John F. Haught, ‘Faith and Compassion in an Unfinished Universe’, Zygon 53, no. 3 (2018): 782–91. 3 4

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a better balance of good over evil than the actual world is possible, or that the actual world is not a world that a good God would create’.8 What approaches to the theology of creation can be used to explore the ways of God with a world that is such an ambiguous (and undisentanglable) fusion of value and disvalue? The problem is intensified by the radical monotheism that emerged in Judaism with the work of Deutero-Isaiah in particular, who can confess God as the author of ‘weal and woe alike’ (Isa. 45.7). If God is not one deity among many, then God’s responsibility for disvalue is intensified. If, further, God is the creator of absolutely everything from absolutely nothing, without the constraints on creation associated with God having to work with pre-existing material, then God must ultimately be responsible for all value and disvalue alike. What follows identifies a spectrum of formulations in the recent literature that seek to avoid placing the blame on God for the disvalues in creation. First, there are positions most explicitly informed by a sense of the rebellion of identifiable freely-choosing (non-human) beings. Michael Lloyd concludes that the only satisfactory account is one based on the rebellion of angels before the creation of the present universe.9 Accounts based on angelic or spiritual rebellion suffer from two major problems: first, the power that has to be accorded to the angels to frustrate the benevolent intentions of the creator of all things ex nihilo; second, the inescapable scientific conclusion that the same processes – specifically evolution by natural selection – give rise both to creaturely diversity, beauty, and ingenuity of adaptation and to the disvalues that concern us. Lloyd’s angelic fall sits at one end of the spectrum, as the position most explicitly informed by a sense of the rebellion of identifiable freely-choosing beings. Next, I place Nicola Hoggard Creegan, for whom the disvalues in creation are like the ‘tares’ in the parable of the wheat and the tares in the Gospel of Matthew (Mt. 13.24-30, KJV).10 The appearance of the tares of disvalue is ultimately mysterious, but the parable’s witness that they are sown by an ‘enemy’ (Mt. 13.25) suggests that Creegan, too, invokes a consciously rebellious force. In the middle of the spectrum are two ingenious proposals that do not depend on a consciously rebellious agent. These come from Neil Messer, invoking Karl Barth’s ‘Das Nichtige’,11 and Celia Deane-Drummond, drawing on Sergei Bulgakov’s language of ‘Shadow Sophia’.12 Both invoke a mysterious constraint on divine activity in creation. A great deal turns on the nature of this constraint on God’s capacity to create a world where there could be creaturely flourishing without creaturely struggle, competition, and violence. If the constraint is construed as a spiritual force, then Christianity becomes over-dualist. A God who, from the beginning, has been in a battle with contrary spiritual forces (forces powerful enough to radically alter the character of any creation to which God might give rise) is no longer the sovereign Lord of the cosmos, the God whose ontological priority and absolute

Robin Attfield, Creation, Evolution and Meaning (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 141. See Michael Lloyd, ‘The Fallenness of Nature: Three Non-Human Suspects’, in Finding Ourselves After Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil, ed. Stanley P. Rosenberg et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 262–79. 10 Nicola H. Creegan, ‘Theodicy: A Response to Christopher Southgate’, Zygon 53, no. 3 (2018): 808–20. 11 See Neil Messer, Science in Theology: Encounters between Science and the Christian Tradition (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), chap. 3; Neil Messer, ‘Evolution and Theodicy: How (Not) to Do Science and Theology’, Zygon 53, no. 3 (2018): 821–35. 12 Celia Deane-Drummond, ‘Perceiving Natural Evil through the Lens of Divine Glory?’, Zygon 53, no. 3 (2018): 792–807. 8 9

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goodness guarantee the goodness of creation. If, on the other hand, the constraint on God’s creative action is not an opposing agency but some form of logical constraint, how can the logic be demonstrated? In the final analysis, Messer’s and Deane-Drummond’s positions have the constraint on God’s perfect freedom be a mystery, not a conscious resistance. This position is metastable – when the appeal to mystery on which they rest is subject to closer questioning, these approaches collapse either into a conscious opposing spiritual force or a form of logical constraint.13 Perhaps the instincts of Paul Fiddes belong next on this spectrum. Fiddes, after a careful analysis of the ‘non-being’ tradition,14 which he traces back to Plotinus, seeks to avoid the conclusion that natural evil is a logical necessity. He writes: Some overall vision of the ‘responsiveness’ and ‘resistance’ of creation to the Spirit of God is needed for a doctrine of creative evolution, for a proper theodicy, and certainly for the claim . . . that God suffers conflict with a non-being which is alien to him. It may be that process thought is pointing in a direction whose destination we do not yet have the conceptual tools to map.15 For Fiddes, the resistance is not logically necessary, nor is it malevolent, but it is inevitable.16 While not a process theologian, Fiddes is sympathetic to the notion, found in process thought, that resistance to the divine lure towards harmony and complexity is an inevitable part of the self-realization of every element of creation. In process thinkers such as David Ray Griffin,17 God continues to offer God’s lure towards the outcomes, short- and long-term, for which God longs, but God does not coerce creation. Rather, God suffers with the suffering caused by conflict between entities in their becoming. Next on the spectrum is a neglected study by Ruth Page. Page emphasizes God as the creator of possibilities, or, indeed, the possibility of possibilities that God ‘lets be’.18 Rather than the classical emphasis on God as giving order to the world, she wants rather to emphasize God’s gift of freedom to the creation to actualize possibilities in a variety of ways.19 Her God, then, lets possibilities be, and then God companions them – a relationship she calls pansyntheism.20 Page’s key step, what makes her study distinctive, is that she wants to deny that God has purposes in creation beyond the moment-by-moment joy God might have in relationship with creatures. Any suggestion that God, in creating or, yet, steering, the evolutionary process uses creatures as a means to an end is subverted by this move. She specifically rebukes the

See Christopher Southgate, ‘Response with a Select Bibliography’, Zygon 53, no. 3 (2018): 909–30. Broadly, the belief that evil has no actual existence but results from some lack within the order of being. 15 Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 228. 16 ‘Not necessary but inevitable’ is also a formulation to which Deane-Drummond is attracted. See Deane-Drummond, ‘Perceiving Natural Evil’, 798. 17 For a recent account of Griffin’s theodicy comparing it with that of Philip Clayton, see Rem B. Edwards, ‘Conflicting Process Theodicies’, Process Studies 48, no. 1 (2019): 19–39. 18 Ruth Page, God and the Web of Creation (London: SCM Press, 1996), 5. 19 This, together with her strong rejection of language of dominion and lordship, means she admits to having to consign Genesis 1 to a category of ancient text rather than living word. See Page, God and the Web of Creation, 126. 20 Page, God and the Web of Creation, 40. 13 14

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schemes of process theology as invoking a God-given aim imparted to entities, since this aim has apparently included ‘the stress and death involved in food chains, the way in which some animals like cats play with their prey, and so forth’.21 For Page, there is no theological problem with the violence and struggle involved in food chains as long as God is not using these processes for the divine purposes.22 This position, however, largely neglects the ‘ontological aspect’ of evolutionary theodicy – the bald fact that God’s creative acts (however passively expressed) are the reason for creaturely suffering.23 In removing God’s ‘hidden agenda’, Page has also removed some of the balancing goods that might be deployed in such theodicy, in terms of God’s purposes giving rise to value as well as disvalues.24 Page’s radical denial of long-term divine purposes, which she calls ‘teleology now’,25 is very difficult to sustain from a contemplation of the evolutionary history of the world. Was it no part of God’s purpose that bacteria should eventually give rise to eucaryotes, and eucaryotes to multicellular organisms, and those organisms to more complex organisms possessing sophisticated sentience, and those sentient organisms ultimately to organisms with selfconsciousness, complex social life, and within that the capacity to give and receive love in freedom? Was it not part of God’s purpose for creation that a creature evolve that was capable of embodying the flesh that the divine Son became (Jn 1.14)? Another question that may be posed to both Page and process thinkers is what it means for primitive life, and indeed non-living entities, to respond in freedom to God’s offer of possibility. Page writes: ‘[W]ithin any particular situation a particular possibility is taken up by a creature within its current constraints and is thus contingently realized.’26 Even at the quantum level, she writes of possibilities ‘endeavouring to realize themselves’.27 But what does this agential language mean in the non-living world? Process thought answers this via a panpsychic metaphysics, but it is unclear where Page derives hers from. Nevertheless, Page’s proposal that what God creates is possibility rather than determinate outcomes is very attractive, and is returned to in what follows. Creatio ex nihilo I suggest that none of the proposals on the spectrum outlined above, which all seek to draw the sting of the problem of God’s responsibility, is satisfactory. And, as mentioned earlier, the doctrine of creation out of nothing exacerbates the problem of harm and suffering in the natural world. The following, however, delves within the doctrine for resources that might assist in clarifying the problem.

Page, God and the Web of Creation, 47. Page, God and the Web of Creation, 101. 23 See Southgate, The Groaning of Creation, 9, 69–71. 24 For Page, the balancing good would be God’s co-suffering with every suffering creature, which I would also want to affirm. See Page, God and the Web of Creation, 104–5; Southgate, The Groaning of Creation, 50–4, 56–7. 25 Page, God and the Web of Creation, 63. 26 Page, God and the Web of Creation, 8. 27 Page, God and the Web of Creation, 10. 21 22

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Creatio ex nihilo has been vigorously scrutinized in recent years on biblical,28 feminist,29 and ethical30 grounds.31 In addition, it is rejected on metaphysical grounds by many process theologians. The critique that concerns us here is the theodical – the charge that creatio ex nihilo puts the blame for the disvalues of natural evil so squarely on the shoulders of God as to be inconsistent with a continued claim as to the absolute benevolence of God.32 Nevertheless, creatio ex nihilo remains the orthodoxy in much Christian systematic theology. Vitally, this type of theology can insist both on God’s utter transcendence from the world and, at the same time, on the intimate relation of the creator to all creatures.33 One of the most important recent contributions to an orthodox trinitarian understanding of creation out of nothing is provided by Ian McFarland in his study From Nothing.34 In a perceptive chapter on ‘Evil’, McFarland draws on three books from the Wisdom tradition to illustrate different approaches. He first acknowledges that suffering-producing disvalues in creation – ‘floods, landslides, volcanic eruptions, bolide impacts . . . predation and disease have characterized terrestrial life from the beginning’, and that ‘these facts raise serious problems for a defense of creation from nothing’.35 McFarland then looks at approaches in the book of Proverbs and finds them coherent and helpful in respect of moral evil, harm, and suffering resulting from human choices. Wisdom as to paths of positive and prudent action is offered to humans by God, and acting with the absence of wisdom is a besetting human folly. In this sense, the very influential view that evil has no real existence, but is only a lack, seems coherent. Yet it is much harder to see how this privative understanding of evil ‘works’ in respect of harms and suffering that lack a human cause. McFarland uses his treatment of the book of Job to acknowledge that there seem to be some evils of which God is the author: ‘As portrayed in Job, evil is a function of deliberate (though not, it seems, malevolent) divine action: if the reasons why God should bring it about that an innocent person like Job should suffer while the wicked remain prosperous remain mysterious, the presupposition remains that it is none other than God that makes it so.’36 This shows a refreshing honesty, often absent from orthodox Christian writing. But McFarland distinguishes the suffering of Job from what might be called systemic forms of evil (e.g. predation, climatic cycles, ageing, and death) that seem to be intrinsic to creation’s everyday patterns of operation.

See Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation Out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994). 29 See Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003). 30 See Whitney Bauman, Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics: From Creatio Ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius (London: Routledge, 2009). 31 For recent surveys of the status of creatio ex nihilo, see David B. Burrell et al., eds, Creation and the God of Abraham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Thomas Jay Oord, ed., Theologies of Creation: Creatio ex Nihilo and Its New Rivals (London: Routledge, 2015); Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl, eds, Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2018). 32 A charge levelled by, for example, Thomas Jay Oord, ‘God Always Creates out of Creation in Love: Creatio ex Creatione a Natura Amoris’, in Theologies of Creation: Creatio ex Nihilo and Its New Rivals, ed. Thomas Jay Oord (London: Routledge, 2015), 109–22. 33 See Kathryn Tanner on ‘non-contrastive transcendence’, in God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), chap. 2. 34 Ian A. McFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015). 35 McFarland, From Nothing, 112. 36 McFarland, From Nothing, 125. 28

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For this ‘systemic evil’, he turns to the Book of Ecclesiastes with its bleak recognition of the ‘stubborn, inexorable fact of creatures’ transience’.37 McFarland writes: Ecclesiastes highlights the ways in which the flourishing of any one creature comes at the expense of others. . . . [T]he interactions that lead to the destruction of an individual creature are often part of a wider context that make [sic] possible the existence of the species (e.g. hunting down the zebra not only sustains the lion but also enhances the overall fitness of the zebra herd by removing the old and infirm).38 McFarland then takes two further key steps. First: ‘Given that the interactions accompanying existence in time and space prevent any creature’s perfection from being fully realized in time, it follows that God’s intentions for creation can be achieved only through a fundamental transformation of the conditions of created existence’;39 McFarland here quotes Romans 8 as a promise of creation’s obtaining ‘the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (v. 21). Second, McFarland rejects the idea that God might weigh ‘the good of created existence against the exposure to evil that it entails. Such a calculation makes sense only if creation is conceived as a means to some end. . . . But the existence of creatures is not a means to an end. . . . God’s intention in creating is simply that creatures should exist’.40 McFarland is very wary of any suggestion that creation as a whole progresses towards a state closer to the divine purpose. Moreover, he thinks the science suggests that ‘the appearance of increasingly complex entities over time appears to be epiphenomenal’.41 So McFarland finds himself defaulting to a combination of two of the strategies noted above – eschatological redemption as the ultimate evolutionary theodicy, plus an effort to draw the sting of the teleological dimension of the problem by an approach similar to that offered by Page.42 There is a major dispute as to the extent to which evolution shows a bias towards certain types of outcome. Page herself celebrates the conclusion of Stephen Jay Gould that had the tape of evolution run again, outcomes might have been very different.43 But Christians confessing an orthodox credal faith can be clear that – by whatever combination of God’s authoring of the process and God’s subsequent interaction with it – complexification, refinements of ingenious adaptation, and eventually higher intelligence, self-conscious freedom of choice, and expressions of worship of the divine did occur, and it is very hard to see that they did not form at least a part of God’s purposes in creation. McFarland concedes that the overall fitness of a zebra herd is enhanced by predation by lions; on a larger timescale, predators and prey

McFarland, From Nothing, 128. McFarland, From Nothing, 129. 39 McFarland, From Nothing, 130. 40 McFarland, From Nothing, 133. 41 McFarland, From Nothing, 154. 42 Just as Page uses two strategies – denial of long-distance divine purpose, and affirmation of divine co-suffering – she also invokes a process-like eschatology in which moments of special concurrence between creaturely experience and divine gift are held eternally in the mind of God. Page, God and the Web of Creation, 170–5. 43 Page, God and the Web of Creation, 75–9. 37 38

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animals have developed their refined and often beautiful characteristics due to this interaction. As Rolston has so elegantly expressed it: ‘The cougar’s fang has carved the limbs of the fleetfooted deer, and vice versa.’44 Two types of theodicy naturally emerge within a theology based on creatio ex nihilo. The first, very often attributed to Augustine, is that God’s creation was perfectly harmonious, as befitted creation out of nothing by the perfect Goodness, but the primal human sin began the process by which creation became pervaded by conflict. Other recent readings of Augustine point out that he seems to accept the existence of thorns and poisonous snakes within God’s good economy of creation.45 That would lead one towards the other type of theodicy offered within the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo – one that sees a world of thorns and vipers as a more complete world than one without them, a strategy elaborated by Aquinas in his view that the best sort of creation would naturally be the one accommodating the maximum diversity of creatures.46 That, in turn, prepares the ground for Gottfried Leibniz’s formulation that this is ‘the best of all possible worlds’.47 It may be helpful, however, to recollect that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo did not emerge fully formed from the ocean of early Christian reflection. What may be taken to be its quintessential form in Aquinas represents the culmination of a long process of Christian reflection, of which the opening centuries had a strong element of the polemical. Paul Gavrilyuk traces this early phase, in which Irenaeus of Lyons could frame the doctrine in rejection of a whole series of competing cosmologies, including a demiurge creating the world from preexisting matter.48 Gavrilyuk recognizes that some alternative cosmologies functioned in part as theodicies – perhaps pre-existing matter was evil or imperfect, or the world the work of lesser divinities, or a divine mistake or afterthought, or the creation of the Devil. Perhaps there was some sort of fall from an initial harmony or perfection. All but the last of these is utterly rejected by creatio ex nihilo. But the early controversies about the doctrine were very much formed in dialogue with Plato’s enigmatic but enormously influential dialogue Timaeus, which postulates a demiurge giving rise to the tangible creation by working with imperfect materials. For centuries this remained a profoundly influential text in a Christian milieu in which creatio ex nihilo had become the unquestioned orthodoxy. Plato speaks of the ‘receptacle’ into which creation is ‘cast’, which is sometimes spoken of as resembling ‘matter’ and sometimes more as ‘space’. This ‘chōra’ has attracted the attention of Catherine Keller in her important meditations on the ‘tehom’ of Gen. 1.2. Keller invokes two very different thinkers who also want to work with

Rolston, Critical Survey, 134. Stanley P. Rosenberg, ‘Can Nature be “Red in Tooth and Claw” in the Thought of Augustine?’, in Finding Ourselves After Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil, ed. Stanley P. Rosenberg et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 226–43. 46 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), I, Q. 47, Art. 1; Simon Oliver, Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 47 Michael J. Murray, ‘Leibniz and the Problem of Evil’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 15 July 2020, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/entries​/leibniz​-evil. 48 Paul Gavrilyuk, ‘Creation in Early Christian Polemical Literature: Irenaeus against the Gnostics and Athanasius against the Arians’, Modern Theology 29, no. 2 (2013): 23–32. 44 45

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chōra – Alfred North Whitehead and Jacques Derrida.49 Virginia Burrus devotes the first part of her essay on ecopoetics to chōra.50 Clearly, the sense of a primordial ‘stuff ’, with potential but without God-endowed form, continues to fascinate. Plato’s picture in the Timaeus is more complex than is sometimes realized. Plato speaks of the necessity (anangkē) that is combined with reason (nous) in giving rise to the phenomenal universe as a planōmenē aitia, a wandering or errant cause (Timaeus 48a). The combination of these three factors – nous, anangkē, and chōra – could be used to fashion an account remarkably similar to how a scientifically informed theology of creation might be framed. It must not, however, be supposed that Plato had any sense of such an account. But if Simon Conway Morris is right that the landscape of evolutionary possibility contains certain ‘attractors’ (such as the camera eye and, more importantly, intelligence),51 then it is possible to formulate a theological postulate that God designed this landscape such that certain creaturely properties were almost bound to arise, given time (and freedom from catastrophic pan-extinctions). This could be seen as the operation of nous, and the landscape could be understood as analogous to Plato’s chōra, the ‘filled space’ of biological possibility. Crucially, the ‘wandering cause’ of natural selection of heritable variants (combined with such recent emphases in evolutionary theory as niche construction, epigenetic inheritance, etc.) supplies the third ingredient, the mechanism by which the space of possibility is explored, and ‘solutions’ involving the fundamental attractors of convergent evolution are arrived at. This is ‘necessity’ but ‘governed by intelligence’ (Timaeus 48a) in being shaped by certain attractors so that the results of the wandering are not truly random but do manifest a tendency towards certain types of adaptiveness to environment. Plato can be criticized for valuing the ideal and unchangeable over the physical and actual. So on the aforementioned scheme, an incarnational faith must hold that the actual creatures that arise – the cheetah, the peregrine, the human being – have to be regarded as more valuable than the attractors of speed, ingenuity, and intelligence that contributed to their evolution within the landscape of evolutionary possibility. What is incarnate is more distinctive and special than the general ‘ideas’ (even if they were divine ideas) that framed its evolution. For the Christian theologian, this is particularly true of the human species because this evolved to be not only a creature created in the image and likeness of God but also a creature in which can be incarnated that image at its truest – Christ (Col. 1.15; 2 Cor. 4.4). The other dimension missing from the Platonic account is the necessary contribution of time. In Plato’s scheme, the chōra contains hints, traces of what become the four elements, but the demiurge (presumably instantaneously) gives them mathematical order and they become the elements themselves. Crucial to the scheme I am developing, however, is that possibilities for creaturely properties, in their particularity and not just in the generality of the attractors, only arise gradually. It took a very long time for life to include eucaryote life, to move to multicellularity, and to land-based locomotion. The space of possible properties of

Keller, Face of the Deep, 165–7. Virginia Burrus, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints, Things (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). 51 See Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 151–8, 243–74. 49 50

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living creatures itself evolves, and the ways in which the creator’s ‘ideas’ are instantiated might not have been altogether predictable, even by the creator, before that evolution.

A new form of ‘only way’ argument What follows is the briefest of outlines of a theology of creation that sits on the extreme end of the spectrum of evolutionary theodicies that have been constructed here, in that it supposes that God knowingly, and without actual resistance, conscious or otherwise, by any created entities, created and companions the evolutionary process, and does so to realize outcomes that include creaturely beauty, diversity, ingenuity, and complexity. The blame for evolutionary suffering is simply acknowledged to belong to God.52 Given the goodness and benevolence presumed in God in this study, it is postulated that such a process of evolution by natural selection was the only way in which God could give rise to God’s desired outcomes. If there had been a possible way containing a lesser proportion of disvalues to individual creatures, a perfectly benevolent God would surely have adopted it. Mats Wahlberg has objected that God, presumably knowing the precise molecular composition of the biosphere at any given moment, could create that molecular system de novo.53 So the result that God is presumed to desire could be obtained without the millennia of suffering necessitated by evolution. Two points may be made in response. The first is that that world would still be one full of predation and parasitism, and driven by natural selection. So, the problem of suffering in the non-human world would not be solved, merely mitigated. But the second point is more subtle. It is that living things, creaturely ‘selves’, are not merely a snapshot in time that could be photocopied by God. (Readers may want to consider whether God could reproduce an exact copy of the persons they are at this instant of reading this section.) Creaturely selves have individual and also ancestral history. They have inherited experience that is far more than molecular composition. So, I am not persuaded by the reality of Wahlberg’s thought experiment. Rather, it seems that some formulation of an ‘only-way’ argument54 is the natural strategy to account for the world’s ambiguity, as I began by describing it. Elsewhere, I have softened the edge of this theodicy by appealing to various other arguments in a ‘compound theodicy’.55 But here, I simply articulate how such an only-way argument might be developed within a theology of creation. I am attracted to Page’s proposal that what God creates, first of all, is a range of possibilities. Certain directions taken in modern cosmology encourage such a view.

So also Schneider, Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil, 32–3. Mats Wahlberg, ‘Was Evolution the Only Possible Way for God to Make Autonomous Creatures? Examination of an Argument in Evolutionary Theodicy’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 77, no. 1 (2015): 37–51. 54 Many others have formulated such an argument. See Christopher Southgate, ‘“Free-Process” and “Only-Way” Arguments’, in Finding Ourselves After Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil, ed. Stanley P. Rosenberg et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 293–305, for references. I am grateful to Christopher Gill and Viktor Ilievski for pointing out that the form of the argument goes back to Platonic and Stoic explanations of natural evil. See Viktor Ilievski, ‘The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil’, Reading Religion, accessed 30 May 2020, http://readingreligion​.org​/books​/cambridge​-companion​-problem​-evil. 55 Southgate, The Groaning of Creation, 15–16. 52 53

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It was Brandon Carter in the 1970s who was the first to articulate the fact that, were certain key parameters giving actual expression to the possibilities inherent in the laws of nature, even fractionally different life could not have arisen.56 An example would be the strength of the force of gravity – stronger, and the universe could never have expanded, weaker, and it could never have retained its structure. The natural response of the theist is to suppose that this particular world has been ‘crafted’ by a creating intelligence so as to be life-bearing. The response of atheists has often been to postulate the existence of an almost infinite number of alternative universes, such that the presence of one or more universes in which the combination of laws and parameters gives rise to the possibility of life is no surprise. Indeed, various versions of Big Bang cosmology naturally give rise to the postulate of multiple universes. How these research programmes will unfold is hard to know, but science has, in various ways, prompted reflection on the likelihood that many universes are or might be possible. It can also be learned from physics that a life-bearing universe must have an age in the billions of years57 and (as far as can be known or imagined) it must be informed by the second law of thermodynamics, which renders the struggle for resources inevitable. To return to the point made at the beginning of this chapter, the same physical processes give rise to the possibility of profoundly ingenious evolved strategies in the struggle for flourishing, and also render that struggle inevitable. Suppose then that God gives rise, first of all, to a whole range of possibilities, to a ‘possibility space’ (analogous to a multidimensional fitness landscape in evolutionary theory). Think of these as the chōra, the ‘receptacle’ for all actual existents.58 Only some, perhaps a very small proportion of these possibilities, can give rise to a life-bearing universe. That is a logical constraint, a necessity limiting what even the divine reason can make happen. These possibilities give rise by processes involving a significant degree of randomness59 to actual mass–energy– space–time universes. Many possible universes may decay instantly. But suppose that God protects a range of universes that have the potential to be life-bearing.60 God accompanies (another motif of Page’s) these universes as they develop under the influence of the laws God has created and the randomness intrinsic to quantum processes. Additional possibilities then arise that God could foresee in general but not in particular. It still cannot be said how likely life was to arise even on a ‘habitable’ planet. But suppose, further, that God protects a range of possibilities that can give rise not just to systems that

For an account of the so-called ‘anthropic coincidences’, see Rodney D. Holder, God, the Multiverse and Everything: Modern Cosmology and the Argument from Design (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 57 To allow the formation of planets around second-generation stars, in which systems the heavier elements required for life can accumulate, having been formed by the supernoval destruction of first-generation stars. 58 The ancient metaphysicians would have understood ‘matter’ not as modern science would conceive it but as ‘the substrate that makes form, or intelligibility, possible in a thing’. Adam D. Hincks, ‘What does Physical Cosmology say about Creation from Nothing?’, in Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges, ed. Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2018), 327. 59 That there is any structure to the universe at all is sometimes attributed to (utterly random) quantum fluctuations in a suddenly-inflating universe. See Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (London: Allen Lane, 2020), 56. 60 This model then exhibits two classic properties of ex nihilo theologies of creation: it calls God the reason why there is anything and not nothing, and also the reason why what contains form, meaning, and value does not decay to nothing. 56

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might meet the definition of being alive but that also have the potential to develop further complexity. Again, the precise nature of that complexity might not be known precisely by God, who continues to accompany possibilities and protect those that can give rise to certain types of value – such as beauty, complexity, diversity, and intelligence. Vital to this theory, then, is not only the rationality of God-given laws but also a ‘receptacle’ of possibility that is God’s first creation and a ‘wandering cause’, which involves both quantum indeterminacy and, once life has arisen, the processes of natural selection, genetic drift, and niche construction that shape organisms and environments in an interdependent way. To these Platonic ingredients, however, can be added an authentic sense of creation ex nihilo, and also a sense of God’s personal providential care for creation as it unfolds, a care that accompanies rather than determines, but which prevents the total destruction of generative possibilities.61 The model recognizes that only a narrow range of possibilities can be life-bearing, and a still narrower range can lead to complex life; also that these life-fruitful systems develop through physical and biological processes that necessarily lead to a blend of value and disvalue. In terms of the thinkers discussed in this chapter, I affirm Plato’s instinct that an element of ‘necessity’ is intrinsic to creation, and that some ‘receptacle’ must be the ‘space’ within which God’s creating purpose works. But I resist the notion that this implies the chōra must have been eternally pre-existent.62 I affirm Page’s ideas of God creating and companioning possibilities, but resist her sense that God lacks long-term goals in creation. I share the instincts of Messer and Deane-Drummond that possibilities in creation are constrained from their outset, but reject their sense that these constraints arise from some form of metaphysical negativity resisting God. I see Fiddes as correct that some divinely offered possibilities are resisted by created entities because creatures develop their own freedom, but I consider that his account would be strengthened by more emphasis that the biological processes by which values develop necessarily involve forms of struggle. What I have attempted here is a speculative account (as Plato indeed regarded the Timaeus) that tries to put flesh on the idea that only via an evolutionary process could certain sorts of creaturely properties emerge. It does not demonstrate the truth of the onlyway argument, which ultimately has to be argued for theologically by appeal to the goodness of God. But it fills in a little of the detail of how necessity might be thought to constrain the divine creative intent. In doing so, it links with the work of perhaps the greatest of all western philosophical thinkers while retaining the Christian confession that an infinitely transcendent and infinitely compassionate God is the reason for the existence of anything rather than nothing.

We cannot know what these were, necessarily, but two of them could have been the extinction of the evolutionary line that led to mammals when dinosaurs became extinct, and the extinction of early hominins when climatic change led to early population bottlenecks. 62 In this respect I follow Augustine’s instinct that ‘the possibility to be something, the potential to be something, itself comes from God’. John C. Cavadini, ‘Creatio ex nihilo in the Thought of Saint Augustine’, in Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges, ed. Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2018), 153. Italics in original. 61

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Further reading McFarland, Ian A. From Nothing: A Theology of Creation. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015. Page, Ruth. God and the Web of Creation. London: SCM Press, 1996. Rosenberg, Stanley P., Michael Burdett, Michael Lloyd, and Benno van den Toren, eds. Finding Ourselves After Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018. Schneider, John R. Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Sollereder, Bethany N. God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering: Theodicy without a Fall. London: Routledge, 2019. Southgate, Christopher. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.

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CHAPTER 37 EVIL

Giles Waller

On the characterization of evil as a privation of the good, Donald MacKinnon wrote pungently ‘that it has only to be stated clearly, and worked out in terms of concrete examples, to be shown to be totally inadequate as an analysis either of moral or of physical evil’.1 MacKinnon’s objection to an understanding of evil as steresis – as a deprivation of being, as non-being, or an absence of goodness – has an immediate and intuitive force. Such an attribution, which has a long history, stemming back to at least Plotinus (c. 204–70 ce), seems to trivialize suffering and loss, which are often experienced as a palpable intrusion or malicious opposition rather than as an absence. Here MacKinnon identifies himself as a ‘moral philosopher’ rather than a theologian, as an ethicist rather than a metaphysician.2 His focus is fixed on the irreducibility of evil from an ethical perspective, with less concern for how such attempts to wrestle with concrete examples of evil might relate to wider theological understandings of the ontology of creation or the nature of God and God’s relation to creation. In an important sense, MacKinnon’s resistance to speculative or abstract attempts at theodicy is salutary. Such attempts frequently end up minimizing or trivializing evil, reducing it to an instance of something else, whether it is teleologically subordinated to a ‘greater good’, such as spiritual growth or creaturely freedom, or by reconciling one to the presence of evil, minimizing its force through facile justifications. However, in his resolute refusal to allow that any kind of abstract or theoretical sense might be made of evil, MacKinnon perhaps risks what Karen Kilby has identified in several thinkers opposed to the project of abstract or theoretical theodicies: that an important aspect of taking evil seriously is to allow that it does indeed raise meaningful and profoundly felt questions about the nature of God and the relation of God to creation. These questions overlap with those typical of more formal theoretical theodicies, even if one questions the legitimacy of theodicy as an enterprise, and rightly baulks at the attempt to provide tidy answers to these questions.3

Augustine (354–430) Augustine, the most significant proponent in the Christian tradition of understanding evil as a privation of the good, did not set out to construct a theodicy in the modern or postEnlightenment sense of the term. For Augustine, the question of the ontology of evil is far from abstract or theoretical; it is bound up inextricably in the questions that arise from his own

Donald M. MacKinnon, ‘Theology and Tragedy’, Religious Studies 2, no. 2 (1967): 165. Donald M. MacKinnon, ‘Atonement and Tragedy’, in Borderlands of Theology, and Other Essays, ed. George W. Roberts and Donovan E. Smucker (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1968), 98. 3 See Karen Kilby, God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2020), 83–4. 1 2

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experiences of suffering and loss in his personal, spiritual search for God. Indeed, Augustine’s account of his speculative theological wrestling with the ontology of evil and its relation to the goodness of creation is inseparable from its form as a prayer, voiced in the second person as an address to God: ‘For you, evil is nothing at all.’4 In his Confessions, Augustine narrates his journey away from his earlier Manichaean understanding of the nature of God, creation, and evil. In Book Five, he writes of how he once believed evil to be a concrete thing or ‘mass’ (moles), a kind of infinite material substance, opposed to the ‘larger’ material substance of God.5 In this scheme, creation is caught between these two warring uncreated substances of light and darkness, each conceived of both as substantial (as having their own being, nature, and essence), and as material agents within the world, superior to finite creaturely agents but operating within the same causal continuum. An obvious theological appeal of this system is that it clears God of any responsibility for having created evil since evil is always already there in the materiality of the created order, something against which God struggles in the act of creating. The implications of this view for one’s understanding of God, of creation itself, and of evil are severe. The scripturally revealed goodness of creation – ‘God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good’ (Gen. 1.31) – is untenable. An unavoidable implication of the Manichaean view of warring good and evil substances is that God is held to be, in principle, vulnerable to evil and thus corruptible. The Manichees, Augustine writes, ‘think it more acceptable to say that your [i.e. God’s] substance suffers evil than that their own substance actively does evil’.6 God is not fully sovereign either over creation or over evil; thus, God’s capacity to redeem creation from evil is limited. For the Manichee, it is not the case that all that exists is, by definition, good because it has been created by the source of all good. God does not timelessly bring all that is into existence in an act of absolutely sovereign freedom. Rather, in the act of creation, God wrestles with a pre-existing materiality that is of itself evil. As Augustine turns away from Manichaeism, he sees that neither God nor evil can be conceived of as an object or bodily ‘mass’ (moles), as concrete entities occupying a physical space in the world. In Book Seven of his Confessions, Augustine holds that God is incorruptible and the creator of all that is, yet Augustine remains puzzled by the nature of evil: ‘God is good and is most mightily and incomparably superior to [created] things. But being God, God created good creatures. See how God surrounds and fills them. Then where and whence is evil? How did it creep in? What is its root and what is its seed? Or does it not have any being?’7 At this point, Augustine still conceives of God in material terms, as if the universe were a ‘sponge’, filled with God in every part. On such an understanding, the ‘place’ and thus the origin of evil must remain a problem (how does it ‘creep in’?), for evil cannot be a substance that is coextensive with the incorruptible goodness of God if God is a substance that ‘contains’ all that is. Here, Augustine hints at a way through his conundrum, wondering whether evil ‘does not have any being’. At this point, Augustine immediately recognizes something like MacKinnon’s objection to a privative understanding of evil: ‘Why should we fear and avoid what has no

Augustine, Confessions, 7.13.19. Augustine, Confessions, 5.10.20. 6 Augustine, Confessions, 7.3.4. 7 Augustine, Confessions, 7.5.7. 4 5

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being?’8 This is followed with a barrage of tortuous questions about an incorruptibly good God’s sovereignty and omnipotence in relation to the pre-existent matter of Manichaean and Platonic understandings of divine creation, before concluding: ‘[S]uch questions revolved in my unhappy breast, weighed down by nagging anxieties about the fear of dying before I had found the truth.’9 The way through this conundrum is an understanding of God’s creating ex nihilo, out of nothing, which further entails an understanding of evil as privative. A God who creates out of nothing cannot be coextensive with creation (in the sense of infinitely containing it) but must, rather, stand absolutely outside creation, as infinitely qualitatively distinct from it, and yet as thereby immanent to every part of creation while also transcending it infinitely.10 God has no ‘place’ in creation in this account, both standing sovereign over the whole as its cause, operating without the constraint of pre-existing matter (and thus preexisting evil) and thus intimately related to each place that depends utterly upon God for its very existence. Creation ex nihilo allows for an understanding of the ‘where’ of evil in relation to the incorruptible goodness of God. The answer is ‘nowhere’: evil does not occupy a ‘place’ as a substantial, concrete element of creation (and thus cannot be something that God brought into being as creator) but is rather a corruption of created substances that are good inasmuch as they exist,11 which is to say inasmuch as they have been brought into being by divine Goodness itself, and thus reflect and participate in that Goodness. Evil is a deprivation of the good that consists in the very being of creation: ‘[W]hatever things exist are good, and the evil into whose origins I was inquiring is not a substance, for if it were a substance, it would be good.’12 Evil, for Augustine, cannot have substantial existence within creation, nor is it another principle, menacing creation from without: For you evil does not exist at all, and not only for you but for your created universe, because there is nothing outside it which could break in and destroy the order which you have imposed upon it. But in the parts of the universe, there are certain elements which are thought evil because of a conflict of interest (non conveniunt). These elements are congruous with other elements and as such are good, and are also good in themselves.13 Evil does not name a concrete, substantial thing, but it does refer to a condition or state of affairs of concrete agents in misdirected relation with the divine source of being and goodness and with other creatures in mutual relation to this source. As Rowan Williams puts it: ‘Talking about evil is not like talking about things, about what makes the constituents of the world the sorts of things they are; it is talking about a process, about something that happens to the things that there are in the universe’, such that ‘we give the name of “evil” to that process in which good is lost.’14 This is not, pace MacKinnon, the same as claiming that the effects of the states of

Augustine, Confessions, 7.5.7. Augustine, Confessions, 7.5.7. 10 Augustine famously declares God to be ‘more inward than my most inward part and higher than the highest element within me’ (tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo). Augustine, Confessions, 3.6.11. 11 Augustine, Confessions, 7.12.18. 12 Augustine, Confessions, 7.12.18. 13 Augustine, Confessions, 7.13.19. 14 Rowan Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016), 79. 8 9

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affairs typically referred to as ‘evil’ cannot have a terribly destructive power. The corruption of the substantive goodness of something as excellent and powerful as the angelic or human will can have devastating effects. The stock analogy here is of a vacuum, a lack or void (rather than a positive force) that can have tremendously far-reaching effects.15 Following Augustine’s account, understanding evil as privative secures key elements of the wider understanding of the Christian doctrines of God and creation. God is immutable and self-subsistent, a uniquely perfect unity of Being and Goodness (which is to say that God is simple) who is absolutely sovereign in his timeless act of creation. Creation is ex nihilo, out of nothing, neither out of God himself as an involuntary overflow of divine Being, as in emanationist schemes,16 nor out of pre-existing matter, whether conceived of as pure potentiality, or as in some sense ‘evil’, as in the Manichaean understanding. Creation, as brought out of nothing by God’s absolute goodness, shares by its being in this very goodness (Gen. 1.31), albeit in a manner that is contingently good by participation, rather than in the necessary and self-subsistent manner of divine goodness. The finite and corruptible creation thus stands in an utterly contingent relationship with the timeless and incorruptible creator, in every way depending on divine grace for its very being: And I considered the other things below you, and I saw that neither can they be said absolutely to be or absolutely not to be. They are because they come from you. But they are not because they are not what you are. That which truly is is that which unchangeably abides. But ‘it is good for me to stick fast to God’ (Ps. 72:28); for if I do not abide in him, I can do nothing (John 15:5). But he ‘abiding in himself makes all things new (Wisd. 7:27). ‘You are my Lord because you have no need of my goodness’ (Ps. 15:2).17 Within Augustine’s account, a question remains regarding the relation of the ‘nothingness’ from which creation is brought forth and the ascription of something like an ‘inherent’ tendency of creation to fall back towards this nothingness, and how this tendency relates to the characterization of evil as privation or non-being. How does the ontological status of creation out of nothing, of that which both ‘is because it comes from you’ but also ‘is not because it is not what you are’, relate to Augustine’s understanding of evil as a kind of nonbeing? In his characterization of the absolute dependence of contingent creation upon divine grace, Augustine consistently emphasizes the corruptibility and mutability of creation in contradistinction to divine immutability and atemporality. While he is careful to avoid both the Manichaean notion of substantial evil and a Platonic notion of something like ‘metaphysical

For a treatment of John Hick’s objection that describing evil as a ‘lack’ might make metaphysical sense but is inadequate when evil is described in experiential terms, see Williams, On Augustine, 91: ‘As any reader of Augustine will be aware, what he can say of specific mala in no way weakens their substantial and historical reality. An “evil” is, by definition, a concrete state of affairs, and a great evil is a massively effective disruption of the world’s order; evil perpetrated by an intelligent being is grave and terrible because of the power of intelligence in the order of things. How one describes mala is, in an important sense, irrelevant to the programmatic question of what evils should be ascribed to. Furthermore, to ascribe them to anything other than skewed, or damaged relations between agencies in the world, is finally to threaten the entire possibility of intelligible talk.’ 16 See Augustine, Confessions, 13. 17 Augustine, Confessions, 7.11.17. 15

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evil’ – the claim that creation is ‘evil’ inasmuch as it is not itself absolute and necessary Being – there is a lingering association of the very being of creation as contingent, finite, and dependent, and the fall of creation away from its source of being and goodness towards a nothingness that is the absence of being and goodness. We return to Augustine’s question, ‘Whence and where is evil?’ What is the condition of the possibility of evil? It cannot be God, who is Goodness itself. It is not another rival metaphysical principle to God, as for the Manichees. Nor is it located in materiality as such, as that against which God has to struggle in the act of creation (for this would not be creation ex nihilo). Augustine is clear that even the formless matter of Gen. 1.2 is a good creation of God, is good inasmuch as it has being, while yet being raised to a better state in a second stage of creation when God gives it form, order, and measure.18 The origin of evil, and thus the responsibility for evil, is firmly located in the creaturely will, turning of its own free choice away from its source of being and goodness, and thus itself falling away ontologically from its being held by grace participatively in being and goodness. And yet the very possibility of this turning away (aversio or perversio) must follow from creation having been created from nothing. Here, following Joseph Torchia’s and Donald Cress’ interpretation of Augustine,19 two understandings of conditionality must be distinguished. Creation ex nihilo is, for Augustine, a necessary condition for evil, in the sense that the mutability of creation is a condition that must be in place for evil to emerge. However, the mutability of creation does not guarantee the emergence of evil but only allows for the possibility of its emergence. The perversion of the will is not an inevitable consequence of creation’s finite, mutable nature. This would be to understand created mutability both as a necessary and a sufficient condition for the emergence of evil in the sense that evil inevitably follows from the fact of creation’s mutability. To hold that mutability is a sufficient condition for the emergence of evil would be to regard creation itself as, in a significant sense, evil, which Augustine consistently denies, citing Gen. 1.31 on the goodness of God’s creation. Nevertheless, Torchia notes that ‘there is a fine line between the claim that our finitude opens us to the possibility of sin and the suggestion that human nature exhibits some inclination, propensity, or tendency in that direction’.20 Carol Harrison, in her study of Augustine’s early theology, notes the ‘essential ambiguity’ of created matter for Augustine, an ambiguity that is sharpened when considering rational creatures: Created matter .  .  . is good but this is a goodness which depends upon the Supreme Good to remain so; it possesses form, order, and unity but can be corrupted and become deformed, disordered, and disunified; it is the temporal, mutable, corruptible creation of an eternal, immutable, incorruptible God. It is characterized, therefore, by dependence and contingency upon its Creator. Rational creation remains good only in so far as

See John C. Cavadini, ‘Creatio ex nihilo in the Thought of St Augustine’, in Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges, ed. Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2018), 151–72. 19 See Joseph Torchia, ‘Creation, Finitude, and the Mutable Will: Augustine on the Origin of Moral Evil’, Irish Theological Quarterly 71, no. 1–2 (2006): 47–66, and Donald A. Cress, ‘Augustine’s Privation Account of Evil: A Defense’, Augustinian Studies 20 (1989): 109–28. 20 Torchia, ‘Creation, Finitude, and the Mutable Will’, 62. 18

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it acknowledges this dependence: if it proudly begins to think itself self-sufficient it inevitably diminishes itself by turning away from its source.21 Ian McFarland has criticized Augustine’s notion that the possibility of evil in creation stems from its having been brought forth from nothing, such that it has a ‘tendency’ to fall back into nothing. McFarland questions whether creation can be thought to have any inherent tendency at all if it is understood to be created ex nihilo, as to speak of a tendency in creation ‘presupposes that [creatures] have some reality independent of God – and that presupposition is inconsistent with creation from nothing’.22 Creatures are either held in being by God, or they have no being at all. This criticism is valid when creation ex nihilo is considered in systematic theological terms but perhaps fails to take account of how frequently Augustine’s claims are set within a wider understanding of the will of rational creatures (which is the source of evil in the fall) and the language of perversion from and conversion to God. What McFarland’s criticism underplays is that for Augustine, the ‘presupposition of a reality independent from God’ for creation is itself something like his definition of sin, as the prideful turning of the will away from its source in being and goodness and towards itself, mistakenly looking to itself or to other creatures for its sustenance in being. Emilie Zum Brunn notes the predominance of the theme of conversion, so central to Confessions, across Augustine’s wider metaphysics of creation: ‘For everything, in this metaphysics, must in a certain way be converted to being. It is especially true as regards the spiritual created being, but also, analogically, as regards the human body, and as regards the entire temporal universe’.23 Zum Brunn highlights how Augustine’s account of the two stages of creation in Book Thirteen of Confessions – the creation of formless matter and, in a second stage, the forming of this matter by the Word – is figured according to a scheme of the fall of sin and its redemption and return to God. This is to say that creation is apprehended most fully from the perspective of redemption.24 The being of creation cannot be conceived of apart from its relation of absolute dependence upon God, and the fall of rational creatures consists in the prideful attempt at such self-substantiation, mistaking creation itself for the creator. Creation, for Augustine, is thus marked by a double aspect or orientation. As Harrison puts it: ‘[C]reated from nothing it seems inevitably to fall back to nothing; brought into existence by being given form, order, unity, it seems to be equally inevitable that it is conformed to its Creator.’25 This double aspect of creation is expressed poignantly in the work of a later, broadly Augustinian theologian, the medieval English anchoress Julian of Norwich (c. 1343– after 1416). In the fifth chapter of the work known as Revelations of Divine Love (a text that

Carol Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology: An Argument for Continuity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 89. 22 Ian A. McFarland, ‘The Problem with Evil’, Theology Today 74, no. 4 (2018): 328–9n17. 23 Emilie Zum Brunn, St Augustine: Being and Nothingness (New York: Paragon House, 1988), 74–5. Zum Brunn continues: ‘The intentional alternation and parallelism of the theme of the fall and of the conversion of AugustineEveryman with the two metaphysical stages of creation indicate the meaning that must be attributed to this departure from God that takes place in principio, on the level of pure existential causality, and to the return to being that takes place through the formative Word, and under the power of the Holy Ghost.’ Zum Brunn, St Augustine, 75. 24 See Cavadini, ‘Creatio ex nihilo in the Thought of St Augustine’, 163. 25 Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology, 104. 21

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emerged from an experience of suffering what she thought to be a mortal illness, and which is profoundly marked by vivid meditations upon the suffering of Christ), Julian writes of a mystical vision of the ‘homely loveing’ of God, in which she is shown ‘a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, on the palm of my hand, round like a ball’. She continues: I looked at it thoughtfully and wondered, ‘What is this?’ And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made’. I marvelled that it continued to exist and did not suddenly disintegrate; it was so small [I mervellid how it might lesten, for methowte it might suddenly have fallen to nowte for littil]. And again my mind supplied the answer, ‘It exists, both now and for ever, because God loves it’. In short, everything owes its existence to the love of God.26 The central image in this ‘shewing’ is at once homely and familiar and yet vertiginously strange and unsettling. As if by a trick of forced perspective, the immense entirety of creation is revealed to be so ‘littil’ that it seems miraculous that it does not fall ‘to nowte’. And yet this shocking fragility of creation’s very ‘littleness’ is itself only made apparent by the inestimably greater love of the God who calls creation into being and holds it in being through his threefold loving act of creation and preservation: ‘In this “little thing” I saw three truths. The first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; and the third is that God sustains it.’27

Karl Barth (1886–1968) Karl Barth’s treatment of evil as ‘nothingness’, as ‘das Nichtige’, is both a rejection of Augustine’s privative account of evil and a kind of radicalization of Augustine’s notion that, from the divine perspective, ‘evil is nothing at all’.28 For Barth, as for Augustine, the peculiar ontology of evil can only be considered in relation to the perfection of the divine will (God’s election) and the concomitant goodness of creation as a product of that will. Put simply, creation is defined as that which God wills. As a product of the will of God, creation is ‘very good’ (Gen. 1.31). In the sphere of God’s opus proprium (proper work), creation is the subject of God’s election, creation, preservation, and ‘overruling rule’, as revealed in God’s gracious covenant with humanity and God’s act on behalf of humanity in Jesus Christ.29 Evil is thus defined as the object of God’s opus alienum (alien work), as the object of God’s ‘jealousy, wrath and judgment’, as that which ‘refuses and resists and therefore lacks His grace’,30 and inasmuch as it is that which God does not will, which cannot and does not have the being of creation, evil is ‘nothingness’ (das Nichtige). This account of the exclusion of nothingness by divine nonwilling is developed hermeneutically from a reading of the creation narrative in Gen. 1.1-2, which Barth reads as God’s ‘rejection, opposition, negation’, passing over, and abandoning of

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Clifton Wolters (London: Penguin, 1966), 68. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, 68. 28 Augustine, Confessions, 7.13.19. 29 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.3, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and R. J. Ehrlich (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 353. 30 Barth, CD III.3, 353. 26 27

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chaos.31 The tohu and bohu, the ‘abyss’ and ‘formlessness’ of the earth in Gen. 1.2, is not for Barth, as it is for Augustine, an initial stage in the creation of matter, a part of God’s good creation that stands as close as is possible to non-being.32 For Barth, this chaos is not a realized, if subsequently surpassed, stage in God’s good creation but is rather always already beyond the threshold of the positive divine will that would actuate it in being, that would dignify it as a part of divinely willed creation. For both Barth and Augustine, whether as an excluded ‘past’ or a subsequently surpassed stage of disorder in the process of creation,33 chaos ‘exists’ at or beyond the margins of creaturely being. In a self-consciously mythopoetic account, the chaos of Gen. 1.2 belongs not to reality but to the mythological imagination (which has its own reality), a ‘portrait, deliberately taken from myth, of the world which according to [God’s] revelation was negated, rejected, ignored and left behind in His actual creation. . . . [S]een from the standpoint of God’s creation as outlined in [Gen. 1.1], it is the epitome of that which was’.34 The peculiar negative ontology of evil that this entails will be returned to shortly. For now, one should note that Barth’s designation of nothingness as that which God does not will means that nothingness is not a creature of any kind and thus cannot fall within God’s providential order for the good of creation (although Barth emphasizes God’s absolute providential power over evil in opposition and defeat). Nor can nothingness be thought to have its own substantial existence and power, as in the Manichaean scheme, although aspects of Barth’s description of nothingness might be thought to tend in this direction. While Barth’s mythopoetic account of creation and evil seems at points to derive from his interpretation of Genesis 1, the true epistemological foundation for the discussion of nothingness lies in Christ, which, as will be seen later, has significant implications for Barth’s understanding of the ontology of evil. Evil as nothingness cannot be known from a naturalistic perspective outside God’s revelation in Christ. Nothingness is not an experiential theological category, even though it is experienced as a terrifying affliction by creatures. Nothingness is only recognized as such from the perspective of God’s opposition to and victory over it in incarnation, death, and resurrection. Just as nothingness is always already excluded from substantial creaturely being by God’s non-willing and rejection of it in the act of creation, so it is only known as already providentially (if from an eschatological perspective, proleptically) defeated by God in Christ. Paradoxically, this both relativizes and reifies nothingness. It is both ‘past’ and defeated, and yet it is sufficiently serious to God for God to yield to nothingness ‘in order to overcome it’.35 Known only through Christ’s death and resurrection, evil as nothingness is far from trivialized. On beholding the magnitude of the gracious act that overcame evil, one sees it with ‘fear and trembling as the adversary with whom God and God alone can cope’ while also seeing it as such from the place in which ‘our one real hope against it is grounded and established’.36

Barth, CD III.3, 353. See also Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 101–11. 32 See Cavadini, ‘Creatio ex nihilo in the Thought of St Augustine’, 162. 33 Augustine, Confessions, 12.8.8. 34 Barth, CD III.1, 108. 35 Barth, CD III.3, 305. 36 Barth, CD III.3, 305. 31

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Writing in the wake of the Second World War, and drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Martin Heidegger’s work on nothingness, Barth emphasizes the horror of evil as that which opposes both God and creation. More so than many formal theodicies, Barth’s account of evil might be thought to be more adequate to the creaturely experience of evil as an intrusive affliction as well as addressing its peculiar metaphysical status. Indeed, Barth attempts to hold these two aspects together with the following formula: ‘The power of nothingness should be rated as low as possible in relation to God and as high as possible in relation to ourselves.’37 What, then, is the ontological status of evil as nothingness? This is a fraught issue in interpreting Barth’s thought and bears some intriguing parallels to the reading of Augustine offered earlier. While Barth is adamant that nothingness is ‘not nothing or non-existent’ (ein Nichts, nicht nichtseiend),38 seemingly rejecting the Augustinian notion of evil as steresis, privation, he writes approvingly of Augustine’s ‘quite correct’ use of the term privatio boni to denote ‘the purely negative character of evil’ as that which intrinsically and relationally opposes both God and God’s creatures.39 Notably, Barth points to Augustine’s rather more forceful language of corruptio (corruption) or conversio boni (conversion of the good), such that evil for Augustine is ‘not only the absence of what really is, but the assault upon it’.40 The character of evil is not so much that of a neutral lack or absence as it is a hostile consuming of that which has being and is good. Barth’s characterization of Augustinian privation, while only briefly dealt with amid his lengthy treatment of Gottfried Leibniz in the long excursus in Church Dogmatics III.3, resonates with Williams’ analogy for Augustinian privation, evoking the nihilating power of a vacuum, a non-being that is a ‘massively effective disruption of the world’s order’.41 Evil need not be considered substantial for human creatures to suffer the powerful effects of a lack of the good. This rather lurid characterization of Augustine is consistent with Barth’s subsequent treatment of the paradoxical ontology of nothingness. Its only ‘essence’ is that of a ‘non-essence’. It is without ‘substance’; indeed, it is ‘insubstantial and empty’.42 And yet Barth is clear that it is ‘surely not nothing or non-existent’43 and that it has an ‘objective reality for the creature’ (while for God, he might say with Augustine, ‘evil does not exist at all’).44 This tension in Barth’s account is unresolved and reflects his contention that nothingness is an ‘aberration’, and, therefore, one cannot expect it to conform to standards of rational explication.45 The ‘brokenness’ of all theological speech is more intensely felt in the case of evil, as evil represents precisely the negation of the relation between the creator and creation, which is the basis of theological speech.46 As for Augustine, only God and creation have substantial existence. While evil does not have essential or substantial being, it nevertheless ‘is’, Barth maintains, in a ‘third way’, as that which God does not will, and thus cannot have being in the manner of

Barth, CD III.3, 295. Barth, CD III.3, 349; Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik III.3, 2nd edn (Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 1961), 402. 39 Barth, CD III.3, 318. 40 Barth, CD III.3, 318. 41 Williams, On Augustine, 91. 42 Barth, CD III.3, 360, 361. 43 Barth, CD III.3, 349. 44 Barth, CD III.3, 350; Augustine, Confessions, 7.13.19. 45 Barth, CD III.3, 354. 46 Barth, CD III.3, 293. 37 38

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creation: ‘It “is”, not as God and His creation are, but only in its own improper way, as inherent contradiction, as impossible possibility. Yet because it is on the left hand of God, it really “is” in this paradoxical manner.’47 This paradoxical ‘impossible possibility’ of the ontic status of nothingness has been seen as a real weakness in Barth’s account. If nothingness results from God’s non-willing of it, does this make nothingness a necessary consequence of God’s positive willing of the being and goodness of creation? Does God thus perversely ‘will’ evil into its paradoxical form of being as the obverse of his positive will for the goodness of creation? Does, as John Hick suspects, Barth presuppose a notion of divine decision-making in which nothingness lurks as a potentiality that God cannot avoid activating in his positive will for creation?48 It seems, Hick suggests, that God, in some curious sense, wills evil through his effective non-willing of it. Such is the emphasis on divine election in Barth’s scheme that even God’s rejection and dismissal of evil must be ‘powerful and effective because they too are grounded in Himself, in the freedom and wisdom of his election’, for ‘not only what God wills, but what He does not will, is potent, and must have a real correspondence’.49 Or is God not fully sovereign but bound by some necessity that runs contrary to the divine will? Does the goodness of creation necessarily entail an obverse evil, whether God wills it or not?50 This seems to be the implication of Barth’s ‘speculative’ exegesis of the origin of nothingness in Gen. 1.1-2. The assessment of this weakness depends largely on the extent to which Barth is taken to be offering a comprehensive aetiological and metaphysical account of the origin of evil in relation to the divine will. Matthias Wüthrich maintains that this is to misread Barth’s intentions, to neglect the christological lens through which he interprets the existence and nature of nothingness. Barth does not, Wüthrich emphasizes, engage in a speculative aetiological and explanatory account of nothingness but rather only ever engages the question of nothingness from the perspective of the scriptural revelation of the defeat of evil in the Christ event: ‘The talk of das Nichtige being grounded in God’s non-willing is only a derived determination that is secondary to the witness of its defeat’.51 What appears to be an aetiological explanation is thus a ‘backward projection’ from the gospel witness to Christ, exegetically engaging Gen. 1.1-2. On this reading, Barth’s account is not a fully developed ontology of nothingness based on non-willing but rather an acknowledgement of the inexplicably mysterious presence of evil in the scriptural witness of Christ’s victory over this evil, which can only thus be thought to exist as divinely non-willed. The exegesis of Genesis is secondary to the exegesis of the Christ event, and in both exegetical accounts evil is seen to be simply inexplicably ‘there’ but also only ‘there’ as defeated and past. In a similar vein, Wolf Krötke notes that the purported difficulties in Barth’s account of divine non-willing of evil stem from the presupposition that it operates in the manner of creaturely willing. God’s definitive ‘No’ to evil, which means that it cannot be thought to exist in the same substantial manner as the creation that results from God’s ‘Yes’, can only be conceived and described from the perspective of creation. The ‘becoming’ of nothingness,

Barth, CD III.3, 349, 351. See John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: Collins, 1968), 144. 49 Barth, CD III.3, 352. 50 See Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 143. 51 Matthias D. Wüthrich, ‘An Entirely Different “Theodicy”: Karl Barth’s Interpretation of Human Suffering in the Context of His Doctrine of das Nichtige’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 23, no. 4 (2021): 611. 47 48

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Krötke notes, ‘has nothing to do in any way whatsoever with the coming into being of creation’. And yet Barth can only elucidate this in creaturely terms, from the perspective of the divine ‘Yes’, ‘even though it does not belong to creaturely reality and may not be understood in analogy to it’.52 Evil is not only outside the sphere of creaturely reality and divine will but is opposed to both. As that which is ‘hostile before and against God, and also before and against His creature’, nothingness necessarily stands ‘outside the sphere of systematisation’; it is ‘altogether inexplicable’.53 Evil as nothingness is, as MacKinnon insisted of the tragic, a ‘surd’, an ‘indivisible remainder’.54 It remains mysterious as it lies outside of, or is actively hostile to, the ontological structures of reality that one can account for rationally. Krötke characterizes Barth’s notion of evil as nothingness as ‘antithetically anhypostatic being’.55 Evil has no substance, no hypostasis of its own, but is rather parasitic upon the being and goodness of creation, coming to ‘be’ enhypostatically in creation only inasmuch as it drains being and goodness from its host. This character makes nothingness ultimately self-defeating (in annihilating the creature in which it takes enhypostatic being, nothingness negates itself in the process) and, from an epistemological perspective, absurd. This reading places Barth closer than he might have imagined to an Augustinian understanding of privatio boni, in which evil only ‘exists’ inasmuch as it derives its force from the substantial being and goodness that is corrupted. How, then, does this account of evil relate to how Barth characterizes the goodness of creation? Before delineating the character of evil as nothingness, Barth distinguishes what he terms the ‘shadow side’, the negative aspect of the good creation that is nevertheless willed by God as an integral part of its goodness. Much that might traditionally be categorized as ‘natural evil’ falls under this shadow. Barth is rather vague on this point, but the shadow side seems to encompass the limitations that derive from finitude and mutability, and in each case, a ‘positive’ is paired with a concomitant ‘negative’: death (as the natural end of life in due season) as the corollary of birth, obscurity as the obverse of clarity, impediment and limitation as the corollaries of progress and continuation, and decay and failure as the corollaries of growth and success.56 The goodness of every aspect of this shadow side is not immediately apparent to creatures, such that it will only fully be revealed in its ultimate goodness at the eschaton.57 Here Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the supreme theologian who discerns and presents through his music the ‘total goodness’ of creation and its shadow side, hitherto missed, or only heard in part, by theologians of every period and persuasion.58 In what one might characterize as Mozart’s unique ability to write music that is both suffused with sadness and longing, and yet in a major key, he hears, Barth claims, ‘the harmony of creation to which the shadow also belongs but in which the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, sadness

Wolf Krötke, Sin and Nothingness in the Theology of Karl Barth, ed. and trans. Philip G. Ziegler and Christina-Maria Bammel (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2005), 29. 53 Barth, CD III.3, 354. 54 MacKinnon, ‘Atonement and Tragedy’, 101; Donald M. MacKinnon, ‘Ethics and Tragedy’, in Explorations in Theology 5 (London: SCM Press, 1979), 193. Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. T. H. L. Parker et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 145, 156. 55 Krötke, Sin and Nothingness in the Theology of Karl Barth, 51. 56 See Barth, CD III.3, 296–7. 57 See Barth, CD III.3, 296. 58 Barth, CD III.3, 298. 52

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cannot become despair, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway’.59 As the motto on the sundial on the south transept of York Minster reads, ‘lucem demonstrat umbra’, the shadow points to the light. The goodness of creation for Barth is thus expansive and variegated. In the sense that he gives of the negative side contributing to a greater overall sense of the goodness of creation, there is perhaps a shade of Irenaean theodicy in which something like suffering is justified on the basis of its indispensable contribution to a greater whole, or to spiritual growth: ‘For all we can tell, may not His creatures praise Him more mightily in humility than in exaltation, in need than in plenty, in fear than in joy, on the frontier of nothingness than wholly orientated on God?’60 Crucially, as the negative shadow side is not itself evil, this is not to justify evil on the basis of its part in a greater whole or as a necessary price for a greater good, such as creaturely freedom or spiritual maturation. Evil remains evil, that which menaces the creature rather than serving its greater interests, and that which God decisively defeats in Christ. This ‘negative aspect’ of the good creation represents its ‘frontier’ with nothingness.61 The shadow side is definitively a part of creation and thus divinely willed, but it is here, as it were, that nothingness gains entry into creation. It is on the shadow side of creation that the creature is ‘contiguous to nothingness’.62 Death is Barth’s primary example. From the perspective of the negative but nonetheless ultimately good shadow side, death is seen as the ‘natural termination of life’.63 Sin, as an instance of the intrusion of nothingness over the frontier of the shadow side, renders death an ‘intolerable, life-destroying thing to which all suffering hastens as its goal, as the ultimate irruption and triumph of that alien power which annihilates creaturely existence and thus discredits and disclaims the Creator’.64 It is thus through this shadow side that creation in its goodness is nevertheless oriented towards the nothingness of chaos and evil, inclined both towards the right and the left hand of God, ‘simultaneously worthy of its Creator and yet dependent on Him’.65 As for Augustine and Julian, creation has a double aspect – towards nothing and towards the absolute Being of God who sustains it, precarious in its absolute dependence upon its creator, ‘on the very frontier of nothingness, secure, and yet in jeopardy’.66 Given this proximity and orientation, Barth is adamant that the shadow side of creation and nothingness are to be rigorously distinguished. To take the shadow side of creation for the nothingness of evil is to ‘slander’ the goodness of creation,67 but it is also to fall prey to the self-concealing deceptive nature of nothingness. This is especially dangerous, Barth suggests, because it leads to one’s tacit acceptance of evil, eventual justification of nothingness, and complicity and complacency with evil rather than joining God in God’s opposition to it. Whether Barth successfully maintains this distinction or whether he is prone to blurring the

Barth, CD III.3, 298. Barth, CD III.3, 297. 61 Barth, CD III.3, 296. 62 Barth, CD III.3, 350. 63 Barth, CD III.3, 310. 64 Barth, CD III.3, 310. 65 Barth, CD III.3, 296. 66 Barth, CD III.3, 296. 67 Barth, CD III.3, 299. 59 60

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boundary between nothingness and the shadow side stands as a question mark against his account. The reading of Augustine offered above drew out his sense of the ambiguous character of creation, which is ‘very good’ inasmuch as it is oriented towards its divine source, and, in turning away from this source and towards itself, tends towards the nothing from which it is brought forth. Augustine’s association of the being of creation as contingent, finite, and dependent with the falling of creation away from its source in Being and Goodness raised the suspicion that the contingency of creation might be taken to be a sufficient as well as a necessary condition for creation’s fall, such that creation is held to be in a significant sense fallen from its beginning. A related worry about the character of creation arises in Barth. Rosemary Radford Ruether identifies an implicit deprecation of the character of creation in Barth’s emphasis on Christ’s overcoming of evil based on his status as the ‘only authentic creature’, as Christ’s creatureliness is uniquely founded in the ‘self-grounding of God’.68 The implication, which Barth never explicitly states, is that ‘original creation’, which is not united to the divine nature in the incarnation, suffers from a ‘vulnerability, not from its origin from God but from its lingering past as chaos’.69 Creation is perhaps thus indelibly marked from the beginning by the ‘impossible possibility’ of the chaos that is its rejected past. Ruether notes that this is far from Barth’s intention since he only speaks of creation from the perspective of God’s ‘Yes’. Nevertheless, the consequence of Barth’s christomonism is perhaps the positing of a ‘fatal vulnerability’ in the original creation: If only a creature who has at the same time the necessary being of God is capable of being a true creature, then God did not quite do a good enough job at the first creation when he left his creation mortal and contingent, because this very contingency was the crack through which chaos could reenter or continue to be operative, casting a severe handicap from the beginning over creation’s capacity for obedience.70 The weight given to this objection, as with Wüthrich’s response to the criticism about Barth’s aetiology of nothingness in his reading of Genesis 1, will depend upon how far one is prepared to see creation outside Barth’s christological lens. As with Augustine, this dynamic points to the difficulties attendant on accounting for humanity’s contingent condition from within this fallen contingency.

Irresolutions in the privatio boni tradition In both case studies offered earlier, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo entails understanding the nature of evil as an aberration, as that which cannot rationally be accounted for by appealing to the divine will. Nor can evil be derived straightforwardly from the contingent being of

Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘The Left Hand of God in the Theology of Karl Barth: Karl Barth as a Mythopoeic Theologian’, Journal of Religious Thought 25, no. 1 (1968): 18, 20. 69 Ruether, ‘The Left Hand of God in the Theology of Karl Barth’, 20. 70 Ruether, ‘The Left Hand of God in the Theology of Karl Barth’, 21. 68

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creation. By definition, evil does not come from God (the Irenaean theodicy is ruled out), who wills only the good, which is being. Evil serves no positive providential purpose, although one trusts that God will bring good out of evil. Evil is thus not a condition of the emergence of good but rather the deprivation and negation of the good that is itself negated in God’s saving work. The Augustinian and Barthian positions (and others within the broad privatio boni tradition) involve points of real ambiguity and even incoherence. If evil is a privation of the good, whence this privation? If the contingent but ‘very good’ being of creation is not the sufficient cause of the fall of rational creatures, why do they nevertheless turn away from their source in Being and Goodness? How is the divine non-willing of evil not a kind of inadvertently positive willing of that evil into being, a ‘non-choice’ that paradoxically activates something that was supposedly never there as a potential to begin with? For Barth, Augustine, and Julian, these questions are left unresolved. Kilby has suggested that this kind of ‘systematic incoherence’ or ‘dissonance’ in theological accounts of evil is unavoidable,71 at least without taking the intellectually tidy but theologically unpalatable route of process theology, in which God’s omnipotence and thus power to save from evil is radically compromised, a version of the Manichaean theology that Augustine rejected.72 Within the doctrine of creation, the origin and ontology of evil are mysterious and absurd, but evil is only mysterious on account of the inestimably greater and plenitudinous mystery of the love of God that brings creation into being out of nothing.

Further reading Creegan, Nicola Hoggard. Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Dalferth, Ingolf U. Malum: A Theological Hermeneutics of Evil. Translated by Nils F. Schott. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2022. Forsyth, P. T. The Justification of God: Lectures for War-Time on a Christian Theodicy. London: Duckworth, 1916. Hart, David Bentley. ‘The Devil’s March: Creatio ex nihilo, the Problem of Evil, and a Few Dostoyevskian Meditations’. In Creation ex nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges, edited by Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl, 297–318. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Kilby, Karen. God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology. London: T&T Clark, 2020. Levenson, Jon D. Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Mathewes, Charles. Evil and the Augustinian Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Southgate, Christopher. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.

Kilby, ‘Evil and the Limits of Theology’, 20, 24. See Kilby, ‘Evil and the Limits of Theology’, 24–5.

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CHAPTER 38 HUMAN PERSONHOOD

Marc Cortez

Within the doctrine of creation, the language of ‘person’ has historically served to demarcate clear boundaries between various kinds of creatures.1 Humans and angels are persons; chairs, rivers, and chimpanzees are not. Such language not only organizes the world into two classes – personal and non-personal – but it also typically corresponds to certain kinds of value judgements.2 Personal creatures have traditionally been accorded greater value than nonpersonal creatures. This does not necessarily involve any denigration of the non-personal, which can still be viewed as having immense value by virtue of its status as God’s creation. Nonetheless, by identifying some creature or class of creatures as falling into the category of person, theologians have interpreted that to include at least a particular kind of unique value or dignity. David Kelsey, an American theologian, refers to these two tasks as the classificatory and evaluative aspects of person-language.3 However, both of these moves have become more complicated in modern thought as the lines between the personal and the non-personal have blurred. Some have argued for an expansion of the concept to include creatures traditionally thought of as non-personal. Thus, recent court cases have debated the personhood not only of higher primates such as chimpanzees and gorillas but also elephants, dolphins, and whales.4 In many western countries, corporations are counted as persons so that societies may attribute a level of agency and moral responsibility that does not transfer to the individual shareholders;5 and some cultures affirm the personhood of things like rivers and mountains.6 From a different direction, others have argued that at least some humans should not be classified as persons (e.g. newborns and those with severe intellectual disabilities).7 Typically defining personhood in terms of some capacity or set of capacities, such arguments serve to exclude those humans who do not seem to possess the requisite capacities. While both approaches still use ‘person’ language to classify and evaluate various creatures, each challenges the boundaries that traditionally surround the concept.

For a good discussion of this, see Gary Steiner, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). 2 Although ‘personal’ can be used in the narrower sense to refer to that which belongs to a particular person, it is used in this chapter as a broad adjective denoting anything one associates with those creatures that one views as persons. 3 See David H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 290–1. 4 See Ashley Coates, ‘Is This Chimpanzee a Non-Human Person?’, The Independent, 13 September 2017, https://www​ .independent​.co​.uk​/news​/long​_reads​/is​-this​-chimpanzee​-a​-nonhuman​-person​-a7941876​.html. 5 See Nina Totenberg, ‘When Did Companies Become People? Excavating the Legal Evolution’, NPR, 28 July 2014, https://www​.npr​.org​/2014​/07​/28​/335288388​/when​-did​-companies​-become​-people​-excavating​-the​-legal​-evolution. 6 See Julia Hollingsworth, ‘This River in New Zealand Is Legally a Person. Here’s How It Happened’, CNN, 11 December 2020, https://www​.cnn​.com​/2020​/12​/11​/asia​/whanganui​-river​-new​-zealand​-intl​-hnk​-dst​/index​.html. 7 See Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 1

Human Personhood

The first part of this chapter will briefly survey one common strategy for delimiting the personal, arguing that it struggles from an over-reliance on a contrastive approach to understanding humanity – that is, focusing on identifying particular ways that human creatures differ from non-human creatures. After briefly noting the historical importance of a second strategy, one that takes a trinitarian approach that seeks to understand human personhood in the light of divine personhood, the second part of the chapter focuses on the discussion of personhood in David Kelsey’s influential Eccentric Existence (2009). Although the final section will identify a few areas where Kelsey’s approach might need amendment, his theologically rich discussion offers a helpful resource for understanding the concept of ‘the person’ in modern doctrines of creation.

Two trajectories for understanding personhood Traditional conceptions of personhood typically assume clear distinctions between personal and non-personal creatures. Since this generally corresponds as well to the distinction between human and non-human,8 discussions about personhood often build on a contrastive account of the human/non-human relationship. In other words, to understand what it means to be human, one focuses on the various ways in which humans are different from (and typically superior to) non-human creatures. Discussions of personhood oriented in this way will thus establish human uniqueness in terms of humanity’s distinct intellectual, social, spiritual, and/ or affective capacities, developing conceptions of human personhood that revolve around those same ideas. David Clough refers to this as the ‘not-animal’ mode of anthropological reflection, which bases human conception of what it means to be human on that which makes human animals different from non-human animals. He worries that any such approach inevitably involves several devastating consequences. Specifically, ‘it fails to name adequately the particular nature and role of human beings before God; it posits a misleading and hubristic gulf between human beings and other creatures; and it founds its account of human identity on the unjustifiable denial of key characteristics to other-than-human animals’.9 The last of those worries is particularly relevant for the discussion in this chapter. The logic of this not-animal framework relies on its ability to identify qualities that are unique to human persons and that serve as the ground for limiting personhood to Homo sapiens alone. However, none of the qualities typically associated with personhood is unique to humans.10 To take the most classic example, whatever one might want to say about the distinctiveness of humanity’s ability to reason, one can no longer claim, in light of significant evidence to the contrary, that rationality itself is unique to human persons.11

Although most would also put angels in the category of the personal, discussions have largely revolved around questions about relating human and non-human personhood. 9 David L. Clough, ‘Not a Not-Animal: The Vocation To Be a Human Animal Creature’, Studies in Christian Ethics 26, no. 1 (2013): 4–17. See also Eric D. Meyer, Inner Animalities: Theology and the End of the Human (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 10 See David L. Clough, On Animals: Volume One: Systematic Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 45–78. 11 See Susan Hurley and Matthew Nudds, eds, Rational Animals? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 8

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A more nuanced argument would thus need to explain why one should affirm humanity’s uniquely personal status despite sharing all relevant capacities in some way with nonhuman creatures. One approach might be to contend that despite the commonalities, human persons possess some capacity to such a degree that one can view it as constituting a qualitative difference. Thus, while there might be other rational animals, human rationality is of a sufficiently higher kind that one can use it to ground claims about humanity’s unique personhood. One challenge for such an argument, though, is the difficulty of establishing a non-arbitrary way of determining where to draw such lines.12 If rationality is the kind of thing that can be charted on a scale from lower to higher, what makes one think that personhood should only be identified at the level of human rationality?13 Why not draw the line further down and include the higher primates or other seemingly rational animals? Additionally, by making rationality into a quantifiable reality and then basing personhood on whether some creature has achieved the requisite level, such an approach will also struggle to account for the different levels of rationality that exist between human persons. Does an infant or someone with a severe intellectual disability qualify? If one claims that they do qualify despite their apparently limited rationality, one is left with the difficulty of explaining why one should not include at least those non-human animals that exhibit similar (or even greater) levels of rationality. Yet it would seem that any attempt to define the relevant capacities in such a way as to exclude non-human animals runs the clear risk of at least implying that some humans do not count as persons. Again, there appears to be no non-arbitrary way to draw a line on the scale of rationality that would exclude all non-human creatures without also at least raising serious questions about the personhood of humans with apparently limited rationality. One might conclude then that the solution to the problem is simply to affirm that one needs to expand the concept of personhood to include non-human creatures and that there are no non-arbitrary ways to establish clear boundaries. One would thus end up affirming that personhood is an inherently vague concept, one that resists any clear delimitation. Once expanded in this way, however, it becomes impossible for the concept to serve either its classificatory or evaluative functions since it would no longer be a useful term for making any such distinctions. Reversing the logic of this not-animal approach, another prominent trajectory for thinking about human personhood begins instead with the idea of divine personhood. To anyone familiar with the history of the concept of person, such a move will be no surprise. Although the term has its roots in Greek funerary practices and Roman law, the Christian appropriation of the term to describe the trinitarian persons reoriented the concept around the unity-anddiversity of the Godhead.14 Many modern theologians have thus argued for a trinitarian approach to personhood. Just as the divine persons are constituted in their unsubstitutable identity by their relations to one another and not by any distinct properties or capacities, so

See Robert Francescotti, ‘Person Essentialism and the Problem of Vagueness’, paper presented at the Proceedings Metaphysics 2006, 3rd World Conference. Rome, 6–9 July 2006, 43–9, http://romemetaphysics​.org​/actas​/2006​_ Proceedings​%20Metaphysics​.pdf​#page​=54. 13 This concern remains even if one eliminates the higher/lower framework and maintains that human rationality is simply different from other forms of rationality. Here again one faces the difficulty of identifying a non-arbitrary way of discerning the boundaries between these apparently discrete forms of rationality. 14 See Antonia LoLordo, ed., Persons: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 12

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human persons are constituted relationally – ultimately through relationship with God, but secondarily through relationships with other humans and the rest of creation.15 However, this trinitarian approach immediately faces two challenges. First, despite any important similarities, the fundamental differences between divine and human personhood ensure that drawing insights from the former to inform the latter will always be challenging. David Kelsey thus argues that since the trinitarian persons are grounded in relations that are perichoretic, eternal, and immaterial – none of which characterizes human relationships – one should be wary of making even analogous connections between divine and human persons: ‘If this sense of “person” is to be generalized to cover human creatures as well, it would seem to be possible only by an analogical (or controlled equivocation) use of the term that blurs its equivocal character and is so extended that its illuminating power would be very dim.’16 Second, and more importantly for this chapter, is that the expansion problem remains a real issue for such an account. Without further explanation regarding the nature of the relationality in view, it remains entirely possible to argue that all creatures have their unsubstitutable identity grounded in their relationship with God and the rest of creation. However, attempts at unpacking the distinctive nature of human relationality often resort to the kinds of ‘not-animal’ accounts addressed earlier. Consequently, even those convinced that trinitarian personhood should be the starting point for understanding human personhood need to draw on additional resources for dealing with the expansion and exclusion problems.

The human creature as eccentric personal being David Kelsey’s analysis of personhood in Eccentric Existence offers an approach that differs from both of the above trajectories, making it a useful model for thinking through the issues involved. Kelsey begins by affirming that theological anthropology must engage both the classificatory and evaluative tasks. But rather than drawing on person-language to accomplish both tasks, he distinguishes between person and human. According to Kelsey: ‘Currently, the most decisive criterion of what counts as human is the genetic structure of Homo sapiens.’17 This means that the classificatory task is relatively simple: to be human just is to have human DNA. The key advantage of this approach for Kelsey is that it avoids the exclusion concern. Any creature with the relevant genetic structure qualifies as human regardless of any perceived lack of the corresponding capacities.

For one notable example, see Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). This approach has been particularly prominent among Eastern Orthodox theologians. See Aristotle Papanikolaou, ‘Personhood and Its Exponents in Twentieth-century Orthodox Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology, ed. Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 232–45. 16 Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 358. Cf. David H. Kelsey, ‘Personal Bodies: A Theological Anthropological Proposal’, in Personal Identity in Theological Perspective, ed. Richard Lints, Michael S. Horton, and Mark R. Talbot (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006), 153. 17 Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 257. Given the robustly theological nature of Kelsey’s anthropology, it might seem odd for him to offer such a decidedly non-theological definition of what it means to qualify as human. Yet Kelsey argues that theological anthropology would run into a vicious circle if it tried to offer a theological way of identifying the group to whom theological claims rightly applied. See Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 258. 15

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Yet Kelsey maintains that this provides no useful information for performing the evaluative task. The fact that humans have a distinctive genetic structure does not in any way suggest that humans are somehow superior to or lesser than any other creature. Human beings’ distinctive genetic structure can establish their uniqueness (i.e. no other creature has that same genetic structure), but it is the kind of uniqueness enjoyed by all creatures with genetic structures. Humans are no more unique in that respect than are hamsters, fungi, or viruses. One could try to appeal again to the distinct human capacities grounded in Homo sapiens’ unique DNA, but Kelsey firmly rejects even this genetic version of the not-animal approach. Theological anthropology must avoid any ‘invidious comparison and contrast either with other, allegedly lesser creatures, or between human creatures’ “physical” and “mental” capacities’.18 While one’s unique genetic structure, along with the corresponding capacities, suffices to classify certain creatures as human, it provides no resources for making any normative judgements about the value or status of those creatures. For Kelsey, it is the distinctively personal nature of human existence that grounds the evaluative move. To develop this, Kelsey argues that a theological reading of texts like Job 10 and the creation narratives in Genesis suggests that one should not view humans as persons – at least not in the sense that humans are rendered unique creatures by virtue of their distinctive capacities – but instead recognize that humans are personalized through their relationship with God, the creator. Thus, ‘human creatures are constituted as personal beings by God relating to them, rather than by certain types of creaturely capacities’.19 God summons human beings into personal existence. Notice, however, that humans are not personal beings by virtue of some general relation to God – for example, the creator–creature relationship. If that were the case, one would again have the problem that all created things would end up being personalized insofar as they also stand in that same creator–creature relationship. According to Kelsey, what matters is that humans are personalized through a particular kind of divine relating, and ‘the distinctive way in which God relates to creaturely human bodies to personalize them is “address”’.20 In other words, it is through a particular kind of divine speech – one in which God addresses these human creatures as persons and from whom God expects a response – that humans become personal beings. Although God speaks all of creation into existence, it is only to human persons that God addresses a divine Word that anticipates an obedient response. At this point, it might seem as though Kelsey is merely offering an updated version of an approach made famous by Karl Barth in which human personhood is grounded in the I–Thou of the divine address.21 For Barth, though, the divine address directly personalizes human beings. God confronts all humans directly and addresses them in a way that demands their faithful response. Indeed, the very immediacy of the divine–human address allows Barth to argue for a parallel with intratrinitarian relationality. Kelsey instead contends that one must distinguish between the creation of human beings, which is a direct act by God, and the personalization

Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 31. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 291. 20 Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 292. 21 See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 181–206. 18 19

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of human beings, which is mediated ‘through the medium of the quotidian and, especially, through its ordinary languages’.22 In other words, the kind of divine speech that Kelsey has in mind is not simply the creative Word that brings rocks, atoms, and hamsters into being with a simple ‘Let there be’. Instead, Kelsey views God’s personalizing action as involving the creation of ‘a public reality’ in which God operates ‘through the social practices of language use’.23 However, an obvious question at this point is whether Kelsey’s view depends implicitly on the kind of capacity account that he explicitly rejects. After all, would one not need at least some creaturely capacities to hear and respond to this divine speech, an addressability that corresponds to the address? Kelsey’s answer to this question is rather nuanced. On the one hand, he rejects the idea that humans are ‘persons’ by virtue of having some requisite set of capacities: From this theocentric perspective, what defines human creatures as ‘personal’ is not a set of properties they have logically and ontologically prior to being addressed by God, say, cognitive or affective capacities that constitute their ‘addressability’ – that is, capacities that make possible their being addressed by God. Rather, it is precisely the actuality of God’s relating to them in address that creates them.24 However, the divine address is not some kind of mystical non-speech beamed directly into human minds. For Kelsey, God addresses humans as the creatures humans are, which means that the divine address comes in and through quotidian creaturely realities. God personalizes humans ‘by using some ordinary language in a public space constituted by use of that language, and using the social conventions presupposed by uses of the language’.25 Kelsey thus differentiates between the act of creation, which is an immediate act by which God directly constitutes humans to be a certain kind of creature, and the act by which God personalizes humans, which is mediated through quotidian creaturely realities. Kelsey thus affirms modern notions about personhood being constituted socially, but he rejects the idea that this should be interpreted through a secular lens. The social is the means of the divine address. Consequently, it is not as though God somehow personalizes humans independently of their creaturely capacities. Those capacities are inseparable from the quotidian realities through which the personalizing divine address occurs. Nonetheless, the divine address does not depend on any particular set of capacities that humans could then use as a basis for distinguishing persons from non-persons: God’s address presupposes actual human creatures in all of their complexity, but it does not privilege any particular set of human creaturely capacities, emotional, moral, or intellectual. Those creatures to which God relates in this distinctive way are, for that reason and no other, ‘personal bodies’.26

Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 291. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 296. 24 Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 292–3. 25 Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 296. 26 Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 292. 22 23

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Kelsey thus maintains that ‘“personal” is logically prior to “person”’.27 From this, one can understand the role that the personal plays in classificatory and evaluative tasks. Concerning classification, Kelsey portrays the divine address by which God personalizes human creatures in unique terms. This is divine speech from God to human creatures, and, as such, it distinguishes these creatures from any other. They alone are constituted by this divine address. And Kelsey maintains that the divine address is directly to all human creatures.28 Consequently, the class of beings who are personalized in this way includes all human creatures and only human creatures. This personalization is grounded entirely in the divine address; one cannot make any evaluative distinctions between the various members of this class. Although the divine address anticipates an obedient response, one’s status as a personal creature does not depend on one’s ability to offer any response, let alone an appropriate one.29 Humans are personal beings by virtue of how God relates to them, not how they relate to God, to themselves, or to other creatures.30 Kelsey thus offers a highly relational understanding of human personhood, but one that provides a robust explanation of the kind of relationality in view and why it personalizes all humans and only humans. Unlike some relational accounts, however, Kelsey affirms the ontological primacy of the individual human creatures who are thus related. Indeed, he goes so far as to defend the necessity of ‘a theologically appropriate individualism’31 and the ‘absolute unsubstitutability’32 of the human creature. Kelsey thus offers an insightful framework for understanding human personhood in a way that grounds the classificatory and evaluative tasks while avoiding the exclusion and expansion problems.

Three possible worries There is much to appreciate in Kelsey’s rich and highly informed discussion of ‘the person’ and its related concepts, one that rejects both the not-animal and the trinitarian approaches to personhood that have largely dominated in modern theology. However, his proposal raises several important questions that need to be addressed. First, Kelsey argues throughout that the personalizing address must be a divine address. Although the divine address reaches humans through creaturely relations, humans are not constituted as personal beings by those creaturely relations. However, what is not entirely clear from Kelsey’s account is precisely why the personalizing address needs to be divine. Given his emphasis on the necessity of the address coming through the quotidian – which includes everyday languages, relationships, and societies – why exactly is it that those things are not themselves personalizing? Could one not follow Kelsey’s argument with respect to the creation

Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 292. See Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 297. 29 See Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 297. 30 See Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 291–2. 31 Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 274. For a longer discussion, see Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 391–401. Kelsey is thus in general agreement with Harriet Harris’ critique of relational ontologies. See Harriet A. Harris, ‘Should We Say that Personhood is Relational?’, Scottish Journal of Theology 51, no. 2 (1998): 214–34. 32 Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 388. 27 28

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and personalization of the original humans but then maintain that the personalizing of all subsequent humans comes by means of the social relations that result from that initial act? One would, of course, still appeal to God’s providential work to maintain that God is fully involved in this creaturely personalization, but not in such a way as to suggest that divine agency is making up for something lacking in these creaturely encounters. One possible concern is that this might undermine one’s confidence in the reliability of the process, thus raising the classificatory and evaluative problems again. Given the finitude, frailty, and fallenness of human creatures and their societies, is it not entirely possible that one might fail to personalize properly, resulting again in the prospect that one could have humans in one’s midst who do not qualify as persons? While that might be a valid concern, it does seem possible to address the problem by maintaining the impossibility of coming into existence as a human creature apart from some relation to another human creature. Could one not argue that any such relation bears personalizing power by virtue of the initial personalizing work of the creator? Another concern might be that humans could end up personalizing too much.33 If humans can personalize one another, why not other things? Consider those who work closely with animals, reaching the point where they love and address them with every bit as much care and concern as others relate to the people around them. Could this not be a personalizing relationship? And since the personalizing address does not depend on any particular capacities, why stop there? A society’s ability to personalize something would then seem to be restricted only by its imagination. This problem seems more difficult to address given that it arises directly from affirming that human communities have personalizing power. One could deal with the concern simply by accepting that one can (and perhaps one does) personalize in precisely these kinds of ways. Indeed, maybe this is one avenue into conversations about personhood that Kelsey chooses not to address (e.g. the personhood of artificially intelligent machines). Yet this would simply reintroduce the expansiveness problem. More fundamentally, though, Kelsey would almost certainly respond by pointing to the fundamental primacy of the divine–human relationship, one that involves not just the initial creation of humanity but also the particular creation of each unsubstitutable individual. For Kelsey, the divine address is not directed towards an abstract class of creatures, nor is it a hereditary reality, something that can simply be passed from one generation to the next. Instead, the divine address is the happening in which God speaks to each human creature and summons them to respond as the unsubstitutable individuals that they are. That this happens amid quotidian realities does not make this something that could be accomplished by quotidian realities. A second question raises a similar concern but from the perspective of God’s personalizing activity. As noted earlier, Kelsey focuses exclusively on human personhood, setting aside questions about other kinds of creatures. Yet the Bible also talks about God addressing other aspects of creation (e.g. Genesis 1), even making a covenant with creation itself (see Gen. 9.9-17). On Kelsey’s account, would this not suggest that God enters into the same kinds of personalizing relations with at least some other creatures? And here again, since personal

See Stephen R. Milford, Eccentricity in Anthropology: David H. Kelsey’s Anthropological Formula as a Way out of the Substantive-Relational Imago Dei Debate (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2019), 133. 33

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existence is not limited by any capacity or lack thereof, there does not seem to be any reason to limit this personalizing activity only to things such as higher primates and dolphins. Kelsey may be right to maintain the uniqueness of God’s address to humans, but there does not seem to be any way of preventing the framework from extending to include nearly all of creation by virtue of other personalizing divine addresses. Some might not have a problem with this, viewing it as a way of undermining what many view as a problematic kind of anthropocentrism. However, if one envisions that things like rocks and mosquitos can be viewed as personal creatures, not only has the expansion problem clearly returned, but it has done so in a way that threatens to render personal virtually meaningless. To some extent, this is an unfair question since answering it would require Kelsey to develop a theology of non-human creatures, which is clearly beyond the bounds of his anthropologically focused project.34 Nonetheless, the question raises a conceptual challenge that goes to the heart of his understanding of the personal. One way of addressing this question would be to draw on more explicit christological resources at this point. If the personalizing nature of the divine address were connected more directly to the divine–human nature of the incarnation, this would seem to provide resources for arguing that this personalizing work was limited to human creatures, not because it is ontologically impossible to personalize non-human creatures, but because God has freely chosen to unite with these particular creatures.35 Granted, this would press Kelsey’s proposal in a more robustly covenantal and Barthian direction, but it would offer at least one way of dealing with this particular concern.36 A final issue arises from a different direction. As noted in the introduction to this chapter, questions about personhood often arise in the context of issues surrounding the beginning and ending of human lives. Although Kelsey does not make theological ethics a prominent aspect of his discussion of personhood, he does have an extended discussion about when the personal existence of a human creature begins. Here Kelsey draws extensively on Job’s lament regarding the day of his birth and on the fact that Job describes it also as the day on which he was created. For Kelsey, this provides resources for thinking that personal existence begins with the birth of the human creature. Up to that moment of birth, one should only talk about a potential living, personal body. It is only with his birth that Job becomes an actual personal creature: ‘In this creation story, the actuality of a living human body does not consist in its being a tissue of living human cells having human DNA. Rather, its actuality as a living

However, Clough rightly notes that one problem with Kelsey’s approach is that it operates as though human creatures can be understood largely in isolation from any robust theological account of non-human creatures. See Clough, ‘Not a Not-Animal’, 9. 35 Karl Barth thus famously grounded his understanding of the human person in the fact that God has addressed all human persons in Jesus (see, especially, Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Harold Knight et al. [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960], 134–52). This does not require Barth to deny that other creatures have a theologically significant relationship with God of their own (see Barth, CD III.2, 137–8), but it does require him to affirm that the divine summons in Jesus makes the human–divine relationship distinct. 36 One could block this Barthian approach by arguing that since the ‘flesh’ of the incarnation (Jn 1.14) is common to all creatures, one should not allow the incarnation to narrow one’s focus to human creatures alone (see, for example, Elizabeth A. Johnson, ‘Jesus and the Cosmos: Soundings in Deep Christology’, in Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology, ed. Niel Henrik Gregersen [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015], 133–56). However, this would not seem to help Kelsey’s argument since such an approach would simply strengthen worries about the expansion problem. 34

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human body is a function of its having been born (past tense).’37 Kelsey recognizes that there is considerable ambiguity in the phrase ‘having been born’, given the significant diversity in both when and how humans are brought into the world.38 Nonetheless, he contends that the concept is important in differentiating the before/after of potential/actual living humans. Kelsey makes an important distinction here between possibility and potentiality.39 A possibility merely involves a situation in which all the requisite ingredients are present for some future state to result but in which some external factor is required to bring about that future state (e.g. the way that flour, water, yeast, and salt are the possibility for a future loaf of bread, but only if there is a baker to combine them). A potentiality, on the other hand, involves ‘a more or less complex dynamic system of some determinate kind that, given the right circumstances, will develop in definite, rule-governed ways into a dynamic system of a related but different kind’.40 For Kelsey, the foetus is a potentiality in precisely this sense. It will, in fact, develop into an actual living human body, assuming that nothing hinders its normal development. But notice that according to Kelsey, the actual state is of a ‘different kind’ than the potential state. He argues that an acorn is fundamentally different from the oak tree that grows out of its potentiality, and, in the same way, a living human body differs fundamentally from the potentiality of the foetus. This is an important distinction for Kelsey because of how he unpacks the significance of Job lamenting the day of his birth as the day of his creation. As Kelsey argues: ‘If, however (following the way Job tells his story), the story of God’s immediate and intimate involvement in our having been born is the story of our creation by God as actual living human bodies, the logic of that story of our creation cuts against classification of human eggs and sperm, zygotes, fetuses, and embryos as actual living human bodies.’41 The history of God’s involvement with his people involves his relationship to actual human bodies, not merely potential ones. Job laments the day of his birth, rather than some pre-birth state, because that is the moment when Job entered into history, with all of its painful realities. While this is an interesting argument, particularly for its deep engagement with the story of Job, Kelsey’s position struggles at two key points. First, it is not clear that the story of Job can bear the theological weight placed upon it here. Should one really draw from Job’s lament the conclusion that his history only truly begins with the day of his birth? If one were to narrate one’s personal history, there is a good chance that one would begin with the day of their birth. And one would probably do so in ways that make it sound as though one thinks that their personal existence, their history as created beings, only truly began on that particular day. However, if one were to ask if one thought one existed in a very real and personal sense prior to the day of one’s birth, one would answer affirmatively. How can that be? The reality is that

Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 254. Here one needs to clarify that although Kelsey argues that DNA is sufficient to identify something as human, the presence of DNA alone does not render it a living, human body. For instance, if a severed hand had human DNA, one would know that it was a human hand. But that alone would not mean that the hand by itself qualifies as a human creature. Instead, Kelsey offers a fairly complex definition of a living human body, one that emphasizes the idea that the body is an organized and homeostatic energy system embedded in a larger ecology. See Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 248. 38 Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 255. 39 See Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 251–4. 40 Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 253. 41 Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 254. 37

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it is entirely possible to place a strong emphasis on the day of one’s birth as a day with unique significance; it is, after all, the day when one emerged onto the world scene in a very real sense. But one can affirm this without thinking that it entails denying any kind of personal existence prior to that day. Similarly, how should one account for biblical texts suggesting that God relates in intimately personal ways with humans prior to their birth (e.g. Jer. 1.4–5; Lk. 1.41)? Does this not suggest that one needs to read Job’s lament with more nuance at this point? Consequently, if Kelsey wants to claim that Job’s lament entails the denial of a pre-birth, personal state, he has yet to provide this argument.42 Additionally, much of Kelsey’s own framework presses in a different direction. Since the unborn child is still human (because of its human DNA), and since most expectant parents will tell you that the unborn child is already embedded in the very web of quotidian relationships that Kelsey emphasizes as integral to the personalizing process, and since all human creatures are included in the divine address (lest one reintroduces the exclusion concern), and since the divine address does not depend in any way on the developmental state of the capacities of the one addressed, on what basis would one conclude that the unborn child is somehow excluded from a personalizing relationship with its creator? All of this suggests that Kelsey’s proposal would be better served by maintaining more continuity between ‘before birth’ and ‘after birth’.43 One can retain the rhetorical power of Job lamenting the day of his birth, recognizing this as the day he emerged into his personally painful history, but one can avoid overloading this rhetoric with too much ontological baggage.

Conclusion Despite its pervasive use in both theological and non-theological settings, personhood is notoriously difficult to define. Its rich history is complicated by the diverse ways it is used and the challenging implications that often plague those various uses. Despite these difficulties, person-language has historically played a vital role in Christian doctrines of creation as a way of distinguishing humans from non-human creatures (the classificatory task) and making a normative judgement about the unique worth and dignity of human persons (the evaluative task). As noted earlier, though, such discussions often find themselves mired in complex debates about how to perform these two tasks without either accidentally (or intentionally) excluding some human persons or expanding the concept to such an extent that it loses any real significance. An alternative approach has been to focus instead on ways humans are like God,

Kelsey may well respond here that his definition of actual living bodies precludes the idea that someone can be an actual living body until they are no longer in utero. However, given his equally strong claim that even actual living bodies are still fully enmeshed in and dependent upon broader ecologies, it is not clear why it is only the ecology of the uterus that would have this implication. 43 The reality of death poses its own set of questions and concerns about the nature of human personhood, particularly as it relates to what it means to say that one is somehow the same ‘person’ after death and whether certain ways of conceiving the eschaton undermine one’s ability to affirm that one will have a truly ‘personal’ existence. For more on at least some of these issues, see Ray S. Anderson, Theology, Death and Dying (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Douglas J. Davies, The Theology of Death (London: T&T Clark, 2008); and Marc Cortez, ‘“I Go and Know Not Whither”: Death, Eternity, and the Immortality of the Soul in Karl Barth’, in Christian Dying: Witnesses from the Tradition, ed. George Kalantzis and Matthew Levering (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2018), 212–34. 42

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grounding human understanding of human personhood in the nature of divine personhood. While many will certainly find much to value in this approach, the radical dissimilarity between divine and human personhood will always constitute a significant difficulty. And although such approaches typically privilege relationality as the basis for one’s understanding of personhood, they frequently end up adopting something similar to the not-animal approach once they begin to explain what makes human relationality distinct. David Kelsey’s approach has been offered as a third way of navigating theological conversations about personal existence, one notable both for the breadth of material that it covers and for the depth of its constructive proposal. This chapter has raised questions about three particular issues – the role of the creature in the personalizing address, the extent to which non-human creatures might be included in this personalizing address, and the fraught question of whether personal existence begins at birth – suggesting ways in which one can both draw from and constructively amend Kelsey’s proposal to address these issues. Further work remains to be done here, particularly in bringing Kelsey’s ideas into dialogue with both those who opt for a more traditionally trinitarian approach and also those who conceptualize the personal aspects of human existence from non-western perspectives. Nonetheless, Kelsey offers a powerful portrait of the human creature that warrants this kind of further reflection.

Further reading Awad, Najeeb G. ‘Personhood as Particularity: John Zizioulas, Colin Gunton, and the Trinitarian Theology of Personhood’. Journal of Reformed Theology 4, no. 1 (2010): 1–22. Eastman, Susan G. Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul’s Anthropology. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2017. Gallgaher, Shaun, ed. The Oxford Handbook of The Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Smith, Christian. What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Spaemann, Robert. Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Swinton, John. ‘What’s in a Name? Why People with Dementia Might Be Better Off Without the Language of Personhood’. International Journal of Practical Theology 18, no. 2 (2014): 234–47. Van Inwagen, Peter and Dean W. Zimmerman, eds. Persons: Human and Divine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Welker, Michael, ed. The Depth of the Human Person: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014.

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CHAPTER 39 DEATH

Chris E. W. Green

Paradox and transfiguration One cannot speak at all about death, at least not Christianly, without speaking of Jesus’ death. That means one cannot talk about death without speaking paradoxically, because in him the uncreated and the created are one. Not only do all opposites coincide in his life, but also, through his death, he has altered even that which was opposed to God. This alteration, therefore, as the revelation of the mysteries of the coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) and communicatio idiomatum (communication of properties), endlessly peculiarizes one’s speech, forcing one at every turn to speak strangely not only about one’s own sufferings and the sufferings of one’s fellow creatures but also of God’s. Something of this strangeness can be seen, for example, in the allegory of transfiguration in the apse of the Basilica of Saint Apollinaris in Classe, Italy, which shows the martyred bishop, Apollinaris of Ravenna, standing arms outstretched in intercessory prayer as a sign of the cross under which he stands. Around the haloed intercessor and enhaloed cross, creation has come fully alive, enlivened by the sun-like death of Jesus. Something of this strangeness can also be heard in Gregory Nazianzen’s justly famous Pascha sermon: He comes forth, God with what he has assumed, one from two opposites, flesh and spirit, the one deifying and the other deified. O the new mixture! O the paradoxical blending! He who is comes into being, and the uncreated is created, and the uncontained is contained, through the intervention of the rational soul, which mediates between the divinity and the coarseness of flesh. The one who makes rich becomes poor; he is made poor in my flesh, that I might be enriched through his divinity.1 Something of this strangeness can also be seen in the Apocalypse. During his exile on Patmos, John the Revelator finds himself face to face with the paradoxes of the reality Gregory calls ‘a second communion’. Seeing ‘one like the Son of Man’ (Rev. 1.13), he falls at his feet ‘as though dead’ (Rev. 1.17) – and is immediately, in that very falling, raised to life again: ‘Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades’ (Rev. 1.17-18). In the white-hot heat of this encounter, John’s speech is radically and totally refigured, made to burn with the fire of the unsayable, which has passed through and burned away the unspeakable. Devotees of this same Jesus believe that all the prophets and all the apostles from Abraham to Mary

Gregory of Nazianzus, Orationes theologicae, 45.9.

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encountered this same Son of Man, risen and crucified, risen as the crucified – and suffered the same transfiguration in his presence. Hence, the church’s speaking always limps, as it were, wounded, as its father was, at the source of its generativity (see Gen. 32.31). God, Christians confess, cannot die. And Christ is God. Yet Christ dies! But not only dies – dies so that God’s creatures may die with him; dies to kill death; dies that human creatures might put to death all that is deadly in them; dies so God’s creatures might never die. To be sure, death is not glorious; God’s least of all. But whatever might have been, if the gospel is to be trusted, it is, in fact, the case that God’s creatures come into their glory only through the death of Mary’s boy, God’s Son. As Gregory says: ‘We need an incarnate God, a God put to death, so that we might live.’2 Bearing all that in heart and mind, this chapter turns first in what follows to a consideration of the living God and the life of Jesus, then to reflections on the suffering God and the death of Jesus, before taking up questions about the death of Jesus and the life of faith as well as the life of Jesus and the death of the faithful. Finally, in light of what one believes to be true about Christ and about those who live and die in him, one can ask what his death means for the rest of creation and the arc of history.

The living God and the life of Jesus A Christian theology of death begins with the confession that God is lively and life-giving, and that this God, the living God of life, made life in, with, and for Jesus of Nazareth, Mary’s son. The Fourth Gospel declares it outright: ‘All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people’ (Jn 1.3-4). He, ‘the true light, which enlightens everyone’ (Jn 1.9), ‘became flesh and lived among us’ (Jn 1.14), and this becoming did not change him. Instead, it brought about a change in creaturely flesh. Apart from him, ‘what is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit’ (Jn 3.6). Apart from him, ‘the flesh is useless’ (Jn 6.63). But in and with him, because of him, flesh comes alive with the liveliness of God (Jn 6.51-55). John’s claims about the Word as creator rework the logic of procreation: all things came to being through the Word because the Word was already with God in such a way that being came to exist in him. Jesus, the only-begotten Son, dwelling eternally in the womb of the Father, the one through whom all things were made, is found to be pregnant with his own body. In the mystery of the Spirit’s creativity, life, creaturely life, came into being in the uncreated Word who is in and with the Father beyond being. And in and through his own created and creative existence, he draws all things into himself and reconciles them as one in his intimacy with the Father. In assuming creaturely ‘flesh’, sharing the creature’s contingent actuality, Jesus was and is simply being God with God – ‘the only begotten Son’ rapt in the Father’s embrace (Jn 1.1, 18). As a result of that sharing, which, again, was and is for him and for other humans perfectly natural, perfectly fitting, ‘life’, the reality that makes and keeps creaturely reality real, is known

Gregory of Nazianzus, Orationes theologicae, 45.28.

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to be rooted in, fed by, and growing towards his infinite and uncreated actuality, given and received by the eternal Father through the eternal Spirit. And in the light of that knowledge, death is exposed as darkness – the evil that threatens, but cannot finally overcome, God’s life, the Spirit, who is the source of all living (Jn 1.5). Christians confess that God made life through, with, and in Jesus. If one asks how God made life, one can only answer this way: Jesus lived the life he wanted to live, the life he knew pleased God, because it was good for his neighbour; and the Father decided for this life, lived exactly as Jesus lived it – an actuality made possible by the Spirit. Jesus, in other words, lived life the way he lived it because it was the life the Father chose for him, and the Father was able to choose that life because it was the life the Spirit inspired Jesus to live. And because God has chosen that life as the reality from which and for which and through which creatures exist and fulfil their existence, that life is now ours, by grace and so by nature. The point cannot be overstated: Jesus lives and loves to live. His love for life shines through every line of his story. Not without reason, he was accused of being a drunk, a glutton, and a friend of all the wrong people. If, as Irenaeus says, God’s glory is the human being fully alive,3 truly living, then Jesus glorifies God precisely in the spiritedness, the liveliness of his life, which shows itself again and again – at the wedding in Cana (Jn 2.1-11), at the funeral in Bethany (Jn 11.1-44), and, most starkly, in the sorrowful mysteries of Gethsemane and Golgotha. Edward Schillebeeckx is right: ‘Jesus is the story of a living.’4 As Michel Henry puts it: ‘Life’s self-revelation, which is Truth, is accomplished in the Ipseity of the First Living, in this Me that is Christ.’5 Only after this is understood is it possible to know what to make of Jesus’ death and his dying – the way that he died – because it is his love for life that is expressed entirely and ecstatically in the ‘hour’ of his death. It is easy to lose sight of this truth: dying is not something that happened to Jesus but something he did. Dying, for him, was a deed: ‘No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father’ (Jn 10.18). By how he dies, Jesus shows humans what it is for God to be God and for humans to be themselves.6 Considered in itself, death remains ‘essentially obscure’, if thinkable at all, equally liable to be understood as the good and necessary closure of a completed life or as the terrible and absurd dissolution of being.7 But the gospel is the invitation to not think of death in itself but rather to think of the death of Jesus and of his dying.8 And the light of his death, and the offering up of his life that ended in his death, pours forth the life God made in him for God’s creatures, exposing that darkness as darkness and, at the same time, illumining it, drenching it in the uncreated light.

See Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.20.7. Edward Schillebeeckx, God Is New Each Moment: Edward Schillebeeckx in Conversation with Huub Oosterhuis and Piet Hoogeveen (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), 21. 5 Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 197. 6 See John Behr, Becoming Human: Meditations on Christian Anthropology in Word and Image (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013), i. 7 Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, ‘Death’, in Dictionary of Theology, 2nd edn (New York: Crossroads, 1985), 112. 8 See Robert W. Jenson, On Thinking the Human: Resolutions of Difficult Notions (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 10. 3 4

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The suffering God and the death of Jesus ‘Death’, theologically speaking, names not a medical exitus – the stopping of breath, heartbeat, and brainwave – but rather the annulment and negation of the life God made for God’s creatures and shares with them. The traditional definition, which speaks of the separation of soul from body, in addition to being anthropocentric, threatens to obscure the severity and finality of death. And death, the death named God’s final enemy (1 Cor. 15.26), is nothing if not severe and final. It does not merely cut creatures off from the delight of shared responsibility and the glad giving and receiving of gifts but pulls their existence up by the roots, extinguishing the light of their personal being. To die is to be un-done, to de-cease. In Alexander Schmemann’s words: Christianity proclaims, confirms and teaches, that the separation of the soul from the body, which we call death, is evil. It is not part of God’s creation. It is that which entered the world, making it subject to itself, but opposed to God and violating His design, His desire for the world, for mankind and for life. It is that which Christ came to destroy. Man, as created by God, is an animate body and an incarnate spirit, and for that reason any separation of them, and not only the final separation, in death, but even before death, any violation of that union is evil. It is a spiritual catastrophe.9 Finitude requires limitation, and limitation demands endings, completions. But death, theologically understood, is a rupture, a breach. Death, as Rahner insists, is ‘the night in which no one can work’.10 And that night is to be dreaded, however it may befall one. An easy death, a gentle death – makes no difference. In the end, ‘we are deprived of everything, even of ourselves; we all fall, each of us alone, into the dark abyss where there are no further ways’.11 In the garden, on the cross, Jesus descended into that wayless abyss. To say he descended into death perhaps suggests he survived his death, but he did not. He died. He was dead. ‘He descended to the dead’, not by extending his disembodied consciousness into the bowels of the ‘afterlife’, but rather by perishing and accepting his demise, by not-being. No one works in that night. But there is one, the Lord of the sabbath, whose not-working makes all the difference. In the garden, he was ‘sorrowful and troubled . . . overwhelmed with sorrow even to the point of death’ (Mt. 26.38), ‘distressed and agitated’, and ‘deeply grieved’ (Mk 14.33-34). On the cross, Jesus descends into an unnatural darkness: From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mt. 27.45-46)

Alexander Schmemann, ‘The Christian Concept of Death’, trans. Robert A. Parent, Orthodox Church in America, accessed 29 March 2022, https://www​.oca​.org​/reflections​/fr​-alexander​-schmemann​/the​-christian​-concept​-of​-death. Originally published in Russkaya mysl 3299–300 (1980): np. 10 Karl Rahner, ‘Following the Crucified’, in Theological Investigations, Volume 18: God and Revelation, trans. Edward Quinn (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1984), 164. 11 Rahner, ‘Following the Crucified’, 166. 9

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He does not merely suffer this anguish; he decides for it. As Hans Urs von Balthasar says: ‘It is an anguish he wanted to have without any consolation or relief, since from it was to come every consolation and relief for the world.’12 Only through the faithful suffering of one who is infinitely good can the abysmal terrors of ‘sin-anxiety’ be overcome once and for all. Because of who he is, Jesus suffers absolute anxiety absolutely – and exhausts it, finally. Jesus’ anxiety was not in any sense an act. Nor was it a failure of nerve. He was anguished in the shadow of death. Why? If Maximus the Confessor is right, it was because he knew with absolute clarity that death is unnatural – not only for him, as the Word of Life, but also for all creatures who have been made to share his life with him in the life of God.13 Said differently, Christ feared death not irrationally but because ‘he assumed, as good, that which is proper to nature and which expresses that power, inherent in our nature, which holdeth fast to being, willing it for our behalf ’.14 According to the Epistle to the Hebrews, Jesus, ‘in the days of his flesh’, ‘offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission’ (Heb. 5.7). Jesus was not kept from dying, obviously. In what sense, then, were his prayers ‘heard’? And what difference did his ‘reverent submission’ make in the end? He lived in awe and surrender at every moment of his life. And also, at this moment, in extremis, he held to God, and in that holding, he opened up the possibilities of a restored and reconditioned creatureliness. His prayers in the garden did not alter the will of God: they affected it. Offering up his being and his not-being, he realized all at once both the revelation of God and the reconciliation of all things – apocalypse and apocatastasis. Just so, Hebrews proclaims, he became ‘the source of eternal salvation’ (Heb. 5.9). He was ‘heard’ not in that he was kept from dying or rescued from sorrows, but in that he was saved from the dead in such a way that all the dead were bound to him, bound to be raised with him. Suffering their fate, he became their future. Jesus grieved for the fallen creation, for fallen creatures suffering affliction – not only to reveal the compassion of the Father but also to awaken that compassion in human beings. In Gethsemane, groaning groans too deep for words, Jesus opens up room in his own blessed heart, the heart of God, the heart of creation, for the bereaved and anguished. On Golgotha, crying out his ‘Why’, he assumes the terror of the godforsaken. He falls into creation’s fallenness, penetrating to its deepest, deepest depths. He ‘descended to the lowest parts’ so that he might in his ascension ‘take captivity, captive’ (Eph. 4.8). He, the risen crucified one, is the reason creation is creation. So, one can say not only that the cross judges all (crux probat omnia) but also that it heals everyone and everything (crux est mundi medicina). It is easy to go wrong at this point. So it must be said with conviction that Jesus’ death was a miscarriage of justice, an absurdity. As Saint Stephen says, Jesus was abused and murdered, suffering evils carried out in direct opposition to the Holy Spirit (Acts 7.51-52). Jesus’ life was crushed from him by the turning of the gears of the world’s social, religious, political, and

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian and Anxiety, trans. Dennis D. Martin and Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 71. 13 See Maximus, Maximi Confessoris Quaestiones ad Thalassium. Volume 1: Quaestiones I–LV, una cum Latina interpretatione Ioannis Scotti Eriugenae iuxta posita, ed. Carl Laga and Carlos G. Steel (Turnhout: Brepols, 1980), 61.8. 14 Maximus, The Disputation with Pyrrhus of our Father among the Saints Maximus the Confessor, trans. Joseph P. Farrell (South Canaan: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1990), 17. 12

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economic power structures. Precisely in that way, Rahner argues, Jesus’ death laid bare the consequences of sin – ‘the wages of sin is death’ (Rom. 6.23) – and the corruption at the source of human being – ‘the soul who sins shall die’ (Ezek. 18.20): The cross of Christ mercilessly reveals what the world hides from itself: that she [i.e. the world], as it were, devours the Son of God in the insane blindness of her sin – a sin whose Godless hate is truly set on fire upon contact with the love of God. How could she have even a ray of hope when she kills this man, when she destroys Him and blots Him out right at the point where He came into His own?15 Jesus, Rahner argues, not only dies. He first takes death to heart. He, ‘the blessed and luminous upholder of all things in being’, not only gave himself up to the Father but also gave himself over to the powers of death, taking ‘all the dark chaos of this world . . . this anguished and loveless incomprehensibility’ as his own reality, and in the creative act possible only for the creator himself, ‘inserted his own heart into the lethal void of non-divine being, to exist there as the true source of all this reality that is in the world apart from God’.16 To say Jesus’ death was unjust is to say it was neither desired nor required by God. Saint Anselm makes the point exactly: ‘God, therefore, did not force Christ to die, there being no sin in him. Rather, he underwent death of his own accord, not out of an obedience consisting in the abandonment of his life, but out of an obedience consisting in his upholding of righteousness so bravely and pertinaciously that as a result he incurred death.’17 Jesus’ betrayal, condemnation, and death, precisely because of their cruelty, incongruity, reprehensibility, and uselessness, accomplished the death of death. Naturally, one might want to ask how this can be. But the only worthwhile Christian answers to that question point to the person of Jesus. One cannot know how his death achieved the death of death because one cannot know how God is God. One can only thank God for him and for what he did – and did not do. All to say, then, Jesus’ death was not justified and cannot be justified – but just in this way, it does justify justly (Rom. 3.26); not because God arbitrarily decides to regard it as virtuous; not through some immanent evolution of creaturely being. Rather, Jesus’ death, and one’s trust in him as the one who died for all, justifies because he is the one who is the source, guide, and goal of all life. The Apostles’ Creed suggests that the whole of Jesus’ life was a dying, a death. At last, however, he descended into the deepest of all depths, fell far further down than any creature could ever fall. As Rahner states: ‘Jesus surrendered himself in his death unconditionally to the absolute mystery that he called his Father, into whose hands he committed his existence’, and ‘in the night of his death and God-forsakenness he was deprived of everything that is otherwise regarded as the content of a human existence’.18 Dead, Christ is truly dead:

Karl Rahner, Spiritual Exercises, trans. Kenneth Baker (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965), 240. Karl Rahner, ‘Unity – Love – Mystery’, in Theological Investigations, Volume 8: Further Theology of the Spiritual Life 2, trans. David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1971), 238. 17 Anselm, ‘Why God Became Man’, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 277. 18 Rahner, ‘Following the Crucified’, 164. 15 16

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In the concreteness of his death it becomes only too clear that everything fell away from him, even the perceptible security of the closeness of God’s love, and in this trackless dark there prevailed silently only that mystery that in itself and in its freedom has no name and to which he nevertheless calmly surrendered himself as to eternal love and not to the hell of futility.19 Dead, Jesus does nothing. But just by doing nothing, he undoes the nothingness that threatens creation from the beginning. Swaddled in death, sealed in a stranger’s tomb, he is still affecting the work that began with him swaddled at birth and secured against his mother’s breast. Dead, Jesus ceased to be – except in the unthinkable mode of God’s being-beyond-being. And precisely in this way, he claimed even death, not-being, for God, for God’s creatures; not in the sense that he made not-being into a something-good, but only in the sense that he made it an access to someone – to God. In his death, Jesus made nothing the nothing out of which all things are called by the Word of God into being. Betrayed, forsaken, abandoned to death, Jesus remained true even when ‘the sensible joy of the indestructible union ceased, subjecting him totally to the Passion [and] the experience of the total abandonment of God’.20 And in the end, he gave up his spirit with a loud cry (Mt. 27.50). Edith Stein argues that at that moment – falling out of time into the break between the uncreated and the creature, ‘the expiating fire’ of the divine light, which had burned in Jesus’ innermost being ‘in his entire, lifelong suffering’ – he, at last, consumed the darkness just as he was consumed by it.21

The death of Jesus and the life of faith Jesus died to be dead with the dead. He died so they would know in dying and in death the consolation he himself did not receive (2 Cor. 1.3-4). He died to be the death of death. He died, as Maximus said, to convert the use of death, ‘reworking it into the condemnation of sin but not of nature’,22 making death an end of all that is inhumane and ungodly, changing death ‘from a weapon to destroy human nature into a weapon to destroy sin’.23 In his passion, Christ vanquished the powers and principalities, erasing the record of human wrongs, which they used to enslave humans (Col. 2.14-15), and he freed humans from their fear of death, destroying the one who wielded the power of death against humans (Heb. 2.14-15).24 Therefore, thanks to the abundance of Christ’s afflictions (2 Cor. 1.5), the human creature never faces death – their own or another’s – without consolation. One can indeed face death. One does not have to look away from what evil has done, or threatens to do. True consolation, therefore, is mysteriously capacious, holding within itself room for all necessary sorrow and

Rahner, ‘Following the Crucified’, 165. Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross, trans. Josephine Koeppel (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002), 233. 21 Stein, The Science of the Cross, 233. See also Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 314. 22 Maximus, Quaestiones ad Thalassium, 61.8. 23 Maximus, Quaestiones ad Thalassium, 61.11. 24 See Jason A. Goroncy, ‘The Powers of Death: Recognition, Resistance, Resurrection’, Jurnal Jaffray 19, no. 1 (2021): 1–26. 19 20

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grief, complaint and intercession. And in that disconsolation-within-consolation one not only shares in Christ’s abundant afflictions but also, just in that way, shares in the unfolding completion of his still-to-be-finished work (Col. 1.24). Dorothee Sölle recognized this truth with uncommon clarity in the refractions of the lives of saints – ancient, medieval, and modern. She saw that adoration for Christ opens one to a prophetic agony. Holding one’s eyes on the crucified, one finds oneself able to ‘remain in inconsolability’, hoping against hope, hearing ‘the silent cry’ that is the word of the unconsoled consoling God, creation’s source and guide and goal.25 Jesus died not only for human consolation, which is always consolation-in-sorrow, a weeping with those who weep while rejoicing with those who rejoice, and not only to make possible human cooperation in his creative sufferings but also so that human beings might use his death against all that is opposed to life as God loves and lives it. In Pauline terms, ‘the mystery of Christ’ (Eph. 3.4), ‘kept secret for long ages’ (Rom. 16.25), the mystery which is, in fact, the mystery of God (Col. 2:2), includes and indwells human beings (Col. 1.17), so that his life and their lives become one. What is his becomes theirs. Everything the Father intends for him is kept for human beings (Rom. 8.17). What he does and what he suffers, humans also do and suffer. Nothing he experiences is kept from human beings: We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. (2 Cor. 4.8-12) As Maximus recognized, the life-giving power of Christ’s death has made it possible for humans to ‘mortify’ sin and the supposedly ‘free choice’ that keeps them from knowing and doing the will of God.26 Because the ‘marvellous exchange’ of the incarnation enfolds one in and entrusts to one ‘a life completely separate from every form of death and all corruption’,27 one can live life as God longs for it to be lived. In Maximus’ words: ‘[T]he activity of the cross appears in the inactivity and mortification of those who have been nailed to it.’28 And in the words of Saint Paul: ‘Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory’ (Col. 3.2-5). God shares humanity’s death so that humanity can share God’s life – the undying uncreated life that is the light that enlightens all.

Dorothee Sölle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, trans. Barbara Rumscheidt and Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2001), 262. 26 Maximus, Quaestiones ad Thalassium, 59.9. 27 Maximus, Maximi Confessoris Ambigua ad Iohannem: iuxta Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae latinam interpretationem, ed. Édouard Jeauneau (Turnhout/Leuven: Brepols/Leuven University Press, 1988), 42. 28 Maximus, Ambigua ad Iohannem, 32. 25

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Human beings are glorified through death. But death itself is not to be glorified. Christ has converted its use, but death is not in itself good. As Jordan Wood has observed, considering Augustine’s theology of death: Christians embrace death only as a means to defeat death, only in the light of Christ’s resurrection. No Christian embraces death because it is good or necessary. They embrace death because God in His inscrutable providence has rendered even death the way to eternal life. They weep at death; they marvel at Christ. The joy of resurrection does not require death, but providentially comes in no other way. Neither side of that ambivalence can be resolved into some more general, rational account. Indeed, for the Christian reason itself requires the ambivalence.29 This holy ambivalence, which emerges out of belief in Christ’s reconciliation of opposites, should keep Christians from saying either that death is in every way a good thing or that death is in no sense a good thing for anyone at any time.30 Christians grieve – even when someone dies a ‘good’ death. And although Christians need not rage against the dying of the light, they do defy the fear of death and those who use it to inflict wrongs against others in the name of Christianity and for its supposed protection. Resisting the lure of the satanic, which promises a life of safety and privilege, a life without suffering, Christians long for the death of death. And in all that, they pray for the sick to be healed, for the young to be protected, and for the aged to die – and depart – well. In a funeral sermon from his time as a pastor in London, Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke about death in almost endearing terms: ‘A life, full of joy and full of suffering, has come to its end. Death came as friend and took away all pain and anxiety from her; and we stand in solemn thankfulness before God, which in his mercy has put an end to this suffering.’31 Only a few years later, however, his seminary students’ notes indicate he had undergone a remarkable change of mind. He argues, in a lecture on funeral homilies, that although no Christian death can be tragic, Christians must speak differently about death than they do about the deceased. There are, indeed, blessed deaths – ‘not because death might come as a friend but because Christ is our friend in death’.32 Death, therefore, is not the believer’s natural end; Christ is. Dying, one does not pass into a post-mortem ‘disembodied’ state; one falls into God, already sharing in the eternal life promised from ‘before’ the beginning, already clothed with the glorified body ‘made without hands, eternal in the heavens’ (2 Cor. 5.1). ‘To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord’ (2 Cor. 5.8), not only in the sense of being present to God but also in the sense of being present in God to all things – present as God’s presence.

Jordan D. Wood, ‘Death in Augustine’s Confessions, or, On Holy Ambivalence’, Macrina Magazine, 31 July 2021, https://macrinamagazine​.com​/issue​-8​-general​/guest​/2021​/07​/31​/death​-in​-augustines​-confessions​-or​-on​-holy​ -ambivalence​-2/. 30 See David A. Jones, Approaching the End: A Theological Exploration of Death and Dying (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 31 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, London: 1933–1935, ed. Keith Clements, trans. Isabel Best (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 409. 32 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935–1937, ed. H. Gaylon Barker and Mark S. Brocker, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 739. 29

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While writing this chapter, I saw the first few weeks of the terrors of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I read reports of the bombings of hospitals, maternity wards, and children’s shelters. I saw image after image of dead body after dead body, and a photograph of a statue of Christ being removed from the Armenian Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary in Lviv. On 20 February 2022, a young couple in our parish learned that their eleven-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with leukaemia. A month later, on the Friday of the first week of Lent, I suffered a stroke, followed in the following days by a few ministrokes. Those experiences cast these words I had been writing about death in a much brighter light. Now, a week after my initial visit to the emergency room, I find there is consolation in knowing I do not have to reconcile myself to death – my own or anyone else’s – because Christ, our friend, has reconciled humanity to God, and just in that way obliterated death, emptying the grave and stripping evil of its power to damn. So, as Schmemann says: ‘[I]n Christ’s Resurrection from the dead, the absolute, all-encompassing law of dying and death, which tolerated no exceptions, was somehow blown apart and overcome from within.’33 Athanasius was right: death either reveals God or exposes him.34 For God to leave humans to the consequences of their sins, for God to let death reign over them, would be for God to be exposed as a fraud. If humanity’s alienation were allowed to stand, it would mean not only humanity’s damnation but also the disgrace of God – the miscarriage and nullification of justice. God saves humanity from death, therefore, by not saving himself, because anything less would be unbecoming of God. When all else has been said, this holds: God is not at the mercy of death, humans are at the mercies of God – even in their dying, even in their being dead. And in Christ, who actualizes the divine way of being human, a way that begins and ends within the lively life of God, humans are ultimately freed from death. Christ, not death, is ‘Lord’. In Irenaeus’ words: ‘The Lord through his passion destroyed death, brought error to an end, abolished corruption, banished ignorance, manifested life, declared truth, and bestowed incorruption.’35 On the Sunday following my stroke, the second Sunday in Lent, I read the Gospel reading for the day lying in a hospital bed: Lk. 13.31-35. In this passage, the Pharisees come to Jesus and warn him that Herod Antipas intends to kill him (Lk. 13.31). Jesus’ response is quick and sharp: ‘Go and tell that fox for me, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem”’ (Lk. 13.32-33). This sharp rebuke pierces Jesus’ own heart and immediately gives way to grief. He weeps over the city: ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’ (Lk. 13.34). Only hours removed from what the emergency room doctors worried would take my life, I stumbled into this epiphany: Jesus, at last, is devoured by the beast. But in that way, he outfoxes the fox, claiming hell as the heart of his kingdom. Now, for me, as for all God’s creatures, the life of God is at work on the insides of death. Even in the fox’s belly, humans are sheltered under the shadow of the hen’s wing.

Schmemann, ‘The Christian Concept of Death’. See Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 13. 35 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.19. 33 34

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The life of Jesus and the death of the faithful By raising Jesus from the dead as Lord, the Spirit has made the Father, not death, the creature’s natural end. So, filled with that same Spirit (Rom. 8.11), one can assent to life as it comes to God’s creatures, resisting evil always only with good (Rom. 12.21), awaiting the reconstitution and setting-right of all things (Acts 3.20-21). And one can also rest assured that the God who ultimately saves creatures from death can make penultimate good of their dying.36 In that sense, Bonhoeffer’s 1934 funeral sermon was right: this sister could, as Simeon did, ‘depart in peace’, because in her life she too had seen the Lord’s salvation.37 Confident in God’s goodness, she could, without worry, let herself fall into the everlasting arms (Deut. 33.27). Penultimately, death can be rest from one’s labours: ‘And I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Write this: Blessed are the dead who from now on die in the Lord”. “Yes”, says the Spirit, “they will rest from their labours, for their deeds follow them”’ (Rev. 14.13). Penultimately, death can be a hard limit, conditioned by the hope of redemption, to miseries and the harm done, or that might be done to oneself or others (Rom. 8.20). The awareness of mortality can serve as a school of wisdom, which is why Christians join with Jews in praying: ‘teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart’ (Ps. 90.12). Because Jesus is who he is, nothing, including death, happens to him but what he wants to happen differently for us. What he suffers does not change him but simply occasions his redemption and transfiguration of all things. So, it is true that God died because God’s beloved creatures die. But it is also true that because God died, God’s human creatures can die otherwise. They can die in ways that are graced and gracing, not agonistic or embittering. They can face death not with resignation or despair but rather in consolation and with hope, enlivened by the promise of the renewal of all things in Christ, who is all and in all (Col. 3.11). By sharing humanity’s death, God made it possible for humans to share death. The time of one’s dying, therefore, can open up room for the reconciliation of the living – including those who have been bound together by wrongs performed. One can aspire to make the end of one’s life a time for the blessing of others and, where possible, of one’s children: ‘By faith Jacob, when dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, “bowing in worship over the top of his staff ”’ (Heb. 11.21). Such penultimate goods open out on the ultimate because God is God of the living, not of the dead (Lk. 20.38). To God, ‘the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change’ (Jas 1.17), darkness is as light (Ps. 139.11-12). To God, who is life and the morethan-living source of all life, all are alive – especially the dead (2 Cor. 5.6-8). As Bonhoeffer said: ‘Actually, it is the dead who are saying to the living: It is you who are dying, and we who are living.’38 In one’s prayers for the dead at their funeral, as well as words exchanged about others after they have been buried, their bodies returned to the earth, one is simultaneously enacting a closure and an opening, entrusting others to God and therefore trusting others to intercede with God for those who remain behind. One does not merely pray for the dead; one prays with them. Living within the ‘dangerous memory’ of the dead, one confronts the

See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Scott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 146–70. 37 Bonhoeffer, London, 410. 38 Bonhoeffer, Theological Education at Finkenwalde, 742. 36

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workings of the world in its gone-wrong-ness because one’s union with the dead forges one’s prayer ‘into the language of lamentation as much as intercession for the forgiveness of sins’.39 Because of Jesus’ sorrows, one knows death is to be grieved. Because he was afraid, one knows death is to be feared. Because he died and was gathered to the dead, one knows one can live through one’s sorrows and fears hopefully, and die faithfully. Because he was raised from the dead as ‘a sacrament of death’s demise’,40 one can know that even in death one participates in his life, cooperating in his ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 6.1). Dying, one does not merely rest from one’s labours but also enters the rest of God, which is the sabbath-making work of Christ. One passes from this life into God to take up a share in the Son’s prayers for us (Rom. 8.34). One becomes intercession. To be sure, death separates God’s creatures from one another; it separates them even from themselves. But death does not separate God’s creatures from God. No one, no thing, is dead to God. This is creation’s hope. This is the hope that keeps humans from foreclosing on the future – including the future of one’s past. In Christ, who reconciles the opposites, the living die in imitation of the dead, and the dead live for the living. The church’s ministry, therefore, is, above all, a sharing of Christ’s life by a sharing in his death – ‘death is at work in us, but life in you’ (2 Cor. 4.12). Thus, preaching is the bodying forth of the life of the crucified, and the sacraments are ‘arranged around the cross’.41 This is the truth embodied in the Saint Apollinaris mosaic: the sainted dead, conformed to the form of the living crucified Christ, intercede for others, and Christ’s open hands and upturned face signify the unconditional promise in which humans – along with all creation – live, move, and have their being. If Jesus has not been raised from the dead, then Christians are ‘of all people most to be pitied’ (1 Cor. 15.19). But because Christ has indeed been raised as ‘the firstborn from the dead’ (Col. 1.18) and ‘the firstborn of every creature’ (Col. 1.15) – the last because of the first – Christians know that as they live life his way, death will be for them not only the end, but a good end, an end that is itself a beginning not only for Christians, and indeed not only for God’s human creatures, but for all – without exception.

The mystery of Christ and the necessity of death Maximus argued that those who know the mystery of Christ know the purpose for creation, the reason of all things: ‘He who is initiated into the inexpressible power of the Resurrection apprehends the purpose for which God first established everything.’42 In a particularly remarkable passage, Maximus breaks into a stunning doxology to the mystery of Christ, which is Christ himself:

Peter X. Gardner, ‘Memoria Mortis: On Metz and the Political Theology of Death’ (presentation, Virginia Graduate Colloquium on Theology, Ethics, and Culture, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, April 2013), 7. 40 Gardner, ‘Memoria Mortis’, 8. 41 Adrienne von Speyr, The Mystery of Death, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 111. 42 Maximos the Confessor, ‘Four Hundred Texts on Love’, in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, Compiled by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, Volume 2, ed. and trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 176 (1.66). 39

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This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end for which all things were brought into existence. This is the divine purpose conceived before the beginning of beings, and in defining it we would say that this mystery is the preconceived goal for the sake of which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing, and it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings. This is, properly speaking, the limit and goal of God’s providence, and of the things under His providential care, since the recapitulation of the things created by God is God Himself. This is the mystery which circumscribes all the ages, and which reveals the grand plan of God, a super-infinite plan infinitely pre-existing the ages an infinite number of times. The essential Word of God became a messenger of this plan when He became man, and, if I may rightly say so, revealed Himself as the innermost depth of the Father’s goodness while also displaying in Himself the very goal for which creatures manifestly received the beginning of their existence.43 But if Christ is the reason for all things, what is one left to think of death? Is there a reason or purpose for it? More to the point, is there a reason for deaths – human, animal, environmental, planetary, cosmic? To ask the same thing another way: If the reason for Jesus’ death was the death of death, does that not mean death is necessary – essential to his identity, to God’s purposes, and therefore to the being of all things? To make matters worse, Christians confess that ‘all things in heaven and on earth’ were created in Christ, ‘created through and for him’, and that ‘in him all things hold together’ (Col. 1.16-17). But if that is so, if this is, in fact, ‘our Father’s world’, why is it so manifestly both threatened by death and sustained by deaths? For 10,000 generations, human beings have learned to live in and with the cycles of birth, maturation, death, and decay. Until only recently, perhaps the last three or four generations in the so-called ‘developed world’, the rhythms of human bodies have been forced to dance with the rhythms of the seasons, the beasts, the grasses, and the trees. Humans have lived for millennia in and through springtime and winter, seedtime and harvest, and have discovered in every generation that new life springs up and finds room for itself only in the expiration of old life. ‘Nature’ is both reliable and reliably unreliable, seemingly designed to menace even while it also serves to bolster existence. In all times, whatever one’s place, the creature finds itself at hazard at every turn – from drought and from flood; from malnutrition and infectious diseases; from domestic violence and war. To be sure, humans are their own worst enemies, and the rest of creation is constantly in peril because of them. But the violence is in no way limited to the Anthropocene. Two hundred million years before Tyrannosaurus rex, Anteosaurus magnificus was an apex predator, a ‘killing machine’; its body, including its brain, seems to have been ‘designed’ for efficient predation.44 To ask these questions, to face these facts, is to address ‘the problem of evil’. But there is also the problem of the good. And any honest account of these problems must reckon with the fact that there is good even in the evils and evils even in the good. On the one hand, for example, nature’s givenness, its concrete otherness, is a good. But that givenness also means

Maximus, Quaestiones ad Thalassium, 60.3. See Julien Benoit et al., ‘Palaeoneurology and Palaeobiology of the Dinocephalian Therapsid Anteosaurus magnificus’, Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 66, no. 1 (2021): 29–39. 43 44

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pain, horrors, and death are inevitable – not only for humans and for whomever and whatever humans love, but also for ‘all things’. On the other hand, even death can be a grace, if not, in fact, a good in and of itself. So Wendell Berry: An old man I’ve loved all my life is dying in his bed there. He is going slowly down from himself. In final obedience to his life, he follows his body out of our knowing. Now may the grace of death be upon him, his spirit blessed in the deep song of the world and the stars turning, the seasons returning, and long rest.45 Death, Berry suggests, is natural; because it is natural, it is graced and can be undergone graciously, gracefully. But his requiem serves as a reminder that all humans live in the tension of two obediences – to the necessity of their own lives and to the freedom of Christ’s. Without question, humans shall follow their bodies out of knowing. Humans shall find long rest, however, only if Christ leads humans in that following. Death is a privation of life; but dying is a living act. And because of the way Christ died and the way he was kept in death, death has been altered, given a purpose it does not in itself possess. Because death has been ‘naturalized’ by what Jesus has done, deaths are not finally cruel or tragic. Indeed, although those who confess that all creatures are meant to share in the life of Jesus, the living one, cannot regard death in and of itself as a good, they can believe that there are good deaths and deaths that occasion good because Jesus lives as the heart of reality. Humans live in a world in which the coming of Christ means the slaughter of innocents. But the coming of Christ to this world also means the triumph of those innocents over their slaughter and their slaughterers. Charles Péguy casts this marvellously in his ‘The Mystery of the Holy Innocents’. He imagines the ‘first victims for Christ/Infant flock of sacrifices’ playing games around the heavenly altar, and singing: Such is my Paradise, God says, My Paradise could not be simpler. Nothing is less elaborate than my Paradise. Aram sub ipsam, on the steps of the altar itself These simple children play with their palms and their martyrs’ crowns, That is what is going on in my Paradise. Whatever can they play at With palms and martyrs’ crowns. I believe they play at hoops, God says, and perhaps at quoits (at least I believe so, for do not think that they ever ask my permission)

Wendell Berry, ‘Requiem’, in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1998), 127.

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And the palm forever green they use apparently as a hoop-stick.46 Paul Griffiths argues that ‘the grammar of Christian thought’ requires one to hold the following quartet of claims in tension: ‘(1) the Lord brings felicities out of all faults; (2) the Lord heals all damage; (3) there are apparently particular faults from which no felicities flow; (4) there are apparently instances of damage that remain unhealed’. Holding them together, rather than deciding between them, ‘yields the characteristically Christian complex attitude to fault and damage, which is lament-laced hope’.47 Maximus’ theology presents a different grammar, however – a ‘Christo-logic’ that allows one to say that the world as one knows it is not yet creation. Nature is fallen in its ‘wisdom’ – at the very source of its being. Or, as Bonhoeffer puts it, through the fall, creation became nature, and because of ongoing failures of human vocation, the natural is often hardened into the unnatural.48 If one fails to make these distinctions, if one confuses what one experiences with what God desires, one cannot help but identify the source of evil and evils as the will of God. The German poet Reinhold Schneider recognized this with unusual clarity: the more he contemplated the weird cruelties of nature (such as parasites living in the bowels of certain birds), the more he found himself at a loss in prayer: ‘The face of the Father has been obscured for me. It is the mask of the one who smashes, who treads the winepress.’49 The grammar of Maximus’ theology also allows one to say that creation is incarnation, and that the goal of Christ’s life, that which he achieves in his living, is precisely the bringing of felicities out of all faults and the healing of all damage.50 Indeed, Maximus argues, Christ takes all human faults as his own and personally suffers all the damage that humans have done – and makes them otherwise. All opposites coincide in Christ’s life, and through his death, he has altered even that that was opposed to God. Hence, as Wood says: I must come to recognize the depths of God’s love in the fundamental God–world reciprocity generated in the Word’s historical experience. That reciprocity creates the freedom to undo my own misuse of freedom exactly because the Word’s identification with the false world is simultaneously his identification with the true one. He made himself the hypostatic identity of bad and good infinities. Which is to say that he received, in his Passion, the entire burden of the errant motions of every individual rational being, and by making them his own – he who is essentially God – endowed the very false ‘principles’ our sin falsely incarnate, i.e. the ‘law of death’, with the deeper principle of providence, the complete deification of even this universe and of the ‘me’ I make in vain.

Charles Péguy, ‘The Mystery of the Holy Innocents’, in The Mystery of the Holy Innocents, and Other Poems, trans. Pansy Pakenham (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), 165. 47 Paul J. Griffiths, Regret: A Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 31. 48 See Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 173. 49 Cited in Christoph Schönborn, ‘You Govern All Things . . .: Suffering in a World Guided by God’, Eternal Word Television Network, accessed 29 March 2022, https://www​.ewtn​.com​/catholicism​/library​/you​-govern​-all​-things​ -suffering​-in​-a​-world​-guided​-by​-god​-10164. 50 See Jordan D. Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2022). 46

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His true Incarnation, always and in all things, destroys all false incarnations from true beginning to true end – for he is both.51 What Maximus says of human beings, he also says of the cosmos: the universe will have to die to be raised again from the dead. It will not be kept from dying any more than Christ was. But through the Spirit’s intercession, it shall become his body: The universe, as a man [sic], will then have perished in that which can be seen, and it will be raised again – new from that which has grown old – at the resurrection that we presently await. ‘The human being in his human nature’, as a part of the whole and a portion of the totality, will then be raised together with the universe, and he will recover the power no longer to be able to be corrupted.52 The incarnation is yet unfolding. Christ is still living his life, unobscuring the face of the Father. Whatever happens, therefore, whether for good or evil, whether fortunate or disastrous, happens within the infinite and super-infinite unfolding of Christ’s being for creation. Jesus makes this truth known: God loves being creation’s God, and God is not yet done being God for God’s creatures. So, humans wait in hope for God’s works in time to meet God’s act on time, trusting that it is in that act, which is the End of All Things, that all sad things shall indeed come untrue. In that act, death itself shall be made to have been nothing more than sleep – as it was shown to have been for Jairus’ daughter (Mk 5.35-43).53 In the meantime, one can both accept one’s mortality and defy the fear of death, certain its finality is not final in the way God alone can be. Coda ‘Why did God make dying?’ This is a question so necessary only a child would think to ask it. When my son, who was six years old at the time, asked it of me, this was the answer I tried to give him: God did not make death or dying but only life and living. I told him that God has no use for death, none whatsoever, and that God wants nothing but for God’s creatures to live the fullest possible lives for the good of everyone and everything around them. I told him that scripture assures us that Jesus will defeat all our enemies, including death, and I read to him this passage from Wisdom of Solomon: ‘God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all things so that they might exist’ (Wis. 1.13-14). If I had known these words at that time from an Easter sermon by James Alison, I would have shared them with him also: And the reason why God rests is because on Good Friday he accomplished everything, he finished creation. He entered into death and made it untoxic. So on Holy Saturday

Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ, 363–4. Maximus the Confessor, On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, trans. Jonathan J. Armstrong (Yonkers: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019), 77. 53 See Chris E. W. Green, ‘“From His Fullness We Have All Received”: Reflections on Divine Agency, Time, and the Experience(s) of Salvation’, in Essays on the Trinity, ed. Lincoln Harvey (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2018), 125–39. 51 52

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a great quietness is over the earth, because of course, no-one else knows about this yet. It’s the great quietness of creation having been completed, of death no longer being the enemy of the creatures, but something that can be lived through and in, as part of being a creature. It’s death occupied by God.54 God’s victory has ‘swallowed up’ death (1 Cor. 15.54), scripture assures. Death, as Alison says, has been de-toxified, occupied by God – and not only in the sense that God has vanquished it. The Son of Man has taken ‘the keys of Death and of Hades’ (Rev. 1.18) so that he might make a bed for all humanity in Sheol (Ps. 139.8). Hell, one might say, has become God’s guest room. If it is true that the hen lives in the belly of the fox, then it is also true that the fox is kept under the shadow of the hen’s mothering wing. Not long before he died, Robert Jenson shared with me the text of a sermon he had given at the funeral of a fellow parishioner. Knowing that Jens and his friend John are now together with our friend Christ interceding for others, these words from the closing of that sermon are an especially fitting way to conclude this chapter: In scripture, death is never seen as a good thing by itself. Rather, it is always portrayed as God’s great antagonist. For death breaks up the communities that the Lord seeks to create – as it will now break up the unique community that the Lord gathered around John. Death makes God’s people fearful, hanging onto life instead of enjoying it and using it to love one another; and I think there are those who will now be more fearful in life then they were when John was around. John indeed died in the hope and consolation of the Lord, but we all had rather he had not died at all – and may even think that God shares that feeling. In short, death is the enemy of love; and God is love. John was a loving man, and now we all lack that love. Despite all our efforts to hide from death, or explain it away, or say that it’s only natural after all, death by itself remains an unfathomable evil. Indeed, only by looking to one particular death, to Christ’s death on the cross, can we grasp it at all. If you want to see what death is really like – John’s death or your death or my death – read one of the Gospels’ accounts of the Crucifixion. We have no other clue to the mystery. But just so, of course, we also see that death is in fact never by itself. For Christ’s story does not end with the Crucifixion. Christianity simply is the faith that the Lord raised him from the tomb to which we consigned him. Death by itself is indeed an unmitigated evil, but it turns out that death is not by itself. Christ lives as the one with that ‘and’ there: he is for all eternity Christ crucified and risen. . . . And that means – among much else – that we can, putting it crudely, relax a little in this life, lay back a bit. If the worst, death, must give way to the best, to life in God, what else could there be to fear? Because Christ lives, we can be a little at ease in this dangerous world. . . . There are, I suppose two ways of relaxing in the world. One is to think that nothing is worth caring about, so why worry? The other is to think – with John – that everyone and everything is worth caring about, and that we dare do that because Christ lives.55

James Alison, ‘Staggered Vision’, accessed 29 March 2022, http://jamesalison​.com​/staggered​-vision. Robert Jenson, ‘Funeral Sermon for John’, personal communication.

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Further reading Adams, Marilyn McCord. Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Life Out of Death: Meditations on the Easter Mystery. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1997. Coakley, Sarah. ‘Evolution, Cooperation, and Divine Providence’. In Evolution, Games, and God: The Principle of Cooperation, edited by Martin A. Nowak and Sarah Coakley, 375–85. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Crépon, Mark. Murderous Consent: On the Accommodation of Violent Death. Translated by Michael Loriaux and Jacob Levi. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Dufourmantelle, Anne. In Praise of Risk. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Fiddes, Paul S. ‘Acceptance and Resistance in a Theology of Death’. Modern Believing 56, no. 2 (2015): 223–36. Levinas, Emmanuel. God, Death, and Time. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Translated by R. A. Wilson and John Bowden. London: SCM, 1974. Thiessen, Matthew. Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First Century Judaism. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020.

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CHAPTER 40 ‘THE HEAVENS DECLARE . . .’ (PS. 14.1, 19.1) CREATION, MISSION, AND THE EMBODIED KNOWING OF GOD John G. Flett

The mediation of creation One key question within Christian theologies of creation concerns the possibility of a ‘natural’ knowledge of the divine. Various forms account for this possibility: creation itself shares in the divine; creation is the acting realm of the Spirit/spirit(s); the divine finds expression through natural human capacities, such as word, reason, or culture. This possibility is further construed as belonging to an event of divine communication: the ‘[e]arth is the medium through which the divinity addresses us’.1 However, the most fundamental element of this possibility, even as its form admits to significant variety, lies in the assumption that it reflects a ‘universal’ human experience. In light of the end and ongoing legacy of western missions, treating creation as a medium of communication and the ground of a universal human experience of the divine serves a twofold purpose: first, it detaches the knowing of God from any overt missionary transmission (local peoples already know God before missionaries arrive); second, it renders creation the necessary medium for all missionary transmission (because people already know God, talk about God is possible). This twofold purpose, in other words, distances the transmission of the gospel and the local Christian knowing of God from the western colonial endeavour by locating it in a universal deemed to be the necessary condition of time and space prior to the human experience of both. Though this indicates the outline of received orthodoxy, the following argues in an opposite direction – conceiving creation as a universal and, as such, as a medium of communication, continues the colonial agenda. The argument rests not on tired and abstract arguments for or against the possibility of a ‘natural theology’ because, first, no consensus exists regarding this possibility, even at a simple exegetical level.2 Nor are the authorities referenced in determining this possibility limited to complex interpretations of a sacred text; they depend on a wider theological structure, including centuries of developed language and tradition. Positing the possibility of a natural theology, in other words, is a complex work of explicit theological construction. Second, given that this knowledge is an assumed universal, it seems reasonable to assume that any argument for a natural theology might be aptly demonstrated by reference

Geevarghese Mor Coorilos, ‘Toward a Missiology that Begins with Creation’, International Review of Mission 100, no. 2 (2011): 318. 2 For a summary reflection, see Benjamin D. Sommer, ‘Nature, Revelation, and Grace in Psalm 19: Towards a Theological Reading of Scripture’, Harvard Theological Review 108, no. 3 (2015): 376–401. 1

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to human experience.3 It is evident, however, even when limiting the discussion to debates concerning ‘reason’ within Christian natural theologies, that no consistent account of this universal’s form or how it is experienced exists – the ‘universal’ differs as it moves through time and across cultures. Third, even the biblical material deployed to demonstrate such a possibility is selective. Alongside the ‘creation’ psalms lies as much reference to those who say ‘there is no God’ (Pss. 10.4, 14.1, 53.1). This sacred text itself acknowledges that there are people who live under the heavens and do not see God. To be sure, these texts describe such unseeing people as ‘fools’ whose acts are ‘vile’ and ‘corrupt’, which is the point. As a statement of Christian belief, one might well affirm that the heavens declare the glory of God, but to treat it as a normative condition beyond those structures of belief is to pretend that it is without location – plain, common sense, self-evident – to the extent that those who cannot see it are fools. The very givenness of this dislocated universality, its static and permanent nature, includes within it an alignment of the virtuous and the wicked and invites a range of uncritical tools for dividing and identifying the two. It is on these tools that the concern outlined here consolidates: much of the language affirming the possibility of a natural knowledge of God – a natural knowledge of the Christian God – relies on identifying ‘whatever is good’. And the colonial era made quite clear that the ‘good’ took on precise cultural forms, including economics, dress, morality, family and social structures, architecture, law, governance, history, embodied forms of religion, language, education, health, and so on. The ‘good’ encompassed the whole human experience, leading to the following position: ‘leave nothing of the African except his skin’.4 Rather than counter the problem of missionary imperialism, theologies that conceive creation in universal terms continue the colonial agenda and promote the disembodiment of local faith communities. To make this case, this chapter begins with the characterization of a natural knowledge of God as preparatory, partial, and universal. The next section examines the nature of the cultural coup as it unfolds during the colonial era. While it may appear that affirming a universal knowledge of God in creation establishes paths for maintaining some form of continuity between pre-Christian heritage and contemporary Christian expression, it does so only by conflating the Indigenous voices upon which it relies. Worse still, because this approach assumes its own rightness, promoting disembodied forms continues but is now secured by an ecumenical legitimation. However, once this recourse to a universal natural theology is identified as an explicit Christian theology aimed at cultural negotiation, a range of other theological tools might be applied to diagnose what is occurring; namely, a universal creation functions as a cypher for a universal salvation history, one that ties the history of Jesus Christ to the church in its western course. The problem of creation is a problem of time. Moving beyond the colonial project of natural theology demands constructive theological work that takes seriously Indigenous

One could here refer to how the idea has developed across religious traditions, but that is simply to confirm that no singular position exists and that each is informed by a prior theological system. See Helen De Cruz, ‘The Enduring Appeal of Natural Theological Arguments’, Philosophy Compass 9, no. 2 (2014): 145–53. 4 Winwood Reade, cited in Arthur Schlesinger Jr., ‘The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism’, in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 362. 3

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assertions concerning the relationship of place and history and so embodies forms of salvation that exist in continuity with local histories.

Nature: The preparatory, universal, and partial knowledge of God Reference to a natural knowledge of God and the coordinated apologetic function of such appears with the earliest Christianity. Justin Martyr (c. 100–65), through his use of the logos spermatikos, the ‘seed-bearing word’, maintained that Christ the Logos was already at work in human beings, with or without explicit faith in Jesus Christ, the person. ‘Partaking’ in this word by way of reason allowed all peoples to see the ‘likeness’ of the truth.5 Though the likeness was not the reality – that is, it required fulfilment through the confession of Jesus Christ – all people who lived according to this word of reason were ‘Christians, even though they have been thought atheists’.6 We begin here because Justin introduces the main lines of argument that have persisted through the centuries, appearing as a guiding rationale within even contemporary theological approaches to cultures and religions: a natural knowledge of God is preparatory, universal, and partial. First, a natural knowledge of the divine (understood as in some way a knowledge of the Christian God) in which the presence of truth is acknowledged in the other constitutes a necessary preparatory starting point for knowing the God of Jesus Christ. At base, a natural theology reflects a general human longing or seeking and manifests as a practised form of questioning and listening. For David Fergusson, ‘the natural capacity of the human mind to raise theological questions can provide a praeparatio evangelii, a context within which the distinctive claims of the Christian faith can be presented and more easily heard’.7 Its necessity resides in this transitioning function – its establishing a medium of communication that permits the movement from one form of knowing to its fulfilment in the Christian faith. John Macquarrie, for example, applies this position to contemporary secular societies, noting that natural theology ‘provides a bridge from everyday concerns to God-language and the experiences which such language reflects’.8 Some strengthen the point by affirming that without a natural knowledge of God, God’s ‘special revelation’, God’s own acting in self-disclosure, ‘would never be able to penetrate to people’.9 In terms of its location, such a natural theology might be identified within ‘society and history, peoples, cultures, and religion’.10 It may take the form of ‘redemptive analogies’ that range from the local acknowledgement of a ‘highgod’ to local customs, practices, or mythologies that are read as formulations of key biblical

Justin, Second Apology, 13. Justin, First Apology, 46. 7 David Fergusson, ‘Types of Natural Theology’, in The Evolution of Rationality: Interdisciplinary Essays in Honor of J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen, ed. F. LeRon Shults (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006), 387. 8 John Macquarrie, ‘Natural Theology’, in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought, ed. Alister E. McGrath (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 405. 9 James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology: The Gifford Lectures for 1991: Delivered in the University of Edinburgh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 1. 10 John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio: Encyclical Letter of the Supreme Pontiff, John Paul II on the Permanent Validity of the Church’s Missionary Mandate (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1990), §29. 5 6

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themes.11 But the importance of these ‘points of contact’ reside in their externality to, and in their specific capacity to establish some form of continuity with, the Christian gospel. Natural theology pretends some form of neutrality in the identified forms of knowing while cherishing that knowledge for its capacity to move the knower towards the fulfilment of that knowledge in its Christian form. Second, this natural knowledge of God is universal. Fergusson notes how ‘[s]ome of the Psalms and wisdom literature appeal to patterns of common experience and observation that are universal and provide a trans-cultural awareness of God’.12 The ground and benefit of a natural theology lie in the ‘common’, the ‘universal’, and the ‘trans-cultural’. While the local experience of this knowledge will find particular embodiment and expression, such knowledge exists beyond every particularity; the knowledge is true to the extent that it might be abstracted (universalized) from any particular religious and cultural location. The key mechanism for this departicularization lies in ‘reason’ as itself seemingly without cultural location, and may include reasoned accounts of how the natural knowledge of God may not present in forms associated with reason; that is, how, despite appearances, it could still conform to established accounts of ‘reason’.13 Such knowledge, precisely as a universal, is set over against explicit religious commitment.14 While it is possible to associate that knowledge with religious systems (such as Christianity, the form of natural knowledge’s fulfilment), this distance from religion is regarded as a key advantage because it provides ‘support for religious beliefs by starting from premises that neither are nor presuppose any religious beliefs’.15 Such a path from the non-religious to the religious, of course, already betrays a cultural location: one in which the absence of religious belief is a possible starting point. Such is the context of the post-Enlightenment resurgence of natural theology in the west. With the rise of the scientific method, the very idea of the divine needed to appear intelligible for those now suspicious of the authority given to the institutions of revealed theology. But acknowledging this cultural location tests the feasibility of separating religion from culture as distinct realms of human experience.16 The whole becomes more confused if the types of experiences ‘religion’ examines are located within an embodied account of social relations and find primary expression as law and custom; that is, when bound to

For the language of ‘redemptive analogy’ and related examples, see Don Richardson, Peace Child (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2014). 12 Fergusson, ‘Types of Natural Theology’, 392. 13 See, for example, Martin Wilson’s distinguishing ‘insight (the intelligent perception of concrete significance) from its expression. The insight can be spelt out, articulated in basically different modes: in reflectively elaborated concepts (whose material qualities and dimensions function purely as analogues for an otherwise humanly inexpressible reality) or in correlatives (concrete models expressive in their own particular material characteristics). A main point is that insight comes before and grounds expression’. Martin Wilson, ‘Reply to Father Dan O’Donovan’s Letter’, Nelen Yubu 5 (1980): 37. 14 ‘[R]eligions are good insofar as they include in themselves seeds and elements of the natural goodness of creation. Religions are not acknowledged to be good as religions proper, but as expressions of human life created by the one God, the Creator of all’. Miikka Ruokanen, The Catholic Doctrine of Non-Christian Religions: According to the Second Vatican Council (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 105. 15 William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 190. 16 See Timothy Fitzgerald, ‘A Critique of “Religion” as a Cross-Cultural Category’, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 9, no. 2 (1997): 91–110. 11

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particularity. This includes certain interpretive expectations regarding how belief might itself appear fixed or dynamic or open to external influences, and this in a way familiar to those acquainted with the categories of doctrine or dogma and their institutionalization.17 Third, while this knowledge of God is acknowledged as in some sense ‘real’, it remains partial and awaits fulfilment through the particular religious commitment to Christianity. Justin is clear: ‘Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians.’18 As it is a movement from the partial to its fulfilment, so the partial itself admits to degrees. To continue with Justin, the extent of the truth apprehended in any instance of knowing is contingent upon the proportion of the seed-bearing word available to those apprehending that truth.19 However partial the knowledge, as it is identified as ‘real’ knowledge, so it becomes possible to make claims for the religious/cultural other (the atheist is already Christian). This serves a twofold purpose: first, it endears the faith to those disposed to the truths articulated by this other; second, it elevates the Christian faith above those truths as the reality towards which those truths point. The immediate related observation concerns those responsible for recognizing this partial knowledge and identifying the mechanisms of its fulfilment. As Christianity constitutes the form of fulfilment, so Christians assume this responsibility. To cite D. Preman Niles: ‘[W]hat is potentially good and redemptive in any culture or history becomes in fact so only when it is appropriated into a Christian viewpoint.’20 This results in an assumed task of discernment. In the words of Ad Gentes, it belongs to Christian witness to ‘gladly and reverently lay bare the seeds of the Word which lie hidden among their fellows’, to learn ‘what treasures a generous God has distributed among the nations of the earth’, and ‘to furbish these treasures, set them free, and bring them under the dominion of God their Savior’.21 Such a need for refurbishment indicates that the evaluative judgement is itself double-edged: as the knowledge is partial, so it is distorted. In stronger terms, sitting alongside the acknowledgement of ‘the good’ and ‘the true’ lies the ‘diabolical imitations’ of the human turning to serve the creature rather than the creator.22 Though universal and true, in its partiality it can serve the diabolical. Furthermore, because this partial knowledge is universal, it is true only to the extent that it might reflect values that are true beyond any local forms of embodiment. Identifying ‘the good’ and ‘the true’ takes form in abstractions like ‘liberty’, ‘progress’, ‘unity’, and ‘peace’.23 But these abstractions never remain abstractions – they necessarily become embodied because the framing criterion for the transition is ‘salvation’; they lie in the possibility that these inhabitants

See Erich Kolig, ‘Religious Power and the All-Father in the Sky: Monotheism in Australian Aboriginal Culture Reconsidered’, Anthropos 87, no. 1/3 (1992): 9–32. 18 Justin, Second Apology, 13. 19 Justin, Second Apology, 13. 20 D. Preman Niles, ‘Reviewing and Responding to the Thought of Choan-Seng Song’, Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research 1, no. 3 (1977): 9. For an overt statement of this point, see Ruokanen, The Catholic Doctrine of Non-Christian Religions, 111: ‘Various cultural forms are accepted and adapted by each local branch of the Church insofar as they are in accordance with the natural goodness of created things as understood by the Church’. 21 ‘Decree on the Mission Nature of the Church, Ad Gentes Divinitus (AG)’, in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport: Costello, 1996), §11. Hereafter cited as Ad Gentes. 22 Justin, First Apology, 54. 23 Ad Gentes, §8. 17

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of a partial knowledge of God ‘might at length have life’.24 Salvation takes embodied forms. One might point to the associated religious rituals, doctrines, liturgies, institutions, hierarchies, and so on of this embodiment, how salvation is ‘proclaimed and sacramentally represented by the Church’.25 However, the era of colonial missions makes clear that the embodied form of the Christian faith reflects the local value structures of western civilization, that the movement from partial local knowledge to embodiment is the movement from ‘paganism’ and ‘superstition’ to ‘civilization’, and this includes the evacuation of local cultures.26

Western imposition and the recovery of the pre-Christian heritage Natural theology, structured by these three principles and directed to an apologetic end, is, to cite Rebecca Lyman’s evaluation of Justin, ‘a cover-up for exporting Christian revelation and asserting Christian power .  .  . for the purpose of a religious and cultural coup’.27 Such a conclusion, no doubt, requires some interpretation. The evident and ongoing realities of a ‘cultural coup’ are often associated with Christian missions as they accompany western colonization. This point is not contested here. Contested, instead, is the proposal that natural theology not simply distances the Christian faith and its transmission from this end but is actually its ‘solution’; that is, it enables some form of redress and healing. Or, precisely in its willingness to acknowledge a real partial knowledge of God found in local culture prior to the entry of western missions, natural theology is assumed to curate forms of continuity between pre-Christian heritage and contemporary Christian embodiments. This appears to be a dominant position within Christian accounts of creation. So, to undo this assumption, it is necessary first to name the nature of the cultural coup. The colonial experience is, of course, complex and varied according to time and location. Of interest here are the forms and consequences of religio-cultural discontinuity. Observe first the materialist cosmology undergirding western cultures in the post-Enlightenment era and its significance in interpreting the gospel message. In the occasion of cross-cultural transmission, missionaries ‘imported Christianity “wrapped” in their ideologies, cultural technologies, scientific cosmologies, and personal idiosyncrasies’.28 It is an obvious point, but

‘Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (LG)’, in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport: Costello, 1996), §16. Hereafter cited as Lumen Gentium. 25 Ruokanen, The Catholic Doctrine of Non-Christian Religions, 105. 26 One might indicate how these framing ideas were exacerbated during the Enlightenment, reinforcing links between the Christian faith as a universal natural religion and its end in the civilizational hallmarks of European societies. See Michael Gladwin, ‘Mission and Colonialism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought, ed. Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe, and Johannes Zachhuber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 288. 27 J. Rebecca Lyman, ‘Justin and Hellenism: Some Postcolonial Perspectives’, in Justin Martyr and His Worlds, ed. Sara Parvis and Paul Foster (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 163–4. Lyman further argues that Martyr’s modus was itself modelled on ‘a common negotiation of cultures’, a common form of argument concerning the nature of truth and the human capacity to inhabit it, one which relied on a definition of ‘Greekness’ as an ‘aggregation of civilised and intellectual values’, meaning that ‘every civilised person had the capacity to be a Hellene’. Lyman, ‘Justin and Hellenism’, 167, here citing Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 21. 28 Mogola Kamiali, ‘Missionary Attitudes: A Subjective and Objective Analysis’, Melanesian Journal of Theology 2, no. 2 (1986): 145. 24

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it meant that a gospel formulated in a world without or against spirits resulted in a message that failed to address basic human needs in worlds filled with spirits. William Longgar laments how ‘borrowed theologies’ ignored ‘the existential realities that Melanesians face every day: sickness and healing, spirit possession, high infant mortality rates, crop failures, barrenness among women, unemployment, job promotion, and other real-life issues’.29 As it failed to address these basic human needs, so this gospel failed to appreciate the social forms developed to meet those needs. Salvation as the embodiment of the gospel required the forms that corresponded to and evidenced the gospel. Negatively stated, this means eliminating the range of rituals and social structures aimed at these needs. Dick Avi laments the loss of ‘some very fundamental and noble values, or traditions’ when Indigenous Christians were ‘taught to throw away all their traditional, and customary, practices, ceremonies, symbols, songs, and dances, with the attendant spirituality, and religious, or cultural, beliefs’.30 This reflects what is often a complete disregard for local cultural substance on behalf of western missionaries. Denationalization (the removal of a convert or a community from the wider social context by radically changing social patterns, institutions, and behaviours) follows. Positively stated, it results in importing a wider set of social indicators of conversion and the capacity to live the ‘good’ productive life, such as ideas and technologies surrounding agriculture.31 It means taking on western cultural forms (economics, education, law, health, governance), along with embodied forms of religious practice (hymnologies, creeds, liturgies, hierarchies, schisms). It means that ‘Aboriginal people have been obliged to adopt western styles of worship and church leadership’,32 with the effect that church practices can separate believers from ‘key family, social and spiritual values. As Aboriginal people enter into the life of a Christian church community, they can find themselves compelled to leave their culture “at the door”’.33 This failure to account for basic beliefs and their embodied social forms, and the coordinated replacement of beliefs and embodied forms, results in the presentation of Jesus Christ as a ‘completely new God who had had nothing to do with the past of Africa’.34 It destroys any potential bridging between the pre-Christian religious and cultural world to the new creation. To cite Tinyiko Maluleke: ‘To be truly Christian means not to be truly African.’35 The ongoing social cost of this cultural dislocation is all too well documented.36

William K. Longgar, ‘Authenticating Melanesian Biblical Theology: A Response to Foreign Theologies’, Point Series 40 (2016): 31. 30 Dick Avi, ‘Contextualisation in Melanesia’, Melanesian Journal of Theology 4, no. 1 (1988): 16. 31 See John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, ‘The Colonization of Consciousness’, in Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Oxford: Westview Press, 1992), 246–50. 32 Graham Paulson, ‘Towards an Aboriginal Theology’, Pacifica 19, no. 3 (2006): 311. 33 Patrick L. Dodson, Jacinta K. Elston, and Brian F. McCoy, ‘Leaving Culture at the Door: Aboriginal Perspectives on Christian Belief and Practice’, Pacifica 19, no. 3 (2006): 250. 34 E. Bolaji Idowu, ‘The Predicament of the Church in Africa’, in Christianity in Tropical Africa: Studies Presented and Discussed at the Seventh International African Seminar, University of Ghana, April 1965, ed. Christian G. Baëta (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 433. 35 Tinyiko S. Maluleke, ‘Christ in Africa: The Influence of Multi-culturity on the Experience of Christ’, Journal of Black Theology in South Africa 8, no. 1 (1994): 53. 36 This may be illustrated in any number of ways, but the Indigenous peoples of the world experience disproportionate rates of incarceration. As one example from Australia, see Australian Law Reform Commission, ‘Disproportionate Incarceration Rate’, Australian Government, accessed 23 March 2022, https://www​.alrc​.gov​.au​/publication​/pathways​ 29

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The effort to rehabilitate the ‘gospel’, the assertion of its capacity to liberate and heal, focuses on the pre-Christian heritage as itself foundational to contemporary embodied forms of the faith. The emphasis now falls on continuity. Such theological linkage begins with affirming the givenness of God’s presence through history and in the experience and social life of local peoples. Ray Minniecon, drawing on Heb. 1.1-2, observes that ‘God did not arrive with the invaders. Our ancestors knew God in their own way through story, land and relationships’.37 Terry Djiniyini, drawing on Amos 9.7 and Acts 10.34-35, notes that God shows no partiality, meaning that God is not the ‘white man’s God’, but ‘He is our God who has lived with us in history’.38 In this regard, features of Aboriginal life, such as the totem, are wrongly named and dismissed by Christians as ‘pagan’. ‘In Aboriginal tradition a ceremonial visit to a sacred site does not emphasize worship, but rather focuses upon the traditional law.’39 The central and structural importance of the law and custom establishes links between this local experience and the experiences narrated through the Old Testament. ‘The Aboriginal Law is almost identical to Mosaic Law.’40 Reading the law through Gal. 3.23-25, traditional custom and spirituality functions as ‘the “school master” or “guardian” or “custodian” of the Melanesians until they came of age to inherit the truth of the Gospel and share in their inheritance in Christ’.41 Law, custom, and traditional religion ‘tutored’ local peoples through the generations leading them to find ‘genuine fulfillment in the Gospel’.42 Jesus came to fulfil the law, not to destroy it. To continue with Longgar, God’s own journeying ‘with their ancestors between time and space’ lead the Melanesians to want to know this God, attributing to God ‘local names that could only explain in religious terms who this invisible power was’.43 With this idea of the ‘unknown God’ (Acts 17.23), Lamin Sanneh argues that the Christian gospel ‘enabled Africans “to decode” their “religious instincts”’, instincts regarding the God who had preceded the missionaries proclaiming this same God.44 Affirming such is necessary precisely due to the embodiment of salvation; that is, due to salvation not as a form of cultural replacement but rather the salvation of this local people.

-to​-justice​-inquiry​-into​-the​-incarceration​-rate​-of​-aboriginal​-and​-torres​-strait​-islander​-peoples​-alrc​-report​-133​/ executive​-summary​-15​/disproportionate​-incarceration​-rate: ‘Although Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults make up around 2% of the national population, they constitute 27% of the national prison population’. 37 Ray Minniecon, ‘Indigenous Theology: The Australian Experience – Where Is the Starting Point?’, Journal of NAIITS 14 (2016): 27. 38 Terry Djiniyini, ‘Aboriginal Christianity: Based on Indigenous Theology’, Nelen Yubu 18 (1984): 30–1. Lamin Sanneh reads Acts 10.34-35 as the decisive text for Christian history. See Lamin O. Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3–5. 39 Djiniyini, ‘Aboriginal Christianity’, 33. 40 Charles Harris, ‘Guidelines for So-called Western Civilisation and Western Christianity’, in Aboriginal Spirituality: Past, Present and Future, ed. Anne Pattel-Gray (Blackburn: Harper Collins, 1996), 67. 41 Longgar, ‘Authenticating Melanesian Biblical Theology’, 29. For a development of this idea using Gal. 4.1-5, see John M. Hitchen, ‘Mission to Primal Religious Groups in a Postmodern Context’, in Mission and Postmodernities, ed. Rolv Olsen (London: Regnum, 2011), 139–71. 42 John S. Mbiti, ‘Christianity and African Religion’, in Facing the New Challenges: The Message of Pan African Christian Leadership Assembly (PACLA): December 9–19, 1976, Nairobi, ed. M. Cassidy and L. Verlinden (Kisumu: Evangel Publishing House, 1978), 311. Cited in Gerald O. West, ‘African Culture as Praeparatio Evangelica: The Old Testament as Preparation of the African Post-Colonial’, in Postcolonialism and the Hebrew Bible: The Next Step, ed. Roland Boer (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), 196. 43 Longgar, ‘Authenticating Melanesian Biblical Theology’, 38. 44 West, ‘African Culture as Praeparatio Evangelica’, 196.

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The colonization of natural theology So stated, it appears that natural theology offers an adequate interpretive theological framework for acknowledging continuity between the pre-Christian heritage and contemporary Christian commitments and embodied forms. Or, the recognition that western missionaries proclaimed the Word of God in cultural form is overcome by reference to the experience of God prior to missionary arrival. The problem is, however, that natural theology as a project of Christian theology succeeds only as it conflates the voices upon which it relies. Indigenous commentaries on creation and attendant social forms of embodiment become read as confirming narratives of natural theology’s established structures. To illustrate this point, observe how natural theology does not form at some distance from the strategies of the western missionary enterprise – missions developed approaches using natural theology and the idea of an existing point of contact within the pre-Christian heritage. One such strategy lies in identifying a high-god within the local religion or cosmology and promoting the use of that name to name the God of the Bible. Though a common occurrence, several evident problems accompany the strategy: not all societies or religious systems refer to a god, never-mind a high-god (non-personalist accounts of the divine as in Buddhism, for example), some include a pantheon of high-gods, and sometimes the presence of a high-god has developed as a result of the encounter with Christianity.45 As an ancillary consequence of identifying a high-god, one which might be used to reflect the Christian creator God, it becomes possible to suppress an additional plurality of spiritual beings (or to name these as demonic and so dispense with them in other ways), and attendant forms of spirituality and ritual, found within local cosmologies.46 The affirmation of a high-god permits the merging of the local religious system with that assumed by western forms of Christianity. Alternately stated: ‘Aboriginal peoples’ experiences of the transcendent were expected to be limited to western understandings.’47 This limiting serves a further constructive purpose. According to Tink Tinker, it leads to the affirmation of ‘the self-identity and cosmology of the conquering colonizer’ and coerces ‘the Native into the new cultural modality of singularity and hierarchy’.48 Conversion becomes ‘the contradiction of the heathen’, to use Sylvester Johnson’s phrase, because the conversion to western forms includes within it an ongoing shame regarding the failure of their prior history and culture to know God.49 The point is not simply that the process

Stated belief structures, in other words, proved malleable in a way uncommon for those familiar with doctrine and dogma and the structuring and identifying function of such. See Gideon C. Goosen, ‘Christian and Aboriginal Interface in Australia’, Theological Studies 60, no. 1 (1999): 82–6. See further, James L. Cox, The Invention of God in Indigenous Societies (London: Routledge, 2014). 46 See Kwame Bediako, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995), 97–101. Bediako observes how Christian scholars of both western and African origin struggle with the plurality of spiritual beings in the primal imagination, and how reference to the one transcendent God serves to suppress rather than address that plurality. 47 Anne Pattel-Gray and Garry W. Trompf, ‘Styles of Australian Aboriginal and Melanesian Theology’, International Review of Mission 82, no. 326 (1993): 170. 48 George E. Tinker, ‘Why I Do Not Believe in a Creator’, in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice, and Life Together, ed. Steve Heinrichs (Waterloo: Herald Press, 2013), 173. 49 See Jawanza E. Clark, Indigenous Black Theology: Toward an African-Centered Theology of the African-American Religious Experience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 30–6. 45

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is fraught but that it is itself an exercise of Christian projection upon local histories, conforming those histories to a claimed trans-cultural natural knowledge of God and its peculiar ordering of the world. One common avenue of response affirms the development of contextual theologies. Writing out of the Melanesian context, Avi names ‘contextualization’ as the necessary avenue for ‘recovering the broken ties between . . . their own people and culture’.50 Contextualization includes both a disassociation from imported western forms and an affirmation of local forms. By way of illustration, for Djiniyini, because God ‘does not take away their culture or language and their true identity as Aboriginal people’, the local church has the freedom to organize ‘herself in her own context in structure, tradition, style and a theology which is our own’.51 Again, this seems to be an obvious point. The problem is that contextual theology as a form of theologizing shaped in relation to western theological discourse (as a movement of negation and construction) is itself limited by a range of controlling assumptions that maintain the priorities of that discourse. This occurs because the discussion remains beholden to the language of the faith’s embodiment.52 That is, contextual questions fall prey to an interpretive and regulatory framework that identifies such questions as illustrative of the ‘diversity’ of theological systems and so embeds them within accounts of ‘unity’ against which diversity constitutes a threat. This leads to the imposition of ‘limits’ on that diversity to render it ‘legitimate’. As one consequence, contextual theologies must conform to a determined shape. The project itself, as Jione Havea observes, rests on the transportation and representation of meaning and forms developed in a foreign location so that they find some ground in another environment. Basic to this is the ‘tendency to omit the differentiating and excess stuff ’ – that is, to elide the very particularity of the receiving context. Contextual theology ‘in subtle ways, resurrect[s] the drive to harmonize, at the expense of diversity and complexity’.53 But this point might be extended: contextual theology is subject to strict controls by mandating acceptable (recognizable) forms. The first lies in liberative political application of the theological tradition, especially as this liberation serves the instantiation of democratic models.54 The second appeals to local metaphors (e.g. mango,55 verandah,56 coconut,57 or pig58). Such theologies are celebrated because they are

Avi, ‘Contextualisation in Melanesia’, 16. Djiniyini, ‘Aboriginal Christianity’, 33. 52 For an extended reflection on how ecumenical discussions of ‘apostolicity’ frame this discussion, see John G. Flett, Apostolicity: The Ecumenical Question in World Christian Perspective (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2016). 53 Jione Havea, ‘The Cons of Contextuality . . . Kontextuality’, in Contextual Theology for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Stephen B. Bevans and Katalina Tahaafe-Williams (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 47. 54 For an examination of the types of tensions surfacing in this discussion, see Mark G. Brett, ‘Postcolonial Ecumenism and Its Multiple Contexts of Solidarity’, in Indigenous Australia and the Unfinished Business of Theology: Cross-Cultural Engagement, ed. Jione Havea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 17–24. 55 See Hwa Yung, Mangoes or Bananas? The Quest for an Authentic Asian Christian Theology (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2015). 56 See Stephen Pickard, ‘The View from the Verandah: Gospel and Spirituality in an Australian Setting’, St Mark’s Review 174 (1998): 4–10. See also the critical response in Tracy Spencer, ‘Getting Off the Verandah: Contextual Australian Theology In-Land and in Story’, Pacifica 19, no. 3 (2006): 323–41. 57 See Sione ʻAmanaki Havea, ‘Christianity in the Pacific Context’, in South Pacific Theology: Papers from the Consultation on Pacific Theology, Papa New Guinea, January 1986, ed. R. Boyd Johnson (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1987), 11–15; Josefa Mairara, ‘The Floating Coconut: A Contextual Approach to Methodist Mission in Fiji’, Asia Journal of Theology 21, no. 2 (2007): 183–96. 58 See Ama’amalele Tofaeono, ‘Behold the Pig of God: Mystery of Christ’s Sacrifice in the Context of Melanesia– Oceania’, Pacific Journal of Theology 33 (2005): 82–102. 50 51

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local (i.e. confirming the diverse appropriation and so universality of the Christian faith) and because, as diverse appropriations (i.e. grounded in located political circumstances or cultural commentaries), they are isolated from the wider dominant tradition. Much of the theologizing taking place within local communities remains unpalatable to western academic theological discourse – even while there are common points of focus within the social sciences. Included here is the importance of dreams, healings, exorcisms, spirits, or the instructions of the ancestors. Matching the intentions and processes behind identifying a high-god, the details of the local understanding and experience, and its attachment to place, is secondary to the general affirmation of a commonality shared across traditions. However, as the truth of diverse local expression resides in the universal of creation, so the various local practices detach from their locality and become available for consumption, for their repackaging and redistribution as ‘spiritual’ or ‘Christian’ practices.59 Aloysius Pieris names this ‘theological vandalism’, and while the language of ‘baptism’ often validates this enlistment of detached practices, it is ‘Christian triumphalism, which turns everything it touches to its own advantage, with no reverence for the wholeness of the religious experience of others’.60 It is a theology that appropriates but is without reciprocity, leading again to the imposition of the values and philosophies of a dominant group on a receiving group, with a ‘resulting tendency to ethnocentrism, ignorance, and intellectual dishonesty on the part of the dominant Christian groups’.61 As one final illustration of this conflation of voice, note that the theological language of fulfilment runs in two directions. The first highlights the local reception of the gospel and how this fulfils the questions and longings expressed by local culture through its law, custom, art, ritual, and religion, and is often described in terms of a confirming and deepening of Aboriginal identity. The second highlights the fulfilment of the Christian faith itself: the fullness of the gospel is contingent upon indigenous experiences and lived forms. Local insight rooted in its own cultural and religious experience contributes to the understanding of the gospel (an unquestioned affirmation when made in relation to Greek culture but somehow radical when applied to Aboriginal peoples). An obvious point concerns how the experience of ‘fulfilment’ outlined earlier rests in the evacuation of local identities and in mandating western forms. Djiniyini takes the axiomatic position that ‘[t]he Christian God has come through each person’s culture’.62 However, where ‘the Reformation gave Western culture the freedom to explore that dialogue in many directions . . . the Western church has not, in turn, given that same freedom to Aboriginal people to explore that dialogue through their own culture’.63 Part of the fulfilment discussion, in other words, rests in the rejection of western forms, in relation to both the assumption of normativity and the potential of these forms to violence. The promise of local fulfilment includes calling the western church to repentance. But, this negative posture (often the one highlighted) includes a corresponding positive assertion – the very incapacity of Christian communions to permit local forms of fulfilment amounts to paganism. In Australia,

See, for example, Tinker, ‘Why I Do Not Believe in a Creator’, 167–79; Garry Worete Deverell, Gondwana Theology: A Trawloolway Man Reflects on Christian Faith (Reservoir: Morning Star Publishing, 2018), 9–18. 60 Aloysius Pieris, An Asian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988), 85. 61 Longgar, ‘Authenticating Melanesian Biblical Theology’, 26. 62 Djiniyini, ‘Aboriginal Christianity’, 31. 63 Djiniyini, ‘Aboriginal Christianity’, 31. 59

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for example, the first goal of the Aboriginal church is to call the ‘Australian church away from its paganism and its idolatry and back to the true and living God of the Dreamtime’.64 The failure to learn from local embodiments and the continued reassertion of received theological norms framing the western theological enterprise (as manifest in the settled patterns of natural theology) betray the freedom underlying the possibility (and necessity) of diverse embodiments of the gospel.

The histories of the departicularized spirit and the particular Jesus Christ Affirming a universal experience of God in creation, far from offering a solution to the concerns of continuity, perpetuates a colonial approach to local traditions. Indigenous voices remain sidelined: ‘discovering’ an appropriate point of contact permits the evacuation of the remainder of indigenous wisdom, ritual, law, custom, and social system, either via the simple disregard of the various mediating forms within a local culture (spirits, ancestors, law), or via reducing local theological insight and practice to commodities available for wider consumption, or via rendering those insights as of only adjectival significance (not theology proper, but Indigenous or contextual theologies). The previous discussion, however, is not simply critical: it demonstrates that natural theology is not ‘external’ to theological commitment as a form of ‘general theology’. It is a constructive Christian theology that aims at forming bridges between embodied forms of the Christian faith and other belief structures (including secular commitments). It is a theology of cultural negotiation. The problem lies not in this attempt at negotiation but in the surreptitious form it assumes and in the underlying assertion of cultural power upon which it relies. Identifying it as an explicit project of Christian theology frees the discussion for a better determination of the problem and the existing operative controls; namely, these assertions regarding the nature of creation are a façade hiding a contest of time and a consequent privileging of (historically and culturally located) embodied forms. Observe how reference to the Spirit often accompanies formal theological accounts of the natural knowledge of God in creation. As one example, Redemptoris Missio names the Spirit as the one ‘who sows the “seeds of the Word” present in various customs and cultures, preparing them for full maturity in Christ’.65 While a common assertion, for many, it lacks material theological consequence. Terry LeBlanc, for example, laments how pneumatology tends to reduce to a discussion of ‘gifts’ to the neglect of ‘Spirit’s animation of the rest of creation’, reducing it to a ‘passing reference on the way to the focal point or pinnacle of God’s story’.66 At other times, the link between the s/Spirit and creation requires a christological key to bear meaning. To continue with Redemptoris Missio, the ‘universal activity of the Spirit’ in bringing about a ‘preparation for the Gospel . . . can only be understood in reference to Christ’.67 This establishes a tension whereby the validation of local heritage lies in acknowledging the ‘animating’ work

Harris, ‘Guidelines for So-Called Western Civilisation and Western Christianity’, 77. John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio, §28. 66 Terry L. LeBlanc, ‘Spirit and Spirituality: New Old Perspectives’, Journal of NAIITS 8 (2010): 71. 67 John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio, §29. 64 65

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of the s/Spirit in creation – at some distance from the work of Jesus Christ, with that later work bound to ‘salvation’ and the body of Christ, that is, the church. With the church a visible society moving through time, some direct connection forms between the experience of Jesus Christ and the west’s own history. This constitutes a strange point of agreement in the debate: the embodied historical presence of Jesus Christ becomes associated with the entrance of the western church during the colonial period. Creation and the acting of the s/Spirit in creation permit a manner of theological support for the validation of the ‘pre-’Christian tradition. This is the point: creation constitutes a universal that permits some form of theological recognition, an account of ‘continuity’ between the local and particular heritage and its ‘fulfilment’. Reference to creation, in other words, establishes the terms of temporality.68 By way of illustration, Choan-Seng Song begins his reflection on the cultural interaction of the Christian faith with the cultures of Asia with an extended treatment of the terms ‘history’, ‘continuity’, ‘discontinuity’, and ‘interruption’. Each of these terms exists in a necessary and discordant relationship. Meaning gives continuity to history but does so in moments that disrupt or interrupt that continuity: history is not fate. But one temptation with asserting the continuity of the meaning of history lies in its possible institutionalization. This is the problem of the church in its western forms: ‘the history which the Christian Church has carved out for itself from world history has come to be identified with God’s redemption in history.’69 The stable relationship between the (western) church and western civilization reinforces ‘the identification of the Church with the so-called history of salvation’.70 During the colonial era, this theologizing of history forged links between cultural trauma and its internalization in the conviction of sin and guilt, with salvation taking form as participation in the forms embodied by western civilization.71 Before one thinks that Song overstates his case, a 1968 Faith and Order report made clear that the history of the church is a ‘universal history, in the sense that all groups, tribes, nations, imperial, races, and classes are involved in one and the same history’.72 While the very universality of that history was ‘identified with a special “Christian culture”, limited to Europe’, it now, thanks to colonization, permits later generations to experience the same ‘universalizing and unifying of history’.73 For Song, this position mandates a peculiar vantage point: other cultures and histories become viewed through a lens of ‘the historical continuity of a messianic hope believed to be lodged in the history of the Christian Church’, meaning that ‘the relation between God’s redemption and these cultures and histories becomes an intermediate one’.74 The bearer of that historical continuity becomes the necessary mediator of the faith, and this

See, for example, Jooseop Keum, ed., Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (Geneva: WCC, 2013); Michael Amaladoss, ‘Cross-Inculturation of Indian and African Christianity’, African Ecclesiastical Review 32, no. 3 (1990): 157–68; George E. Tinker, ‘The Integrity of Creation: Restoring Trinitarian Balance’, The Ecumenical Review 41, no. 4 (1989): 527–36. 69 Choan-Seng Song, ‘From Israel to Asia: A Theological Leap’, The Ecumenical Review 28, no. 3 (1976): 255. 70 Song, ‘From Israel to Asia’, 256. 71 See Tinker, ‘The Integrity of Creation’, 530–1. 72 New Directions in Faith and Order, Bristol 1967: Reports – Minutes – Documents (Geneva: WCC, 1968), 25. 73 New Directions in Faith and Order, 25. 74 Song, ‘From Israel to Asia’, 256. 68

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denies the possibility that the ‘histories of the nations’ might themselves inform the nature of that continuity. Song indicates that the key failure lies in the operative Christian account of history, a logic that sets revelation, faith, and history in a determined order. Creation affords an answer but is itself formed in relation to this logic: with the incarnation set in distinction to creation, the part-solution sets the Spirit in creation and in distinction to Christ. Such a distinction itself lies as basic to the ‘historical particularism’ that conflates the history of Jesus Christ with the history of the western church.75 In other words, this approach grants that the western church properly owns Jesus Christ’s embodied form, his history. Distinguishing the Spirit in creation from the history of Jesus Christ intends to safeguard a cultural past and, by this, to secure a measure of continuity, the notion that local histories contribute to the faith.76 This very move, however, inhibits more than it helps. In that local wisdom is identified with creation and the Spirit, and this over against Jesus Christ and his history, then the very contribution of that wisdom is in distinction to christology – local wisdom only secondarily contributes to the fullness of Jesus Christ. More than this, any knowledge deemed prior to the entrance of western missions is identified as ‘non-Christocentric truth’ and results in the dismissal of that knowledge even if its partiality was affirmed.77 It further grants that ‘salvation’ belongs to that historical embodiment of Jesus Christ and is something to be distinguished from the acting of the Spirit in creation; that is, it retains the frameworks of universality, partiality, and preparatory – local wisdom only secondarily contributes to the fullness of salvation and its embodied experience. Undoing these claims to history and the consequential denigration of pre-Christian heritage requires an account of history as linked to place. The problem of creation and of continuity is a problem of time.

The time of place ‘Creation’ is an interpreted reality. It is contingent upon culture; culture provides the language, the aesthetic, and the interpretive frameworks to discover nature and draw conclusions about its reality. Creation as perceived directs human response. This is aptly demonstrated by the economic and colonial behaviours attached to the ideas of ‘dominion’ and ‘stewardship’ and the theological roots supporting hostility towards native peoples.78 As a second example, Tink Tinker observes that there are ‘no credible, historical American Indian stories that tell of a creation ex nihilo, a creation from nothing’.79 Each story begins with the creation of a people

Choan-Seng Song, ‘The Divine Mission of Creation’, in What Asian Christians Are Thinking: A Theological Source Book, ed. Douglas J. Elwood (Quezon City: New Day, 1978), 312. 76 For one example, see Edmond Tang, ‘The Cosmic Christ – the Search for a Chinese Theology’, Studies in World Christianity 1, no. 2 (1995): 131–42. 77 Clark, Indigenous Black Theology, 55. 78 See, for example, Vine Deloria Jr., ‘An Open Letter to the Heads of the Christian Churches in America’, in For This Land: Writings on Religion in America (New York: Routledge, 1999), 77–83; Kevin Gilbert, ‘God at the Campfire and That Christ Fella’, in Aboriginal Spirituality: Past, Present and Future, ed. Anne Pattel-Gray (Blackburn: Harper Collins, 1996), 54–65. 79 Tinker, ‘Why I Do Not Believe in a Creator’, 175–6. See also Kwasi Wiredu, ‘Toward Decolonizing African Philosophy and Religion’, African Studies Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1998): 17–46. 75

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within an already existing world. The emphasis falls on maintaining balance or harmony and includes the ritualized practices and social ordering through the law and custom of a people in a place. This identity of a people with place is of such fundamental existential importance that the enforced removal from place is ‘culturally and genocidally destructive to Indian peoples as peoples’.80 ‘Creation’ is an interpreted reality. It is not a ‘universal’, something that is apprehended the same way across times and cultures. It is an idea that exists only in relation to other sets of ideas, such as history, place, and salvation. For Sevati Tuwere, an ‘[o]ver-concentration on salvation at the expense of creation is tantamount to a view of history without place, or humanity without the womb, the vanua’.81 Much resides within this affirmation. First, it suggests that popular conceptions of salvation are disembodied, set over-against creation and birth. Second, the question of salvation and disembodiment is itself set in relation to the dissociation of history from place. Both result in theological distortions. Tuwere’s concern for a ‘sustained theological interpretation of history’ begins with a lament for how the history of Oceania is dominated by the stories of western colonial institutions. The point is not to deny these stories but to declare them incomplete because they fail to ‘permit or enhance people’s participation in the contemporary history of Oceania, with reference to the Christian story’.82 Any account of this history must include a ‘direct link’ to the history of Israel, without mediation through ‘Sydney or London or Rome’.83 This will mean a necessary realignment of ‘entrance’ stories, especially those that rehearse the identity of the Christian faith and western colonial expansion. It will promote local accounts of the flow of time and history that retain an active role of the ancestors or the law as leading peoples to Jesus Christ, forsaking a departicularized knowledge of the divine for one centred on a relational guiding within the community and its interactions with other communities. This history stimulates a continuity of embodiment, of salvation, and is part of the Christian faith growing in the fullness of the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Nor is this concern with history an abstraction; it is tied to place.84 In opposition to an account of history married to lineal time and the processes of evolution – an account which, in the estimation of Kosuke Koyama, underlies imperialism and the idea of a ‘manifest destiny’85 – history lives in a location itself alive with ‘symbolic meaning’ that remains ‘operative today’, such as ‘our continuous belief in the ancestors, in our living legends, myths and use of sorcery’.86 To deny the realities of place as ‘mother’ is to render Christianity ‘incomplete and superficial’ because it ‘denies itself a deeper understanding of the inner recesses of our people’s lives’.87 This concern with place cannot be detached from local existence as though it resided at a mere

George E. Tinker, ‘An American Indian Theological Response to Ecojustice’, Ecotheology: Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture 2, no. 1 (1997): 97. 81 Ilaitia S. Tuwere, ‘Emerging Themes for a Pacific Theology’, Pacific Journal of Theology 7 (1992): 53. 82 Tuwere, ‘Emerging Themes for a Pacific Theology’, 52. 83 Tuwere, ‘Emerging Themes for a Pacific Theology’, 52. 84 See Josiah Baker, ‘Native American Contributions to a Christian Theology of Space’, Studies in World Christianity 22, no. 3 (2016): 234–46. 85 See Kosuke Koyama, ‘New World – New Creation: Mission in Power and Faith’, Mission Studies 10, nos. 1–2 (1993): 72–5. 86 Tuwere, ‘Emerging Themes for a Pacific Theology’, 52. 87 Tuwere, ‘Emerging Themes for a Pacific Theology’, 53. 80

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conceptual level. To cite Māori theologian Sir Paul Reeves, former Anglican archbishop of the Church of the Province of Aotearoa/New Zealand and governor-general of New Zealand: When one thinks of life one thinks of one’s mother. A Māori viewpoint is that the land is Papa-tua-nuku, our ‘earth mother’. . . . As they work the land they are engaged in the sacred act of bringing life to birth. To rob people who believe this about land is to rob them of life. Land is their right to life, to power, and to eternity.88 This linkage of history and place and the centrality of land for the livingness of a people is an oft-stated and consistent refrain across the native peoples of the world.89 The first constructive lesson rests in attributing significant theological merit to this difference in conceiving creation and so differences in accounts of history, of place, and of the embodiment of salvation. The concern for continuity is not resolved via the insertion of a norm (a universalized creation) that itself interferes with that continuity. It is not possible for local peoples to simply accept this retelling due to the concrete human behaviours which follow in its train. Robbery, dispossession, and forced removal from place demonstrably result in a generations-long loss of identity and of location, and in physical death. The emphasis on place and inculturation is immediately political; the spiritual and the political belong together as law serves the balance of creation. To continue the practice of an imagined ‘trans-historical’ and ‘trans-cultural’ commentary regarding creation is simply to assert the normatively of the dominant tradition’s account. The spiritualization of creation permits its further compartmentalization as ‘possession’ or ‘environment’ with the attached assumptions regarding ‘ownership’ and ‘use’.90 In place of a wooden universalization of creation, it belongs to the fulfilment of Christianity that it learns a theology of place, a theology already in robust form through the work of Indigenous authors. This will include greater attention to the operative account of history driving much Christian theology – a history formed due to the consequential link between the movement of a community through time and its visible form. Local embodied forms that develop in continuity with the pre-Christian heritage must reject two assumptions: that the history of Jesus Christ is identified with the history of the church through its western course, and that the Spirit’s acting is at some distance from Jesus Christ. The difficulty here lies not in the positive theological construction. It lies in recognizing the extent to which the assumed normative embodied forms of ‘salvation’ trade upon that account of history. Among other things, this means rejecting the application of the arbitrary limits posed on ‘diversity’, limits mandated as protecting the ‘unity’ occasioned by the historical continuity of these embodied forms. The

Paul A. Reeves, ‘Mission and Church Identity’, in Crossroads Are for Meeting: Essays on the Mission and Common Life of the Church in a Global Society, ed. Philip W. Turner and Frank E. Sugeno (Sewanee: SPCK, 1986), 209–10. 89 As one example, see the Indigenous commentary in Denis Edwards, ‘Apprentices in Faith to the Aboriginal View of the Land’, Compass Theology Review 20, no. 1 (1986): 23–31. 90 See, for example, the 1991 legal case that sought to secure traditional lands within Northwestern British Colombia for non-Native usage and the argument that ‘Aboriginal people did not use the backcountry . . . the land was empty’. Jonathan Dyck and Cornelius A. Buller, ‘Mapping the Land: Toward an Aboriginal Biblical Theology of Land’, Journal of NAIITS 2 (2004): 55. 88

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difficulty, in other words, lies in the critical work of deconstructing territorial accounts of ‘the faith’ (its de-identification with western forms and history). As to the positive theological reconstruction, several theological trails present themselves (‘embodiment’, ‘salvation’, ‘pneumatology’), but we begin with the resurrection and the living history of the now-cosmic Jesus Christ. Johann Baptist Metz, in rejecting an account of evolutionary time, one in which ‘[n]othing from the past can be saved from its graceless, indifferent continuity’, observes that ‘the God of the living and of the dead, the God for whom even the past and the dead are not left to rest in peace – is absolutely unthinkable within this logic’.91 Insofar as natural theologies draw on evolutionary time, on the movement from partial truth to its fulfilment, so they fail to speak of the living God. The possibility of embodied forms of salvation, the possibility that the gospel speaks to the whole of creation, lies in the possibility of the redemption of our histories and so in the possibility of diverse Christian histories. It lies with the God who raised Jesus from the dead. This is not a God who closes history, who limits our histories to a simple pre- and post-, to a graceless and empty continuum. This God overcomes death. The dead are those without a future and so without the possibility of a history. Their history is ended. But no people exist without a history. An embodied salvation recognizes human histories and redeems also those histories. This includes the salvation of ancestors because we are not who we are without our ancestors.92 Kwame Bediako describes the pre-Christian religious traditions as being part of ‘an “ontological” past, which, together with the profession of the Christian faith, gives account of one and the same entity – namely, the history of the religious consciousness of the African Christian’.93 In naming it an ontological past, the past of our being, Bediako identifies this past as properly part of the present existence of an African. The past is not forgotten, not abandoned, not consigned to darkness, but present in who we are in Christ. This past shapes and informs the human response to God’s work. It is fundamental to the local embodiment of the gospel. Our cultural and religious past contributes to the fullness of Christ because it contributes to who we are in Jesus Christ. Our histories belong to the history of Jesus Christ.

The God of the new creation As a Christian theology, ‘creation’ speaks first of the creator. It belongs to this God’s perfection to create and to live in relation to this creation. Mission forms in correspondence to this missionary God: the opening of our histories to draw near to others through the cultivation

Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Herder & Herder, 2007), 160. 92 The difficult passage of 1 Cor. 15.29 and the baptism for the dead might be read in these terms. According to Nicholas Taylor, ‘[t]he formation of communities of converts implies that members would have had deceased relatives who had not heard the Gospel proclaimed, and had not been initiated into the Church or into salvation as conceived in Christian terms. Kinship loyalties would have conflicted with the exclusive claims of the Church to salvation through Christ, and generated a dissonance which could potentially be resolved through contriving a vicarious and posthumous initiation ritual’. Nicholas H. Taylor, ‘Baptism for the Dead (1 Cor 15:29)?’, Neotestamentica 36, no. 1/2 (2002): 116–17. 93 Kwame Bediako, ‘The Roots of African Theology’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 13, no. 2 (1989): 59. 91

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of a mutual space, one in which we discover the joy of the Lord in the other; the mutual discovering of God in speaking the word and hearing it spoken back. This requires a rejection of a flat universal that establishes the rules for gathering prior even to meeting the other. Instead, the very difference evident in creation is the ground of our unity. The promises of God rest in the unity of all things precisely in their difference. The cultivation of mutual space, in other words, requires the active irruption of our own histories. This preserves the church from petrification even as it is local, the people of God in a particular place. This irruption is the location of meaning as one learns what is continuous in one’s history and what attempts the premature closure of history, the claim that one already possesses the end of time, and so the perfection of form. This is the freedom to redeem human histories and the hope of communion with other histories, our ingrafting into the history of Jesus Christ, and so too, our own salvation. In this communion and the hearing of the word, we are called to the fulfilment of our knowledge of Jesus Christ, and in this process of history, one finds ‘the continuation of the work of the creation’.94

Further reading Baker, Josiah. ‘Native American Contributions to a Christian Theology of Space’. Studies in World Christianity 22, no. 3 (2016): 234–46. Dyck, Jonathan and Cornelius A. Buller. ‘Mapping the Land: Toward an Aboriginal Biblical Theology of Land’. Journal of NAIITS 2 (2004): 53–69. Pobee, John S. ‘Lord, Creator-Spirit, Renew and Sustain the Whole Creation: Some Missiological Perspectives’. International Review of Mission 79, no. 314 (1990): 151–8. Song, Choan-Seng. ‘The Divine Mission of Creation’. In What Asian Christians Are Thinking: A Theological Source Book, edited by Douglas J. Elwood, 297–324. Quezon City: New Day, 1978. Tuwere, Ilaitia S. ‘Emerging Themes for a Pacific Theology’. Pacific Journal of Theology 7 (1992): 49–55.

Song, ‘The Divine Mission of Creation’, 314.

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CHAPTER 41 CHURCH AND WORLD

Simon Chan

Introduction This chapter focuses on the relationship between the church and the world.1 There are two ways of configuring this relationship. One sees creation as the expression of God’s ultimate purpose and the church as God’s instrument to restore creation after the fall; the other sees creation as the means to fulfil God’s ultimate purpose, which is the church. For convenience, in this chapter, the first is called the western view, and the second the eastern view. These two approaches are not mutually exclusive; they overlap in the new creation. But they reflect tendencies and emphases that nonetheless have consequences for belief and practice. Creation as God’s ultimate purpose In many traditional works in biblical and systematic theology, the grand biblical narrative is usually explicated in terms of a creation–fall–redemption–new creation paradigm. The problem is not in the narrative itself but rather in its underlying assumption. God created an originally perfect world which cannot be improved upon; that is, creation reflects God’s ultimate intention. But the fall marred a perfect creation, and the subsequent actions of God are to reverse the effects of the fall and restore creation to its original pristine condition. The new creation, then, is a return to Eden, the final restoration of all things. This is basically how the biblical metanarrative is understood, even if it is not explicitly stated in such terms. The church as instrumental So understood, creation carries several consequences for ecclesiology. First, the church is understood in strictly instrumental terms: The church is the means for restoring the fallen creation. Stated otherwise, the church’s raison d’être is to realize the kingdom of God, which has been thwarted by the fall. God’s reign over the whole creation is the larger category under which the church is subsumed.2 In some Reformed traditions, the instrumentality of the church is framed within the distinction between special (saving) grace and common (non-saving) grace. The church’s involvement in the world depends on how common grace is understood – a contested issue in Reformed churches.3

‘World’ is used synonymously with the created order, although at times it refers to the world in opposition to God. The context should make it clear. 2 See George E. Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament, rev. edn (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1993), 109–17. 3 See, for example, David J. Engelsma, Common Grace Revisited: A Response to Richard J. Mouw’s He Shines in All That’s Fair (Jenison: Reformed Free Publishing Association, 2003). 1

Church and World

In the larger Christian tradition, the church’s specific role in realizing the kingdom of God has been understood in different ways and motivated by different concerns. For ‘progressive’ Protestants, the church’s role is to promote the kingdom of the God of social justice. It is perhaps best represented in Walter Rauschenbusch’s A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). The trajectory set by Rauschenbusch finds its most poignant expression in the Uppsala Assembly (1968) document on the church’s role in the world: The church does not so much point the world to Christ as let the world set the church’s agenda. Although the Uppsala document does not say so in those words, the catchphrase ‘the world sets the agenda for the church’ more or less sums up the spirit of the Assembly. It suggests that creation has its own goal independent of the church and that the church’s role is to promote what the world regards as important. The church serves the world by becoming subservient to it. The stance of Uppsala is still prevalent in much of progressive Christianity, especially in the west. As social anthropologists Elizabeth Brusco and Saba Mahmood have shown from their respective Christian and Muslim perspectives, western egalitarian and feminist ideologies are very much shaped by the spirit of the age.4 The world is still setting the agenda for the church. The only difference between then and now is that nowadays the world’s agenda is so integrated into the thought and life of the church that their concerns have become virtually identical. More conservative Protestants, such as George Lindbeck, however, have criticized the Assembly’s main thrust of making ‘the unity of the world’ or ‘the new humanity’ the direct goal of the church, so that ‘in the imagery employed by those in favor of the change, the paradigm is not the old “God-church-world” but rather “God-world-church”’.5 Furthermore, he suggests, understanding the relationship between the church and the world in this way deflects the church from its distinctive calling for the world. Similarly, Wolfhart Pannenberg notes that the Assembly’s idea of the church as the sign of the unity of humanity lacks a missionary perspective and tends towards a ‘purely ethical interest in promoting a unity of humanity’.6 If the church takes its cues from the world, it has nothing distinctive to say to the world that the world needs to hear. The points at issue for both Lindbeck and Pannenberg are about who sets the agenda for the church and what constitutes the church’s agenda; the church as the instrument of the kingdom of God is not in question. Evangelicals, too, have generally subscribed to an instrumentalist view. As Mark Galli has noted, the modern evangelical has simply substituted the social gospel of Rauschenbusch with the ‘missional church’.7 For Protestants, part of the motivation for emphasizing the instrumentality of the church is the concern over the Roman Catholic tendency to blur the distinction between Christ and the church. Pannenberg accuses Catholics of failing to distinguish between the ‘mystery’ and the

See Elizabeth E. Brusco, Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Columbia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 5 George Lindbeck, ‘The Unity We Seek: Setting the Agenda for Ecumenism’, Christian Century 122, no. 16 (2005): 28–9. 6 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 3:47. 7 Mark Galli, ‘The Unfortunate Pedigree of the Missional Church’, Christianity Today, accessed 14 September 2019, https://www​.christianitytoday​.com​/ct​/2019​/june​-web​-only​/unfortunate​-pedigree​-of​-missional​-church​.html. 4

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‘sign’ of salvation by applying both to the church, whereas the former can only be applied to Christ, who effects salvation for the world. Pannenberg is concerned that if the church is seen as an end in itself, it loses its missionary character, whereas the church’s distinctive mission is preserved only if it is seen as the sign and sacrament of the future kingdom of God.8 The church is being purified by Christ, and its calling is to realize the eschatological kingdom. To distinguish Christ and the church, the role of Christ in creation is accentuated. Creation finds its consummation in Christ, who is the goal of creation (Eph. 1.9-10; 4.10; Phil. 2.9-11; Rev. 22.13). The Eastern Orthodox churches have also severely criticized Uppsala’s view of the ‘new humanity’ as defining the church’s mission. But the basis of the Orthodox critique is quite different from that offered by Protestants such as Pannenberg and Lindbeck. The latter maintain an instrumentalist view of the church; they only object to the idea that the church’s mission is so identified with the world’s that it loses its distinctive mission to the world. For the Orthodox, however, the church in its very being defines what constitutes the ‘new humanity’: ‘It is within the Mystery of the Church that the new humanity and God’s mission takes form and meaning’.9 For the Orthodox, the church’s mission does not point to an extraneous end, such as some abstract ethical principle, and not even to the kingdom of God as an all-embracing category. It is, rather, to be found in the church itself. It seeks no less than the transformation of the world into the church. This understanding of the church’s mission will be taken up in the next section. The church as a redemptive community A second consequence of seeing creation as expressing God’s ultimate purpose is that the church is then seen as the product of the divine economy of redemption; it is essentially a redemptive community. This is a view found in both Protestantism and Catholicism. Historically, both are concerned with the question of predestination to salvation but differ over the nature of predestination and its relation to reprobation. More importantly, they differ in how the church is viewed as the instrument of salvation. For Protestants, the church should point beyond itself to Christ; whereas for Catholics, the close identification of the church with Christ (totus Christus) means that the church is the locus in which salvation is actualized – extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, ‘outside the Church there is no salvation’. The phrase, however, makes sense only if the church is understood more inclusively than is traditionally so (see discussion herein).10 Sin and grace The idea of the church as the means to a higher end affects other aspects of dogmatics. If the church is a redemptive community, grace is then understood almost exclusively in soteriological terms. Thus Thomas Oden defines grace as ‘the favor shown by God to sinners’.11 This (western) concern with sin has led to the question that has plagued western theology

Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 3:45. An Orthodox Response to the Preliminary Draft for the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches to be Held at Uppsala (London: Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, 1968), 6. Italics mine. 10 Cf. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church (London: Penguin), 247–8. 11 Thomas C. Oden, The Transforming Power of Grace (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), 33. 8 9

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since the time of Augustine: the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom. Since sin has resulted in the bondage of the will, the question is to what extent and in what ways human freedom is affected. Western theology has been preoccupied with trying to unravel that relationship. It has tended to see the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom as a zero-sum game – thus, the Augustinian–Pelagian and Calvinist–Arminian controversies continue to this day. The east, by contrast, sees the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom as a mystery for which the term ‘synergy’ is used. When grace is understood exclusively in relation to sin, a distinct form of spirituality emerges. Historically, Puritans struggled over their assurance of salvation by looking inward for signs of grace. They developed a whole genre of spiritual works to help the soul ‘prepare’ for salvation. Popular Catholic devotion showed similar concerns: the via dolorosa, meditation on the wounds of Christ, and so on. Overall, it’s a doleful spirituality; or, as Pannenberg puts it, a ‘penitential piety’.12 Another feature of such spirituality is its tendency towards activism, whether evangelical or so-called ‘progressive’. The Evangelical movement expends much of its energy on mission and evangelism. Even the more recent development of ‘missional ecclesiology’ reflects basically the same concerns, except that mission is now explicated in ways that make more explicit its connection with trinitarian theology. The spirituality of ‘progressives’ is no less activistic, except that its concerns are mostly focused on the sociopolitical. The work of the Spirit is also affected. Particularly with modern ecological concerns in mind, the tendency is to emphasize the Spirit’s work of renewing the earth along with the work of redemption in the church. But if the Spirit works in the world apart from the church, the issue of discernment becomes highly problematic. Various criteria for discernment have been offered. For Michael Welker, ‘the Spirit universally establishes justice, mercy, and knowledge of God’.13 Where these principles are present, as in liberation and feminist movements, there the Spirit is present.14 Similarly, Pentecostal theologians like Amos Yong and Frank Macchia have sought to locate the Spirit in the world in terms of the kingdom of God understood largely in ethical terms.15 The critiques levelled against Uppsala regarding the ‘new humanity’ can also be levelled against such pneumatologies: outside the context of the church, terms such as ‘justice’, ‘mercy’, and ‘kingdom of God’ could mean anything or be identified with any movement in the world that is perceived to be humanizing and liberating. But what are humanization and liberation, and who defines them?

The church as the goal of creation The eastern tradition has a different understanding of the nature of creation vis-à-vis the church. It still follows the creation–fall–redemption–new creation storyline, but it sees the

Wolfhart Pannenberg, Christian Spirituality and Sacramental Community (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1984), 13–30. 13 Michael Welker, God the Spirit, trans. John F. Hoffmeyer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 40. 14 See Welker, God the Spirit, 16–17. 15 See Frank D. Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecostal Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 62–3; Amos Yong, The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 250–6. 12

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new creation as more than simply the restoration of creation to its Edenic condition. The new creation brings to consummation God’s original purpose of creation – the church. Beginning with Irenaeus, creation was perfect in that it was without blemish or defect. But it was not perfect in the sense that it needed further development. Adam and Eve were perfect, but only as children are ‘perfect’. They still needed to grow to adulthood or full maturity in Christ. Grace, apart from sin Creation is the work of a gracious God. But grace is defined not exclusively in relation to sin. Grace is first internal to the trinitarian life. It refers ‘to that delight, pleasure, and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity’.16 Creation signals the ‘overflow’ of the fullness of the trinitarian life. All life is graced in the sense that the whole universe results from God’s free act and self-giving love. Grace is God’s gift of himself involving a free decision to create that which is distinct from himself. Apart from sin, grace would have led the primal couple from childhood to full maturity in the Son.17 They would have continued to grow in grace and in the knowledge of the incarnate Son from whom they would have come to know the Father and freely respond to God’s initiative in ever-increasing thanksgiving for the free gift of life (cf. 2 Pet. 3.18). Even if the fall had not occurred, the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity would still be necessary to show what Adam and Eve as embodied beings were meant to be.18 The Son, then, would not be incarnated as Jesus the Christ; he would simply be revealed as the Son of the Father and as humanity’s Big Brother (cf. Heb. 2.11, 12). The ‘if ’ is, of course, hypothetical since the death of Christ for sin is included in God’s eternal purpose (1 Pet. 1.20; Rev. 13.8). But how it is included without implicating God in sin is a mystery which cannot be fully resolved (as the west had tried to do by appealing to decretal theology) any more than can the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom. Thus, while the western view has tended to define grace largely in relation to sin so that spiritual progress is understood as a sanctifying process, the eastern view, while not ignoring the reality of sin, understands grace more broadly as God’s gift of himself apart from sin, and spiritual progress as a process of deification or growth in Christ-likeness which is distinguished from the imago Dei. While the west has tended to see ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ as synonymous, the theological distinction between ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ is critical for the east. ‘Image’ is what makes a human essentially human; it was not lost even after the fall. But when Adam sinned, he lost his ‘likeness’ to God, which the coming of the God-man restores and brings to perfection by his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection. Irenaeus’ recapitulation theory is an expression of this idea. To be deified is to partake of the divine nature, to be God-like, and to realize full potential as persons in eternal communion with and in the tri-personal God. If Adam and Eve had not sinned, sanctification would not be necessary, but deification would have continued until humanity attains the full likeness of Christ (Eph. 4.13).

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 249. 17 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.38.1–2. 18 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.22.4. 16

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In contrast to the west, which sees the church as essentially a redemptive community, the east sees the church as the end for which Adam and Eve and their descendants were created, even if they had not sinned. It is essentially the communion of persons with the Trinity and with one another in the Trinity. In short, the church is the telos of creation. As Ion Bria puts it: ‘Renewal of the human community makes sense ultimately if the entire world is transfigured and incorporated into a community which in history is the Body of Christ, the Church.’19 Robert Jenson’s idea that the world is the ‘raw material’ for God to make the church20 may be understating the nature of God’s original creation, but it is basically correct insofar as its purpose is concerned. God created the world for it to find its consummation in the church.21 It is clear from the foregoing that the Orthodox have a more inclusive view of the church vis-à-vis the western traditions. The church is ‘both the ecclesial institution, the visible community of God’s people in history, and the koinonia, that dynamic movement of God towards humanity and creation’.22 All humanity and even non-human creatures are divinely ordered towards communion with God; that is to say, persons as beings-in-communion are oriented towards the church as the locus of eucharistic communion and a foretaste of full eschatological communion. In short, God’s ultimate intention for the world cannot properly be understood apart from the church. The world derives its identity from its relation to the church; the world finds its true meaning or telos in the church. The church is what God has eternally purposed before the creation of the world (Eph. 1.4). The church has logical priority over creation, even though creation is temporally prior to the church. This is the consistent view of orthodoxy. Such a view of the church has important consequences markedly different from much of the western view. Mission beyond redemption One consequence of such decisions is how the mission of the church is understood. When the church is viewed as the means for the restoration of a fallen creation, the mission of God is undertaken primarily to overcome sin and its effects. Mission reveals the love of God for a fallen creation, just as grace is God’s undeserved favour towards sinners. Conversely, when the church is considered to be the goal of creation, the mission of God looks beyond the problem of sin. The very nature of the trinitarian life ad intra (from within) is not self-enclosed but ecstatic, always going out of itself. Creation, apart from sin, reveals the ecstatic life of the Trinity ad extra (towards the outside). The dynamic relationship of the Trinity is an eternally outgoing relationship. Without getting entangled here with the filioque issue, from the perspective of origin, the Son is eternally generated from the Father; and the Spirit is eternally breathed forth by the Father (through the Son?). The Spirit is both

Ion Bria, ‘The Unity of the Church and the Renewal of Human Community’, Mid-Stream 21, no. 3 (1982): 389. Italics mine. 20 Robert W. Jenson, ‘The Church’s Responsibility for the World’, in The Two Cities of God: The Church’s Responsibility for the Earthly City, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997), 4. 21 Cf. Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 13: The ‘Miscellanies’, a–500 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 374. 22 Bria, ‘The Unity of the Church’, 390. 19

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the bond of love between the Father and the Son, and the product of the outgoing love of the first and second Persons. Hans Urs von Balthasar uses the analogy of the child to bring out the distinctive identity of the Spirit as the third person in the Trinity and the ecstatic life of God. For Balthasar, the relationship of the Spirit to the Father and Son is analogous to the child who is the fruit of the union (the ‘we’) between a man and a woman. Thus in Scripture, the Spirit is called ‘the Spirit of truth’ because the Spirit is ‘the disclosure (a-lētheia) of the eternal life of the divine love (just as the child discloses the sexual act of the parents; the work, the cooperation of the friends), which permits us to look into God and to see him as he is’.23 Full and inclusive communion must involve a third party; a dyadic relationship is self-enclosed and mutually exclusive.24 From the perspective of the future, the Spirit is the ‘Archimedean standpoint’ from which to view the work of the Trinity in drawing the Father and the Son towards a new order of communion with all God’s creatures.25 If mission is the eternal going-out of the Spirit of love between the Father and the Son, then one can speak of mission as eternally present in God. If the church is the extension of the trinitarian mission, then its mission on earth goes beyond the work of restoration to one of increasing participation in the ecstatic life of the Trinity. The church’s mission does not end with the new creation; it continues as the eternal self-giving to the Father in the celebration of the heavenly liturgy. If liturgy is the work of the people of God (as well as the work of God), then the heavenly liturgy is where work and rest are one. The work–rest rhythm of the old creation finds its fulfilment in the heavenly liturgy, where work is rest and rest is work. The ‘work’ of worship is at once the sabbath rest. Mission is worship, the eternal vocation of saints, not in terms of ‘saving souls’ but of the continuing ‘going forth’ of each person to the other in love and service. Concerning the trinitarian mission in the world, the western view tends to favour a direct approach to social engagement consistent with its conception of the church as the instrument of the kingdom. Conversely, the eastern view tends to engage the world by drawing the world into the church. If the church is the present embodiment and future consummation of the kingdom, then it engages the world by offering the world an alternative community. This is why eastern mission is largely centripetal. Such an approach is made more urgent in an increasingly secularizing world.26 But it is not just the fact that the west has become postChristian. In Asia, where Christianity exists as a minority religion amid other major world religions, direct engagement is often not an option. It witnesses more effectively to the gospel by its way of life. But it is not just an option necessitated by cultural shifts; if God’s eternal purpose is to transform the world into church, then being church is intrinsic to the church’s mission in the world.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, III: Creator Spirit, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 127. 24 See Vladimir Lossky, Orthodox Theology: An Introduction, trans. Ian and Ihita Kesarcodi-Watson (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989), 45. 25 See Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Volume 1: The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 157. 26 See Vigen Guroian, Ethics after Christendom: Toward an Ecclesial Christian Ethic (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2004); cf. Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel), 2017. 23

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Joyful and restful spirituality Instead of the largely doleful spirituality that marks the western experience, eastern spirituality is marked chiefly by joy and beauty.27 To be sure, there is a place for compunction of heart, but mourning and joy are two sides of the same coin (cf. Mt. 5.4). One might even speak of the ‘joy of penthos’ (mourning or lament).28 The Christian life is joyful because the grace of the intratrinitarian life is characterized by ecstasy and intimacy – the going-out of one person to be united with the other.29 This ecstatic movement in the Trinity is revealed as grace in the work of creation – a free act which finds its consummation in the intimacy of communion between creatures and God. A communion spirituality of ecstasy and intimacy can be nothing but joy. The Christian life is also beautiful because it is a participation in the life of the Trinity, which is beauty itself. Especially in the liturgy, the church beholds and adores the divine beauty (cf. Ps. 29.2). Hesychasm (inner stillness) is usually associated with the east for good reason. In the divine economy, the trinitarian opus ad extra (outward works) follows the pattern of work and rest. At creation, the six days of work are followed by God’s resting on the seventh day. In the economy of salvation, the trinitarian mission (the sending of the Son and the Spirit) is completed in the return of the creatures to God.30 If this is the trinitarian economy, then the church’s missionary activity is fulfilled in rest. Hesychasm, not activism, is the defining characteristic of Christian spirituality: glorifying God and enjoying him forever as (in the words of the Westminster Shorter Catechism) humanity’s ‘chief end’. Mission does not ultimately define what the church is, as in missional ecclesiology; rather, the church’s true end is sabbath. If the final reality is eternal worship and communion, all earthly activism must be viewed sub specie aeternitatis [in relation to the eternal]. Evangelism, social justice, and so on are not the raison d’être of the church but will find their proper place in relation to the church’s ultimate end – rest, communion, and feasting. We work so that we may rest; we fast so that we may feast. ‘Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb’ (The Roman Missal). This life of participation in and enjoying the beauty of God is an ever-increasing enjoyment. The ecstasy and intimacy – going forth and return – is not consummated in ‘repetitive static novissimum’ as Paul Griffiths believes,31 but rather, in the words of David Bentley Hart, in ‘infinite deferral’.32 Contra Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch, maturity in Christ does not mean Christians will finally ‘come of age’. So Hart: ‘The soul .  .  . has no effective ability to become infinite, but does have the capacity infinitely to become; though ever finite, it is, one might say, teleologically infinite’.33

See Boris Bobrinskoy, ‘The Church and the Holy Spirit in 20th Century Russia’, The Ecumenical Review 52, no. 3 (2000): 326–42; Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite. 28 See Irénée Hausherr, Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1982), 137–56. 29 See Edith M. Humphrey, Ecstasy and Intimacy: When the Holy Spirit Meets the Human Spirit (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 3–4. 30 On the return model of the Trinity, see David Coffey, Deus Trinitas: The Doctrine of the Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 31 Paul J. Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), 215–40. 32 Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 201. 33 Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 204–5. 27

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The church and the non-human creation It is in understanding the church as a communion of persons and as the goal to which all creation points that a better account of the renewal of non-human creation can be offered. Even before the fall, animals enjoyed a special relationship with Adam. He was their namer, giving each species its distinctive name. Since the fall of humans affected non-human creatures, the latter’s renewal is also linked to humanity’s renewal. Thus the whole creation groans, as it were, in the pains of childbirth, in anticipation for the revelation of the ‘children of God’ (Rom. 8.19). The dependence of the non-human on humanity’s renewal implies not only an order in the relationship between humans and non-humans but also a task that humans must undertake for non-humans to find their intended place in the new creation. That task is priestly and epitomized in the church’s liturgy. Radu Bordeianu, citing Maximus the Confessor, notes that ‘the entire universe was created to celebrate a cosmic Liturgy and be transformed into a church through the priestly mediation of the human being’.34 Similarly, Daniel Munteanu has observed: In Maximus [the] Confessor’s thinking the theology of matter is connected with cosmic ecclesiology. The whole creation has an internal vocation to become an icon of divine beauty; a house or temple of the trinitarian God. The material world can achieve the same level of transfiguration as the resurrected body of Jesus Christ; thereby it can become a church, a space for God’s indwelling and a transparent medium of divine love.35 The church at the consummation will include the non-human and even the inanimate. This is anticipated in the church’s eucharistic celebration as a foretaste of the transfiguration of the whole creation. As bread and wine are ‘transfigured’ in the eucharistic celebration, so the material world will eventually be transfigured in the eternal cosmic liturgy. The church in via is involved in the work of cosmic renewal through its priestly mediation. Unlike ‘animal theology’, which places humans and non-humans on an equal footing,36 the eastern view insists on a hypostatic order in creation, with humans acting under God as responsible stewards of creation. While creation and humanity share certain similarities, having their end in God, they are not related to each other as equal partners. Non-human creatures do not have their own independent ends: ‘Thus, the world as nature .  .  . has an anthropocentric character. Only in human subjects does the world discover and fulfill its meaning.’37 God, humans, animals and all things are joined together in communion. Created things are necessarily involved in human growth in knowledge and spirituality. Interpersonal communion is through created things as at baptism (water) and the Eucharist (bread and wine), not only between human persons. This is why the consummation of creation will

Radu Bordeianu, ‘Priesthood Natural, Universal, and Ordained: Dumitru Staniloae’s Communion Ecclesiology’, Pro Ecclesia 19, no. 4 (2010): 407. 35 Daniel Munteanu, ‘Cosmic Liturgy: The Theological Dignity of Creation as a Basis of an Orthodox Ecotheology’, International Journal of Public Theology 4, no. 3 (2010): 333. 36 See, for example, David L. Clough, On Animals: Volume 1: Systematic Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2012); David L. Clough, On Animals: Volume 2: Theological Ethics (London: T&T Clark, 2018). 37 Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Volume 2. The World: Creation and Deification (Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2000), 18–19. 34

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include non-human creation. In the new creation, face-to-face communion does not make things redundant. The nuptial union between the Bridegroom and Bride is celebrated with a wedding feast. Dialogue between God and humanity is through the agency of created things.38 The Spirit, church, and creation The renewal of creation in and through the church cannot be properly understood apart from the supervening work and indwelling of the Spirit. Creation is the work of the Father through the Son and the Spirit – the two hands of God. The Father is the ultimate source (cf. the first article of the Apostles’ Creed) who created the world by his Word and Spirit. There is an inherent intelligibility in the world as created by God through the eternal Logos so that the heavens could declare the glory of God and the earth proclaim his handiwork (Ps. 19.1). This is the christological dimension of creation. The other dimension is pneumatological. The ‘intelligent universe’ is not a static order; rather, it is being directed to its eschatological fulfilment by the Spirit. The key to understanding God’s continuing relationship with the church and the world is the person of the Spirit. This theme in dogmatics has its basis in the Old Testament, where the Spirit of God is generally understood as God-in-action.39 There is a special relation that the Spirit sustains to the church that is different from the Spirit’s presence in the world. This special relationship has a long history in the church. It is seen in the Apostles’ Creed, where the Spirit and church form part of the third article.40 The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus declares that the church as the liturgical assembly is the place ‘where the Spirit abounds’.41 In its formulation of the baptismal creeds, the question posed to catechumens was, ‘Do you believe in the Holy Spirit in the holy church?’42 The Holy Spirit is the future of the church and the world. More precisely, the Spirit, the foretaste and pledge of the new creation, indwells the church and, through the church, seeks to draw the world into the church by convicting the world of sin, righteousness, and judgement (Jn 16.8). The goal is personal communion which is only realized in the church where the Spirit is fully manifested as a person who binds the church together as persons-in-communion.43 Before the end, the personal communion in the church is realized supremely, though not solely, in the eucharistic celebration, the communion in the body and blood of Christ. The church is where the Spirit binds persons together as interdependent members of the body of Christ, where Christ is confessed as ‘Lord’ through the indwelling Spirit (1 Cor. 12.3). What God intends for the cosmos has its foretaste in the church. The church, in its eucharistic

Staniloae, The Experience of God, 40. Staniloae helps one appreciate the connection between persons and other creatures, or nature, by seeing humans as giving meaning to creation and seeing creation finding fulfilment in humans. Thus, humans hold the key to creation’s renewal. 39 See Edmond Jacob, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. Arthur W. Heathcote and Philip J. Allcock (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1958), 124, 127. 40 See Confessing the One Faith: An Ecumenical Explication of the Apostolic Faith as it is Confessed in the NiceneConstantinopolitan Creed (381). Faith and Order Paper, No. 153 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1991), 82. 41 Hippolytus, The Apostolic Tradition, 31.2. 42 Hippolytus, The Apostolic Tradition, 21.17. 43 See David M. Coffey, ‘Did you Receive the Holy Spirit When You Believed?’: Some Basic Questions for Pneumatology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2005), 34; Ralph del Colle, ‘The Holy Spirit: Presence, Power, Person’, Theological Studies 62, no. 2 (2001): 334. 38

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celebration, anticipates the transformation of creation.44 It is from what God is doing in the church that one can understand what God will do in the world. At the eschaton, the Spirit will have accomplished transforming the world into the church. All things are united by the Spirit to enjoy communion with God and with each other – saints, beasts, and things.45 One valuable insight from animal theology is that the vision of the lion lying beside the lamb is not merely a metaphor for universal reconciliation; nor is it a kind of ‘intermediate state’ in the millennial age as seen in dispensational premillennialism, but is rather a reality of the new creation. It is what the whole created order is meant to be when all things are finally consummated in Christ when he hands the kingdom over to the Father, and God will be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor. 15.24-28). One can only remain apophatic on the question of how non-human creatures will participate in the new creation. Kataphatically, one can affirm that if the present heaven, earth, and all things therein, even in their fallen condition, reveal the glory of God, how much more so does the renewed creation. From an eastern perspective, one can also affirm that communion marks the relationship between the creatures. Stories of the harmonious relationship between beasts and saints may be a foretaste of their communion in the new creation.46

Conclusion Did God call the church to fix a broken world, or did God create the world to form the church? Answering this question has important consequences for how one views both the church and the world. It will especially affect the church’s raison d’être, mission, and spirituality.

Further reading Clough, David L. On Animals: Volume 1: Systematic Theology. London: T&T Clark, 2012. Clough, David L. On Animals: Volume 2: Theological Ethics. London: T&T Clark, 2018. Gittoes, Julie, Brutus Green, and James Heard, eds. Generous Ecclesiology: Church, World and the Kingdom of God. London: SCM Press, 2013. Griffiths, Paul J. Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014. Levering, Matthew. Engaging the Doctrine of Creation: Cosmos, Creatures, and the Wise and Good Creator. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017. Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. New York: National Student Christian Federation, 1973. Vassiliadis, Petros, ed. Orthodox Perspectives on Mission. Oxford: Regnum Books, 2013. Wilson, Jonathan R. God’s Good World: Reclaiming the Doctrine of Creation. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013.

Hippolytus, The Apostolic Tradition, 31.2. See Griffiths, Decreation, 273–312. 46 See Helen Waddell, Beasts and Saints, ed. and trans. Helen Waddell (London: Constable and Co., 1934). 44 45

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CHAPTER 42 UNVEILING SCRIPTURE CREATION IN AN APOCALYPTIC KEY John Behr

‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ (Gen. 1.1). These opening words of scripture are as familiar as the question asked by Origen is unfamiliar, and perhaps even more so his answer. ‘What is the beginning of all things’, he asks, and continues: except our Lord and ‘Saviour of all’, Jesus Christ, ‘the firstborn of every creature’? In this beginning, therefore, that is in his Word, ‘God made heaven and earth’ as the evangelist John also says in the beginning of his Gospel. . . . Scripture is not speaking here of any temporal beginning, but it says that the heaven and the earth and all things which were made were made ‘in the beginning’, that is, in the Saviour.1 To assert, so simply and bluntly, that ‘the beginning’ mentioned in Gen. 1.1 is the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, in which, or rather in whom, God created all things, might seem a rather fanciful piece of (allegorical) exegesis, with nothing more to tell about creation itself. Alternatively, one might let it call into question some of the presuppositions with which scripture is read and so unveil another way of thinking about the creation it describes. In fact, as C. F. Burney pointed out almost a century ago, Origen’s position was already sketched out by Paul.2 According to Burney, Col. 1.16-18 is an exposition of the first word of Genesis, Berêshíth (In the beginning), alluding also to Prov. 8.22, and taking this rêshíth (beginning) as referring to Christ himself. In so doing, Paul draws out the various aspects of the preposition be: ‘in’, ‘by’, and ‘unto’ (v. 16: ‘in him [ἐν αὐτῷ] were created all things . . . all things were created by him [δι᾽αὐτοῦ] and unto him [εἰς αὐτὸν]’). And, then, in the following verses, he unpacks the various meanings of the substantive rêshíth: while its primary meaning is that of ‘beginning’ (v. 17; ‘he is before all things’), it also has the sense of ‘sum-total’ (v. 17; ‘all things hold together in him’), as well as ‘head’ (v. 18; ‘he is the head of the body, the church’) and also ‘first-fruits’ (v. 18; ‘he is the beginning, the first-begotten of the dead’), and all this ‘so that in all things he might be first’ (v. 18); or, as Burney puts it, ‘in all senses He is the Fulfiller of the meaning of rêshíth (πρωτεύων)’.3 In this way, the crucified and risen Christ is, as he says of himself in Rev. 3.14, ‘the beginning of the creation of God’ (ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κτίσεως τοῦ θεοῦ), and is so, moreover, as the ‘Amen’, that is, as a response, and as ‘the faithful and true witness

Origen, ‘Homily 1’, in Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1981), 47. 2 C. F. Burney, ‘Christ as the ΑΡΧΗ of Creation (Prov. viii 22, Col. i 15–18, Rev. iii 14)’, The Journal of Theological Studies 27, no. 106 (1926): 160–77. 3 Burney, ‘Christ as the ΑΡΧΗ of Creation’, 175. 1

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[ὁ μάρτυς]’, and in turn ‘we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus (αὐτοῦ γάρ ἐσμεν ποίημα κτισθέντες ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ) for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them’ (Eph. 2.10).

The unveiling of the mystery The reason why ‘creation’ is spoken of in this way, through this midrashic exegesis of Genesis as speaking about Christ, is a very different kind of theological discourse to the usual discussions about ‘creation’ is because, I would suggest, there is now a book called ‘The Bible’. Although there were certainly great codices containing all the various books of scripture (such as those Constantine asked Eusebius of Caesarea to provide), these were the exception; in many ways, the idea of ‘The Bible’, as a singular book (rather than the plural τὰ βιβλία or αἱ γραφαί), is an invention of the printing press and brings with it certain assumptions about how the books hold together – the medium has profoundly affected how the message is heard.4 Conveniently divided up between the ‘Old Testament’ and the ‘New Testament’, the mental framework inspired by the printed ‘Bible’ can be represented in Figure 42.1.​ ‘Creation’, here, is what happened at ‘the beginning’, at or as the first moment of time, followed (sometime?) afterwards by the Fall, and then the long history of salvation, culminating finally with the person of Jesus Christ, whose life and works are narrated in the Gospels, followed by an account of the doings of the apostles, then their letters, and, finally, as an odd appendage, the Apocalypse. With the books arranged this way, a continuous narrative is presented, from the beginning to the end, and one is invited to assume that the thread that holds these books together is the history of the narrative described within the books thus arranged. However, this ordering is not, of course, the historical order: Paul wrote his letters before the Gospels were written, and his point of reference was not the account they would provide but rather the scriptures (OT), now unveiled (cf. 2 Cor. 3.12–4.6), in accordance with which he proclaimed his gospel (e.g. 1 Cor. 15.3-5). This implies a very different way of understanding the relationship between the scriptures (OT) and the gospel than the gospel being, as it were, ‘what happened next’. For Paul, the gospel is, rather, ‘the apocalypse of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now made manifest and made known through the prophetic writings’ (Rom. 16.25-27). It is by reference to these prophetic writings, the scriptures, that Paul proclaims Christ, and so too the Evangelists thereafter, in their own accounts of the gospel. The scriptures are, for them, a ‘paint box’, as Joel Marcus puts it, from which they depict Christ.5 And the Christ they present does likewise: by ‘opening’ both the scriptures and the disciples’ minds on the road to Emmaus, he showed how Moses and all the prophets had spoken about how the Christ had to suffer and enter into his glory (Lk. 24.25-49).

Cf. Andrew Louth, ‘Inspiration of the Scriptures’, Sobornost 31, no. 1 (2009): 32–3; John Behr, ‘Reading from the End, Looking Forward’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity, ed. Eugen J. Pentiuc (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 519–38. 5 Joel Marcus, The Way of the Lord: Christological Exegesis of the Old Testament in the Gospel of Mark (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 2–3. 4

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Figure 42.1  Scripture read in a linear manner.

Historically, then, and hermeneutically – and also liturgically, one might add – the order is: the scriptures (OT), now unveiled in the proclamation of the gospel, then the letters of Paul, and only then the Gospels. Thus, the starting point for reading Genesis is, indeed, none other than the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. When Paul describes Adam as ‘a type of the one to come’ (Rom. 5.14), this entails that the one to come, as the prototype, pre-exists the one who is a type, just as the stamp or seal is prior to the impress it makes in wax, or the reality the shadow that it casts. If Adam is made ‘in the image of God’ (Gen. 1.27), it is Christ who is ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Col. 1.15), so it is with reference to Christ that Adam was made.6 Rather than thinking in terms of Figure 42.1, where the New Testament follows the Old as ‘what happens next’, it would be better to think of scripture (OT) as being, in Irenaeus’ words, like a mosaic, which, when viewed with the right hypothesis, depicts the king, or the field in which Christ is hidden, brought to light by the cross.7 In Figure 42.2, the larger circle represents scripture (OT). The smaller circle represents the writings of the New Testament, bringing into focus the one of whom Moses and all the prophets had always spoken, even if this was not seen before the veil was lifted. To borrow from Irenaeus once again, the writings of the New Testament provide a ‘recapitulation’ of the whole, a ‘recap’ which, by summarizing the whole, brings into focus what had previously been presented at length. The unveiling of scripture (OT) in the light of the cross also affects a twofold reading of the same text: how it had initially been read (the way that, for instance, Paul, as Saul, read the same scriptures prior to his encounter with Christ) and how it is now read, in the light of the end, the end that now determines how the beginning should be understood. This double-level drama is, in fact, one that is often present within the narratives of scripture themselves. For instance, Joseph was undoubtedly sold into slavery by his brothers in their jealousy, but by the end of the narrative, he can tell them: ‘Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. . . . So it was not you who sent me here, but God’ (Gen. 45.5, 8). There is, in the light of the end, a two-level drama, or rather a single drama played out on two different registers, earthly and heavenly, where those on the earthly level are unaware (as are the readers) of the heavenly dimensions until the end. This motif was common in apocalyptic writings from the late Second Temple period. But it was also something that the

Cf. Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), 190: ‘It was not the old Adam who was the model for the new, but the new Adam for the old. . . . For those who have known him first, the old Adam is the archetype because of our fallen nature. But for Him who sees all things before they exist the first Adam is the imitation of the second.’ 7 See Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.8.1; 4.26.1. Cf. John Behr, Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 124–44. 6

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Figure 42.2  Scripture as a mosaic.

Mishnah cautioned against, specifically warning against reading too freely certain passages of scripture that invite such reflection and prohibiting certain other avenues: The forbidden degrees [Lev. 18.6ff] may not be expounded before three persons, nor the Story of Creation [Gen. 1.1-3] before two, nor [the chapter of] the Chariot [Ezek. 1.4ff] before one alone, unless he is a Sage that understands his own knowledge. Whosoever gives his mind to four things it were better for him if he had not come into the world – what is above? what is beneath? what was beforetime? and what will be hereafter?8 These four dimensions – above/below, beginning/end – are, however, intrinsic to the proclamation of the gospel, especially as proclaimed by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 and the parallels he makes there between the first human, Adam, animated by a breath of life, and the last Adam, who became a life-giving spirit; the first is from the earth, a human of dust, while the second is the human from the heaven (1 Cor. 15.45-47). Moreover, as Adam is a ‘type of the one to come’ (Rom. 5.14), a sketch or preliminary model, he is but an infant, as Irenaeus asserts, compared to the full stature of humanity that is seen in Christ, the perfect or complete human being.9 Mapping these descriptors onto the axes in Figure 42.3, here, the two axes – inscribing the cross, brought into focus by the proclamation of the gospel and in the writings of the New Testament, throughout the whole of scripture – now also represent movement, which

Hagigah, 2.1. The translation comes from The Mishnah, trans. Herbert Danby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 212–13. 9 See M. C. Steenberg, ‘Children in Paradise: Adam and Eve as “Infants” in Irenaeus of Lyons’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 12, no. 1 (2004): 1–22. 8

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Figure 42.3  The axes and movements described in scripture.

is both, as it were, horizontal and vertical, from Adam to Christ, from earth to heaven. This movement is, moreover, played out in three realities, which are, in some sense, coextensive, if not, for each one personally, the same. First, the scriptural movement from Adam to Christ and his Pascha, from type to reality, from infancy to maturity, from earth to heaven. Second, the movement from the beginning of the world to its end (for what comes to be in time will certainly pass away in time), or, more precisely, the passing away of the fashion of this world, to be renewed, finally becoming, in the end, the paradise of God. And third, the movement that is, for each one, the path of their own life, from (involuntary) birth to a death, a death which can either be voluntarily embraced as a birth into the life of God given in Christ or be suffered involuntarily, but either way unavoidable. Movement, however, requires time. Although time is habitually thought of as a horizontal line on which one moves forward (as in Figure 42.1), there is, in fact, no spatialized timeline along which one moves. As Augustine points out in his Confessions, although there was a past, there is no past; all there is is the past-in-the-present. Likewise, there is only the future-inthe-present. And yet the present is always passing.10 What is envisioned as a line along which one moves is a projection, as also is what is called ‘history’, the past told based on the past-inthe-present, which is but a minuscule portion remaining of what was, in the past, and which is also always subject to revision in light of new discoveries. Time, rather, is what happens in one as one physically and spiritually progresses along the horizontal and vertical axis: from

See Augustine, Confessions, 11.17–26.

10

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Figure 42.4  Reading scripture at the foot of the cross in the present.

left to right, from birth to death; and from below to above, from earth to heaven – in each case, from Adam to Christ. Time is the measurement of one’s growth, or, as Plotinus suggests: ‘Time is the life of the soul in its changing motion from one way of living to another.’11 As Irenaeus argues, only that which is subject to time is capable of growth and changing its mode of existence while remaining what it is by nature, and so, although being and remaining created, humans can come to share in the power of the Uncreated, through a growth that has order, rhythm, and movement.12 What is called ‘history’, and the sense of oneself as moving along a line, as intuitive as that is (and perhaps necessary, as one plans for tomorrow), is also, as it were, a veil – ‘eternity in disguise’, as Abraham Heschel puts it13 – veiling the fact that each present moment is the last moment, always passing, yet a present that can thus also be ‘the fulness of time’ (Gal. 4.4) when unveiled. Always in the present, one constantly stands at the foot of the cross as one ‘moves’ (temporally, not spatially) along the horizontal and vertical axes from Adam to Christ. As such, perhaps Figure 42.3 can now be repositioned Figure 42.4. One stands, as one reads scripture and the world and its history, always in the present, at the foot of the cross, only partially, but increasingly, seeing reality unveiled with unveiled minds. The movement thus

Plotinus, Enneades, 3.7.11, 43. See Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.38.3; cf. Behr, Irenaeus of Lyons, 185–98. 13 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951), 16. 11 12

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indicated by the axes in the diagram is again the movement or growth that takes place in us, a movement that takes time, from birth to death, from being in Adam to being in Christ, and indeed the time it takes to read from Genesis to the Apocalypse. The ‘time’ of scripture is not a linear line in the past (as in Figure 42.1), but the time it takes one, in the present, to read, such that the ‘history’ read in scripture is one’s own.14

Speaking of creation If such, then, is the mental framework or paradigm for how scripture was read by Paul and Origen when they took the ‘beginning’ of Gen. 1.1 to speak about Christ, what, then, is the ‘creation’ that scripture speaks about? Regarding Christ and ‘creation’, the most controverted verse is Prov. 8.22: ‘The Lord created me [ἔκτισέν με], the beginning of his ways.’ In opposition to Arius, Athanasius would argue that this verse applies to Christ, the Wisdom of God, as human, in a ‘partitive reading’ of scripture that became standard thereafter. However, Origen seems to take this self-description of Wisdom as applying directly to Christ himself in a distinct and distinctive manner: for Origen, ‘creation’, κτίσις, is, as Rowan Williams puts it, ‘strictly only the unimpeded expression of God’s rational will’.15 Heaven and earth, and all those who inhabit these realms, were certainly brought into being by God (although other words are used), but what one actually sees in and around one, conditioned as it is by one’s own free actions, while regulated or ordered by the providence of God towards a certain end, do not yet manifest that end, so that it is not yet, strictly speaking, ‘the creation of God’. The ‘unimpeded expression of God’s rational will’ is seen uniquely, of course, in Christ, ‘the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation’, who ‘reconciles all things to himself ’, ‘making peace by the blood of his cross’, in whom ‘in whom the fulness of God was pleased to dwell’ (Col. 1.15, 20, 19). And he speaks of himself, as was noted at the beginning of this chapter, as ‘The Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God’ (Rev. 3.14). ‘Creation’, here, would be eschatological, not protological: it is that which is entered into through death and resurrection, as indeed is affirmed by Ps. 104.29-30: ‘When you take away their breath they die and return to their dust; when you send forth your Spirit, they will be created [κτισθήσονται], and you renew the face of the ground.’ Understood this way, the ‘created’ (ἔκτισέν) of Prov. 8.22 (LXX) approaches the Hebrew kānā, ‘acquired’, which, as Origen knew, had been rendered by others as ἐκτήσατο, also ‘acquired’.16 Using the image of iron and fire that Origen introduces in First Principals 2.6, where the iron, once placed in the fire, is no longer known by its own properties but, even while remaining the iron that it is, is now known by the properties of the fire, one could perhaps say

Cf. Rowan Williams, ‘The Discipline of Scripture’, in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 44–59, the conclusion of which parallels the thrust of this chapter: ‘In the light of all this, we might try re-conceiving the literal sense of Scripture as an eschatological sense. To read diachronically the history that we call a history of salvation is to “read” our own time in the believing community (and so too the time of our world) as capable of being integrated into such a history, in a future we cannot but call God’s because we have no secure human way of planning it or thematizing it’ (p. 58). 15 Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, rev. edn (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001), 141. 16 See Origen, Hexapla, 2.326. Cf. Burney, ‘Christ as the ΑΡΧΗ of Creation’, 160–73. 14

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that it is only when the iron is in the fire, and so ‘acquired’ by the fire, that it is ‘created’; it is what God intends for this iron. And this creation/acquisition is, thus, its ‘deification’. As Origen further comments, when God is, in the end, ‘all in all’, then the one in God ‘will no longer sense anything else apart from God; it will think God, see God, hold God. God will be the mode and measure of its every movement, and thus God will be all to it’.17 Intriguingly, the image of God as a ‘consuming fire’ (Deut. 4.24; Heb. 12.29) ties one back to time. Origen notes how, throughout scripture, those who are far from God are described by scripture as ‘cold’, while those who approach him become hot – ‘he makes his ministers a flame of fire’ (Ps. 103/4.4; Heb. 1.7) – kindled by the ‘fire’ that Christ has come to cast upon the earth (Lk. 12.49), so that his disciples’ hearts burn when he opens the scriptures (Lk. 24.32).18 The interplay between cold and heat is intrinsic to the passing of time. As Carlo Rovelli observes, ‘heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one. . . . This is the only basic law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future. . . . The link between time and heat is therefore fundamental: every time a difference is manifest between the past and the future, heat is involved.’19 For Origen, growing from Adam to Christ is a ‘heating up’ of the cooled ‘soul’ (ψυχή, fancifully etymologized from ψυχόω, ‘to become cold’) so that it becomes an inflamed intellect (νοῦς), a process that thus requires, or is, time; or, in other words, time is the measurement of the transfer of heat, of creation/acquisition/deification. Genesis 1, however, does not use the word ‘create/acquire’ (κτίζω/κτάομαι); but, instead, uses the verb ‘to make’ (ποιέω). In the course of analysing how Christ, as Wisdom, is said to be ‘the emanation of the purest glory of the Almighty’ (Wis. 7.25), Origen argues that if it is ‘in Wisdom’ that God ‘made’ all things (Ps. 104.24; πάντα ἐν σοφίᾳ ἐποίησας), or by his Word (cf. Jn 1.3), then ‘the title “Almighty” cannot be older in God than that of Father, as it is through his Son that the Father is Almighty’;20 in other words, it is as ‘Almighty’ that the ‘one God Father’ is ‘Maker [ποιητήν] of heaven and earth’, as the Nicene Creed orders the titles of the one God.21 But, lest this ‘omnipotence’ is misunderstood, Origen continues by pointing out that it is exercised in a particular manner, that is, through his Son (who thus also bears the title ‘Almighty’, Rev. 1.8), for ‘at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow’ (Phil. 2.10). After reasoning in this way, Origen adds: ‘so that it may be more clearly understood what the “glory” of omnipotence is’: The God and Father is ‘Almighty’ because he has power over all things, .  .  . and he exercises power over them through his Word, ‘for at the name of Jesus every knee bows . . .’. And, if ‘every knee bows’ to Jesus, then, without doubt, he it is who exercised power over all things, and through whom ‘all things have been subjected’ to the Father, for it is through Wisdom, that is by Word and Reason, not by force and necessity, that they have been subjected. And therefore his glory is in the very fact that he possesses all things, and

Origen, First Principals, 3.6.3; cf. 1 Cor. 15.28. Origen, First Principals, 2.8.3. 19 Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018), 24–5. 20 Origen, First Principals, 1.2.10. 21 Origen, First Principals, 1.2.10. See further the discussion in Origen, On First Principles, ed. and trans. John Behr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), lvi–lxv. 17 18

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this is the ‘purest and most clear glory’ of omnipotence, that by Reason and Wisdom, not by force and necessity, all things have been subjected.22 The omnipotence of God, by virtue of which he is the Maker of heaven and earth, is an omnipotence that is exercised not ‘by force and necessity’ but rather by ‘Reason and Wisdom’ (a Christian replaying of Plato’s account, in Timaeus 47e–48a, of how mind persuades necessity to bring all things to perfection). And the end of this exercise is to bring all things into voluntary subjection, accomplished in every knee bowing at the name of Jesus, when the name above all names is bestowed upon him as a result of his voluntary self-emptying on the cross; the paradigm for this ‘omnipotence’ is thus not a projection of humanly conceived power, but rather the strength that is perfected in weakness (cf. 2 Cor. 12.9), exemplified in full upon the cross. When all things are thus brought into subjection (for, indeed, all shall die), and Christ then subjects all things to the Father, God will then, in the end, be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor. 15.28). ‘Creation’ here is thus again understood as ‘possession’, bringing all things to their final end. Moreover, as an omnipotence exercised through Reason and Wisdom, the end requires one’s voluntary cooperation so that one too, as and in Christ, the ‘Amen’, may give one’s own ‘Amen’, one’s ‘let it be’ to that which is God’s own project. Whereas in Genesis 1 everything else is spoken into existence with a divine imperative, for God’s own particular project – a human being in the image and likeness of God – the subjunctive is used: ‘Let us make . . .’ (Gen. 1.26). This project requires a human response; as Ignatius urged the Christians in Rome: ‘hinder me not from living, . . . allow me to receive the pure light; when I shall have arrived there, I will be a human being; allow me to be an imitator of the passion of my God’.23 In Genesis 2, the verb used for this project is ‘to mould’ (πλάσσω). The action denoted by this verb is taken by Irenaeus as encompassing the whole economy, eschatologically oriented, and completed at the end. As he puts it: [J]ust as, from the beginning [ab initio] of our being-moulded [plasmationis] in Adam, the breath of life from God, having been united to that which is moulded [plasmati], animated [animavit] the human being and showed him to be a rational being, so also, at the end [in fine], the Word of the Father and the Spirit of God, having become united with the ancient substance of that which is moulded [plasmationis] of Adam, rendered [effecit] the human being living [viventem] and perfect, bearing the perfect Father, in order that just as in the animated we all die, so also in the spiritual we may all be vivified [vivificemur]. For never at any time did Adam escape the Hands of God, to whom the Father speaking, said, ‘Let us make the human being in our image, after our likeness’. And for this reason at the end [fine], ‘not by the will of the flesh, nor by the will of man’, but by the good pleasure of the Father, his Hands perfected a living human being [vivum perfecerunt hominem], in order that Adam might become in the image and likeness of God.24

Origen, First Principals, 12.10; citing Phil. 2.10; 1 Cor. 15.27-28. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Romans, 6. In the Gospel of John, the ‘project’ announced in the opening chapter of scripture is completed, ‘perfected’, by Christ’s voluntary ascent of the cross, with Pilate announcing ‘Behold the human being’, and Christ’s final word being τετέλεσται, ‘it is finished’ (Jn 19.5, 30). See John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 194–217. 24 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.1.3, citing Gen. 1.26; Jn 1.13. 22 23

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God is continually at work, fashioning with his Hands the earth that one is, so that at the end there is finished ‘the living human being’, ‘the glory of God’.25 Following Paul (1 Cor. 15.45-48), the movement from Adam to Christ is also a movement from breath to Spirit, from one form or modality of life to another, and thus essentially temporal. In an intriguing passage, Origen seems to coordinate the three different verbs that have so far been considered – ‘to create’ (κτίζω), ‘to make’ (ποιέω), ‘to mould’ (πλάσσω) – not to refer to distinct or discrete separate acts, but rather as different aspects of God’s act of creating, in much the same way as he analyses the different titles of Christ as various aspects of the one Christ. According to Origen: Because, therefore, the first human being fell away from the superior things and desired a life different from the better life, he deserved to be a beginning neither of something created nor made [οὔτε κτίσματος οὔτε ποιήματος], but ‘of something moulded [πλάσματος] by the Lord, made [πεποιημένον] to be mocked by the angels’. Now, our superior being [ἡ προηγουμένη ὑπόστασις] is in our being created [κτίσαντος] ‘according to the image’ of the Creator, but that resulting from a cause [ἡ ἐξ αἰτίας] is in the thing moulded [ἐν τῷ . . . πλάσματι], which was received from the dust of the earth.26 As Marguerite Harl points out, Origen seems to indicate a hierarchy of terms describing different aspects of ‘creation’, a descending gradation of ‘create’ (κτίζειν), ‘make’ (ποιεῖν), and ‘mould’ (πλάσσειν).27 One’s ‘προηγουμένη being’ is not simply a ‘superior’ existence, as created in the image of God, an intellectual reality superior to bodily matter, but, more immediately, one’s primary or primordial existence – Gen. 1.26 comes, literally, before Gen. 2.7 – while that which is ‘moulded’ from earth, on the other hand, is neither simply ‘created nor made’, but, as resulting ‘from a cause’, it has ‘been made to be mocked by the angels’. What this cause might be will be considered in a moment. Finally, two further words pertain to what is generally considered ‘creation’. Both are used in Eph. 1.3-4, a passage of particular importance for Origen: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose [ἐξελέξατο] us in him before the foundation [πρὸ καταβολῆς] of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. Although regularly translated as ‘foundation’, the Greek word καταβολή, as Rufinus notes in his translation of On First Principles, ‘has been very improperly translated into Latin as constitutio; for in Greek καταβολή signifies rather deicere, that is, to cast downwards’.28 Related to this ‘throwing down’, of course, is Rev. 13.8, which speaks of those who worship the beast,

Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.20.7. Origen, Commentary on John, 20.182, citing Job 40.19 and Gen. 1.26. 27 Marguerite Harle, ‘La Préexistence des âmes dans l’oeuvre d’Origène’, in Origeniana Quarta: Die Referate des 4. Internationalen Origeneskongresses (Innsbruck. 2–6 September 1985), ed. Lortha Lies (Innsbruck-Wien: Tyrolia Verlag, 1987), 244. 28 Origen, First Principals, 3.5.4. 25 26

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‘whose names have not been written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’ (ἐν τῷ βιβλίῳ τῆς ζωῆς τοῦ ἀρνίου τοῦ ἐσφαγμένου ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου). While humanity is chosen before the foundation of the world, the Lamb, on the other hand, is slain from its foundation. Finally, to see how these words pertaining to ‘creation’ might be coordinated, they could perhaps be aligned with the different dimensions of Figures 42.3 and 42.4 to give us Figure 42.5. In doing so, it must be borne in mind that, as with the titles of Christ, these different words relating to ‘creation’ are not distinct or discrete moments in a linear time but different aspects of the one reality, one’s being formed to be ready for God to be, in the end, ‘all in all’. Although not immediately apparent, individuals are, primarily, from the upper register, ‘called’ into being, ‘chosen’ by God, ‘before the foundation’ or throwing down ‘of the world’. But, as Maximus puts it, together with coming-into-being (ἅμα τῷ γενέσθαι), Adam (and individuals in Adam) have turned away from God, squandering their spiritual capacity for enjoying God by turning it towards the material world, attracted by its beauty rather than by God. This results in the need for a slow, long, patient pedagogy, teaching through the reciprocity of pleasure and suffering, till we, too, reverse the order and, by ‘changing the use

Figure 42.5  The dimensions of creation. 555

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of death’, give our ‘Amen’ or ‘Let it be’ to God in Christ.29 Being made (ποίησις/πλάσις) ‘in Adam’ (left and below, in Figure 42.5), with the world having been ‘thrown down’, we first know Christ as ‘the Lamb slain from [not before] the foundation of the world’ (Rev. 13.8), that is, within the appearances of this world as ‘thrown down’ we see Christ as ‘crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men’ (Acts 2.23). But, as we grow in Christ, we come to see that Christ’s Pascha is, in fact, ‘the definite plan’ foreknown by God (Acts 2.23), not merely an act of atonement in response to our sinfulness (which it also is on the lower register of the duallevel drama) but instead, the expression of the love of God, originating in God himself, as in Gospel of John, a love which is unconditioned and unconditional: ‘This is the way [οὕτως] God loves the world’ (Jn 3.16), and it is ‘for this reason that the Father loves me because I lay down my life, that I may take it again’ (Jn 10.17). Moreover, as individuals grow from left to right, from below to above, from infancy to maturity, sacramentally and ascetically dying in Christ, they finally come to see that they were called into existence ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph. 1.4): while seen in the lower register, the primary cause of their existence is their biological parents, they increasingly come to realize, as they manifest the fact, that God is their point of origin, the fundamental cause of their existence, such that, as the Psalmist proclaims: ‘You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you’ (Ps. 82.6). Perhaps, then, the ‘antecedent cause’ to which Origen appeals in On First Principles, as an explanation for the diversity and suffering individuals see around them, yet which God holds together as a ‘cosmos’, that is, as providentially arranged so that individuals arrive at the end to which God has called them from the beginning,30 is their reaction to seeing what divine love and life look like: from their first breath, they prefer to hold on to their breath, committing themselves to death, resulting in the long pedagogy (in which they are ‘mocked by angels’), culminating in death, whereby they finally experience, in weakness, the perfect strength of God, and are, finally, ‘created’ or ‘acquired’. If one’s end is to enter into the eternity of God, then one’s end is also to share in that eternity. As the iron in the fire, while remaining iron, is known by the properties of the fire, so too, while remaining created beings, one comes to share in the power of the uncreated;31 or, more dramatically, as Gregory Palamas puts it, paraphrasing Maximus: [T]he saints clearly state that this adoption, actualised by faith, is enhypostatic. .  .  . Yet the divine Maximus has not only taught that it is enhypostatic, but also that it is unoriginate (not only uncreated), indescribable and supratemporal. Those who attain it become thereby uncreated, unoriginate and indescribable, although in their own nature, they derive from nothingness.32 To enter into the eternity of God, however, is not to enter at some moment of time, and to be there thereafter, for there is no before or after in his eternity; and so, although, on the lower/

St. Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Maximus Constas (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 439–42. Modified. 30 See Origen, First Principals, 2.9.6–8. 31 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.38.3. 32 Gregory Palamas, The Triads, ed. John Meyendorff, trans. Nicholas Gendle (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1983), 3.1.31. 29

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left register, one is not there yet, it turns out that, in the end, one indeed already is, and always has been so, even if it is not evident to them: one’s end is, in fact, one’s beginning. One does indeed, as Paul asserts, have ‘a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens’ (2 Cor. 5.1), where resides one’s ‘citizenship’, while one waits here for ‘a saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change [one’s] lowly body to be like his glorious body’ (Phil. 3.2021). And as such, ‘our life upon the earth [is] but a shadow’ (Job 8.9; cf. Origen, First Principals, 2.6.7). Seen in this way, ‘creation’ is, in fact, ‘in travail’, awaiting the apocalypse, the unveiling, of the children of God in their truly glorious liberty (Rom. 8.18-25). The framework implied by ‘the Bible’ (Figure 42.1) pushes one to think of creation as a temporal or pre-temporal beginning, or to identify the world as it currently is with the intention of the creator. Compared with this, returning to an ‘apocalyptic’ way of reading scripture – which is, in fact, the historical, hermeneutical, and liturgical order – the ‘creation’ spoken about by scripture – in, by, and unto Christ – is a much more complex and sophisticated manner of seeing the world in which we live, and ourselves, always in the present but oriented towards the end, as its final and primary cause.

Further reading Behr, John. Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013. Behr, John. John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Blowers, Paul. The Drama of the Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bouteneff, Peter. Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008. Holsinger-Friesen, Thomas. Irenaeus and Genesis: A Study of Competition in Early Christian Hermeneutics. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009. Tzamalikos, Panayiotis. Origen: Philosophy of History and Eschatology. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

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CHAPTER 43 ASTROPHYSICS

David Wilkinson and Jennifer Wiseman

Introduction Astrophysics, astronomy, and cosmology form a close family of sciences exploring the birth, life and death of stars, planets, galaxies, and the universe. While they overlap, astronomy concentrates on observing objects beyond Earth, astrophysics concentrates on small- to medium-size structures in the universe through the application of physics and chemistry, and cosmology concentrates on the history, structure, and future of the universe as a whole. Thus, they seek to understand the physical universe and our place in it. This chapter first reviews some of the recent discoveries in astrophysics, astronomy, and cosmology in order to give a sense of an exciting and fast-moving field, and then explores what questions are posed for Christian theology. It sees a rich dialogue where astrophysics does raise challenges for theology, but these challenges are fruitful for a deeper understanding of the Christian doctrine of creation. A changing scientific understanding: Unveiling a bountiful, dynamic universe Observing the heavens Throughout history, humans have observed the heavens with wonder, fear, and curiosity. Heavenly phenomena have been seen as indicators of God’s power, as well as omens of doom or prophets of significant happenings in human affairs.1 But the era of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) spawned a radical change in how the heavens were viewed – theologically, philosophically, and literally.2 Galileo first used the newly invented telescope to make systematic observations of the heavens, including scanning Earth’s moon and discovering the inner moons orbiting Jupiter, which are now designated ‘the Galilean moons’. The subsequent four centuries saw vast improvements in optics technology. By the early twentieth century, careful astronomical observation resolved a profound debate about whether visible stars and fuzzy ‘nebulae’ were all part of our one, cohesive ‘universe’, or if some of these nebulous smudges seen in astronomical images were actually entire galaxies outside Earth’s Milky Way.3 The latter proved to be true, and it is now known that our own Milky Way galaxy, with at least 200 billion stars, is only one of the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe.

See Dennis R. Danielson, The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking (Cambridge: Perseus Books, 2002). 2 See David Whitehouse, Renaissance Genius: Galileo Galilei & His Legacy to Modern Science (New York: Sterling, 2009), 219. 3 See ‘The Great Debate of 1920’, National Academy of Sciences, accessed 19 February 2022, http://www​.nasonline​.org​/ about​-nas​/history​/archives​/milestones​-in​-NAS​-history​/the​-great​-debate​-of​-1920​.html. 1

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Figure 43.1  The Very Large Array (VLA) Radio Telescope Observatory. Astronomers today use different kinds of telescopes on the ground and in space to gather information about the universe from different kinds of radiation ranging from radio waves through visible light to energetic X-rays and gamma-rays. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF.

Today’s astronomers use technological tools unimaginable even decades ago to unveil a universe hitherto mostly unseen. Sensitive telescopes are placed in high and remote places, including mountaintops and high-altitude deserts, which provide the darkest, clearest, driest skies. With the advent of putting telescopes in space, most notably the Hubble Space Telescope, the clarity and sensitivity afforded by avoiding the blurring and light-filtering effects of Earth’s atmosphere have enabled a leap in understanding the universe almost as significant as that pioneered by Galileo. Astronomical cameras and instruments now detect colours and wavelength bands far beyond what the human eye can see, including high energy ‘bluer than blue’ ultraviolet light, X-rays, and gamma rays, and also lower energy ‘redder than red’ infrared light, millimetre waves, and radio waves. In addition to the visible light ‘rainbow’ colours, these radiation bands give vast information about everything from planets to galaxies to the diffuse gas and dust between the stars that would otherwise be unseen and unknown. An unimaginably rich universe As now observed with modern telescopes, the universe is peppered with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with billions or even hundreds of billions of stars. This was revealed most dramatically in the ‘deep field’ observations of the Hubble Space Telescope, obtained by pointing the telescope to a relatively ‘empty’ direction in the sky and simply collecting light over several days, thereby detecting the faintest objects from distant space. Deep field observations show 562

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with stunning visibility a glimpse of what our universe, filled with unimaginable numbers of galaxies and stars within, looks like.4 Galaxies are rich with activity, including supermassive black holes at their centres, where many dead stars tend to migrate and form a repository of great mass compressed by gravity into a small volume. Each galaxy contains myriad stars, hundreds of billions in galaxies like our own Milky Way. Stars themselves are diverse, ranging from supergiants, over ten times more massive than the Sun, down to the most common red dwarf stars with less than half the mass of the Sun. And, as is known from our own solar system, stars can have orbiting planets. One of the greatest leaps of discovery in recent years is the detection of exoplanets; that is, planets

Figure 43.2  The Ultra-Deep field of galaxies, as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Nearly all of the thousands of knots and clouds of light in this image are entire galaxies, each with billions of stars. If one could get far outside our Milky Way galaxy and look back, our galaxy would look like one of these spirals visible here. Deep space looks similar in every direction, with hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe. The galaxies here are at diverse distances, therefore representing different time epochs when their light began its trek. Some are billions of light-years away, and we see them as they were in the early phases of the universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI).

See ‘Discoveries – Hubble’s Deep Fields’, NASA, accessed 19 February 2022, https://www​.nasa​.gov​/content​/discoveries​ -hubbles​-deep​-fields. 4

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orbiting stars other than our Sun. No exoplanets were known before the 1990s, but with the advent of new technology and clever indirect techniques, discoveries of these tiny bodies began with ground-based telescopes and accelerated with space-based missions such as the Kepler space telescope. There are now thousands of exoplanets known in our galaxy, and statistically, it is clear that most stars have at least one planet. That means hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy alone, and if other galaxies are similar, the number of planets in the universe is staggering. A changing universe The universe revealed through astronomy is not one of stagnant stars and planets. Indeed, Galileo’s detection and monitoring of tiny ‘dots’ next to Jupiter showed that they moved from night to night: these were orbiting moons and gave credibility to the model of the entire solar system orbiting the Sun. Modern studies of the solar system show great changes over time: Jupiter’s storms change in size, comets appear and disintegrate, asteroids collide, and the

Figure 43.3  The Orion Nebula. This composite image from the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes highlights the glorious features of gas energized by light from massive young stars recently formed within this giant cloud of interstellar gas. Stars continue to form in this stellar nursery; radio and infrared telescopes have detected gas clumps behind this nebula where lower mass heated protostars are accreting mass and will eventually turn on as shining stars. Credit: NASA, ESA, T. Megeath, and M. Robberto (STScI). 564

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climate on planets can change, such as the dramatic transition of Mars from an ancient waterbearing world with rivers and lakes to the frozen desert that it is today. Stars are also transitory entities, still forming within great stellar nurseries hidden in dense clouds of interstellar gas and dust throughout galaxies like our own. These regions of stellar birth can be seen with radio and infrared telescopes, and where infant stars are beginning to burst forth with light, the surrounding leftover gas can be energized by the stellar radiation, creating colourful nebulae as signposts of star formation activity. Stars form when a pocket of gas within the vast regions between stars becomes dense enough to collapse from its own gravitational pull.5 If enough matter is compressed at the centre, the enormous pressure will incite fusion of the hydrogen gas atoms, resulting in reactions producing helium and heavier atoms as well as photons of light. This is the starlight one sees, including sunlight. Star ‘death’ is as dynamic and significant as is stellar birth. After millions or even billions of years, depending on the mass of the star, the hydrogen fuel for fusion at the core of a star becomes depleted, kicking off a chain of instabilities that eventually results in the star ejecting its outer layers and either cooling off as a dead ‘white dwarf ’ star, or else, for the most massive stars, exploding as a spectacular supernova. In both cases, the material forged through the star’s ‘fusion factory’ reactions is dispersed into the interstellar environment where the next generation of stars forming from this material is enriched with atoms such as carbon, oxygen, and iron produced through the reactions (and explosions) of the previous generation of stars. One can tell, for example, from the diverse composition of our Sun that it is not a firstgeneration star. The first stars and matter in the early universe were composed almost entirely of simple hydrogen; without this production of heavier elements through stars, there would be no solid material to form rocky dust belts around subsequent forming stars and to enable planets to form within those dusty disks. Thus our very existence as carbon-based life on a planet with solid material and water is made possible by the creative activities of stars before our Sun. Galaxies are not stagnant, either. One of the greatest achievements of modern astronomy is the unveiling of the universe far back in time, thanks to the ‘time machine’ aspect of light travel time. Anything one observes looks not as it actually is at this moment in time but as it was when the light began its trek to us, travelling at the speed of light, approximately 300,000 kilometres per second. That’s fast, but not infinitely fast, and, in fact, it takes 150,000 years just for light to travel across our own Milky Way galaxy. Using ‘light years’ as a convenient measure of distance – the distance light travels in one year – the nearest grand spiral-shaped galaxy to our own, Andromeda, is two million light years away. Modern telescope sensitive images, such as the Deep Fields, reveal galaxies from millions or even billions of light years away in space and, therefore, back in time. Astronomers can now compare the composition, appearance, and activity of galaxies in the early universe to that of those like our own and can deduce if galaxies change over time. And they do – earlier galaxies appear smaller, more irregular, and have simpler compositions in their stars and gas because there haven’t been many generations of stars yet to produce a significant amount of heavier elements as seen in mature galaxies.6 Galaxies also show signs of colliding, as gravity draws close galaxies together to the point

See Eric T. Young, ‘Mysteries of How a Star Is Born’, Scientific American 302, no. 2 (2010): 34. See ‘Galaxies: The Building Blocks of the Universe’, NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), accessed 19 February 2022, https://hubblesite​.org​/science​/galaxies. 5 6

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Figure 43.4  Interacting galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163. Galaxy interactions and mergers, caused by mutual gravitational pull, have built up the mass of galaxies and stimulated star formation over billions of years. The Earth’s Milky Way galaxy shows signs of past and future merging with other galaxies. Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team.

where they merge to form larger galaxies. Such collisions can trigger pressure waves and star formation throughout the interstellar gas in the galaxies involved. Our own Milky Way galaxy has experienced mergers in its cosmic past, and recent careful measurements show that it is heading to merge head-on with Andromeda – in a few billion years! Astronomers can also measure the apparent brightness of certain types of individual stars in nearby galaxies, or of individual supernova explosions in faraway galaxies, and then use these to gauge the distances of their host galaxies. The apparent velocities of these galaxies can also be determined by measuring the amount of ‘red-shifting’ of their light colour caused by relative motion between us and the galaxy. These techniques have revealed that most galaxies are moving away from each other; or, more accurately, described as being caught up in the expansion of space itself. In fact, the expansion of space is one of several independent lines of evidence that our universe has not been here forever in a ‘steady state’ but instead burst into dynamic action about 13.8 billion years ago. The so-called ‘Big Bang’ kick-off period of our universe has left behind remnant background radiation throughout space that is now detected in every direction of the sky.7 An unseen universe Modern astronomy is revealing visible phenomena that, in turn, point to the existence of a much larger realm of unseen phenomena. While the expansion of the universe was verified

See Rhodri Evans, The Cosmic Microwave Background: How It Changed Our Understanding of the Universe (Cham: Springer, 2015). 7

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by Edwin Hubble’s galaxy measurements a century ago, more precise measurements in recent years of galaxies near and far have revealed that the expansion of the universe has actually been accelerating over the past few billion years, much to the surprise of astronomers who assumed gravity would slow or even eventually reverse the expansion. The term ‘dark energy’ has been assigned to the driver of this acceleration, but the nature of dark energy is still a mystery and is a hot topic for modern astrophysics. Another unseen entity is ‘dark matter’, the effects of which are apparent throughout galaxies and across space itself. Dark matter is detected by its gravitational effects, seen, for example, in its influence on orbital velocities of stars in galaxies or by its distorting effects on light from distant galaxies passing through regions of space filled with this material, which seems to make up 85 per cent of the known matter in the universe. But dark matter does not radiate or reflect light, and its actual make-up is not yet understood. Modern experiments in astrophysics and

Figure 43.5  The Abell 370 Galaxy Cluster. This collection of hundreds of galaxies is held together by gravitational attraction, which balances the other motions of the galaxies. However, most of the matter in the cluster is not in the bright visible galaxies but rather in the unseen dark matter within and between the galaxies. In fact, the gravity from the dark matter is so prevalent that it significantly warps the shape of space itself, magnifying and stretching the light coming through from background galaxies into distorted shapes and arcs, like a funhouse mirror. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Lotz, and the HFF Team (STScI). 567

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in particle physics are studying both the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe and its possible make-up.8 And now an unseen messenger of the universe has been detected, carrying information, not by electromagnetic waves – the radiation traditional astronomy detects as everything from radio waves to visible light to X-rays – but instead by travelling distortions of space– time itself. While these gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein to be incited by accelerations of mass, it was not clear that such tiny disturbances would be detectible unless perhaps they were launched by accelerations of the most massive condensed objects known, such as the merger of two black holes. After years of technological improvements and patient waiting, detector facilities on the ground such as LIGO (the Laser Interferometer GravitationalWave Observatory in the United States) have started to detect gravitational wave events spawned from events like black hole mergers and neutron star mergers, the latter sometimes accompanied by a visible kilonova explosion. Gravitational wave detections are part of a new effort called ‘multi-messenger astronomy’, combining information from gravitational waves, particle detections, and traditional electromagnetic wave astronomy to get a more complete picture of active phenomena in the universe. An inhabited universe The enormous, bountiful and active universe has produced, over billions of years of development, innumerable galaxies, each filled with dark matter, gas, and stars, and, at least for galaxies like our own Milky Way, many planets.9 At least one planet orbiting one star in one galaxy, our own, hosts life (our own planet, Earth). And therefore, the universe is not ‘dead’; rather, it seems to have become steadily more capable of hosting life through billions of years of stars producing heavier elements that have enabled the formation of planets and the hosting of life in at least one star system. The recent actual detections of planets beyond our own solar system have rejuvenated the age-old question of whether there is life beyond Earth. While no extraterrestrial life has yet been detected, new technologies are fuelling a major goal of astronomers and space agencies around the world to study and characterize as many of the detected exoplanets as possible, especially the rocky ones that seem to orbit their stars in the ‘habitable zone’ – that is, at a comfortable distance from their parent star that would neither be too cold nor be too hot for liquid water to possibly exist on the planet’s surface. Since exoplanets are too far away for humans to explore in person or with probes, humans are dependent on clever techniques of astronomy to analyse characteristics of these alien worlds, such as their orbits, densities, likely climate, and atmospheric composition. Most exoplanet detection and study is done through indirect techniques because taking an image of a tiny, faint body next to a star that can be a billion times brighter is very difficult. Instead, astronomers detect gravitational tugs on a star from planets, or the slight dimming of a star when a planet passes in front of it, to infer the existence and characteristics of orbiting planets. Starlight passing through the atmosphere of a planet transiting in front can further

See Brian Clegg, Dark Matter and Dark Energy: The Hidden 95% of the Universe (London: Icon Books, 2019). See ‘Exoplanet Exploration: Planets beyond Our Solar System’, NASA, accessed 19 February 2022, https://exoplanets​ .nasa​.gov. 8 9

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Figure 43.6  An artist’s impression of what the view might be on the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b, a planet slightly larger than Earth detected to orbit in the habitable zone of the very nearest star to our own Sun, Proxima Centauri. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser.

elucidate the composition of the planet’s atmosphere; already, components such as sodium, nitrogen, and water vapour have been detected in some systems. In these ways, astronomers have now determined that most stars have planets but that most planetary systems are not quite like the collection in our own solar system in terms of mass, make-up, and distribution. The next major goal in the astronomical study of exoplanets is to search for biosignatures in the atmospheres of exoplanets, requiring the technology and increased sensitivity of the next generation of telescopes being designed. Biological activity can produce detectible changes in a planet’s atmosphere, such as the presence of replenished oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere thanks to ongoing photosynthesis from plants around the globe. Similar clues seen in exoplanets could provide the first true tell-tale signs of life beyond Earth, most likely from what one might call ‘simple life’. An entirely new scientific field of astrobiology is determining what kinds of biosignatures could be detected with instruments and techniques in development. Astrobiologists are also examining the extreme conditions in which life can exist and thrive on planet Earth to predict the range of conditions conducive to life on other diverse worlds.10 Other contemporary efforts to search for life include plans for probes to study more carefully the water-bearing icy moons in our own solar system, and the privately funded Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme, which searches for signs of intentional signals that could be sent from advanced civilizations, in contrast to the scientific searches for signatures of simple biological activity.

See ‘Astrobiology at NASA: Life in the Universe’, NASA, accessed 19 February 2022, https://astrobiology​.nasa​.gov.

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While life beyond Earth has been imagined for centuries in literature and science fiction, humans are today living in an incredible time in human history when thousands of actual planets beyond our solar system have been detected, and the realized technology for potentially finding signs of at least simple life beyond Earth is becoming available within near-term decades.

A changing theological understanding These discoveries raise several questions about God as creator, sustainer, and redeemer of creation. While some may be puzzling, they are part of an ongoing conversation between science and Christian theology that has been going on for centuries. What has been striking about this conversation is how science has reminded Christians of the richness of their own theological tradition and has enabled a more authentically biblical understanding of God to emerge. A question about the nature of science Astrophysics is only possible because of certain assumptions about the nature of science. As Galileo turned his telescope to observe the heavens, he was driven by the Christian conviction that the creator God was free to create whatever God wanted.11 Therefore, the nature of the universe could not be worked out based on human logic alone. Rather, if God was free to create then one had to observe the universe to understand what God had done. Sometimes this would be surprising and puzzling and go beyond expectations, whether of common sense or current reasoning. Thus, Earth was not at the centre of the universe, the planets were not carried on the perfect crystalline spheres of Aristotle or the epicycles of Ptolemy, and Earth was moving at a speed of over 100,000 km/hr. In fact, most opposition to Galileo came from the old models from the Greeks being challenged.12 Galileo’s observation of the heavens and the importance of data gave a new approach to how science could be done and also for its implications for theological thinking. However, observation needed to be coupled with other assumptions, which the JudeoChristian tradition provided.13 That God is a faithful, rather than a capricious, God means that one can see consistent patterns throughout the vast distances of space and aeons of time. Thus arose the belief in the universality of physical laws. Now the question arose whether those physical laws could be understood through the human mind. Human beings created in the image of God provided the optimism that God would not jealously guard secrets about the universe but rather has given science as a gift.

See Michael Sharratt, Galileo: Decisive Innovator (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See Stillman Drake, Galileo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Owen Gingerich, ‘The Galileo Affair’, Scientific American 247, no. 2 (1982): 132–43. 13 See Michael B. Foster, ‘The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Science’, Mind 43, no. 172 (1934): 446–68; Reijer Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972). 11 12

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Astrophysics beautifully illustrates this nature of science. Observation is fundamental and, as has been noted, can often surprise; for example, in the discovery of dark energy. The laws that govern the end of a star’s life in a supernovae explosion are the same laws throughout the universe. And some of the models for black holes and the Big Bang show the amazing success of science in understanding the universe. Yet recent observations remind us that our scientific models do not describe everything perfectly. Scientific models are provisional descriptions of a deeper reality. These models are always open to challenge; they may need to be refined and sometimes overturned. The faith of the astrophysicist is that in this process, in the context of the scientific community, models move towards a tightening grip on reality. They are never the final story. This is important to remember, especially in a world where scientific claims frequently appear in the media. It is easy to hear headlines suggesting that everything is ‘proven’ or that our understanding of the universe is completely overturned with each new discovery. Science is much more complex, being both dynamic and stable in its process. Astrophysicists rarely talk about ‘proof ’. All of this has importance for theology. First, one needs to recognize the Christian influence on the development of science. This subverts those who want to pose science in conflict with theology. Second, one needs to see science as a gift from God and not be afraid to use it for God’s glory. Third, common sense is not a good guide to either the nature of the universe or the nature of God. Our everyday experience is such a small part of the universe. Fourth, as scientific models progress, one must be careful to allow science and theology to stay in a rich conversation rather than allowing current scientific thinking to be the final arbiter of truth about God, the universe, and everything. As T. H. Huxley once said of science: ‘Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.’14 Astrophysics in the last few decades has illustrated this beautifully. And coupled with this humility comes a sense of awe. A question about a sense of awe The discoveries described at the beginning of this chapter reflect one of the consistent human experiences of astronomy and astrophysics: a sense of awe at the universe’s scale, beauty, and intelligibility. None of these things is trivial, and they need to be taken seriously by theology. Within the biblical material, a sense of awe flows into the worship of the creator God. One can see something of this in Psalm 8. Debate continues as to its connection with wisdom material, its authorship, and the era when it was written. Whatever its original setting, it is certainly true that this psalm has been used regularly in both individual and corporate worship of both Jewish and Christian communities. There is a strong sense of awe in the opening refrain – ‘O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!’ (Ps. 8.1) – and this leads the psalmist to reflect on the greatness of God in terms of ‘the moon and the stars, the work of your fingers’ (Ps. 8.3). The psalmist stands in awe of such a God. And yet, this sense of awe leading to a sense of the greatness of God is not straightforward. The psalm opens up another couple of perspectives. The first is puzzling. Verse 2 is difficult to translate. It is unclear whether ‘from the lips of children and

Leonard Huxley and Thomas Henry Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1900), 1:219. 14

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infants’ is a qualification to the previous verse or is connected to the rest of verse 2. However, the contrast between the apparent weakness of children and the apparent strength of God’s enemies is clear. But this is strange. The God whose praise is above the heavens has enemies, and sometimes God’s praise can only be heard through children. The complexity of God’s power and revelation of himself is highlighted – God’s subverting of his enemies comes through weakness. In the New Testament, Jesus uses the psalm in this way. In Mt. 21.16, after the cleansing of the temple, he is criticized by the chief priests and scribes for accepting the praise of children. His reply employs Ps. 8.2, saying that the truth comes from infants rather than enemies. The biblical material is a caution against reading too much of the nature of God from the universe itself. But the second perspective is more puzzling – perhaps even distressing. The psalmist asks the obvious question in the light of creation: ‘what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?’ (Ps. 8.4). What are human beings in relation to this? Indeed, the question is phrased so that the obvious answer is ‘nothing’! Blaise Pascal wrote: When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. . . . The eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me.15 The vastness of the universe may not lead to a sense of the greatness of God – for some, it may lead to the insignificance of human beings. These perspectives caution those who want to use the universe to prove ‘God’. The psalmist is saying it is far more complicated than that and, for some, creation by itself can lead to the despair of insignificance. In the last few decades, astrophysics has sometimes been used by those who want to try to resurrect the design argument that was popular before the time of Darwin. It pointed to design in the natural world and proceeded to argue, therefore, for the existence of a designer. It was Darwin who showed that the apparent design in nature could be the result of natural selection rather than a divine watchmaker, and this led to a fading of the design argument within Christian theology. Yet over several recent decades, humans have discovered that the laws and circumstances of the universe need to be just right to provide a universe of structure and intelligent, selfconscious life. It is what Paul Davies calls ‘the Goldilocks Enigma’16 and raises the question of whether such life is the inevitable and central outcome of the processes within the universe. This has led to some contemporary toying with the design argument. Perhaps the clearest contemporary exposition of its significance came in Martin Rees’ Just Six Numbers. He highlights the apparent fine-tuning of the ratio of the electrical force to gravitational force, how firmly atomic nuclei bind together, the amount of material in the universe, the cosmological constant, the ratio of energy needed to disperse an object compared to its total rest mass energy, and the number of spatial dimensions in the universe. If any of these were just slightly different

Blaise Pascal, Pascal ’s Pensées (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 61. Paul C. W. Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (London: Allen Lane, 2006).

15 16

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to what they actually are, intelligent life would not develop within the universe. Rees then gives three options to explain this striking feature of the universe. First, one can simply accept this is how it is and not ask further questions. Rees resists this option because this fine-tuning is of such an extraordinary degree that it pushes one to consider whether there is a deeper story to the universe. The second option is to see fine-tuning as evidence of a creator God. This is not discussed in depth. The third option is the one he sees as ‘compellingly attractive’ and ‘a natural deduction from some (albeit speculative) theories’.17 This is the claim that the anthropic principle selects this universe out of many. One sees fine-tuning because one is here to observe it. In another universe, where there is no fine-tuning, there would be no observers to see it. The move here is to introduce the concept of the multiverse. This has become popular in recent discussions, and there is a multitude of multiverse theories. (This is discussed in more detail in the chapter by Rodney Holder in this volume.) However, the crucial point in all of this is whether other universe speculation is metaphysics or physics. Can one know that the multiverse is there by passing information from one universe to another, or does one accept the existence of the multiverse based on the prediction of theories that solve other problems to do with our early universe? There is considerable disagreement on these matters. Some argue strongly that this coupling of the anthropic principle with a theory of many universes is more of a metaphysical suggestion than a physical theory.18 In that sense, it is an alternative explanation to that of a creator God, although the Christian theologian would put forward the evidence of God becoming a human being in Jesus as a strong argument in favour of the existence of God. However, others point out that if, for example, a particular theory – inflation theory – is required to explain certain features of our own early universe and a particular form of this theory predicts the existence of other universes, then this could be seen as a physical rather than metaphysical theory. How does one then assess the Goldilocks Enigma and the multiverse? The multiverse sounds a necessary cautious word that our observation of the universe is depends on the fact that humans are here. And it further gives an alternative (if only at the very least metaphysical) explanation of design. The design argument depends on the possibility that there is no other explanation apart from that of a designer. What Darwin did in the nineteenth century was to give, through natural selection, an alternative explanation to design. The multiverse acts in the same way. The possibility of a multiverse cautions us against resurrecting the design argument as a means of proving the existence of God. Nevertheless, a multiverse capable of producing just one galaxy that generates self-reflecting intelligent life is cause for humble reflection on potential purpose, even at this larger scale. The Goldilocks Enigma of fine-tuning, if not providing an easy proof of God, can be used in pointing to at least a question of whether there is a deeper story to the universe regarding the relationship of humanity and the cosmos. Perhaps the awe and wonder of not only the vastness of the universe but also that things are just right for sentient life may be the beginning of a search or an intriguing puzzle. Another aspect of the close and intriguing relationship between humanity and the cosmos is to be found in our experience of the intelligibility of the universe. In November 1915,

Martin J. Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000), 150. 18 See Rodney D. Holder, Big Bang, Big God: A Universe Designed for Life? (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2013). 17

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Albert Einstein, after several years of hard work, was able to extend his work on the Special Theory of Relativity to what became the General Theory of Relativity. He was able to derive the field equations for gravity that would describe how the geometry of space and time was shaped by the presence of matter and radiation and then apply them to the decades-long puzzle of the small advance of the perihelion of Mercury (that is the closest point of the planet to the Sun). Einstein’s theory of gravitation accounted for the advance exactly without the need for other planets or other attempted ‘fixes’. He wrote: ‘For a few days I was beside myself with joyous excitement.’19 In this joyous excitement was the sense that the universe was intelligible and that intelligibility was characterized by simplicity and beauty in the equations of physics. The consequences of the general theory were profound. It implied that on the rare occurrence when two black holes collided, they would produce gravitational waves, small ripples in the fabric of space–time. Einstein himself was sceptical about whether it would be possible to see these gravitational waves, but, as already noted, on 11 February 2016, the LIGO collaboration announced the detection of gravitational waves from two black holes (of twenty-nine and thirty-six solar masses) merging about 1.3 billion light years away.20 This is an extraordinary example of intelligibility – the ability to understand the universe even in its most bizarre and counter-intuitive outworking of the laws of physics. As Einstein once commented: ‘The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.’21 Some see this as a pointer to some kind of rationality behind the universe. Of course, some Christians respond positively to Darwin’s natural selection with awe that God should have used an intricate process, and recognize God in the biological laws rather than the special design of each creature. Indeed, this has a long tradition stretching back to Isaac Newton, who recognized the laws of the universe as the work of the divine lawgiver. Johannes Kepler was carried away by ‘unutterable rapture at the divine spectacle of heavenly harmony’22 as the correlation between orbital periods and mean diameters, which show that the planets move in elliptical orbits, was disclosed. The same can be said of some physicists today who see the laws of physics as a reflection of the consistent work of God in sustaining the universe. It has been argued elsewhere that this sense of awe rather than the attempt of logical proof of a designer was much more characteristic of a fruitful Christian approach to theology and mission.23 For Christians, God is known primarily through his self-revelation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and it is from this perspective that awe can be used to point to deeper questions about the universe and to enrich worship. Certainly, the experience of awe opens up the possibility of dialogue between science and theology, between the academy and the layperson, and it seems to be key to learning and building in students a passion for their subjects.24

Albert Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest, 17 January 1916. Cited in Norbert Straumann, General Relativity: With Applications to Astrophysics (Berlin: Springer, 2004), 147. 20 See B. P. Abbott et al., ‘Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger’, Physical Review Letters 116, no. 6 (2016): 061102. 21 Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: Out of My Later Years (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 61. 22 Max Caspar, Kepler (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1959), 267. 23 See David Wilkinson, ‘Proofs of the Divine Power? Temple Chevallier and the Design Argument in the Nineteenth Century’, Scottish Journal of Theology 68, no. 1 (2015): 34–42. 24 See Ruth M. Bancewicz, ‘The Scientist-Believer: Following Christ as We Uncover the Wonders of the Living World’, in Christ and the Created Order: Perspectives from Theology, Philosophy, and Science, ed. Andrew B. Torrance and Thomas H. McCall (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2018), 273–88. 19

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A question about God as creator The Big Bang model of the universe has often been used naively in theological discussions. Some Christians have objected to it because it does not fit with reading the first chapters of the Bible as a scientific text. This position of six-day creationism argues from the genealogies of Genesis that the universe is only a few thousand years old rather than the 13.8 billion years accepted by the vast majority of astrophysicists. Some scientific creationists attempt to use astrophysics to support their six-day claims, such as a decrease in the speed of light over time and the winding up of the arms of spiral galaxies, but outside six-day creationist circles, these arguments have virtually no support.25 Other Christian voices have attempted to argue that the Big Bang model supports the cosmological argument in its temporal form, the so-called ‘kalam argument’ for the existence of God. This argument traces a chain of cause and effect backwards to a first cause. Thus, the following question is posed: If the universe began with a Big Bang, who set out the initial explosion? It seems that one motivation in developing the steady state model of the universe by Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi, and Thomas Gold, the main rival to the Big Bang in the 1960s,26 was resisting the possible theistic implications of the Big Bang. Indeed, encouraged by the work of Roman Catholic cosmologists such as Edmund Whitaker, Pope Pius XII, in 1951, stated, based on the Big Bang model: Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, [science] has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch [some five billion years ago] when the cosmos came forth from the hands of the Creator. Hence, creation took place in time. Therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists!27 However, there are several problems with using the Big Bang in this way. First, it is unclear in terms of the nature of time whether cause and effect observed within the universe can be extended to the whole universe. Second, the spectre of what Charles Coulson called ‘the god of the gaps’28 is always in the background of such an argument. Coulson warned that theologians should be cautious that if a gap exists in science, then it is dangerous to insert God into the gap. The danger is that science may fill in the gaps with the result that God is pushed out of the gap into obscurity. This can be clearly seen in the work of Stephen Hawking, who resisted any attempt to say that the first moment of the universe’s history was beyond scientific exploration. His attempt to, therefore, develop a theory of quantum gravity, combining general relativity

See Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 26 See Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, ‘The Steady-State Theory of the Expanding Universe’, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 108, no. 3 (1948): 252–70; Fred Hoyle, ‘A New Model for the Expanding Universe’, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 108, no. 5 (1948): 372–82. 27 Pope Pius XII, The Proofs for the Existence of God in the Light of Modern Natural Science: Address of Pope Pius XII to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, November 22, 1951 (Washington, DC: National Catholic Welfare Conference, 1951), paras 50–1. Also online: https://www​.papalencyclicals​.net​/pius12​/p12exist​.htm. 28 C. A. Coulson, Science and Christian Belief (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 20. 25

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and quantum theory, led to his speculation of a no-boundary proposal for the origin of the universe, where God starting it all off was no longer needed. The universe simply appeared due to a fluctuation in a quantum field. While the search for such a consistent theory continues through string theory, M-theory, and the multiverse, it remains at the moment elusive.29 However, the theologian should not insert ‘God’ into this gap. The gap may be closed by the successors of Hawking, and such an approach risks a third problem. This is the danger of using the Big Bang to argue for the existence of God, but in doing so, one ends up with a god of deism rather than the God revealed in the Bible. The rise of deism late in the seventeenth century depended on the design and cosmological arguments for the existence of God. It viewed the creator as remote, creating the mechanism of the universe but then having nothing more to do with it. Yet the biblical pictures view God as holding the universe in existence moment by moment and not simply being involved at its beginning. A biblical understanding of God sees God intimately sustaining the laws by which the universe develops, whether in the first fraction of a second of the Big Bang or in the subsequent creative processes of 13.8 billion years. The work of Hawking and other astrophysicists on the beginning of the universe is to be welcomed in subverting a deistic view of God, which continues to be popular among Christians. Further, it may help understand another biblical idea – the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Within some strands of Greek philosophy, there was the view that God was an architect who imposed order on pre-existent matter. This view, reflected in Plato’s Timaeus, also appeared in Gnostic writers and was used for apologetic purposes by Christian apologists such as Justin Martyr in the second century. Central to the first chapter of Genesis is that God has no competitors to overcome in creation. But does Genesis itself suggest that God worked with pre-existing matter, or did God create out of nothing? Some have argued that the opening line of Genesis, ‘In the beginning . . .’, does not portray the absolute beginning of all things but simply asserts that God created the world. The argument suggests that creation out of nothing does not occur in Genesis, or is, at best, an ambiguous doctrine only developing as the Christian faith encountered the questions of Greek philosophy.30 While the writer of Genesis 1 was much more concerned with the movement from chaos to order rather than with the absolute origin of things, one needs to be clear that for the biblical writers, there was no dualism of God and matter/chaos.31 The emergence of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in the Christian writers of the second and third centuries – such as Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus, and Tertullian – was based on the biblical themes that creation affirmed the goodness of the world and that God created the world freely so that the world depends on God for its existence. As Mark Worthing claims, the doctrine is ‘biblical in its seminal form, if

See David Hutchings and David Wilkinson, God, Stephen Hawking and the Multiverse: What Hawking Said, and Why It Matters (London: SPCK, 2020). 30 See Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994); Frances Young, ‘“Creatio Ex Nihilo”: A Context for the Emergence of the Christian Doctrine of Creation’, Scottish Journal of Theology 44, no. 2 (1991): 139–52. 31 See Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11: A Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), 109. 29

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not indeed in its full expression’.32 The explicit doctrine of creatio ex nihilo then emerged in the church’s encounter with paganism and Greek philosophy. Irenaeus, in Against Heresies, characterized the doctrine as: ‘God, in the exercise of his will and pleasure, formed all things . . . out of what did not previously exist.’33 The doctrine finds its mature form, however, in Augustine, who stressed that God creates out of nothing at all.34 Reflecting this, T. F. Torrance puts the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in the following way: ‘The creation of the universe out of nothing does not mean the creation of the universe out of something that is nothing, but out of nothing at all. It is not created out of anything – it came into being through the absolute fiat of God’s Word.’35 Torrance argues that this doctrine and its rejection of Gnosticism were important for developing the natural sciences in affirming the fundamental goodness of creation. Creation is distinct from God but is dependent on God for its existence. Further, God was not constrained in creating by the limitations of pre-existing matter but could create freely. Thus, to fully understand the God-given order in the universe, one had to observe it, thereby providing the basis of empirical science. In light of this, one can ask whether the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo resonates more with a Hawking-type model of the universe emerging from nothing. Certainly, Christianity has nothing to fear from this kind of discussion. Some argue that a temporal origination of the universe can provide confirmation, although not conclusive or essential evidence, for the ontological origination of the universe as a creation. Yet, at the core of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is the principle of ontological dependence, and the discovery of an actual temporal beginning to the universe would serve only as a gloss on the doctrine.36 But a Hawkingtype model may illuminate the sense of God as creator of something out of nothing. The cosmologist Don Page, a collaborator with Hawking, makes an important point about the Christian theology of creation: God creates and sustains the entire Universe rather than just the beginning. Whether or not the Universe has a beginning has no relevance to the question of its creation, just as whether an artist’s line has a beginning and an end, or instead forms a circle with no end, has no relevance to the question of its being drawn.37 A question about what it means to be human Discussion of fine-tuning of the universe has raised in the anthropic principle the question of how central human beings are in the universe. Do humans simply note the fine-tuning because they are here in a universe with the fine-tuning, while in other universes without the fine-tuning there would be no observers to note it? Or are humans intimately connected with the very existence of the universe?

Mark W. Worthing, God, Creation, and Contemporary Physics (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1996), 76. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 2.10.2. 34 See Augustine, Confessions, 12.7. 35 Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 207n4. 36 See Robert J. Russell, ‘T=0: Is It Theologically Significant?’, in Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue, ed. W. Mark Richardson and Wesley J. Wildman (London: Routledge, 1996), 201–24. 37 Don N. Page, ‘Hawking’s Timely Story’, Nature 332 (1988): 742–3. 32 33

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While such discussions have allowed some to stress the uniqueness and centrality of human beings, the recent discovery of exoplanets, some similar to Earth, raises the possibility of many other intelligent life forms within the universe.38 These kinds of discoveries have completely changed our view of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and raised the question again of what it means to be human in such a cosmic context. But one should be careful not to get carried away. It is easy to say that if most stars have planetary systems, and there are a hundred billion stars in each of a hundred billion galaxies, then there must be another Earth-like planet capable of producing intelligent life ‘out there’. Yet one must be cautious about thinking the universe is teeming with intelligent life. A planet needs to be ‘just right’ for life to evolve. In addition, it is a long way from an amoeba to an accountant! There could be many bacteria, but they may not have evolved to intelligence. Perhaps the strongest argument against other intelligent life within our galaxy came from Enrico Fermi. Fermi, an Italian physicist, argued that if Earth is not special in having intelligent life, then civilizations should already have evolved many times in the galaxy since there are billions of stars older than the Sun. If any of these civilizations wanted to colonize the galaxy , they could have done so within 300 million years, even using technology almost within humanity’s grasp. However, the galaxy is 10 billion years old, so he concluded: ‘Where is everybody?’39 The discovery of exoplanets highlights again the complex web of arguments of whether Earth’s creatures are alone. It also focuses on the question of what the effect would be on humanity’s self-understanding if the search for extraterrestrial intelligence proved successful. Some have suggested that one consequence would be the demise of religion, as it will no longer be able to maintain the uniqueness of human beings or the special revelation of God, for example, in the way the Christian faith appraises the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. However, just as it would be wrong to jump to conclusions about aliens based on the discovery of exoplanets, it would also be wrong to oversimplify the relationship between religion and SETI. In fact, some of the first scientists to speculate about life on other planets were, in part, motivated by their Christian faith. Astronomers such as Richard Bentley and Christiaan Huygens in the seventeenth century, impressed by the size of the universe, speculated about life around the millions of stars and insisted that this was evidence of God’s ability to create life anywhere he wished and that the universe existed not for the sole benefit of human beings but rather to exhibit God’s glory. Why had such speculations become so respectable? One can draw together several influences. First, before the Copernican revolution, human beings considered themselves placed at the centre of everything. The universe, as described by Aristotle and Ptolemy, had Earth as its centre and everything orbiting around in beautiful (but increasingly complex) circles. The interpretation of this is, however, quite complex. Some voices suggested that Earth was viewed as the furthest away from the glory of the spheres, and in the words of Michel

See David Wilkinson, ‘Searching for Another Earth: The Recent History of the Discovery of Exoplanets’, Zygon 51, no. 2 (2016): 414–30. 39 See Stephen Webb, If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens . . . Where Is Everybody? Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life, 2nd edn (Cham: Springer, 2015), 1–8. 38

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de Montaigne, in 1568, ‘the lowest story of the house’.40 Copernicus may not, therefore, have dethroned men and women but, in fact, suggested that there were greater possibilities for and beyond human beings. Alternatively, as Colin Russell has pointed out, the decoupling of the physical position and actual status of human beings was a major influence.41 In the Aristotelian universe, position and status were closely associated. Human beings were special because they were placed at the centre. By contrast, the Bible does not associate status and place. The dignity and worth of human beings come from the gift of their relationship with God. The problem of the devaluing of human beings by moving them away from the centre of everything could be countered by this view. Bentley, Huygens, and others were set free to use observations of the world as the primary basis of science. And observing such a vast universe raised the real possibility of other inhabited worlds. These other inhabited worlds, far from threatening humanity’s special relationship with God, would express God’s extravagance and freedom in creating the universe. If intelligent life elsewhere in the universe does not undermine a Christian view of being human in creation, might it, however, impact the doctrines of the incarnation and of redemption? Arthur Peacocke put this bluntly: ‘Does not the mere possibility of extraterrestrial life render nonsensical all the superlative claims made by the Christian church about [Jesus’] significance.’42 Peacocke was worried by the particularity of revelation and salvation focused on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Were the events of Bethlehem and Calvary once and for all, and for the whole universe? Some, such as the distinguished cosmologist Edward Milne viewed the incarnation as a once for all event.43 However, E. L. Mascall, in his Bampton lectures in 1956, stressed that salvation has to be achieved through incarnation: [I]f there are, in some other part or parts of the universe, rational corporeal beings who have sinned and are in need of redemption, for those beings and for their salvation the Son of God has united (or one day will unite) to his divine Person their nature, as he has united it to ours.44 There are several theological issues which are not easy to untangle here.45 Why was there only one incarnation for the different cultures and times of human beings? The coupling of

Michel de Montaigne, ‘An Apology of Raymond Sebond (1568)’, in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Charles Cotton (London: George Bell, 1892), 2:134. Cited in Dennis R. Danielson, ‘Myth 6: That Copernicanism Demoted Humans from the Center of the Cosmos’, in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 54. 41 See Colin A. Russell, Cross Currents: Interactions between Science and Faith (Vancouver: Regent College Publications, 2002). 42 Arthur R. Peacocke, ‘The Challenge and Stimulus of the Epic of Evolution to Theology’, in Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life, and the Theological Implications, ed. Steven J. Dick (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2000), 103. 43 See Edward A. Milne, Modern Cosmology and the Christian Idea of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). 44 Eric L. Mascall, Christian Theology and Natural Science: Some Questions on Their Relations (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1956), 40. 45 See David A. Wilkinson, Science, Religion, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 40

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incarnation and salvation is partly due to the reality of sin, and as explored in the fiction of C. S. Lewis, would an alien civilization have sinned and require salvation?46 Origen, writing in the third century, presented Christ’s redemptive work as a transcendent action that gradually takes effect in every realm of creation but which, nevertheless, needs to find corporeal expression in a particular place on a particular occasion; that is, at Calvary. There is some attraction to this view, but it poses the question about further working out the relationship of Christ to the universe as a way to understanding better the nature of being human. The current interest in SETI perhaps reinforces the call of J. B. Phillips, made many years ago, that ‘Your God is too small!’47 A question about hope If scientific work on the universe’s origin raises questions of awe and wonder and of the mysterious connection between humanity and the cosmos, work on the long-term future of the universe, at first sight, seems to raise questions of a very different kind. Here the future is full of despair and futility in thinking about being human in a cosmic context. Until the late 1990s, the universe’s expansion rate was believed to be slowing down. Some thought that the universe would nevertheless expand forever; others felt that a point would come when the gravitational force would overcome the expansion and the universe would begin to contract. However, work in 1998 completely changed our understanding of the universe, and this work was of such significance that it was recognized in the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Astronomers looked at distant supernovae explosions of stars. Their results showed something completely unexpected. The universe is accelerating in its rate of expansion due to some unknown type of force, the so-called ‘dark energy’.48 There had been no theoretical prediction of this apart from Einstein’s original inclusion of his cosmological constant in his solution of the equations of general relativity for the universe. It led to near-panic among theorists and to a range of possible explanations, none of which at the time of writing comes anywhere near to a generally accepted understanding. Yet the accelerating universe points to a future of futility for the physical universe and, with it, the end of the survival of intelligent life within the universe. An accelerated heat death is a bleak end. When the universe is 1012 years old, stars cease to form, as no hydrogen is left. At this stage, all massive stars have turned into neutron stars and black holes. At 1014 years, small stars become white dwarfs. The universe becomes cold and uninteresting, composed of dead stars and black holes.

See C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (London: Bodley Head, 1938); C. S. Lewis, Perelandra: A Novel (London: John Lane, 1943); C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-tale for Grown-ups (London: Bodley Head, 1945). 47 See J. B. Phillips, Your God Is Too Small (London: Epworth Press, 1952). 48 See Saul Perlmutter et al., ‘Measurements of Ω and Λ from 42 High-Redshift Supernovae’, The Astrophysical Journal 517, no. 2 (1999): 565; Saul Perlmutter, ‘Supernovae, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Universe: The Status of the Cosmological Parameters’, Physics Today 56, no. 4 (2003): 53–60; Adam G. Riess et al., ‘Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant’, The Astronomical Journal 116, no. 3 (1988): 1009. 46

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Some physicists have tried to argue that the ability of humans to manipulate the environment will lead to the creation of forms of life able to survive in such a universe.49 Freeman Dyson, for example, famously suggested that human intelligence could be downloaded into interstellar gas clouds that could survive the low temperatures of a heat death universe. However, while this may be possible (although not terribly attractive!) in a universe slowing down in its expansion, it becomes increasingly impossible in an accelerating universe. Paul Davies is, therefore, correct to suggest that an ‘almost empty universe growing steadily more cold and dark for all eternity is profoundly depressing’.50 Steven Weinberg famously put it: The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. But if there is no solace in the fruits of research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. . . . The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.51 It is a sobering thought that the optimism of science and technology in shaping our world for good is unable to find any hope in its own prediction of the futility of the end of the universe apart from the fact that humans know the end is coming. The sense of futility undermines the way that science has been enrolled in the myth of human progress – the notion that as science and technology progress, they will lead to some kind of eternal utopia for humanity. By contrast, Christianity can face the challenge and rediscover within its own tradition resources that give hope.52 The theme of new creation, a new heaven and earth, is present within a range of biblical genres. This is not about some otherworldly existence without connection with the physical universe. It is, instead, about God doing something with the totality of existence. This new creation is a possibility because of a creator God. The new creation is continually linked to God’s original creative work, and hope for the future is built on an understanding of God as creator. Whatever the circumstances, creation is not limited to its own inherent possibilities because the God of creation is still at work. The evidence of this work is focused on the resurrection of Jesus, which is also the model by which the continuity and discontinuity between creation and new creation are held together. If, as St Paul argues, the resurrection is the first fruit of God’s transformative work, then there should be both continuity and discontinuity in the relationship of creation and new creation, just as there was in the relationship of Jesus before the cross and Jesus risen. The empty tomb is a sign that God’s purposes for the material world are that it should be transformed and not discarded. If resurrection affirms creation, then it also points forward to new creation. Continuity and discontinuity in transforming the physical universe may be located in the nature of matter, space, and time. To take time as an example, the resurrected Jesus does not seem limited by space and time. In new creation, the continuity may be that time is real, but the discontinuity is that

See Freeman J. Dyson, Infinite in All Directions (New York: Perennial, 2004); Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead (London: Pan, 1996). 50 Paul Davies, ‘Eternity: Who Needs It?’, in The Far-Future Universe: Eschatology from a Cosmic Perspective, ed. George F. R. Ellis (Radnor: Templeton Foundation Press, 2002), 48. 51 Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 144. 52 See David Wilkinson, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe (London: T&T Clark, 2010). 49

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time no longer limits us in the way it does in this creation. It could be argued that the resurrection body is characterized by decay’s reversal; that is, by purposeful flourishing. In this creation, time is associated with decay and growth, but in a new creation, might time be simply about growth? Therefore, the suggestion here is that our experience of time in the physical universe is a small and limited part of an ontologically real time that one might call ‘eternity’. Such insights are offered as a structure for dialogue. They do not set out to map the biblical account exactly onto the scientific account or to see them as completely independent. The Christian will come to the scientific description of the future of the physical universe with much to learn but also much to offer.

Further reading Danielson, Dennis R. The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking. Cambridge: Perseus Books, 2002. Hutchings, David and David Wilkinson. God, Stephen Hawking and the Multiverse: What Hawking Said, and Why It Matters. London: SPCK, 2020. McLeish, Tom and David Wilkinson. ‘After an Apologetics of Conflict: Biblical Exegesis for a Creation Theology of Science’. In New Directions in Theology and Science: Beyond Dialogue, edited by Peter Harrison and Paul Tyson, 147–69. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. Rees, Martin. Our Cosmic Habitat. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Wilkinson, David. Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe. London: T&T Clark, 2010. Wilkinson, David. Science, Religion, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

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CHAPTER 44 COSMOLOGY

Rodney Holder

Introduction In this chapter, the modern scientific understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe as a whole, the subject matter of the discipline of cosmology, is discussed, and if and how that understanding relates to the Christian doctrine of creation. The Big Bang theory, at least naïvely understood, points to a beginning of the universe some 13.8 billion years ago. The origin and development of this theory are first discussed, including its evidence. Modern cosmology seems to raise two issues of potential importance for Christian doctrine. The first is the beginning itself. That seemingly resonates with the idea of a temporal origin to the universe as understood from scripture, though it will be argued that matters are not quite as clear-cut as one might initially suppose. The second issue goes beyond the fact of God’s creating to the kind of universe God would and did create. In cosmological terms, this relates to the so-called ‘anthropic principle’, or, as will be argued, more appropriately, to the apparent ‘fine-tuning’ of the universe for life. In what follows, it will be argued that cosmologists have not overcome the problem (at least, the problem from the atheist perspective) of the beginning; even if they had, that would not affect the Christian doctrine of creation. This is because the latter is much more concerned about why there is anything at all than whether or not the universe began at a particular point in the past. It will also be argued that the fine-tuning is real and demands an explanation. Some examples of what is meant will be given, and alternative explanations will be considered. It will be argued that creation and design by God is the most rational explanation to adopt.

The Big Bang theory It is not widely known in the public sphere that the Big Bang theory was the brainchild of a Belgian Roman Catholic priest named Georges Lemaître. In 1927, Lemaître solved Einstein’s equations of general relativity (his theory of gravity) for the universe as a whole and obtained an expanding universe solution. The Russian mathematician and physicist Alexander Friedmann had found solutions a few years earlier, but Lemaître differed in regarding them as applying to the universe in reality rather than just as mathematical games. In the theory, space is expanding and pulling the galaxies apart. In his paper of 1927, Lemaître derived the law of proportionality between the speed of expansion and the distance of a galaxy and the constant of proportionality. With the publication of Edwin Hubble’s observations in 1929,1 this became known as the Hubble Law. However, justice was finally done towards the

Edwin P. Hubble, ‘A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-galactic Nebulae’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 15, no. 3 (1929): 168–73. 1

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end of 2018 when the International Astronomical Union voted overwhelmingly to rename the law the Hubble-Lemaître law. Lemaître’s 1927 solution was not a Big Bang solution. Rather, the universe was expanding from an initial, large-sized universe. This original state was Einstein’s static universe solution, which Lemaître had shown to be unstable – hence the expansion. In 1931, Lemaître went further and obtained a solution in which space expanded from an initial highly compact state. This he called the ‘primeval atom’,2 though it was Cambridge astrophysicist Fred (later, Sir Fred) Hoyle who dubbed it the Big Bang in a radio broadcast in 1949. From early on, there were metaphysical objections to the idea. Although Einstein made favourable technical comments on Lemaître’s 1927 paper, he remarked that from the point of view of physics, it appeared abominable to him.3 Arthur (later, Sir Arthur) Eddington, with whom Lemaître worked as a graduate student in Cambridge in 1923–4, found the idea that the universe had a beginning ‘repugnant’. However, it was he who gave publicity to Lemaître’s 1927 paper by republishing it in 1931 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in English4 – its original neglect was due to its first publication in French in an obscure journal, Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles, hardly read outside Belgium. Following an up-to-date presentation of Lemaître’s work in Pasadena in 1933, Einstein declared, in contrast to his earlier remark: ‘This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I ever listened.’5 Hoyle and his colleagues in Cambridge hated the idea of the Big Bang’s indicating a beginning point to the universe where science broke down, and they developed the alternative ‘steady state theory’. In the latter, the expansion is explained by the coming into existence of new matter in the space between the galaxies as they recede. This rate of creation of new matter, something like an atom per year in a building the size of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, is just right to ensure that the universe is ‘the same yesterday, today and forever’; that is, it looks the same at all times and places, past, present, and future. The model thus accords with the ‘perfect cosmological principle’, a metaphysical principle (NB. not a scientific principle or one connected with empirical observation) put forward by Hoyle’s colleagues Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, who produced a steady state theory somewhat different from Hoyle’s. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, the steady state and Big Bang were rival theories, although evidence was starting to mount that the distribution of radio sources was incompatible with the steady state. In 1965 the debate between them was settled decisively.

This model was first sketched in Georges Lemaître, ‘The Beginning of the World from the Point of View of Quantum Theory’, Nature 127, no. 3210 (1931): 706, but the term ‘primeval atom’ was first used by Lemaître in a discussion on the evolution of the universe at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and was published in Abbé G. Lemaître, ‘Contributions to a British Association Discussion on the Evolution of the Universe’, Nature 128, no. 3234 (1931): 704–6. The mathematics came in Georges Lemaître, ‘L’Expansion de l’Espace’, Revue des Questions Scientifiques, 4e série, t. 20 (1931): 391–410. 3 As related by Lemaître on Belgian radio on the occasion of the second anniversary of the death of Einstein, and published in Georges Lemaître, ‘Rencontres avec A. Einstein: texte lu à la radio nationale belge le 27 avril 1957 en commémoration du deuxième anniversaire de la mort d’Albert Einstein’, Revue des Questions Scientifiques, 5e série, t. 19 (1958): 129–32. 4 Georges Lemaître, ‘A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radius accounting for the Radial Velocity of Extra-galactic Nebulae’, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 91, no. 5 (1931): 483–90. 5 Albert Einstein, cited in ‘Salvation without Belief in Jonah’s Tale’, The Literary Digest 115, no. 1 (1933): 23. See Helge Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy: The Historical Development of Two Theories of the Universe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 55, 408n93. 2

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In 1948, American cosmologists Ralph Alpher and Robert Hermann had predicted, on the basis of the Big Bang, that the universe, originally hot and dense, would cool throughout its history and leave a remnant radiation. This radiation stems from the era when matter and radiation, initially in equilibrium, decouple, and it bears a particular signature, namely a black body spectrum. In 1963, this predicted radiation was observed by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Telephone Laboratories, though the radiation was only identified two years later (in 1965) by Robert Dicke and Jim Peebles as the ‘cosmic microwave background radiation’ stemming from the origin of the universe at the Big Bang.6 It was decisive because it had a natural explanation on the basis of the Big Bang, and the steady state could not explain it. Georges Lemaître learned of the discovery on his deathbed in 1966.

Modern challenges to ‘the beginning’ In his early work with Roger Penrose, the late and great Stephen Hawking showed that the universe must have begun at a singularity, a point of infinite density and temperature where the laws of physics break down. However, Hawking backtracked on this in later years, attempting to show that there was no beginning. With colleague Jim Hartle, he developed the ‘no boundary proposal’, according to which, as one tracks the history of the universe back to its earliest moments, time becomes ‘imaginary’. This is ‘imaginary’ in the technical mathematical sense of complex numbers, involving the square root of minus one. In practice, time becomes a space dimension, so there are four dimensions of space instead of three space dimensions and one of time. Furthermore, there is no singularity since the four-dimensional space has no boundary or edge. Hawking’s take on this in his popular writings is distinctly anti-religious. For example, in A Brief History of Time, he says this: There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: ‘The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary’. The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.7 And again: ‘So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?’8 In his later book The Grand Design, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow, he says the same thing. Likening the conception of time to a railway track, he writes: ‘If it [time] had a beginning, there would have to have been someone (that is, God) to set the trains going.’9

The story is told in Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy, 346–51. Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam, 1988), 136. 8 Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 140–1. 9 Stephen W. Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life (London: Bantam Press, 2010), 134. 6 7

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There are serious problems with Hawking’s proposal. First, there is the question of imaginary time. Time (i.e. real time) measures the change of a system from one state to another. However, if time has become imaginary (i.e. another space dimension), the universe may just ‘BE’ as Hawking puts it, but how can it change state to be anything other than it is? Even more significant is Hawking’s own philosophical take on imaginary time. In A Brief History of Time, Hawking writes: ‘[W]e may regard our use of imaginary time and Euclidean space-time [i.e., the four-dimensional space] as merely a mathematical device (or trick) to calculate answers about real space-time.’10 And again: ‘[A] scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations: it exists only in our minds. So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, “real” or “imaginary” time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.’11 Hawking’s stance is what philosophers of science would call ‘instrumentalism’, though according to his self-description, it is positivism or, in The Grand Design, a position he labels ‘model-dependent realism’.12 Essentially, all that matters for Hawking is which is the most useful description. In Hawking’s view, therefore, it is perfectly satisfactory to reject imaginary time as ontologically real and treat it simply as a useful calculating device. Indeed, this is precisely what Hawking himself does in his technical papers. In these, the universe has a beginning, and it is at the surface where the four-dimensional space and the three dimensions of time meet. Hawking writes: ‘We live in a lorentzian geometry [i.e., one of three space dimensions and one of time] and therefore we are interested really only in the oscillatory part of the wave function [in which time is real].’13 Moreover, ‘The Lorentzian geometries began at a nonsingular minimum radius. . . . The Lorentzian solutions will be the analytic continuation of the Euclidean solutions. They will start in a smooth non-singular state at a minimum radius equal to the radius of the 4-sphere and will expand and become more irregular’.14 As atheist philosopher Quentin Smith notes, the only physical reality in the model, as described by Hawking in his technical papers, is a classical universe that begins at a minimum radius, inflates, and then goes over to a normal Friedmann (classical homogeneous and isotropic Big Bang) expansion, reaching a maximum radius and recollapsing to a singularity.15 Hawking, then, has not circumvented the universe having a temporal beginning. Another way in which some cosmologists seek to circumvent the beginning is through the remarkable claim that the universe creates itself out of nothing. This is the strategy of Lawrence Krauss, who wrote a book called A Universe from Nothing (indeed, it is also a claim of Stephen Hawking). This bizarre-sounding notion sounds paradoxical, as indeed it is. The problem is that Krauss redefines ‘nothing’ so that it is not the absence of anything at all – as a philosopher or theologian would define it – but rather a sophisticated something, namely the ‘quantum vacuum’. The quantum vacuum is, in fact, a hive of activity in which particles

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 135. Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 139. 12 Hawking and Mlodinow, The Grand Design, 7, 42–51, 172, passim. 13 Stephen W. Hawking, ‘The Quantum State of the Universe’, Nuclear Physics B239 (1984): 273. 14 Stephen W. Hawking, ‘Quantum Cosmology’, in Three Hundred Years of Gravitation, ed. Stephen W. Hawking and Werner Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 650. 15 Quentin Smith, ‘The Wave Function of a Godless Universe’, in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, ed. William L. Craig and Quentin Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 316. 10 11

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come into existence and annihilate in a split second. Krauss himself describes the vacuum as ‘unstable’. A true ‘nothing’ cannot be unstable – indeed, it cannot have any properties at all. It cannot be acted on by quantum fields or gravity, as is also claimed, and even if it could, these themselves would not be nothing. Elsewhere I have compared Krauss’ confusion over the meaning of nothing with a passage from Through the Looking Glass in which Alice sees ‘nobody’ on the road.16 The King interprets this as ‘Nobody’, a person with properties such as walking speed. Inevitably, the conversation becomes more and more confusing. Similarly, Krauss’ ‘Nothing’ is very like the King’s ‘Nobody’: to label a quantum vacuum nothing can only lead to confusion.

The kalām cosmological argument Some modern philosophers of religion, notably the evangelical William Lane Craig and the Jesuit Robert Spitzer, capitalize on the temporal beginning of the universe apparently shown by the Big Bang theory to represent an argument for God’s existence from medieval Islam. This is the kalām cosmological argument and proceeds as follows:

1. Everything which begins to exist has a cause for its existence.



2. The universe began to exist.



3. Therefore, there is a cause for the existence of the universe.

At least part of what is meant by the term ‘God’ is the universe’s cause. Thus, in the way that Thomas Aquinas concludes his five ways, to point three it could be added: ‘and this we call God’. The aforementioned is a straightforward logical proof of God’s existence. The premises seem secure. Surely nothing can begin to exist uncaused since everything seen has a prior cause of its coming to be. And the Big Bang is saying that the universe began to exist. The conclusion therefore follows. Moreover, it is a conclusion that Stephen Hawking agreed with: if the universe began, he said, it would need God to create it. Some caveats might be in order, however. The argument is very good, given the current state of play in cosmology. In particular, Alexander Vilenkin and colleagues have proved certain theorems, of increasing generality, which show that the main cosmological models presently proposed all possess an initial singularity and, therefore, a beginning to time.17 However, things may change, as, of course, they regularly do in science. The main problem is that no agreed or empirically verified theory exists for the first tiny fraction of a second from the Big Bang. What is required is a theory which combines general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, with quantum mechanics, the theory of the very small. There are candidates for such a theory, but nothing has been established. Vilenkin himself is thus commendably cautious:

Rodney Holder, Big Bang, Big God: A Universe Designed for Life? (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2013), 71–3. Arvind Borde and Alexander Vilenkin, ‘Eternal Inflation and the Initial Singularity’, Physical Review Letters 72, no. 21 (1994): 3305–8; Arvind Borde, Alan H. Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, ‘Inflationary Spacetimes Are Incomplete in Past Directions’, Physical Review Letters 90, no. 15 (2003): 151301-1–151301-4; Audrey Mithani and Alexander Vilenkin, ‘Did the Universe have a Beginning?’, arXiv:1204.4658, [hep-th] (2012): 1–6. 16 17

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‘Did the universe have a beginning? At this point, it seems that the answer to this question is probably yes.’18 On the other hand, there are paradoxes associated with an infinite past. One of these concerns entropy, which measures the amount of order in the universe. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the universe is progressing from a state of order to increasing disorder. If the universe expands forever, eventually, it will be completely disordered; when all the stars have burnt out, the universe has expanded vastly more, and all is cold and dark. Alternatively, the universe may recollapse; but, as Roger Penrose points out, the ‘Big Crunch’ will be totally disordered, completely different from its state at the Big Bang.19 The question then arises: If the universe has an infinite history, why is it still so ordered today? Why has it not already wound down? Indeed, why has it not wound down many years ago, indeed infinitely long ago? This sort of consideration makes it seem more philosophically coherent to postulate a universe with a temporal beginning. However, even if the universe had an infinite past, that would not undermine the Christian doctrine of creation for reasons I now consider. Why is there something rather than nothing? The Christian doctrine of creation is most properly considered a response, not to the question as to whether the universe had a beginning in time, but rather to why the universe exists at all: Why is there something rather than nothing? Aquinas did not think it was possible to prove that the universe had not always existed, though he believed it had a beginning from his reading of scripture: ‘That the world has not always existed cannot be demonstrably proved but is held by faith alone. We make the same stand here as with regard to the mystery of the Trinity.’20 However, he believed it needed God to create it regardless of whether it had a temporal beginning. Thus, the arguments towards a first cause he advocates are not to be interpreted in the sense of causing the temporal beginning of the universe. A vitally important distinction between God and the universe is that God is necessary, but the universe is contingent. At least part of what is meant by the term ‘God’ is a being who cannot not exist, who has not come into existence, who is eternally existent and who cannot go out of existence. In contrast, the universe is contingent, meaning it may or may not have existed, it did not have to exist, and it could be different from what it is. To say that the universe depends for its existence on God, who is a necessary being, provides a stopping point for explanation and a coherent reason for the universe’s existence. The response of atheists such as Richard Dawkins to this is to ask, ‘Well, who made God then?’21 However,

Mithani and Vilenkin, ‘Did the Universe have a Beginning?’, 5. Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 335–45. 20 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Blackfriars edition (London/New York: Eyre and Spottiswoode/McGraw-Hill, 1967), I, Q. 46, Art. 2. 21 See, for example, Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Transworld, 2006), 161, where Dawkins dismissively writes: ‘Ask for an explanation of where that bloke came from, and odds are you’ll get a vague, pseudo-philosophical reply about having always existed.’ 18 19

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that is to mistake the meaning of the term ‘God’. Whatever is made is not God, so either there really is a stopping point for an explanation, namely God, or there is not. In the latter case, the universe is left as an unexplained and deeply mysterious brute fact that must be accepted. To abandon the search for explanation at this point seems a distinctly unscientific attitude to me, and far the more scientific approach to adopt is to accept the perfectly rational and coherent one – that is, God. Furthermore, it seems more rational to accept the stopping point for explanation in the one unique necessary and eternally existent God posited by the Abrahamic faiths rather than a multiplicity of ‘gods’. This would be consistent with Occam’s razor, the principle that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Scientists themselves utilize this principle when adopting the simplest of competing hypotheses which explain the evidence under consideration. God is not only simple in himself, as expounded by Aquinas (and in a rather different way by Richard Swinburne), but much simpler than ‘many gods’. Also, if there were 327 or some other arbitrary number of gods, one would have to ask: ‘Why are there just that number?’ The fact that the same laws of physics apply across the whole of space-time provides an additional reason for positing just one God behind the universe. This point about the contingency of the universe has been noted by cosmologists. Stephen Hawking expressed the problem beautifully in A Brief History of Time, writing: ‘What is it that breathes fire into the equations, and makes a universe for them to describe?’22 Indeed, one can have the most elegant and comprehensive theory of physics – perhaps the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything’, Hawking’s favoured M-theory or whatever – but why is there a universe which that theory describes? Noted previously was Hawking’s assertion that if the universe had a beginning it would need God to create it and that Hawking has failed to avoid the beginning. But the more fundamental implication of what Hawking says is that if he were able to avoid the beginning, then God would be redundant. And that is false. The mistake that Hawking and others make is to see God only involved in a temporal beginning. However, Christian theology asserts that God is involved in every moment in the universe’s history, whether that be finite or stretching infinitely far back in time. Indeed, the universe would collapse into nothing at any moment if not held in being by God. Thus, St Augustine says: ‘When a builder puts up a house, his work remains in spite of the fact that he is no longer there. But the universe will pass away in the twinkling of an eye if God withdraws His ruling hand.’23 And Aquinas likewise: ‘For the esse [being] of all creaturely beings so depends upon God that they could not continue to exist even for a moment, but would fall away into nothingness unless they were sustained in existence by his power, as Gregory [the Great] puts it.’24 Aquinas is here citing St Gregory the Great, who says this: For all things subsist in Him by Whom they were created, nor do the things that live owe their life to themselves, nor are those that are moved, but do not live, by their own

Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 174. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad Litteram), trans. John H. Taylor (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1982), 1:117. 24 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 104, Art. 1. 22 23

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caprice brought to motion. . . . For all things were made out of nothing, and their being would again go on into nothing, except the Author of all things held it by the hand of governance. All the things then that have been created, by themselves can neither subsist nor be moved.25 This discussion of necessity and contingency can also be framed in terms of existence and essence. God exists essentially – or, as Aquinas put it, existence and essence are the same for God (they cannot be separated) but different for creatures. Thus one can conceive of the essence of a cat, what the term ‘cat’ means, apart from whether there are actual physical examples of cats. Thus, again, the idea of God whose existence is his essence provides a coherent explanation for why there are concrete examples of things which may only exist otherwise as abstract notions. In the passage cited, Gregory refers to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. That is not clearly spelt out in scripture, although there are intimations of it. The opening verses of Genesis 1 are somewhat ambiguous on the point. However, much later, in 2 Macc. 7.28, the mother of the Maccabean martyrs cries: ‘I beg you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed. And in the same way the human race came into being.’ Certain passages in the New Testament can also be read this way, perhaps especially Rom. 4.17: ‘God . . . who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.’ The doctrine developed further in the early church as Christians faced the surrounding pagan stories of creation, for example, that of Plato in the Timaeus, in which the creator (demiurge) has to mould pre-existent matter that resists the divine will. That latter point is particularly important for the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. There is no pre-existent matter which is outside God’s sovereign control. Theophilus of Antioch (c. 115–81 ce) is credited with the development of the doctrine in the second century, and he says this, contradicting the Platonic idea: ‘And what great thing is it if God made the world out of existent materials? For even a human artist, when he gets his material from some one, makes of it what he pleases. But the power of God is manifested in this, that out of things that are not He makes whatever He pleases.’26 The main thrust of this doctrine is that the universe depends on God for its existence moment by moment.27 Theophilus would have concurred with the quotations earlier in this chapter from Augustine and Aquinas. The doctrine counters Hawking’s naïve view that God is only needed to ‘light the blue touch paper’ at the putative beginning. Most significantly, it answers his question: ‘What is it that breathes fire into the equations?’ Sadly, as when jesting Pilate asked, ‘What is truth?’, Hawking posed the question but would not stay for an answer.

Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, trans. Members of the English Church (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1845), 253. 26 Theophilus, To Autolycus, 2.4. 27 See Janet Soskice, ‘Creatio ex nihilo: Its Jewish and Christian Foundations’, in Creation and the God of Abraham, ed. David B. Burrell, Carlo Cogliati, Janet M. Soskice, and William R. Stoeger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 24–39. 25

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The specialness of the universe: Cosmic fine-tuning The second issue raised by cosmology for theology concerns the special way in which the universe appears to be set up, seemingly for humans (or something like humans) to be here. On the basis of the Christian doctrine of creation, it would be expected that the universe would be an ordered and well-structured domain – that is at least part of what the creation narrative in Genesis 1 means to convey. What cosmologists have found in recent years accords neatly with this. The term ‘anthropic principle’ was coined by cosmologists to refer to the very special constraints on the laws of physics which had to pertain for life to arise in the cosmos. The term ‘anthropic principle’ is not ideal for two reasons. First, the conditions being discussed are not those specifically for humans (anthrōpoi) to arise; rather, they are conditions required for life, in general, to arise – indeed, in some cases, for anything interesting to happen at all. This consideration has led cosmologist and astrobiologist Paul Davies to refer instead to the ‘biophilic principle’.28 The second reason is that the term as it stands is somewhat ambiguous. In particular, it has spawned several subcategories. Thus John Barrow and Frank Tipler, in their classic book on the subject, define the ‘weak anthropic principle’ (WAP) as follows: ‘The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirement that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so.’29 Stated thus, the principle is a tautology since necessarily the physical and cosmological quantities have to take values compatible with human existence. However, the probabilities referred to are what statisticians call ‘posterior probabilities’ and are probabilities conditional on human existence: given there exists carbon-based life, the values of these quantities must be compatible with that and so must be constrained to lie in certain, often narrow, ranges. The more interesting question, however, concerns the prior probabilities, which measure how likely the constants lie within life-compatible ranges a priori; that is, before considering any impact on whether they are compatible with life. On the other hand, the WAP is sometimes interpreted in a ‘multiverse’ sense: humans, of course, have to measure the quantities to be compatible with their existence, but there may be other regions of the universe or other universes in which the constants take different values and there is no life. Barrow and Tipler also define the ‘strong anthropic principle’ (SAP): ‘The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history.’30 Again, there is an ambiguity. Given human existence, the universe must have those properties that are compatible with it. The problem is that the SAP is generally considered a highly speculative metaphysical claim; namely, that life must develop in the universe. In this latter sense, it is

Thus he uses the terms ‘biophilic’ and ‘biophilicity’ in Paul Davies, ‘Universes Galore: Where will it all End?’, in Universe or Multiverse?, ed. Bernard Carr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 487–505. In Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 149–50, he cites the originator of the anthropic principle, Brandon Carter, as saying that if he had known the trouble it would have caused he would have used another term, such as ‘biophilic principle’. 29 John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 16. 30 Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, 21. 28

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linked with interpretations of quantum theory whereby humans, as intelligent creatures, bring the universe into existence by observing it. Less contentiously, the universe is referred to as being ‘fine-tuned’. There are numerous examples of this fine-tuning, so for the moment, I will limit these to three:

1. The mean density of matter–energy in the universe at one second from the beginning of the Big Bang needed to be what it was to one part in 1015. If the density had been just slightly more than the so-called ‘critical’ value, the universe would have recollapsed to a ‘Big Crunch’ before galaxies and stars had time to form. On the other hand, if the density had been slightly below the critical value, matter would have flown apart too quickly for galaxies and stars to form by gravitational attraction.



2. The strength of gravity αG can increase by a factor of a few thousand and intelligent life would still be possible. However, as αG increases, the size of planets for which life is viable goes down, ultimately to a size incapable of sustaining an ecosystem. Since, in principle, αG could be up to 1040 times what it is, there is only a tiny probability (of order 10-37) of αG being in the required range if this parameter were chosen randomly from the range 0 to 1040.



3. The elements out of which planet earth and life on it are made are manufactured by nuclear fusion in the interiors of stars. Carbon is produced by crashing three helium nuclei together, and oxygen by crashing a further helium nucleus onto carbon. A very delicate balance is required: first, so that carbon is manufactured at all since the intermediate element beryllium is unstable, but secondly so that not all the carbon is turned into oxygen, as both carbon and oxygen are essential for life. Fred Hoyle predicted that because humans exist, there had to be an energy level at a certain value in the carbon atom, which would be a ‘resonance’ level to make the production of carbon efficient, but that there would not be a corresponding resonance level in oxygen. Hoyle informed colleagues in the United States of America of his prediction, who then went and discovered this hitherto unknown energy level in carbon.

Ultimately this last seeming coincidence depends on the strength of the strong nuclear force lying in a narrow range (within about 0.5 per cent of its actual value). Hoyle’s discovery struck this atheist cosmologist very forcibly, and he was moved to remark: If this were a purely scientific question and not one that touched on the religious problem, I do not believe that any scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside the stars.31 Hoyle seems to be saying that anti-religious prejudice prevents scientists from drawing the natural conclusion that the laws of physics are designed. A priori, it seems highly unlikely that the free parameters going into the laws of physics should lie within the narrow ranges required for life. Cosmologists generally agree about this.

Fred Hoyle, address delivered in the University Church, Cambridge, in Religion and the Scientists, ed. Mervyn Stockwood (London: SCM Press, 1959), 64. 31

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The natural explanation, at least for a theist, is that the laws were indeed designed by God, who expressly intended that intelligent creatures arise in the cosmos who can understand God’s universe, enjoy a relationship with God, and exercise moral responsibility within the universe. The main alternative to the theistic explanation is the so-called ‘multiverse’ hypothesis, according to which the values of the constants and the initial conditions take on the whole range of values they could take but in different universes. Humans should then not be surprised to find themselves in a universe where the values are just right for them to exist because they could not exist in a universe in which they are not right. Of course, strictly speaking, the multiverse hypothesis does not preclude design. God could have brought about his purposes by creating a multiverse. However, the multiverse is often seen as avoiding the need for God. One example is the view of Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, Lord Rees of Ludlow: ‘If one does not believe in providential design, but still thinks the fine-tuning needs some explanation, there is another perspective – a highly speculative one. . . . It is the one I much prefer, however, even though in our present state of knowledge any such preference can be no more than a hunch.’32 Rees rightly acknowledges that the multiverse concept is highly speculative. There are several ways in which a multiverse is conceived. The most popular is as separate domains within an overarching space-time. In 1981, Alan Guth proposed a theory which would solve some problems with the standard Big Bang, including one of the finetunings I have described; namely, why the mean density of matter-energy is so close to the critical value.33 According to his theory of inflation, the universe underwent an incredibly rapid and accelerating expansion during the first 10-32 seconds from the beginning. This drives the mean density to the critical value. However, the fine-tuning is not solved but merely shifted to the theory of inflation itself, which needs fine-tuning. In recent years, cosmologists have opted for a multiverse version of inflation (‘eternal inflation’) in which different regions of an overarching space-time inflate for various lengths of time and in which universes form as bubbles, and bubbles within bubbles ad infinitum.34 The problem is that regions other than ours are undetectable, even in principle. Another problem is the sheer ontological extravagance of the multiverse hypothesis. It violates the principle of Occam’s razor that entities are not to be multiplied unnecessarily to the highest degree. However, perhaps the greatest problem for the multiverse relates to what typical observers would expect to see if they belonged to a member of the tiny subset of universes conducive to their existence. Oxford cosmologist Sir Roger Penrose argues that observers would typically observe a cosmos ordered enough for their existence and that a single solar system surrounded by chaos would be enough.35 What is actually observed is a cosmos with 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars’ worth of order. Penrose calculates 123 the probability that this would be observed by an individual to be of order 1 in 1010 .36

Martin Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), 164. Alan H. Guth, ‘Inflationary Universe: A Possible Solution to the Horizon and Flatness Problems’, Physical Review D 23, no. 2 (1981): 347–56. 34 Pioneering papers on eternal inflation are: Alexander Vilenkin, ‘Birth of Inflationary Universes’, Physical Review D 27, no. 12 (1983): 2848–55; and Andrei Linde, ‘Eternally Existing Self-Reproducing Chaotic Inflationary Universe’, Physics Letters B 175, no. 4 (1986): 395–400. 35 Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind, 354. 36 Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind, 344. 32 33

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An analogy is to imagine a monkey sitting at a typewriter for trillions upon trillions of years. Suppose that when the monkey types ‘To be or not to be, – that is the question’, which it eventually will do, that that corresponds to a universe with observers. The problem is that the universe in which humans exist is not that one but is much more like the complete works of Shakespeare. The monkey will eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare, but it is vastly more likely on the multiverse hypothesis that humans would find themselves in the much less ordered universe corresponding to just one line from Hamlet.

Conclusion I have considered two questions which arise from cosmology and which are claimed to relate to the theological doctrine of creation: the temporal beginning indicated by the Big Bang theory and the fine-tuning of physical constants and initial conditions. I have shown that attempts by cosmologists to avoid a temporal beginning to the universe have been unsuccessful. However, while this might pose a problem for atheists, it does not do so for Christian theists. This is because the Christian view of creation is not especially concerned with a particular moment in the past but rather asserts that God is the reason why anything exists at all and that God upholds the universe in being at every moment. Similarly, invoking a multiverse instead of divine design to explain the fine-tuning is not really to invoke an alternative since God can perfectly well create a multiverse. However, the multiverse hypothesis is highly speculative, ontologically extravagant, and fails to explain the ultra-fine-tuning of our particular universe. Divine design seems the more rational approach to adopt.

Further reading Copan, Paul and William L. Craig. Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration. Grand Rapids/Leicester: Baker Academic/Apollos, 2004. Davies, Paul C. W. The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? London: Allen Lane, 2006. Hawking, Stephen W. A Brief History of Time. London: Bantam Press, 1988. Hawking, Stephen W. and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life. London: Bantam Press, 2010. Holder, Rodney. Big Bang, Big God: A Universe Designed for Life? Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2013. Holder, Rodney and Simon Mitton, eds. Georges Lemaître: Life, Science and Legacy. Heidelberg: Royal Astronomical Society-Springer, 2012. Krauss, Lawrence M. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012.

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CHAPTER 45 PHYSICS THE RECREATION OF CREATION Tom McLeish

Introduction: The humanity of physics – physics as a humanity In the so-called ‘developed’ countries of the twenty-first century, a particular and parochial framing of the sciences has become commonplace, which by no means assists the task of integrating a discussion of physics into a theological work on creation. Far from finding a place of communication within philosophical and theological reflections on the questions and implications of creation, the fragmentation of disciplines between the sciences and humanities, and of the sciences among themselves, complicates even the starting position by placing ‘physics’ in a position of multiply-tensioned opposition. First, the threadbare, latemodern ‘conflict narrative’ of science and religion has attempted to frame science in general, and physics in particular, in epistemological competition over the territory of nature.1 Second, the repeated resurgences of a related conflict between the sciences and humanities in general, whether assuming the form of the ‘Two Cultures’ or the ‘Science Wars’, and fuelled by an increasingly instrumental scale of value and funding in academia, scatter secular obstacles among the socio-religious ones across any road to an integrative programme.2 Third, within the sciences themselves, ‘physics’ has repeatedly, either by projection or by self-promotion, assumed a higher or more fundamental position than the ‘special sciences’, eliciting reactions from diffidence to envy.3 The discussion in this chapter requires a completely different relational framing of physics at the outset. It needs to assist in preparing a response to the weighty theological consequences of the possibility of physics as an epistemological pathway that contributes to an understanding of creation and to the reciprocal need to frame physics within a human narrative teleology. It requires considering how the profound mathematical structures that interpret cosmological observations may be assumed within a humanistic discourse and an appreciation of the fundamental transdisciplinary network of methodologies and communities in which science thrives. There is not space here to rebut or deconstruct the three conflictual barriers summarized above, nor to reconstruct the more positive and holistic account of a transdisciplinary physics just envisioned, before engaging the task proper. This chapter, therefore, will simply ignore the first and take the second as read.4

See Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). See Keith M. Ashman and Philip S. Barringer, eds, After the Science Wars (London: Routledge, 2001). 3 See Philip Mirowski, ‘The Ironies of Physics Envy’, in In More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 354–95; Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (London: Routledge, 2002). 4 Accounts of possible pathways to removing the first, and resources to do so, can be found in Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion; Tom McLeish, Faith and Wisdom in Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Michael 1 2

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There is one more preliminary remark to make, necessary especially since the advent of quantum mechanics, on the scope and definition of ‘physics’ that addresses, as far as this discussion requires it, the third of its ‘conflicts’. Over-tidy categorizations of the sciences have attempted to assign to each a proper length scale (so that, for example, biology or materials science takes over where chemistry leaves off, leading to psychology, geology, astronomy, and so on). In this schema, ‘physics’ is confined to the atomic and subatomic worlds – to electrons, light, and the fleeting particles of high-energy physics. Such further fragmentation in the name of clean taxonomy does justice neither to the history nor to the current practice of physics, which knows no such restriction of object class or scale. The etymology serves as a clear signpost here: while bio-logy, geo-logy, or astro-nomy, and so on, declare their territories through their prefixes, φύσις (physis) means possibly more, but certainly no less, than is known, by ‘nature’. There is, therefore, ‘physics’ being done at the smallest of all accessible scales, but also at the level of molecules as well as atoms, within biological cells and tissues, at the metre-scale of human bodies and human constructions, at the kilometre scale of clouds and mountains, and on to ocean currents, planets, stars, galaxies, and the structure of the universe as a whole. It is noteworthy that one of physics’ great twentieth-century contributions to learning (earning a Nobel Prize for its mathematical conceptualization as ‘renormalization’) has been the very notion of ‘scale-invariance’ and its link to the idea of ‘emergence’ whose conceptual tensions with strong forms of reductionism should not be construed as a conflict between the special sciences and physics, but rather as a creative debate arising within the discourse of physics itself.5 Within that broad scope of thinking, there has been a perpetual string of questions and research programmes within physics concerning the emergent ‘coming into being of things that were not’. In that sense, physics has served as an underpinning science of ‘creation’ from its first formulations. Setting those preliminaries aside permits a direct route in what follows to a brief examination of the long history of ‘physics’ in regard to creation – from Aristotle, through his work’s Islamic reception and development into the Christian milieu of the High Middle Ages, and thence into early modern science. The chapter then takes creation into the physicist’s own hands in an account of the emergence of experimental method, describing the persistent duality between matter and form, order and chaos, and the two senses of ‘creation’ that refer to matter and to form, to creation ex nihilo and creation through ordering, that are paralleled in scientific and theological thinking throughout physics’ long story. The chapter concludes briefly with a renewed call to the restorative and therapeutic framing of physics within a vocation of cocreation. At a few points, the text is accompanied by mathematical quotations. This is not done assuming notational familiarity on the part of all readers but rather to be faithful to an essential tradition of physical thought, and to provide in visual form an impression of both the economy and the scope of mathematical descriptions of creation.

Hanby, No God, No Science: Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017). For the notion of ‘science-humanities’ rather than disciplinary fragmentation, similar ways forward are suggested in Midgley, Science and Poetry; Tom McLeish, The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); and Maria Popova, Figuring (New York: Vintage Books, 2020). 5 See Michael E. Fisher, ‘The Renormalization Group in the Theory of Critical Behavior’, Reviews of Modern Physics 46, no. 4 (1974): 597–616.

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A long history of physics: The perspective on creation as coming into existence If an urtext for physics is needed, then despite the gulfs of time, question, knowledge, and world view that separate his fourth-century bce Physics from today’s discipline, Aristotle’s Φυσικὴ ἀκρόασις (Lectures on Nature) serves as its ancient foundation. Reading it is a salutary exercise for a modern physicist, for its subject matter addresses basic questions that today’s educational pathways for scientists typically bypass, taking them for granted. Aristotle’s goal is an account of change and of the causes of change, or, more properly, of controlled and limited change – the essential property of the universe that steers a course between total chaos and perpetual stasis. His route to a phylogeny of cause begins with a discussion of what is meant by the ‘nature’ of a thing (the modern concept of ‘Nature’ as a system arises much later, arguably not until the eighteenth century6) and which principles might be attached to natures. What is meant by place, infinity, void, continuity, and time itself are at first puzzling, then impressive, to the modern scientific reader who has not typically been challenged on the foundational need for their explicit definitions. Fundamental to thinking about ‘creation’ under a definition that encompasses ‘something coming to be after not having been’, Physics begins with this question and the three necessary ‘Principles’ by which coming-into-being can happen – matter, form, and privation (the last describing the prior absence into which any ‘becoming’ moves). Today’s agenda for physics is unrecognizable in Aristotle’s work and in its progeny up to the early modern period, at least in terms of the answers given to fundamental questions about the structure of the world. On the other hand, the Physics does set foundational questions, some of which are becoming increasingly central today. The issue of a physics of controlled change is also the problem that birthed, also in the ancient world, the various early versions of atomism that Aristotle inherited from Democritus on the one hand and from Plato on the other. If atoms are changeless, then emergent change is explained by their rearrangement without the need for any local creation or destruction. Elsewhere, Aristotle seems to repudiate any atomic hypothesis. His theory of controlled change emerges from the motion, mixing, and demixing of the Empidoclean ‘elements’ of earth, water, air and fire. But in Physics, in a characteristically perplexing apparent contradiction, he seems to argue strongly against the infinite divisibility of matter (and so, by implication, for atoms): ‘But since it is impossible for an animal or a plant to be arbitrarily big or small, clearly none of its parts can either.’7 On time, however, the argument for continuity, and therefore infinite divisibility, is clearer.8 Aristotle’s final goal in Physics, anticipated at the outset by the three Principles (i.e. matter, form, and privation), is to establish a theory of causation and an account of the ‘first mover’ – the agent that can be said to set going the multiple chains of causation by which all subsequent change takes place. He is clear that ‘first’ should not be taken in a temporal, but in a purely causative, sense. Nor is such an agent remotely divine, although it cannot support any measure. However, the conclusion of Physics itself sets in motion the idea that physics may have something

See Laura D. Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). 7 Aristotle, Physics, 1.4. 8 See Aristotle, Physics, 4.11. 6

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to say about the origin of material and motion: ‘The first agent of movement, however, causes eternal movement and does so for an infinite time. It is clear, then, that it is indivisible, and has no parts or magnitude.’9 Aristotle’s search for the causes of motion led him, as in much of his natural philosophy, to a categorization of motion itself. The most significant division, at least for the history of physics, was between ‘natural’ and ‘violent’ motion. The former described the unforced attainment of natural place – an example would be the fall of a stone or the rise of steam. The latter concerns motion caused by interference of a willing agent, such as the upward or horizontal trajectory of a thrown stone. This aspect of Physics was to have strong consequences for the development of experimental method, as discussed herein. The first millennium of the Christian era, and beyond, saw many commentators on Aristotle; a survey would be beyond the scope of this chapter. However, perhaps the most influential was the early-eleventh-century Persian polymath Ibn Sina (Latinised to Avicenna). Among his encyclopaedic work under the banner of his Healing (Shifāʾ), Avicenna proved himself among the most astute and most influential of those who would develop Aristotle’s theme of physics in regard to being and becoming.10 There are two particular contributions of relevance to creation. The first is his attempt at a logical proof that time must always have existed, a formal re-statement of Aristotle’s bar to any temporal beginning to the universe. The demonstration is built on Avicenna’s novel approach to time as derivatory of motion rather than prior to it. Given bodies and their ability to possess the accidents of different velocities, he deduces the existence (and definition) of time from the ratio of distance to velocity. His argument runs as follows: where there is motion, and body, which is true even of a place where God alone exists, there must perforce be time. We might note, however, the instability of this argument to different notions (such as Augustine’s, see herein, who reached an opposite conclusion) of divine attributability of place and motion. Avicenna’s second salient contribution to the history of physical thought regarding creation is his identification of the problem of three-dimensionality or extension. Simple matter, by virtue of its simplicity, can have no extension (for that is an accident and additional to matter itself). The endowment of extension, particularly extension into the three dimensions of the world, is a puzzle to be explained. Avicenna suggests, as a solution, a particular ‘first form’ or ‘form of corporeity’ that endows matter with dimensionality.11 For many thinkers in antiquity and throughout the first millennium, religious commitment to a theology of creation did not imply a finite time-course for the cosmos. Whether time is finite or infinite, it is part of the created order, of the fabric of physics. Agents of creation could be outside time, as they were for Avicenna within an Islamic milieu and in an earlier Christian context for Augustine.12 The resonances with today’s relativistic ‘space–time’ debates are as strong as are the departures of these earlier thinkers from a Newtonian concept of universally flowing time, independent of space.

Aristotle, Physics, 8.10. Avicenna, Shifāʾ, al-Afʿāl wa-l-infiʿālāt, ed. Maḥmūd Qāsim (Cairo: The General Egyptian Book Organization, 1969); Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, trans. Michael E. Marmura (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2005). 11 Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 78–9. 12 See Augustine, Confessions, 11. 9

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The thirteenth century saw, within the burgeoning new universities, a remarkable confluence of inheritances from both the ancient world and its Islamic transmission. That Christian Europe assumed and developed such a tradition across the entire world of thought is testimony to a much greater intellectual openness than is commonly attributed to the ‘Middle Ages’.13 A search for examples of the ‘physics of becoming’ drawing from Aristotle and Augustine, via Avicenna into the intellectual community of Paris and Oxford of the 1220s, leads inevitably to the extraordinary work On Light (De Luce) by Master to the Oxford Franciscans (and later Bishop of Lincoln) Robert Grosseteste.14 The English polymath, who had by this point probably written his own commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, now takes the Philosopher to task for the doctrine of the eternal existence of the universe. But, although this is a theologically motivated disagreement, the tools of the argument are those of physics and mathematics. Grosseteste wants to show how developments from Aristotle’s own physics of light and matter can be used to describe a cosmogeny in detail that describes the universe possessing a temporal origin. To do this, he employs Avicenna’s notion (developed, as seen earlier, from Aristotle) of ‘first form’ and identifies it with light (lux). Light has the property of ‘infinite multiplication’ (we might say ‘space filling’) so does the work, when incorporated within matter itself, of imparting solidity, extension, and three-dimensionality to material bodies. In a highly original use of non-geometrical mathematics in physics, Grosseteste maps the physical process of combining the infinite multiplication of light with the infinitesimal extension of matter to the mathematically finite product of infinitely large and infinitely small numbers. Remarkably, this mathematical physics directed at accounting for the finite size of everyday objects is subsequently applied in the De Luce to the origin of the cosmos as a whole. A first-created, central point of light expands, drawing matter into a sphere the size of the world-machine.15 The process does not end with the initial expansion, but under the subsequent inward radiance of light (in a secondary form, termed lumen) shining from the newly formed boundary of the universe, matter is compressed into the series of shells that become the ‘crystalline spheres’ of the medieval cosmos. Grosseteste even gives a deft explanation of the ‘symmetry-breaking’, as it would now be termed, between the compressed and perfected matter above the orbit of the Moon and the unstable and mixed material of the elemental spheres below. For at this point, the weakening of the inwardly propagating lumen renders it no longer of sufficient strength to form further crystalline spheres by a process of compaction and purification. The brilliance of this extraordinary scheme, which has been called the ‘Medieval Big Bang’, is remarkable not, of course, for its correctness, but rather for the imagination with which it works out, for the first time in detail, the way that a mathematical tradition in physics can describe the coming into being of the entire cosmos. The mathematical writing is so clear that it has been possible to translate not only the text from Latin to English but also its early mathematical physics into contemporary mathematical language.16 To give a specific example,

See David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to a.d. 1450, 2nd edn (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008). 14 See Cecilia Panti, ‘Robert Grosseteste’s De luce: A Critical Edition’, in Robert Grosseteste and His Intellectual Milieu, ed. John Flood, James R. Ginther, and Joseph W. Goering (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2013), 193–238. 15 See Robert Grosseteste, On Light (De Luce), trans. Clare C. Riedl (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1942). 16 See Richard G. Bower et al., ‘A Medieval Multiverse? Mathematical Modelling of the Thirteenth Century Universe of 13

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a translation into algebraic form of the treatise’s description of the field of lumen interacting with the matter it is compressing generates the differential equation:

dx bx = k ( r - trc )x - g [1] dr r

The function x (r) represents the spherically symmetric intensity of light (lumen) a distance r from the cosmic centre. Equation [1] describes what several lines of text are required to do in terms of its connection with a similarly distributed field of matter, ρ(r). The parameters k and γ quantify the notions of opacity and degree of lumen generation, respectively, in matter, while τ defines the transparency of ‘perfected’ matter. The point of writing [1] here is that it captures an early instance of an instantiation in physics of the Augustinian imagination that takes the entire spatiotemporal process of cosmic formation in at a single glance. It re-creates creation in the human mind. The theological consequences of such a conceptual leap were understood by medieval thinkers such as Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, and Thomas Aquinas, and by some early moderns (Johannes Kepler is a clear example), but have generally been obscured by the later Kantian divorce of materialism and idealism, as this chapter will discuss briefly in the final section. A second set of important emerging ideas lie behind this medieval cosmogeny, commonplace in physics today but not established when Grosseteste was writing – the uniformity of physical law across time and space. In light of the Aristotelian doctrine of a cosmos separated into the two domains of superlunary perfection (and purely circular motion) and sublunary imperfection, it is the more remarkable that Grosseteste’s De Luce attempts a single theoretical frame for both (and, as earlier noted, even an explanation for the division). Needless to say, in a pre-telescopic era, this is also the natural deduction from observation: the celestial objects of stars and planets do indeed seem to follow quite different behaviours to those of the tangible world. The connection of universal physical behaviour to local, controlled, and even artificial instances brings the discussion to the gradual development of experimental method.

Experiment as creation: The unexpected fruitfulness of experimental method A myopic view of history locates the birth of experimental method sharply within the early seventeenth century, which a presentist interpretation takes as illustrating the starkly reactionary slant of earlier centuries to the methodological discovery of scientific knowledge. Reality is, as always, both more complex and more informative. There are, first, strong historical precedents in the medieval centres of philosophy of both eastern and western traditions for early experimental procedures. This is especially true of optics, within which the technology of glass-making is happily suggestive of simplified investigations into lenses and mirrors, using natural or artificial light-sources, and which inherited a natural theoretical framework in Euclid’s geometry.

Robert Grosseteste’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 470, no. 2167 (2014): 1–16.

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Even without lenses, the creation of images by a ‘camera obscura’ and their description by means of lines, angles, and planes was possible for the tenth-century philosopher AlHazen (Ibn al-Haytham) in Cairo.17 His predecessor by a generation, Ibn Sahl, in Baghdad, was familiar enough with the measurable properties of angles of refraction to have described the earliest known attestation of the law of refraction conventionally known as Snell’s law.18 Grosseteste wrote about simple optical demonstrations in a later treatise on colour (De Colore) that developed the light-informed-matter theory of On Light into an abstract three-dimensional categorization of colour.19 Although Alastair Crombie’s thesis that the origin of experimental method should be attributed to Grosseteste is now considered to overstate the case, his description of these and other demonstrations indicate that the gestation of experimental method is historically a very long one. Certainly, it is hard to use any other term for the raytracing constructions of water-filled glass spheres that led both Ibn al Farabi of Baghdad and Dietrich of Freiburg to their remarkable simultaneous (but independent) resolution of the problem of the rainbow at the level of geometric optics in 1304–8.20 There is no doubt, however, that a fully articulated experimental method, conscious of its abstraction and simplification of nature, with concomitant accounts of induction on the one hand and theory-testing on the other, did not appear before the seventeenth century. Among the key transformational texts are Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), Galileo’s Discourses on the Two New Sciences (1638), Robert Boyle’s New Experiments (1660), and other works leading to the foundational formulations of the Royal Society (of London) and other institutional embodiments of science.21 There are several reasons for the late flourishing of experimental method, several pertinent to the discussion of creation from the point of view of physics. The Aristotelian categorization of motion is one. For if one is interested in learning about nature, or in particular about ‘natural motion’, then experiment – which by definition from its artificiality could only introduce the alternative category of ‘violent’ motion – has no grasp on the question at all. From this perspective, it was necessary to abandon a core tenet of Aristotelian physics before experiment (rather than simple observation) became even entertainable as a possible means of learning about nature. A second reason for the late adoption of experiment is less axiomatic, but, by that measure, more persistent, for it remains a cautionary principle today. Nature is complex, connected, and often chaotic – a mixture of many interacting components. To make an experiment, on the other hand, is to create an artificial, disconnected, simplified, and controlled environment

See A. I. Sabra, ed. and trans., The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham, Books I–III: On Direct Vision (London: The Warburg Institute, 1989). 18 See Roshdi Rashed, ‘A Pioneer in Anaclastics: Ibn Sahl on Burning Mirrors and Lenses’, Isis 81, no. 3 (1990): 464–91. 19 See Greti Dinkova-Bruun et al., The Dimensions of Colour: Robert Grosseteste’s De colore (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2013). 20 See Alastair C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). 21 Francis Bacon, The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, 3 vols, ed. John H. Bridges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1897– 1900); Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences, including Centres of Gravity and Force of Percussion, 2nd edn, trans. Stillman Drake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974); Robert Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects (Made, for the Most Part, in a New Pneumatical Engine) Written by Way of Letter to the Right Honorable Charles Lord Vicount of Dungarvan, Eldest Son to the Earl of Corke (Oxford: H. Hall, 1660). See also Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). 17

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or system. Put this way, it is not at all clear that one learns anything useful, or even anything at all, about nature by performing acts as artificial and simplified as ‘experiments’. This argument was sustained during the seventeenth century long after the Aristotelian objections to experiment had been suppressed, articulated most clearly by Margaret Cavendish in 1668.22 The discussion continues today, most notably in biology, between proponents of in vitro and in vivo methodologies. The first deem pure observation within living systems to be rendered of little use through unmanageable complexity; the second condemn the simplified systems of test-tube experiments as inadequate to the science. Peter Harrison has convincingly demonstrated that it took the theological and imaginative power of Bacon’s argument in Novum Organum to overcome this second, and more difficult, objection to experimental method.23 The recovery of an intimate knowledge and understanding of nature, intended for humankind but lost as a consequence of the fall, implied an act of grace on the creator’s part, enabling the rebuilding of natural knowledge by small steps, beginning with sense data rather than ideation. Such a theological articulation of the purpose of natural philosophy was not entirely new; earlier expressions can be found in the reflections of medieval scientists.24 Grosseteste wrote about the successive recovery of sense, memory, imagination, and understanding as the mind’s eye explored below the surface of matter; Dietrich of Freiburg ascribed the motivation for his optical investigations to God’s questioning of Job in that biblical book’s long nature poem (Job 30–42). The difference in the intellectual environments of the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries that allowed the narrative of recovery and restitution of natural knowledge to be converted into a full-blown experimental method drew on the greater sense available since the Reformation of humankind’s propensity to create by virtue of the exercise of labour and to ‘think small’, as Harrison puts it. The new physical experiments of Boyle, Galileo, Robert Hooke, and others represented ‘small worlds’ created and observed by human hands and eyes that patterned, in greatly reduced image, the work of the divine creator (the optical resonance of this language is deliberate – the long centuries of optics as the foremost physical science had left metaphorical legacies of image and representation, as well as technical and mathematical ones). It is no coincidence that the same period and place that saw the birth of experimental method also engendered the new literary form of the novel.25 Both new forms required the creation, in scientific laboratory or in literary imagination, of a ‘small-world’ system of limited complexity, followed by a careful observation (very commonly, if surprisingly, the word used by fiction writers to explain the recording of their characters’ actions within the fictional writing process). Both required an understanding and deployment of a human aptitude to bring into being that which did not exist before, and both reflected in some way a truth about the wider, more complex, cosmos.

See Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 23 See Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 24 See Tom McLeish, ‘Medieval Lessons for the Modern Science/Religion Debate’, in Robert Grosseteste and the Pursuit of Religious and Scientific Learning in the Middle Ages, ed. Jack P. Cunningham and Mark Hocknull (New York: Springer, 2016), 281–300. 25 See McLeish, The Poetry and Music of Science, chap. 4. 22

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Physics of creation ex nihilo and creation by ordering The metaphysical tradition that has explored necessary principles for creating and performing physics in the first place and the creative aspects of physics itself surveyed to this point – the conceptual and mathematical description of the early universe and the construction of experimental small-worlds within it – neither participate in nor concern the process of creation ex nihilo basic to Christian theology.26 The imaginative and mathematical leap that holds a description of all that is within its scope, whether that is Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century formulation of a geocentric Aristotelian cosmogeny or its modern counterpart of the general relativistic expanding universe, due to Belgian cosmologist and priest Georges Lemaître,27 reflects one of the most astonishing human capacities, but it does not touch Gottfried Leibnitz’s question, written in 1714 – ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’28 Instead, these physical descriptions of ‘all of creation’ take the act of creation itself for granted, describing the subsequent ordering of that universe over time. This is true at all scales. Lemaître’s formulation of the density field ρ(t) in a universe with an expanding scale a(t) can be written (and it is worth the comparison with equation [1] in the universal scope of its descriptors):

¶r 3 ¶a æ pö =r + 2 ÷ [2] ç ¶t a ¶t è c ø

The subsequent observational verification of an expanding universe by Edwin Hubble through galactic redshifts, and in recent years by satellite observation of the cosmic microwave background, is well known.29 The more recent advent of extremely powerful computation has permitted several research groups to calculate the developments of the vital inhomogeneities, or density fluctuations, that are not captured in the homogenous simplicity of [2],30 whose contents, as W. H. Auden put it, ‘couched in the elegant euphemisms of algebra, look innocent’.31 The gravitational instabilities that emerge from the very early universe seed the threads of a structure known as the ‘cosmic web’, whose knots and whorls subsequently condense into galaxies, stars, planets, and living organisms. One of physics’ great questions, and one that has proved much more fruitful than ‘Why something rather than nothing?’ is, ‘How does ordered structure emerge from chaos?’ This is not asked, of course, in a way that flouts the second law of thermodynamics, which states only that the universal sum of ‘entropy’, the quantitative measure of disorder, must increase. From the largest galaxy cluster to the condensation of atoms and molecules into crystalline

See Simon Oliver, ‘Every Good and Perfect Gift is from Above: Creation Ex Nihilo before Nature and Culture’, in Knowing Creation: Perspectives from Theology, Philosophy, and Science, ed. Andrew B. Torrance and Thomas H. McCall (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018), 27–46. 27 See Georges Lemaître, ‘Un univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques’, Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles 47 (1927): 49–59. 28 See Gottfried W. Leibniz, La Monadologie, ed. E. Boutroux (Paris: LGF, 1991). 29 See Harry Nussbaumer and Lydia Bieri, Discovering the Expanding Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 30 See Joop Schaye et al., ‘The EAGLE Project: Simulating the Evolution and Assembly of Galaxies and their Environments’, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 446, no. 1 (2015): 521–54. 31 W. H. Auden, ‘Ode to Terminus’, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 811. 26

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arrays, to the formation of the ordered structures of living cells’ membranes and protein filaments, these delicate and multilayered structures emerge locally, while disorder increases globally (typically through the emission and dispersal of radiation as the product of heat). The emergence of ordered structures depends not only on the possibility of the transport of heat but also on the interactions of molecular matter itself. The huge abstract space in which chemical bonding lies permits the implicit coding of emergent structure at the molecular level. So, the symmetries of crystals at the scale of their entire dimensions are linked to the geometry of bonding at the smallest (diamonds depend on local tetrahedral bonding of carbon atoms). Within the biologically relevant arena of ‘soft matter physics’, the self-assembly of membranes is, in the same sense, coded by the amphiphilic, or bipolar, nature of surfactant molecules. Possessing both water-loving and water-repelling ends of their short rod-like geometries constitutes an inner instruction to assemble into lamellae whose surfaces consist of like molecular extremities.32 The final ingredient of the physics of emergent order is, paradoxically, the molecular instantiation of chaos itself. For without some molecular movement, no degree of implicit coding for large-scale assemblies would be to any avail – the molecular components need to be brought into immediate contact before the forces between them, be they the covalent bonds of diamond or the subtler hydrophobic interactions of surfactants, can come into play. Heat comes to the service of emergent order for the second time at this point, for as Albert Einstein first showed, at the atomic and molecular level, heat is no more than the random translation and rotation of every component.33 It is the cause of ‘Brownian Motion’, named after the nineteenth-century botanist who performed the first exhaustive experimental survey on the diffusive behaviour of microscopic particles that it propels.34 Without this directionless and random material substrate of continual disordered motion, the highly ordered patterns of inorganic and organic materials would not appear. Furthermore, the random motion of heat that, by diffusion, brings components of self-assembled structure into contact in the first place is retained after its formation in the form of fluctuations within the structure itself. These continually random dynamic distortions can make decisive contributions to emergent material properties. Examples include the stabilization of the dominant structures among alternatives and the constitution of properties such as ‘softness’.35 The great majority of physics in regard to creation, therefore, applies to the sense in which order is created from a pre-existing chaos rather than creation ex nihilo. Intriguingly, this is also the sense of much biblical creation narrative. The shorter creation texts of the Psalms and other Wisdom literature refer to the ordering of, for example, the seas and the land by ‘giving the sea its boundary’ (Proverbs 8) and ‘setting the earth on foundations’ (Psalm 104). The second, ‘Yahwist’, account of the creation of humans (Genesis 2) takes the existing material of

See Tom McLeish, Soft Matter: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). See Albert Einstein, ‘Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen’, Annalen der Physik 322, no. 8 (1905): 549–60. 34 See Robert Brown, ‘A Brief Account of Microscopical Observations made in the Months of June, July and August 1827, on the Particles Contained in the Pollen of Plants; and on the General Existence of Active Molecules in Organic and Inorganic Bodies’, Edinburgh New Philosophy Journal 5 (1828): 358–71. 35 See McLeish, Soft Matter. 32 33

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dust to form Adam.36 This is not to say that there is no biblical warrant for the original creation ex nihilo, but rather to affirm that both senses of a broader ‘coming into being’ are clearly narrative themes in the tradition. The double sense, as has been observed, is also present in physics, again with a strong bias towards the emergence through ordering of pre-existing matter. But physics, too, has its attempt at something that looks more like the ex nihilo sense of creation. On the microscopic scale, quantum field theory, the current foundational theory of light and matter, requires the continual creation and annihilation of ‘virtual’ particles. The core component of mathematical descriptions within field-theories contains an operator called the ‘Hamiltonian’, which drives the system’s dynamics while also delivering the value of its total energy (modern physics, as well as ancient philology, knows the connection between energy and change). It is worth one more look at a notational instantiation of the physical thinking in mathematical form. A ubiquitous and fundamental form of this Hamiltonian operator, Hˆ in quantum field-theory is written:

1ö æ Hˆ = w ç a a + ÷ [3] 2ø è

Here, a† and a are the ‘creation operator’ and ‘annihilation operator’, respectively, for the field of particles in question. These component operators do exactly what their names suggest when acting on the quantum mechanical wavefunction – they make a particle, or equivalently a unit of excitation of the field, appear (a† ) or disappear (a). It is the astonishing success of theories of light and matter constructed from this mathematical structure that gives rise to narrative descriptions of a modern physics of the world as perpetually filled with a seething substratum of creation and annihilation. Some physicists have conjectured that the Big Bang singularity that begins the cosmic expansion described by Lemaître might be accounted for in the framework of such quantum fluctuations.37 Whether one thinks of these events as creationthrough-ordering, as creation ex nihilo, or as realization of matter from potentiality is, however, a moot point. In all such constructions, there must be a non-temporally prior quantum physics from which a universe can be generated by spontaneous fluctuation.

Conclusion: Physics of creation and contemplation In the light of the longer story, as well as the current narrative, of the physics of creation, it is clear that the late-nineteenth-century invention of the ‘conflict narrative’ of science and religion has unhelpfully clouded much more resilient, rich, and fruitful resource for theological thinking that the possibility and practice of physics provides. Enhanced by the two-cultures division and the post-Cartesian departure of subject and object,38 the notion that science might, for example, support a reflective, personal, and therapeutic source of contemplation, let alone material for theological analysis, appears in a late modern context

See McLeish, Faith and Wisdom in Science, 70–4. See Dongshan He, Dongfeng Gao, and Qing-yu Cai, ‘Spontaneous Creation of the Universe from Nothing’, Physical Review D 89, no. 8 (2014): 083510, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevD.89.083510. 38 See Midgley, Science and Poetry. 36 37

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as almost absurd. Yet, echoing Boethius, science writer Tim Radford has written an account of just such a contemplative experience.39 For Radford, absorbing the unparalleled journey beyond the solar system of the NASA Voyager probes, or the cosmic echoes of gravitational waves, became more than a solace during a time of trouble; it also performed a change of perspective. The issue of perspective of the human gaze onto creation, and its interaction with it, is one of the most salient issues in theology today, concerning not only its engagement with science and ethical issues of environment and medicine but also the reframing of the sacramental, the incarnation, and the theology of creation itself. Malcolm Guite has recently redrawn attention to the co-creative implication of humans created themselves in the image of God: ‘If part of the Imago Dei is itself our creative imagination then we should expect the action of the Word, indwelling and redeeming fallen humanity, to begin in, and work outward through, the human imagination.’40 This is as true of the scientific as it is of the poetic imagination. The extraordinary and surprising story of physics’ contemplation of the entire cosmos, in its intricate, connected, and many-layered level of detail, aligns with the perspective that Guite (and also Coleridge, who constitutes the major figure of his study) urges. This is a perspective that aligns with that of the divine, rather than, as the tradition of natural theology would have it, of perceiving God (albeit darkly, mistily, and from a distance) through the veil of nature. This co-creational perspective is also the one explicitly introduced by Jahweh to Job in the great Hebrew nature poem of the ‘Lord’s Answer’ (Job 38–42) that we have already encountered as a motivation for the optical solution of the rainbow. In this extraordinary text, the chaotic, wild, untamed – but by that same token fruitfully creative – aspects of nature are shared with the suffering human, who asks whether all this chaos means that nature is materially as well as morally out of control, and so out of care.41 Jahweh’s famous response consisted of over 150 questions: Were you there when I laid the foundations of the earth? . . . do you know the abode of light? . . . the path of the lightning? . . . the laws of the heavens? This cannot be read, with any sensitivity to the text, as simply a means to humble and quieten the anxious and angry Job. The questions constitute, at the very least, a contemplative journey through nature that contributes to Job’s healing. But more than that, they are invitational. The most fundamental and generative act of the scientific imagination, which is to re-create the universe, takes the form of creative questions. These are also the questions that generate the recreational activity of physics in the first place.

See Tim Radford, The Consolations of Physics: Why the Wonders of the Universe Can Make You Happy (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2018). 40 Malcolm Guite, Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 14. 41 See McLeish, Faith and Wisdom in Science, 102–48. 39

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Further reading Aristotle. Physics. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Brown, William P. The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Burtt, E. A. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003. Crombie, Alastair C. Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. Harrison, Peter. The Territories of Science and Religion. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. Lindberg, David C. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to a.d. 1450. 2nd edn. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. McLeish, Tom. Faith and Wisdom in Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Midgley, Mary. Science and Poetry. London: Routledge, 2002. Radford, Tim. The Consolations of Physics: Why the Wonders of the Universe Can Make You Happy. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2018. Torrance, Andrew B. and Thomas H. McCall, eds. Knowing Creation: Perspectives from Theology, Philosophy, and Science. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018.

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CHAPTER 46 THEOLOGIES OF CREATION AND THE ANTHROPOCENE

Forrest Clingerman

Christian theology has thus far been a practice of Holocene thinking. The 12,000 years of the Holocene epoch are characterized by a stable climate, generously amenable to human biological life and society. The entire history of Christianity has happened within this timeframe. The Christian doctrine of creation, therefore, is a doctrine born and raised amid the Holocene’s stability. As explored by biblical writers, theologians, and mystics, the story of the divine creation places humanity into a generally benevolent cosmos. The characteristics of the Holocene serve as a perfect setting for this type of vision of cosmic benevolence. Thus without realizing it, what has been described as ‘creation’ over the two millennia of Christian theology is a rather unusual period of natural history. Every theology of creation has assumed the ongoing backdrop of the Holocene, its remarkably consistent atmospheric carbon dioxide level, and its ability to encourage human progress in the form of civilization, agriculture, and technology. What happens to Christian understandings of humanity and creation when the Holocene ends? The proposed start of what researchers have termed the Anthropocene, or the Age of the Human, gives us an occasion to ask this question. This chapter attempts to highlight a number of the issues that the Christian doctrine of creation faces with discussions of the Anthropocene. It is organized in conversation with theologian Sigurd Bergmann’s reminder to envision a religion of the Anthropocene, as well as religion in the Anthropocene.1 First, this chapter examines the interdisciplinary analysis of the Anthropocene in order to offer examples of how theology is influenced by the concept of the Anthropocene. The second part of the chapter addresses what a theology of creation will look like in the Anthropocene, suggesting a few of the contours of an Anthropocenic theology of creation. While it is impossible to offer a fully developed Anthropocenic doctrine of creation – a task only a few years old, compared with the millennia of theologies of the Holocene – the aim of the following is to suggest new areas needed for future theological reflection.

Theological questions of the Anthropocene Until the modern era, the relationship between humanity and nature was framed by human desires and the limitations imposed by nature. On the one hand, the human species attempted to guide the biophysical world to suit its purposes, while on the other hand, the material world –

See Sigurd Bergman, Weather, Religion, and Climate Change (New York: Routledge, 2021), 202.

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through fire, flood, and famine, among other things – reminded humanity that human control is, at best, incomplete. Christian scriptures and theological reflection reinforce this understanding.2 Despite humanity being created in the image and likeness of God (or perhaps because it is), the human ability to know and master creation has always been partial. Located amid desire and limitation, humans have had the role of mediator (or, as Philip Hefner argued, are ‘created co-creators’3) of God’s creation. Theologically, humanity interprets itself to have a creative role of imprinting its will upon local surroundings, even though human stewardship is a pale, meagre reflection of the absolute omnipotence of the creator. Christian views of creation see the fecundity of the world as good because God declared it so, not because humanity has had a hand in its creation. In this goodness, humans follow after, but do not replace, the creator. This view – and the delicate balance between humans, creation, and creator – has recently been questioned. Human actions now control and overwhelm the planet: nowhere is the planet untouched by human impacts; humanity exerts mastery on even the largest ecological systems; and genetic science has led to proposals to not only alter life but also to pursue the ‘de-extinction’ of bygone species. Due to our ever-expanding control over the planet, scientists and scholars have proposed that the earth is entering the Anthropocene, a period defined as when human actions are primary drivers that change structures of life and geology. Proponents argue that the Anthropocene story begins with the collapse of the longstanding division between society and environment (or, in theological terms, humans and the rest of creation). Through the success of science, engineering, and technological thinking, the modern period is seen as a pivotal moment in the relationship between human mastery and the world. For instance, the seventeenth-century Industrial Revolution ‘marked the end of agriculture as the most dominant human activity and set the species on a far different trajectory from the one established during most of the Holocene’.4 This trajectory intensified, such that now ‘the patterns of behaviour of the oceans, atmosphere, land (i.e. the geosphere’s terrestrial surface, cryosphere, biosphere, and climate) are no longer those that over eleven millennia characterized the great bulk of the epoch we still formally live in, the Holocene’.5 Indeed, by the mid-twentieth century, thinkers such as theologian and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky mused how humanity is responsible for new stages in the planet’s development,6 which one might see illustrated by technical and scientific advances

See Richard Bauckham, The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), chap. 2; H. Paul Santmire, The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991); Ernst M. Conradie, ed., Creation and Salvation, Volume 1: A Mosaic of Selected Classic Christian Theologies (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2012); Ernst M. Conradie, ed., Creation and Salvation, Volume 2: A Companion on Recent Theological Movements (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2012). 3 Philip Hefner, The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and Religion (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1993), 23–51. 4 Will Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369, no. 1938 (2011): 847. 5 Jan Zalasiewicz et al., ‘History and Development of the Anthropocene as a Stratigraphic Concept’, in The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate, ed. Jan Zalasiewicz et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press 2019), 2. 6 See, for example, Vladimir Vernadsky, The Biosphere (New York: Copernicus, 1998); Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959); Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (New York: Harper, 1960). 2

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that have brought humanity into the Atomic Age, the large-scale agriculture called the Green Revolution, and the Age of Plastics. In an attempt to explicitly describe these trends, Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stroemer proposed, in 2000,7 that the earth’s transformation under overwhelming human control required a name. The ‘Anthropocene’, they suggested, designates how humanity alters the material fabric of the planet – when humans are the empowered and in control, not mere bystanders. For Crutzen, the start of the Anthropocene means the human encounter with natural systems has passed from one geological period (the stable Holocene) to a new age, one rife with possibility and peril.8 In the two decades since Crutzen’s suggestion, researchers have studied whether humanity (and, by extension, the planet itself) has entered the Anthropocene. Some researchers have been concerned with the environmental and scientific dimensions denoted by the concept, suggesting a pressing need to investigate the ‘Great Acceleration’ of human control, use, and environmental manipulation that began in the 1950s.9 At the same time, even though interest in this term started as an attempt to understand changes in the geologic record and the human impact on earth systems, the term has been extended to capture more transdisciplinary interpretations of the human–environment relationship. In other words, the term is a hermeneutical or interpretive tool for conversations across fields insofar as ‘Anthropocene storylines have fiscal, ecological, psychological, and other practical effects’.10 At the extreme, multiple fields study how the Anthropocene proposal suggests that humanity has moved from steward to a sort of creator in its own right, effectively remaking the entire world for its own purposes and needs. In this new age, creation is anthropology: the world is (over)humanized, and nature becomes an extension of culture. The start of the new, (over)humanized earth From a scientific perspective, the Anthropocene is a shorthand description for the convergence of quantitative, material indicators that show how humanity has become the primary driver of environmental change. Before now, the scientific community thought ‘the scarring of the landscape associated with industrialization may appear as transformation, but the vicissitudes of the geological past – meteorite strikes, extraordinary volcanic outbursts, colliding continents, and disappearing oceans – seemed of an epic scale beyond the factories and most populous cities’.11 However, human impacts are now quantitatively and qualitatively different. For example, human effects contributing to the composition of the atmosphere through fossil fuel use are on course to radically alter global climate patterns in ways that have not been seen

See Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. See Paul J. Crutzen, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, Journal de Physique IV France 12, no. 10 (2002): 1–5; Paul J. Crutzen, ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature 415 (2002): 23; Paul J. Crutzen and Will Steffen, ‘How Long Have We Been in the Anthropocene Era?’, Climatic Change 61 (2003): 251–7. 9 See Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene’, 842–67. 10 Holly J. Buck, ‘On the Possibilities of a Charming Anthropocene’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105, no. 2 (2015): 371. 11 Jan Zalasiewicz et al., ‘The New World of the Anthropocene’, Environmental Science and Technology 44, no. 7 (2010): 2228. 7 8

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in millennia. Considering this, the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences began work in 2009 to decide whether to adopt the Anthropocene as a formal geological time unit. Jan Zalasiewicz and his colleagues acknowledged that scientists have attempted to comprehend the massive nature of human impacts on the earth system for over a century, but it has only been in the last few decades that there has been momentum to identify human alteration as a force of geology, equivalent to an asteroid strike or a tectonic shift. Scientists like Zalasiewicz debate when this period started in earnest. The proposals for an exact starting date range from the mid-twentieth century to the rise of agriculture thousands of years ago. For instance, Crutzen and Steffen argue that while there are human impacts across a large timespan, the changes that are measured from 1950 – the beginning of what Steffen has called the Great Acceleration – are the clearest indicators of a new earth: ‘The period of the Anthropocene since 1950 stands out as the one in which human activities rapidly changed from merely influencing the global environment in some ways to dominating it in many ways. . . . Earth is currently operating in a no-analogue state.’12 In contrast, William Ruddiman questions a recent dating for the Anthropocene, instead suggesting that human activities have for centuries had massive impacts. Agriculture had massive geological impacts well before 1950.13 Sceptics even question whether enough material markers exist to meet the criteria that geologists use to delineate a new epoch. Moreover, ‘[t]hese skeptics are not persuaded that the geological formalization of the Anthropocene would fulfil the most fundamental requirement, that of usefulness. After all, the history of recent centuries is recorded in infinitely more detail in written records than in layers of ocean sedimentation’.14 Even though many researchers are certain that earth now exists in a uniquely (over)humanized state, there is uncertainty about the exact time of this tipping point. As one confronts the many levels of interpretation that come with the concept of the Anthropocene,15 how much should the doctrine of creation focus solely on the relationship between humanity and the environment? The debates over the dating of the Anthropocene affect how this concept is just as much a hermeneutical device as it is a scientific theory. In its interpretation, is humanity still a ‘created co-creator’, or the solitary creator of a new, (over) humanized earth? Theological reflection about this concept can thus begin with the function of the concept of the Anthropocene. In the scientific community, the function of the term is debated: some scientific researchers advocate formalizing the term as a geological description of material and social shifts in natural history, while others argue that the term Anthropocene should be used for normative evaluations on human behaviour informally and suggestively. Theology should consider this a fundamental question of how the Anthropocene discourse works. If the Anthropocene is a proposal that the world – creation – has ontologically changed at the hands of humanity, then, by extension, this affects the being of God as creator and humanity

Crutzen and Steffen, ‘How Long Have We Been in the Anthropocene Era?’, 253. See William F. Ruddiman, ‘Three Flaws in Defining a Formal “Anthropocene”’, Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment 42, no. 4 (2018): 451–61. 14 Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 88. 15 See Forrest Clingerman, ‘Place and the Hermeneutics of the Anthropocene’, Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 20, no. 3 (2016): 225–37. 12 13

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as well. But, if it is a metaphor for how human temptation for power is manifested in a technoscientific age, then such an informal use provides an opening to reflect on a relationship between eschatology and creation without challenging God as the Ground and Abyss of Being (to use Paul Tillich’s terms). A theological exploration of the doctrine of creation must confront this dilemma, especially if there is a third possibility, in which humanity is now in a liminal state between the Holocene and the Anthropocene, or between the world as it was and the world as it will be. Naming the Anthropocene Challenges are not limited to the existence or dating of a new material age. Another question is what to name this time; in effect, asking what acts as the primary driver of environmental change (once again, seeing the interpretive dimensions of this concept). Some suggest a more apt name is the ‘Capitalocene’.16 This is not focused exclusively on economics but also on how capitalism is ‘a way of organizing nature – as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology’.17 Anti Salminen and Tere Vadén suggest the study of nafthology, because ‘the Age of Oil’ has been entered.18 Alf Hornborg suggested that the ‘technocene’ highlights the agency humans have bestowed upon industrial objects.19 Perhaps the most famous alternative is from Donna Haraway, who foregoes using the term Anthropocene in favour of the ‘Chthulucene’. This alternative points to hitherto unrecognized interconnected and multispecies engagements. For Haraway, placing humans at the heart of a new age presents problems: she says it includes myths that are closed off rather than ongoing; it is built upon a species that does not make history; it trades in human exceptionalism; it does not acknowledge the need to shift from history to geostories or Gaiastories; it is ‘top heavy and bureaucracy prone; it relies too much on individualism; and it relies on systems of autopoiesis instead of sym-poiesis (that is, “making with”)’.20 Instead of placing humanity as separate and at the pinnacle of a new age, Haraway’s Chthulucene suggests ‘tenticular practices’ that connect the human and more-than-human in a collective effort to work within the fragility of the planet. She writes: ‘[H]uman beings are with and of the earth, and the other biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story.’21 The similarly optimistic and intertwined tone is also found in Thomas Berry’s ‘ecozoic’, an imagined future defined as an ecocentric human– environment relationship. Just as with the scientific debate over dating, the issue of nomenclature has a theological impact on the understanding of creation. For theology, wording always has importance, as

See Andreas Malm and Alf Hornberg, ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’, The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 62–9. 17 Jason W. Moore, ‘Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism’, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), 6. 18 Anti Salminen and Tere Vadén, Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology (Chicago: MCM Press, 2015), 17–20. 19 See Alf Hornborg, ‘The Political Ecology of the Technocene: Uncovering Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System’, in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, ed. Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 57–69. 20 Donna J. Haraway, ‘Staying with the Trouble: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), 52–3. 21 Haraway, ‘Staying with the Trouble’, 59. 16

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shown simply by examining theological treatments of ‘creation’ versus ‘nature’. To christen the Anthropocene arguably establishes a new narrative: a story of the human–earth interaction, which some might argue emerges in a secularized world after the death of God. As Daniel Chernilo explains, it is ‘tempting’ to think of the Anthropocene as ‘a new metanarrative for the twenty-first century’ because it gives an all-encompassing story of the earth’s natural history.22 The cost of renaming creation after humanity is that it removes both nature and the Divine from this new theological story. Such a story forces speculation as to what the meaning of the imago Dei might now be. The transdisciplinary nature of the Anthropocene Crutzen’s initial proposal quickly interested researchers from several disciplines. For example, journalist Christian Schwägerl explains that the Anthropocene concept offers a ‘grander scale’ for a scientific investigation of the planet: ‘By being geological, the Anthropocene opens a doorway between supposedly dead matter and living matter.’23 This extends basic scientific fields such as biology, geology, and physics into each other, as well as into fields such as sociology, psychology, and political science: the difference between humans’ ability to impact the world compared with other species is that ‘human consciousness and geology [are] forming a unity’.24 The repercussions of such interconnections push the study of the Anthropocene beyond the natural sciences. Jamie Lorimer explains this transdisciplinarity of the Anthropocene by saying the term’s usage has ‘far-reaching ontological, epistemic, political, and aesthetic consequences’. Because of its evocative and fecund conceptualization of the human–environment relationship, Lorimer proceeds to say that the concept is an occasion for reflection, noting that ‘[v]arious commentators have termed this event–space the Anthropo-scene’.25 The transdisciplinarity of the Anthropocene – an ‘event–space’ for reflection – is what makes it so provocative for theology. At the heart of this space is deliberation on what it means to rename the world system after the human experience. Insofar as the ‘age of the human’ is named after our species, we should recall Reinhold Niebuhr’s observation: ‘Man [sic] has been his own most vexing problem. How shall he think of himself?’26 Or as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty writes: ‘To call human beings geological agents is to scale up our imagination of the human.’27 The Anthropocene, then, quickly becomes a hermeneutical or interpretive lens through which the humanities, the arts, and the sciences are gathered together to reconceptualize both the environment and the human species itself. In the contemporary age, theology can no longer claim to be the queen of the sciences. Yet the Anthropocene presses

Daniel Chernilo, ‘The Question of the Human in the Anthropocene Debate’, European Journal of Social Theory 20, no. 1 (2017): 45. 23 Christian Schwägerl, The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet (Sante Fe: Synergetic Press, 2014), xi. 24 Schwägerl, The Anthropocene, 22. 25 Jamie Lorimer, ‘The Anthropo-scene: A Guide for the Perplexed’, Social Studies of Science 47, no. 1 (2017): 117. 26 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 1:xiv. 27 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 206. 22

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us to question how theological method must be transformed as a transdisciplinary enterprise through the (over)humanization of this proposed new age. Possibility or peril? Writing before the Anthropocene came into scholarly discourse, philosopher Erazim Kohák wrote about the difficulty of making sense of the human technological mediation of the world. Kohák explained that artefacts carry the threat of hiding the sense of lived experience: ‘The heavens may still declare the glory of God, but we look up not at the heavens but at neon reflected in smog; we walk not on good earth but on asphalt.’28 But at the same time, technology is what Martin Heidegger termed an ‘authentic human possibility’29 that cannot be simply removed from human beings, such that ‘we could say that even the natural, when done voluntarily rather than instinctively, becomes artificial. Technology is the human’s achievement, not his failing – even though the use he chooses to make of it may be fallen indeed’.30 Applying Kohák’s insight to the prospect of the Anthropocene, it is easy to understand why researchers often move from the description of the human impacts that characterize the Anthropocene to normative claims about the possibility or peril of this new age. Seeing the peril of the age is obvious enough. The Anthropocene contains a warning, especially because the departure from the stability of the Holocene means humanity is entering a period of uncertainty and risk. Perhaps the most pressing concern is whether current human actions will lead to stepping over a planetary threshold,31 which would lead out of the stability of the Holocene and ‘toward new, hotter climatic conditions and a profoundly different biosphere’.32 This Anthropocenic potential – a ‘hothouse Earth’ – presents a cascade of crises for natural and social systems. This analysis includes ongoing political and social – not simply scientific and technical – causes of the Anthropocene. As Katherine Yusoff writes, the Anthropocene delivers ‘a new geochemical earth through the excess of colonial practices’ and western expansion.33 This suggests the need to examine the long history of political and social world-making, which has been exclusionary and defined by a specific form of the Enlightenment project. In other words, ‘[t]he Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence’.34 Along a similar vein, Chernilo highlights how the Anthropocene is as much about the future as it is about the present: ‘[T]he vision of the future

Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 23. 29 Kohák, The Embers and the Stars, 24, referencing ideas from Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings, rev. edn, ed. David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), 318–41. 30 Kohák, The Embers and the Stars, 24. 31 See Johan Rockström et al., ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, Nature 461 (2009): 472–5; Johan Rockström and Mattias Klum, Big World Small Planet: Abundance within Planetary Boundaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 32 Will Steffen et al., ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 33 (2018): 8253. 33 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 13. 34 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, xiii. 28

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that the Anthropocene portrays is fundamentally dystopian, as it is based on the assumption that the exploitation of the planet’s natural resources is reaching, or has already reached, the tipping point, so that the very prospects of the continuity of human life are being questioned.’ This implies that the Anthropocene is a ‘futurology of crises’.35 Whether the Anthropocene is primarily a dystopia of environmental devastation or geo-social oppression, it is difficult to see the goodness of creation contained within it. Yet there are also calls to see a ‘good’ Anthropocene. For example, Crutzen and Steffen suggest that the trajectory of the Anthropocene offers hope for the possibility of a better future – using a form of ecocentric theorizing36 – wherein humanity turns away from widescale environmental destruction and towards ‘vastly improved technology and environmental management, wise use of Earth’s remaining resources, control of human and of domestic animal population, and overall careful treatment and restoration of the environment – in short, responsible stewardship of the Earth system’.37 Similarly, Holly Jean Buck suggests qualities of an ‘enchanted Anthropocene’, where human practices such as rewilding, arts and crafts, a sense of care, and turning towards more open systems will lead to a more ‘charmed’ future.38 The debate over the future envisioned by the Anthropocene is where discussions most fully engage theology insofar as it shows the connection between creation, salvation, and the eschaton. By raising questions of the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ Anthropocene, we are asked about something at the heart of the doctrine of creation itself: What is the eschatological direction of creation, the material home of the body of Christ? Answering this means rethinking Christianity to see what creation might look like in the Anthropocene.

Creation in the Anthropocene: Finding a new theological lens Thus far, this chapter has taken stock of how theology is impacted by the interdisciplinary discourse on the Anthropocene. In other words, the foregoing shows some of the theological questions that begin to emerge when talking about the Anthropocene. But if humanity, indeed, has passed beyond the threshold of a new (over)humanized creation, then theological reflection must also address what Christianity in the Anthropocene looks like – creating an ‘Anthropocenic’ doctrine of creation rather than one that remains in the Holocene. At its core, Christianity in the Anthropocene requires a faith that desires and nurtures a benevolent Anthropocene. Bergmann states: ‘Will the Anthropocene narrative . . . hinder or enhance reflection on nature’s complex gifts of life to the human, or what religions compress into the language of “respect for”, “wisdom about”, and “compassion and wonder within” nature?’39 What follows suggests a few examples of what theologians must address to accomplish this: an Anthropocenic doctrine of creation that opens possibilities of flourishing and compassion between the human and more-than-human worlds.

Chernilo, ‘The Question of the Human in the Anthropocene Debate’, 45. See Pasi Heikkurinen et al., ‘Organising in the Anthropocene: An Ontological Outline for Ecocentric Theorising’, Journal of Cleaner Production 113 (2016): 705–14. 37 Crutzen and Steffen, ‘How Long Have We Been in the Anthropocene Era?’, 256. 38 Buck, ‘On the Possibilities of a Charming Anthropocene’, 369–77. 39 Bergman, Weather, Religion, and Climate Change, 148. 35 36

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Epistemology and nature in the Anthropocene Balanced between peril and promise, can the Anthropocene usher in a more harmonious relationship between humanity and the rest of creation? We desire a ‘green’ Anthropocene – an ‘ecozoic’ age – but much will depend on how theologians come to understand our (over) humanized world. Something is made clear in the Anthropocene debate: a new epistemic framework has turned the page on our planetary material engagement. Therefore, an Anthropocenic doctrine of creation must critique the relationship between Christianity and our scientifically informed knowledge of the world. One facet of the epistemic shift underlying an Anthropocenic doctrine of creation is that the doctrine of creation itself must include an explicit critique of reductive uses of technology, engineering, and science. For much of the theological tradition, humanity knows the world through the task of steward: a holistic vocation that places the theological and ethical (not scientific or technological) interpretation of the cosmos at the fore. The world was first made by a creator, who granted it intrinsic meaning; scientific and technological explanations were grounded upon such moral and spiritual understandings. In turn, science and technology were means to investigate the fabric of creation to gain knowledge of nature as good. Taking up a metaphor from the patristic and medieval theologians, the fulfilment of human knowledge of creation comes from reading the sacred Book of Nature. The view of this second Book tends to be unreflective in its promotion of the goodness of science and technology. By contrast, creating an Anthropocenic doctrine of creation calls for an epistemology that balances humility and limits to knowledge, on the one hand, with the human as homo faber, the human as maker, on the other. The Anthropocene is a threat insofar as our planet is increasingly under a reductive reliance on techno-scientific and instrumental frameworks. The danger is that human knowledge of the natural world is always already an enactment upon it – when humans know the world, they simultaneously make the world. Thus the choice between a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ Anthropocene becomes a choice between how humans materialize knowledge in and through the rest of the created order. Another epistemic change that occurs in the Anthropocene is found in the temporality of knowledge. The science of the Anthropocene is predicated upon a geological sense of deep time. Thanks to the work of scholars of science and religion, many contemporary interpretations of the doctrine of creation have already reconciled scientific depictions of the deep time of the universe with the history of salvation. Yet the Anthropocene suggests a variation in this interpretation of time. The spatiotemporal assessments of the Anthropocene – for example, the impacts that define Steffen’s ‘Great Acceleration’ and Johan Röckstrom et al.’s ‘planetary boundaries’40 for human society – are not simply scientific descriptions but also narratives that must be assimilated into the ongoing stories of the tragedy of humanity’s sinfulness and of God’s gracious involvement within the deep time of the world. The Anthropocene undercuts past interpretations of the temporality of the doctrine of creation by collapsing the longstanding distinction between the natural world and human

See Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’, Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 617–19; Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene’, 849–53; Röckstrom et al., ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, 472–5. 40

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culture. On the one hand, because of the intertwining of human technology and nature, the Anthropocene renders explicit the ways that the doctrine of creation is temporally connected to human history. Yet, on the other hand, the Anthropocene discourse necessitates that the doctrine of creation is placed within the deep time of geology. ‘The Anthropocene does not put an end to natural history. On the contrary, it locates the present firmly within the geohistorical narrative.’41 More to the point: the scientific narrative of the Anthropocene shows the present as a fundamental break (even a kairos?) in the history of the human place in the cosmos. How might an Anthropocenic doctrine of creation re-envision time? It begins by interpreting the myriad ways there is now a crisis point in what has hitherto been perceived as a continuous story of the creator’s guidance across the deep time of the natural world. Although often hidden from scientific explanation, theology suggests tools for uncovering the eschatological dimensions of living between Steffen’s ‘hothouse Earth’ and Buck’s ‘charming Anthropocene’. A third epistemic change for religion in the Anthropocene focuses on the knower and how this knower transforms the world. Things like climate change, loss of biodiversity, industrialization, and the spread of radioactivity were all caused by humanity. Humanity has manipulated genetic codes, atmospheric chemistry, and the earth’s carbon budgets. Not all humans had an equal role in these activities. Cristián Simonetti expresses the Anthropocene as a paradoxical situation, wherein humans ‘are meant to dwell simultaneously in and outside the earth in that . . . the term [of the Anthropocene] refers to a universal male human, standing above nature. Humans are meant to be simultaneously everywhere and nowhere’.42 There is no universality of ‘humanity’ when examining whose knowledge controls the world and who receives the economic, political, and material benefits from this knowledge. There is a mirage of a homogeneous, equal humanity, which theologians must rectify by seeing the politics of knowledge across both humanity and the more-than-human creation. An Anthropocenic doctrine of creation, therefore, takes a contextual epistemic approach. The political nature of creation in the Anthropocene Advocating for a more contextual lens moves past the epistemic dimensions of an Anthropocenic doctrine of creation and towards questions of power. It means transforming the doctrine of creation from an implicitly political doctrine to an explicitly liberatory one. The doctrine of creation, in many ways, has always been a doctrine related to power and the political. As Chakrabarty notes, the connection between human history and natural history is convoluted since questions of nature invariably bring forward political questions.43 This can indicate a political undercurrent to the doctrine of creation. For instance, when theologians describe the structure of creation, a parallel political dimension is assumed, with nature and society acting as complementary sides of the overarching divine order. That means that we can align the overwhelming power that Augustine writes about in God’s ordering of the heavens and earth in the twelfth chapter of his Confessions with the ‘natural’ political growth of The

Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene, 28. Cristián Simonetti, ‘Dwelling in the Anthropocene’, in Global Changes: Ethics, Politics, and Environment in the Contemporary Technological World, ed. Luca Valera and Juan Carlos Castilla (Cham: Springer, 2020), 143. 43 Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’, 220–2. 41 42

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City of God. Likewise, the hierarchical nature of medieval scholastic views of the natural world mirrors and justifies certain political structures. More recently, theologians like Peter Scott have shown how intertwining society, nature, and the divine offer potential for an environmentally focused theology.44 While the doctrine of creation has always been at least implicitly political, the world in the Anthropocene makes unique claims about power. First, it offers a specific narrative of human power over the more-than-human world; second, it gives a narrative about the power of humans over each other. Thus, an Anthropocenic doctrine of creation must first use the tools of environmental theology and ethics to critique human power over nature. For instance, as Kohák writes, each human is ‘by far the most expensive member of the community of nature. What is it that justifies the expense?’45 According to Kohak, humans are somehow ‘accepted’ because humans are ‘justified in the order of being’.46 Being, simply in its being, is to be good. In turn, ‘[h]uman beings are justified by their ability to do good’.47 If this is the case, then (contra Francis Bacon) the enactment of knowledge as a form of power must replicate this goodness. When theologians look askance at the hallmarks of the Anthropocene – climate change, biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus use, and so on – it is because these effects result from power structures that do not align with the justification that Kohák discusses. An instrumental materialization of the Anthropocene implies a distortion of how humans wield power over creation. Second, an Anthropocenic view of creation critiques the distorted imbalances of power between humans and between societies. There is a frequent question about ethics and the Anthropocene: Who is the Anthropos, the human, that forms the root of the term ‘Anthropocene’? As liberation theologians argue, much of the injustice and oppression of the world comes from the inequity of economic development and resource use. Sri Lankan theologian Tissa Balasuriya reminds us, ‘From the point of view of the West, the past five hundred years [the period that included the scientific revolution, industrialization, and the Great Acceleration] were a period of great expansion and growth. For others, they were centuries of defeat, pillage, colonization, exploitation, and marginalization, in diverse forms.’48 Similarly, ‘Equity issues are often magnified by the Anthropocene. The strong difference between the wealthy countries that are most responsible for the additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the poorest countries that are likely to suffer the most severe impacts of climate change is a classic example’.49 Despite being named for the entire species, the actions that led to the Anthropocene – industrialization and skyrocketing fossil fuel use – have been perpetrated and beneficial for only some of the human community. This power imbalance returns us to the question of naming. Eileen Crist writes that the name ‘Anthropocene’ effaces alternatives and gives us a ‘Promethean self-portrait’ that favours technical mastery of the world:

See Peter Scott, A Political Theology of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Kohák, The Embers and the Stars, 92. 46 Kohák, The Embers and the Stars, 95. 47 Kohák, The Embers and the Stars, 101. 48 Tissa Balasuriya, Planetary Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1984), 21. 49 Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene’, 856. 44 45

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The Anthropocene discourse clings to the almighty power of that jaded abstraction “Man” and to the promised land his God-posturing might yet deliver him, namely, a planet managed for the production of resources and governed for the containment of risks. By the same token, however, the power of Anthropos is herding men willy-nilly into the banished condition of being forced to participate in a master identity where there will be no escaping from the existential and ethical consequences of that identity.50 For Crist and others, the Anthropos embedded in the concept ‘Anthropocene’ refers to the assumed power of an abstract white, post-industrial, western male. What is necessary, then, is a theological engagement that explicitly both critiques the forms of inequality and oppression that gave rise to the Anthropocene and promotes a liberative vision of creation which empowers many bodies and people. Thankfully, liberation ecotheologians have already begun creating resources for this task. For example, Leonardo Boff ’s groundbreaking Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor railed against the ‘crisis of the paradigm of civilization’51 and its ecological threats against the poor, even before Crutzen and Stoermer coined the term ‘Anthropocene’. Boff ’s theology critiques the oppression of both human communities and creation while advocating for a renewed connectedness and ecospirituality. Similarly, Daniel Castillo asserts that responding to the ‘technocratic paradigm’ necessitates a new political ecology that includes liberation.52 Sallie McFague’s theology of nature suggests ways to incorporate feminism and non-Christian voices, while Melanie Harris avers that a spiritual understanding of ecology must be intersectional, considering race and gender.53 A naming of the present earth system that universalizes ‘humanity’ threatens to obscure how the (over)humanized world was built on power relationships between human beings. An Anthropocenic doctrine of creation takes heed of Boff ’s advice: ‘Human beings must feel that they are sons and daughters of the rainbow, those who translate this divine covenant with Gaia, the living superorganism, and with all the beings existing and living on it, with new relationships of kindness, compassion, cosmic solidarity, and deep reverence for the mystery each one bears and reveals.’54 An anthropocenic anthropology and christology To take Boff ’s advice is to return to the initial question: What happens to Christian understandings of humanity and creation when the Holocene ends? This return hints at an important insight: any future Anthropocenic doctrine of creation is theological anthropology, just as any future Anthropocenic theological anthropology is a doctrine of creation. The notion of the Anthropocene renders anew the longstanding theological trope of the human as

Eileen Crist, ‘On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature’, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), 23. 51 Leonardo Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997), 8. 52 Daniel P. Castillo, An Ecological Theology of Liberation: Salvation and Political Ecology (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2019), 60–1, 142–4, 146–8, passim. 53 See Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1993); Melanie L. Harris, Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2017). 54 Boff, Cry of the Earth, 114. 50

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a microcosm: humans are microcosms of the world, with their knowledge of the world acting as a reflection of their self-understanding. Unlike past theologies, however, theologians cannot assume this microcosm to be not homogeneous or static: it is seven billion microcosms (and counting), each ambivalent, paradoxical, and contested. With that in mind, the foremost task to be pursued in an Anthropocenic theology of creation is to redefine what ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’ mean. What is human creativity, and does the diversity of ways of imagining humanness promote the flourishing of creation? Theologian Adam Pryor has worked out the implications of the relationship between theological anthropology and astrobiology, noting that the ‘refractive’ symbols of the Anthropocene and the human as imago Dei work corroboratively to explore the tension between ultimacy and concreteness.55 Applying this to the question of creativity, there are two possible options: if creativity means that humanity must take on the role of Promethean ‘worldmasters’, the world will mirror structures of knowledge and power bereft of the fundamental Otherness of the Holy. But if individual humans imagine a localized and flourishing cosmos through the Anthropocene, human beings begin to incarnate the multiplicity of possibilities that express the Divine in creation. A key concept that connects creation and anthropology in an Anthropocenic doctrine of creation is ‘incarnation’. The Anthropocenic doctrine of creation must be Christic in its orientation – that is, taking up the ‘shape’ and ‘scope’ of the Christic paradigm,56 in McFague’s words. Without this kind of theological safeguard, Christians might fall prey to what Edward Echlin called ‘the forgetfulness of Christ’ – ‘that we sometimes forget that we [i.e. the Christian community] are the prophetic presence of the living and risen Jesus Christ’.57 The intertwined nature of theological anthropology and creation in the Anthropocene culminates in a desire to see the inbreaking of the incarnate Christ amid the (over)humanization of the planet. Peter Scott points out that environmental theology affirms appropriate descriptions of nature, ‘but too little attempt to relate such descriptions in the doctrine of creation to Christ’.58 While this might be an overstatement, Scott is correct in how the incarnation of God is essential for any understanding of the doctrine of creation. This is especially true in the Anthropocene: the danger is that the overwhelming (over)humanization we now see might be taken to imply a loss of the Transcendent. The corrective offered by Christian theology should be that, through an incarnation – an animistic, embodied inbreaking – the Divine remains central in an otherwise (over)humanized world. This is a cosmic vision of the Christ, who – as the God–human – mediates between creation and the Divine: ‘In Jesus, our Creator is the selfemptying God.’59 What happens to the doctrine of creation at the cusp of the Anthropocene:

Adam Pryor, Living with Tiny Aliens: The Image of God for the Anthropocene (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 90. 56 So McFague, The Body of God, 179: ‘The body of God, shaped by the Christic paradigm, is also the cosmic Christ – the loving compassionate God on the side of those who suffer, especially the vulnerable and excluded. All are included, not only in their liberation and healing, but also in their defeat and despair. Even as the life-giving breath extends to all bodies in the universe, so also does the liberating, healing, and suffering love of God. The resurrected Christ is the cosmic Christ, the Christ freed from the body of Jesus of Nazareth, to be present in and to all bodies.’ 57 Edward Echlin, Climate and Christ: A Prophetic Alternative (Dublin: Columba Press, 2010), 106. 58 Scott, A Political Theology of Nature, 179. 59 Echlin, Climate and Christ, 46. 55

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The epistemic and political challenges of the Anthropocene require theologians to imagine a new vision of human activities manifesting the incarnate, cosmic Christ. Conclusion: God of and in the Anthropocene Johann-Albrecht Meylahn writes that, in classical theology, God is an Other – a Transcendent who is ‘needed to challenge, critique, transform, and save humans . . . enslaved in sin’.60 Yet, Meylahn continues, what happens in the Anthropocene, when there is nothing outside the human? Drawing on the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, he argues that what appears to be the Other is merely a human construction of the Other. Thus both God and salvation – requiring a position of transcendence in classical theology – must be re-envisioned in the Anthropocene. Or, as Bergmann says: ‘Created beings and artefacts turn into idols if they are confused with the Creator God, and are therefore not to be adored’.61 As discussed earlier, the push towards an appropriately Anthropocenic view of creation will require a more contextual and chastened epistemology, a more explicit recognition of the politics of nature, a new vision of what it means to be human, and a fuller sense of Christ in the world. These investigations will require innovation and openness. For example, underlying these trends must be new or stronger relationships between Christian theology and other disciplines. An Anthropocenic theology of creation requires a more direct and open conversation with climatology, earth systems sciences, economics, and so forth. The doctrine of creation, we might say, is no longer a merely theological doctrine, just as the science of the Anthropocene is not merely scientific. The planetary and temporal nature of the Anthropocene also means that answering such questions must draw on truly planetary sources: not only the global liberative theology noted earlier but other faiths and traditions of knowledge as well. What might be of particular importance are traditions that reach back to times before the Holocene since those traditions offer a vision of another time of instability and change. This dialogue can be beneficial in many ways. For indigenous communities, philosopher Kyle Whyte argues that the Anthropocene can be an opportunity to regain traditional knowledges and traditions in the face of instability and colonization.62 Traditional indigenous knowledges can help create a bridge that spans the pre-Holocene to the Anthropocene. Along these lines, biblical scholar Mark Brett points out how indigenous wisdom spiritualities complement biblical traditions and are well suited to the task of dialogue advocated for in Laudato Si’.63 This raises new theological possibilities, such as theologian Mark Wallace’s promotion of an animistic Christianity that challenges classical forms of theological thought, envisioning a more embodied and holistic faith.64

Johann-Albrecht Meylahn, ‘Doing Public Theology in the Anthropocene Towards Life-Creating Theology’, Verbum et Ecclesia 36, no. 3 (2015): e3, doi: 10.4102/ve.v36i3.1443. 61 Bergman, Weather, Religion, and Climate Change, 142. 62 See Kyle P. White, ‘Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene’, English Language Notes 55, nos. 1–2 (2017): 159–60. 63 See Mark G. Brett, ‘Redeeming Eden: Biblical Ethics in the Anthropocene’, in Theology on a Defiant Earth: Seeking Hope in the Anthropocene, ed. Peter Walker and Jonathan Cole (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022), 145–60. 64 See Mark I. Wallace, When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 60

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As theology takes leave of the Holocene, humans are confronted with the need for a theological reappraisal of religion of and in the Anthropocene. Investigating how religion is reinterpreted as part of the interdisciplinary conversation of the Anthropocene, before turning to how the Anthropocene recontextualizes creation, has allowed some suggestions of the dimensions of an Anthropocenic doctrine of creation. Such sketches will become even more pressing as the theologies of the Holocene fall away, and it becomes clearer what an (over) humanized future will bring.

Further reading Crutzen, Paul J. and Eugene F. Stoermer. ‘The “Anthropocene”’. Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. Deane-Drummond, Celia, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt, eds. Religion in the Anthropocene. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2018. Schwägerl, Christian. The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet. Sante Fe: Synergetic Press, 2014. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

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CHAPTER 47 ECOLOGY AND ETHICS

Whitney A. Bauman

Usually when one asks, ‘What do you think of when you think of the word “nature”?’ one receives all sorts of answers such as blue sky, mountains, oceans, deer, bees, and trees. One rarely gets human beings, cities, computers, or cell phones. This illustration guides the beginning of many conversations about ecology and ethics: How is it that human beings have written and imagined themselves outside the rest of the natural world, and how might they rewrite and reimagine themselves back into the rest of the natural world? In a nutshell, this is what ecological ethics is all about: words (logos) about the house (oikos) in which human beings live and of which human beings are a part. If one follows the field of religion and ecology, one answer to how some humans have come to think of themselves as ‘above’ the rest of the natural world involves the ‘Lynn White Thesis’.1 Lynn White Jr. and others argue that it is religion, and in particular the understanding of creation and human beings from the biblical story of Genesis 1, that is the root of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism. In this story’s ‘priestly’ narrative (only one of several creation stories in Genesis), only humans are ‘made in the image of god’ and, as such, have ‘dominion’ over the rest of the natural world. Much ink has been spilt on what the ‘image of God’ and ‘dominion’ mean. White, a historian of science, argues that this ‘dominion clause’ is at the spiritual heart of the contemporary environmental crisis. As such, if the heart of the crisis is spiritual, then a spiritual solution is required. White offers the model of St Francis of Assisi as an alternative for understanding human relations with the rest of the natural world. Though narratively White is often seen as the touchstone of western understandings of religion, nature, and many environmental ethics, there have been many other ‘ecologically’ minded religious thinkers throughout different cultures and histories.2 This chapter examines some of these non-dominant voices within the history of western ideas about nature, some kinship, animist, and pantheist ideas outside western ideas about nature, and some emerging voices that understand humans (and all things human) as deeply intertwined with the rest of the natural world, or what Christian theology understands as ‘creation’. As emergent organisms from the evolutionary process (and longer cosmological expansion of the universe), part of what it means to be human is to be ecological: the human creature’s ability to respond in the world has evolved into an ethical responsibility to imagine different ways of becoming with the rest of the planetary community. All theology, then, is also already eco-theological anthropology.3

See Lynn White Jr., ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–7. See Matthew T. Riley, ‘The Democratic Roots of Our Ecological Crisis: Lynn White, Biodemocracy, and the Earth Charter’, Zygon 49, no. 4 (2014): 938–48. 3 See Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982). 1 2

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In whose image? The ecology of the theological imagination The turn towards anthropology in theology means exploring questions that have little to do with the reality of god in god-self (ontology or metaphysics) and more to do with how human understandings of god shape and inform (i) what it means to be human (anthropology), (ii) human–human relations (sociology), and (iii) human–more-than-human relations (ecology). In this case, all theology is anthropology, sociology, and ecology. Theology, therefore, has much more to do with aesthetics and ethics than it does with ontology and metaphysics. This is a good starting point for thinking about the ‘ecology’ of the theological imagination. Jürgen Moltmann, a prominent German theologian and one of the early contemporary theologians to think ecologically, has written much about what it means to be made ‘in the image of god’. For Moltmann, the idea of the omni-God (omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal, unchanging) was perhaps much-needed in the so-called axial age, thousands of years ago when the Genesis creation narratives were being shared orally and then later written down.4 At that time, the average human life was relatively short (forty was considered old age); infant mortality rates were high; there was no modern western medicine to combat diseases, viruses, and infections; and there were a lot of things that could end a human life prematurely, especially outside the city or town walls. Just as ancient Egyptians and many Indic traditions firmly believed in reincarnation, and for many so-called indigenous traditions the dead are present with the living (as ancestors and spirits), so for Jewish and Christian monotheists, there was an omni-God in whose image humans alone were made (the imago is not a tradition in Islam). This imago, perhaps, was the part that lived on eternally after the physical body had died, or, in some understandings, it was this imago that would be resurrected into eternal life in the life to come. Either way, if being made in the image of an omni-God is meant anthropologically, one interpretation is that humans are like individual gods in some way, perhaps having power ‘over and against’ the rest of the natural world. In this way, humans can be understood as managers or stewards of the rest of the natural world (for better or worse). Technologies have emerged out of this theologically filled metaphor of what it means to be human vis-à-vis the rest of the natural world that indeed create the illusion that humans are ‘above’ the rest of the natural world.5 The increase in speed in communication and transportation technologies has enabled a type of omnipresence for those who can afford it; medical technologies have nearly doubled human life expectancy for those who can afford it, and trans-humanist technologies hope to extend that life indefinitely (creating a type of eternity). For those who can afford it, agricultural, production, and even military technologies have meant that humans can be somewhat omnipotent in the face of others; while some things, such as the internet, also promise a kind of human omnipresence and omniscience. The problem, of course, is that humans are through and through relational creatures who do not exist outside of relationships with other humans and the rest of the natural world. Thus, Moltmann argues that though humans may have needed these omni-metaphors at one time,

See Jürgen Moltmann, Science and Wisdom, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). See Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022). 4 5

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some humans have become too god-like at living, and this has been done at the expense of many human others (the poor, marginalized, and people of colour) and at the expense of the rest of the natural world, which in both cases are treated as mere resources for some human ends. For Moltmann, the imago is less an essence or something substantial within a human being and more of a relationship. Just as the Trinity is the perfect example of relationality, so humans live into their humanity and into what it means to be made ‘in the image of god’ the more they live in right relations with other humans and the rest of the natural world. As others have argued, becoming human is not a given but rather a process that must be worked towards.6 Similarly, ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara argues that if humans are made in ‘the image of God’, that god is trinitarian through and through and is thus relational.7 From this perspective, as one might find in process theology, pantheisms, animisms, feminism, and many other ways of thinking, relationality is primary.8 Individual humans are only made through the relationships that make them up and of which they are a part. Such a relational ontology means, again, that whatever it means to be a human being, it is about living in right relationships with other humans and with the rest of the natural world. For Gebara, the trinitarian god becomes the ‘ground of being’ for all life: everything is made up from and emerges out of this divine matrix. In this way, all life is part of this divine matrix, a sentiment theologian Sallie McFague agrees with in her understanding of the earth as God’s ‘body’.9 This relational understanding of reality and of individual entities that make up reality also means that humans are defined in and through their relationships with others. As many postcolonial, queer, and critical race theories and ideas suggest, humans are formed in the ‘in between’ of their relationships with human and earth others (past, present, and yet to come). Gloria Anzaldúa refers to this as living in the ‘borderlands’.10 Homi Bhabha and other postcolonial theorists refer to this as the ‘interstitial’ nature of human identities and of connections with other entities.11 Philosopher of science Donna Haraway suggests that because humans are relational, humans are all hybrids (of other animals, plants, minerals, ideas, and machines).12 For these reasons and more, theologian Catherine Keller argues that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, or creation out of nothing, is a problematic (colonial and sexist) interpretation of the Genesis 1 story of creation that developed in the fourth century to secure the power of the Christian God over all others.13 Keller argues convincingly that there is no way to get a creation out of nothing from the Hebrew tehom (the deep, watery chaos). In fact, tehom is a transliteration of Tiamat (the earth goddess). It is from this watery depth, the grounds of being–becoming, that all things are co-

See Sylvia Winter, On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). In an earlier time, John Macquarrie, for example, spoke about human ‘becoming’. See John Macquarrie, In Search of Humanity: A Theological and Philosophical Approach (London: SCM, 1982), 2. 7 See Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999). 8 For a good introduction to process thought, see Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008). 9 See Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (London: SCM Press, 1993). 10 See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd edn (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999). 11 See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 12 See Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 13 See Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003). 6

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created. Keller proposes that this is a creatio ex profundis – ‘creation out of the watery depths’14 – rather than a creation out of nothing. Human beings are, again, through and through relational creatures. So much of Christian creation theology has focused on the ex nihilo interpretation of the Genesis 1 narrative that there is something of a neglect of the theological importance of the Garden/Eden story as another creation story. Too often, the story of Adam and Eve is turned into a moral tale about sexuality, and it all but neglects its ecological implications. As Phyllis Trible and others have argued, the adam, the gender-ambiguous mud creature, comes out of the adamah, the dirt or humus. Humans are all, then, mud or earth creatures whose ‘original state’, as such, did not fall into the gender/sex binary.15 Humans become with other creatures of the mud whose life is also blown into them by Yahweh. Importantly, as Amy-Jill Levine points out, how is it that many humans understand women as subordinate to men because Eve was created from the mud creature, yet they don’t think of humans as subordinate to the earth because humans are made from the mud/humus?16 This questioning highlights the frail and contradictory logic of patriarchy. It is perhaps this patriarchy that is the real original sin, as it leads to distorted relations among humans and between humans and the rest of the natural world. Instead, what would an entangled environmental ethic of becoming look like from a more relational understanding of the doctrine of creation?

An ethics of entangled becoming Though some theological traditions within Christianity are earth-denying and mainly look forward to a ‘new creation’, most theological understandings of creation provide contexts for an environmental ethic couched in ‘creation care’. Such an ethic might start with how God saw creation as ‘good’ and ‘very good’; or with how the covenant with humans is tied to their relationships with others, including the land on which they live (if they disobey god’s covenant, the land will vomit them out), or the Noahic covenant with all of creation. Indeed, many biblical scholars and theologians have derived a stewardship ethic from these and other biblical sources.17 Theologically, there is a long tradition within Christianity (as well as in Judaism and Islam) of the ‘two books’ tradition – the book of nature and the book of scripture. From this perspective, natural philosophy and, eventually, natural science are also methods for exploring and understanding god’s creation.18 Still others have argued that the incarnation of god in Jesus Christ means that god is in the material world and in material things: What better justification for an ethic of creation care?19 And, finally, one finds figures throughout the history of Christianity (broadly defined) that argue for the care of the earth and other animals. St. Francis, Teresa of Ávila, Giordano Bruno, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and, more recently,

Keller, Face of the Deep, i. See Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978). 16 See Douglas A. Knight and Amy Jill-Levine, The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 295–328. 17 For examples, see Kathryn D. Blanchard and Kevin J. O’Brien, An Introduction to Christian Environmentalism: Ecology, Virtue, and Ethics (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014). 18 See Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 19 See McFague, The Body of God. 14 15

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all the eco-nuns and monks inspired by the works of Thomas Berry and the work of ecofeminists and other ecotheologians are examples of this tradition. What each of these streams that promote an ecological ethic of care suggests is that humans must pay deep attention and respect to the rest of the natural world as humans are part of it rather than lords over it. As such, one should draw from earth sciences, eco-theories and philosophies, and environmental ethics to articulate what an ethic of creation might look like. If there were only one word to describe what the physical and natural sciences mean for life on planet earth, it would be ‘relationality’. Though, paradoxically, modern western science has involved a process that makes most of non-human life ‘stuff ’ for use by humans,20 the message of contemporary sciences from cosmology to quantum physics is one of vitality, relationality, and entanglement. From a cosmological perspective, science suggests that human beings are part of a 13.7-billion-year process of cosmic expansion and that all of the elements that make up everything humans know, including their bodies, are from the explosion of stars. Joni Mitchell was right – humans are stardust. On this planet, humanity’s home, evolutionary theory and biology insist that humans are interconnected with a 4.5-billion-year process of geo-evolution. Homo sapiens are ‘kin’ with the rest of life on this planet (not to mention the abiotic members of the earth community that are also entwined with human bodies and lives). Zoology, ethology, and botany insist that humans are not the only sentient beings and that humans exist entangled with all other sorts of communicating, thinking, intentional, emotional, and creative beings. Ecology is a reminder that humans are both predator and prey, and that all daily human interactions ripple out to affect many earth others, just as those others affect humans. The presence of human microbiomes is a reminder that even individual human bodies are more like ecosystems, made up of many different types of creatures to the extent that only one in ten cells of the human body is uniquely human.21 And, finally, at a quantum level, everything in the universe is made up of intertwined energy–events, to the extent that the fluid reality illustrated in Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s The Matrix is much more accurate than any sort of idea of a stable, substantial reality. In this reality, humans need ways of thinking that prioritize changing relations rather than stable individual bodies. In theoretical and philosophical circles, the twentieth century brought about a ‘turn to ontology’. Ontology, or ‘words about being’, is the area of thought that considers what the ‘true’ or ‘real’ nature of reality is. For those who understand reality in a substantialist way – there is a real essence or foundation to reality upon which all that one sees and knows exists – finding the universals and essences of reality is very important. This understanding of reality is usually accompanied by a more individualist understanding of the human being and discrete categories into which things are organized according to the universal laws that the essence of a given person or thing contains. Male/female, good/evil, reason/emotion, human/animal, and matter/energy are some of the dualisms built upon a substantialist understanding of reality. However, what happens if one understands reality as relational through and through, as unstable forms constantly changing and morphing into other forms? Many relational

See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). 21 See The National Institute of Health, ‘NIH Human Microbiome Project’, accessed 25 September 2022, https://www​ .hmpdacc​.org. 20

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ontologies can be found in world religions (in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Shinto, for instance) and in so-called indigenous traditions, which usually focus more on animism. In addition, there are pantheist and panentheist traditions within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam that suggest a more relational understanding of the world.22 As a result of this turn towards ontology and relationality in theory and philosophy, there are now many non-substantialist theories of reality. New Materialisms, Object Oriented Ontologies, Neo-Animisms, Process Thought, and Emergence Theory, among others, all try to think without essences and with changing relations. From these perspectives, all of life and everything humans understand as distinct life forms or things (a specific cat, a human being, a coffee mug, for example) manifest a constant flow of materials, energy, and information. From this perspective, one cannot tell where one thing begins and another ends, nor can reality be divided into distinct categories and entities. Human beings are related through and through, and everything is in constant flux. If this is correct, it doesn’t make sense to talk about reality in terms of ‘essences’ and ‘universals’; rather, the question becomes more about ethics and aesthetics: What types of worlds do humans want to help co-create, what and who do those worlds benefit, and what and who are the costs of those worlds? Humans are becoming creatures along with the rest of the planetary community and are, in this sense, in deep kinship with the rest of the ongoing creation. Though many extant western environmental ethics reflect the substantialist ideas of essences, universals, and individuals – basically the language of stewardship/management ethics – there are resources for ethics of relationality, flow, and change. Though stewardship and land ethics are useful and helpful, they are also based upon ideas that understand humans to be managers of the rest of the community of creation. Such metaphors are not fidelitous to the relational and hybrid realities in which humans live. It is hard to ‘manage’ a reality that one is part of, in the mix of, as it were, rather than standing over it and seeing the whole situation. If human beings are, indeed, relational and in the mix, then they ought to adopt a kinship ethic that pays deep attention to this reality and thus pursue an ethic that can deal with ambiguities, unknowns, and change. Something like an ‘oceanic’ ethic would be helpful here.23 Oceans are not solid; they are shifting, and they are mostly uninhabitable for human beings. They also provide spaces for a whole other world of life that has almost nothing to do with human life on the land. This type of geography is a good place to start thinking about a non-anthropocentric ethic for the precarious future of life on the planet.24

Open futures: Ethics and re-attunement Ecology and environmental ethics are about relationships and how things are affected by and affect the web of relationships. In a way, what it takes for modern western humans to become

For a collection of these relational ontologies, see Karen Bray, Heather Eaton, and Whitney Bauman, eds, Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking (New York: Fordham University Press, 2023). 23 See Amanda M. Nichols and Whitney A. Bauman, ‘The Watery Depths of American Environmentalism: Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Rachel Carson, and Sylvia Earle’, Journal for the Society of the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 16, no. 3 (2022): https://journal​.equinoxpub​.com​/JSRNC​/article​/view​/22947. 24 See Brian G. Henning and Zack Walsh, eds, Climate Change Ethics and the Non-Human World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 22

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more ecologically and socially sound and just creatures is ‘re-attuning’ to their embeddedness within the rest of the evolving planetary community. Rather than ‘doing’ ethics from above and forcing life into human-based concepts of right and wrong, just and unjust, good and evil, humans ought to think of ethics as part of constantly re-attuning to the worlds around them. If humans attune to how they affect other bodies (in both good and bad ways) and attune to how they are affected by other bodies (in both good and bad ways), then ethics and aesthetics become ecological.25 An ethic of planetary attunement has at least three main guiding principles. First, unlike an ethics based upon essences, universals, and individuals, a planetary ethic of re-attunement and relationality is based on a great deal of uncertainty and unknowing. Because humans are a part of the ecological community and evolutionary process, human haecceity is derived from the specific set of relations that make up humanity at any given moment and how different bodies are treated differently in different times and places. Different bodies experience the world differently, which means there is no universal or god’s-eye view of the world. This means that the more particular perspectives one can learn about, listen to, and understand, the more ‘objective’ one’s understanding of a situation will be. This is a certain type of perspectivism that relies on the unknowing at the edges of human thinking, feeling, and experiencing the world. Rather than projecting the certainty of universalism or the detached stance of relativism (which doesn’t worry about the relations in which one finds oneself and by which one is constructed), one might instead embrace uncertainty. In other words, one needs multiple perspectives on a given topic (queer, decolonial, feminist, trans, differently abled, and perspectives from the non-human worlds of plants, animals, fungi, and even geological entities). The more one listens to these various perspectives, the more one is attuned to one’s ecological and planetary contexts. And, once one is more attuned to the context, it is already time to re-attune again as the future is open and uncertain. Second, just as most religions warn of human idolatry (taking something out of its ongoing relations and making it Ultimate and Universal; or, in philosophical terms, promoting ‘enframement’ or ‘reification’)26 and of the folly of human certainty (iconoclastic and trickster traditions, for instance), so too do they have a lot to say about the uncertainty of the future. As Keller argues, perhaps certainty in human thought (about the past, present, and future) has caused more violence and destruction than uncertainty ever will.27 How can one be certain of what is to come in an evolving planetary community that is an open-ended process? In such a case, certainty is no more than a projection of what has been onto the future, and this creates violence to emergent newness in the ongoing process of creation creation-ing.28 Imagine if one held all people to their pasts; or if one didn’t allow anything to grow and change because it would exceed one’s understanding of a given organism, event, or entity. It turns out that the planetary community, and even more the cosmic community, cannot be confined

See Russell J. Duvernoy, Affect and Attention after Deleuze and Whitehead: Ecological Attunement (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). 26 See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 27 See Catherine Keller, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005). 28 See Whitney A. Bauman and Kevin J. O’Brien, Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty: Wrestling with Wicked Problems (New York: Routledge, 2019). 25

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to human reasoning and imaginings. The universe, and all life therein, are simply more than what humans can think or imagine. This, again, is why one needs multiple perspectives in one’s attempts to understand the evolving planetary community. Third, even with multiple perspectives, uncertainty hangs over the emergent future. From a scientific perspective, approximately 95 per cent of the universe comprises dark matter and dark energy. This means that most human knowledge of the universe is based upon the 5 per cent of the visible universe that humans can detect with their human senses and technologies. Physicists at places like Cern, and cosmologists using ever stronger satellite telescopes, like the Webb, are only beginning to get an idea of what that other 95 per cent of the universe might be. One might say that even from a scientific perspective, the entire universe is a mystery, and the more humans know about it, the more awesome it is. Such uncertainty, wonder, and awe, then, are not the basis for despair and fear but for hope. Certainty, after all, is the opposite of hope. If one knows what will happen, there is no need for hope. Despite many arguments to the contrary, there is still a great need for a realistic hope in this world. Despair and apathy emerge from ideas about what will certainly happen to the world. Such attitudes, it seems, make it difficult to imagine different planetary futures that are more just and that create increased flourishing for all life within the evolving planetary community. To be sure, humans certainly need to deal with their traumas, despairs, angers, and sadness. Anyone who wakes up in the world today and doesn’t experience some sense of ecological and social dread, despair, depression, and/or anxiety is not paying attention to the collective trauma the planet is now experiencing. Hope in the face of such realities is not about a false hope in which ‘the lion sleeps with the lamb’ in some sort of utopic (no place) new Garden of Eden. That is what Moltmann, perhaps following Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s understanding of ‘cheap grace’, might have referred to as a naïve or shallow hope.29 Rather, it is the kind of hope that is with the suffering and groaning of the planetary community and still argues that it can be better, and that humans can contribute to that betterment. As long as humans are alive, their actions and decisions can help to change the world towards a different future. Of course, as Karen Bray and others have pointed out, these ‘new worlds’ will mean the destruction of and violence to some old worlds.30 The flip side of newness is that it comes at the destruction and expense of something else. Such creative violence is written into the ongoing process of creation. However, that fear of the destruction caused by creation is no reason to maintain the status quo. The status quo has brought about much violence to human and other earth bodies. How might humans, then, orient their ethical and aesthetic thinking towards a pluralistic planetary future that brings about more justice and flourishing?

Developing a critical planetary romanticism for the earth There will never be a single framework to encompass all others. The desire for singular frameworks of understanding is just a repetition of the modern western tendency towards

See Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitch (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 241. 30 Karen Bray, Grave Attending: A Political Theology for the Unredeemed (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 29

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universalization. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who first wrote about planetarity in the way assumed here, noted: the planetary is opposed to the global view from above.31 The planetary is simply a collection of the plurality of worlds that make up the earth at any moment. The planetary at any given moment is what makes being human possible.32 It should not be considered an overarching container into which worlds fit, but rather its shape takes on all the evolving relationships and bodies that make it up at any given moment. With a slight modification to Walter Mignolo’s decolonial ideas,33 there are many worlds, at any given time, which can link together to make up the planetary. Practicing a critical planetary romanticism (CPR) means listening to as many perspectives as possible within the planetary community: from this view, the more perspectives, the better understanding humans have of the planetary at any given time. Each of the terms of CPR calls for attention. This chapter will, therefore, conclude with a consideration of these, in reverse order. Romanticism. As some have argued, the Romantic movement in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was in response to the fallout of industrialization: the beginnings of the fossil-fuelled era.34 Perhaps more interestingly, some argue that European romanticism contains the vestiges of what was left over in the indigenous ‘pagan’ traditions stamped out by the spread of Christianity.35 Indeed, romanticism then and now does have many similarities with older indigenous traditions worldwide. According to most animistic traditions, humans are interrelated with other animals and also the earth, which is often considered sacred. Various indigenous peoples interpolate their culture, language, and cosmology with features of the local landscape.36 This is what it would look like to re-attune human bodies to the earth. There are romantic strands in most mystical traditions of monotheism also. Moreover, there are many earth-affirming/worshipping traditions in almost every religion one might categorize as a ‘world religion’.37 Modern western science, too, has its romantic traditions and proponents. Many nineteenth-century scientists argued that a non-reductive understanding of nature should be the basis for the sciences, and there are many scientists and other scholars today who take romantic readings of nature as scientific.38 New materialisms, emergence theories, animisms, and other philosophies and theories have more recently called for a form of neo-romanticism that gives agency and value back to the more-than-human planet. Perhaps it is time humans re-attune their thinking to these ways of imagining things. Some form of

See Gayatri C. Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). See Anna L. Tsing et al., eds, Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021). 33 See Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 34 See Kate Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization (New York: Bloosmbury, 2020). 35 See Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism; Kocku von Stuckrad, A Cultural History of the Soul: Europe and North America from 1870 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). 36 See Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973). 37 See, for example, the resources on the ‘Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology’, accessed 25 September 2022, https:// fore​.yale​.edu. 38 See Dalia Nassar, Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). 31 32

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romanticism could help re-embed fossil-fuelled humans (and all things human) into the mineral, plant, and animal worlds. However, this romanticism cannot be local, parochial, or national, hence the need for planetary thinking. Planetary. One critical difference between earlier romanticisms, and perhaps between animisms also, is that there are no cutting localities off from the planetary flows of materials, energy, and information. Humans live in a glocalized world, for better and worse, and it is difficult and problematic to defend a ‘return’ to localism, parochialism, or nationalism as a good option. Indeed, humans are experiencing a return to localism across the globe, with rising nationalisms across India, Russia, China, North America, Europe, and other places. Making romanticism local provides too much opportunity for ‘us’ and ‘them’ thinking. Keeping out ‘illegal’ immigrants and ‘non-native, invasive’ species results in much violence to earth bodies and doesn’t reflect the worlds in which such bodies live.39 One need not argue for completely open borders and for introducing all non-native species, as this would create its own violence. But one might well argue for a re-attunement of the human to planetary contexts, which, even before fossil-fuelled globalization, experienced exchanges between ecotones, oceans, and the atmosphere. Even when one stays ‘local’, one’s life is crisscrossed daily by global flows of energy, materials, and information. Thus the call for a polyamory of place: the love of many places that humans can link and connect to through planetary flows.40 The planetary is also a term meant to remind humans of our creatureliness. Human beings are first and foremost creatures among creatures, sharing the ‘common grounds’ of earth, air, fire, and water.41 Humans are nothing without the planet. This may seem obvious, but the hopes and dreams of leaving this planet on the part of some means that the human anthropology that propagates the idea that humans are not part of earth’s nature is still active and persuasive.42 A focus on the planetary means also realizing that whatever one thinks of as ‘the best’ of humans results from an entanglement and relationality with the rest of the natural world rather than despite it. Finally, the focus on earth cannot be singular because humans, in the multiplicities of reality, embody and experience the world differently. Thus the need for the critical part of CPR. Critical. CPR for the earth must be critical. There is no single experience of the planet, and there are multiple worlds at any given time of the planetary process that make up the planet. Different embodiments in different worlds experience the planet in multiple ways. One needs critical theories of race, gender, and affect, as well as queer studies, disability studies, class studies, post- and de-colonial studies, and animal studies, to map out how certain worlds privilege certain bodies at the expense of others. These ‘maps of different kinds’43 provide better understandings of any current construction of the planetary. In this case, the more critical

See Peter A. Coates, American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 40 See Whitney Bauman, Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 41 See Catherine Keller and Laurel Kearns, ‘Introduction: Grounding Theory – Earth in Religion and Philosophy’, in EcoSpirit: Religion, Philosophy, and the Earth, ed. Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 1–17. 42 See Rubenstein, Astrotopia. 43 Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (London: Routledge, 2001), 81. 39

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perspectives that can be listened to, the more ‘objective’ understanding there is of the planet at any given moment. Pluralism, multiperspectivalism, and diversity do not need ranking from this perspective; they are each in their own right different, valid perspectives on the planetary moment. Of course, one must also contend with ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ in the ever-fluid and shifting world of the internet and twenty-four-hour news and information. Critical perspectives do not mean ‘anything goes’. In fact, the more perspectives, the better. Uncertainty and multiperspectivalism are better judges of knowledge than certainty and monological thinking. Conspiracy theories, fake news, and alternative facts are based on ‘certain’ knowledge to the exclusion of all others. The inability to change one’s mind or to consider alternatives is a sure sign of one’s self-certainty, and, from a CPR perspective, such monological, dogmatic thinking is dangerous. Rather, contextual, critical thinking enables the consideration of ‘other’s’ perspectives (human and non-human) while still allowing some sort of collective decisionmaking. From the perspective of CPR, one might think of creation as a continuing creation with no teleological end. The point of the ongoing creation is exactly the manifestation of bodies and entanglements that make up the creation at any given moment. Life, then, is more as French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari described it – ‘rhizomatic’.44 Isabelle Stengers refers to it as a palaver: a meandering talk without a goal. Another way to think of it is a spazieren gehen, or taking a stroll with no specific point.45 One might also imagine the planetary community as a starling murmuration: there are emergent patterns and directions of the murmuration, but these patterns and directions are ‘sympoietic’; that is, they emerge from the ongoing process of emergent entangled bodies becoming.46 Such an understanding has deep roots in the theological idea of creatio continua and in the more pantheistic and panentheistic understandings of incarnation and pneumatology within Christianity. It is on the basis of these more immanent strands that some have even begun to articulate a Christian animism.47

Further reading Bauman, Whitney, Richard Bohannon, and Kevin J. O’Brien. Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology. 3rd edn. London: Routledge, 2023. Carter, Christopher. The Spirit of Soul Food: Race, Faith, and Food Justice. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Castillo, Daniel P. An Ecological Theology of Liberation: Salvation and Political Ecology. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2019.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 6, 8, 11, 18, passim. 45 See Isabelle Stengers, ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal’, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, trans. Liz Carey-Libbrecht (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 994–1003. 46 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 31, 33–4, passim. 47 See Mark I. Wallace, When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 44

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CHAPTER 48 (NON-HUMAN) ANIMALS

Ryan McLaughlin

Addressing the question of the ‘animal’ from the perspective of creation theology requires a working definition of ‘animal’. Providing such requires a broader consideration of creation theology, including the role of science in developing such a theology. A large portion of this chapter, therefore, is devoted to building this framework for a theology of animals. The remainder focuses on a single question within creation theology: Given our understanding of the ‘animal’, how should we understand the relationship between human and non-human animals regarding the notion of the ‘image of God’? Such things considered, the chapter lays out an argument for maintaining that all animals should be understood as part of a broad and intrinsically interconnected community of creatures, and at least many animals should be the recipient of direct moral concern.

Preliminary issues: Creation theology and science Before considering a theology of animals, one should address two preliminary issues. First, the very nature of creation theology itself must be considered. The doctrine of creation should be broad enough to include the entire narrative of the created order, from its beginning to its eschatological destiny.1 The question of the ‘animal’ (here meaning ‘non-human animals’) then takes on many layers of consideration within various aspects of creation theology, such as creatio originalis, creatio continua, and creatio nova. Are animals fallen? What is the proper relationship between humans and animals? Will animals participate in the eschaton? And so on. The focus of this chapter is primarily centred upon questions regarding creatio continua: the boundaries of the term ‘animal’, the relationship between human and non-human animals, the extent of animal capacities, and the moral status of animals. Second, what is the role of science in this exploration? Insofar as creation theology addresses creatio continua, it requires dialogue with the natural sciences. Colin Allen and Michael Trestman make this point well in discussing animal consciousness. Questions about ‘animals’ require interdisciplinary engagement because ‘no amount of arm-chair pondering . . . will tell us whether a platypus, an iguana, or a squid . . . enjoy a life of subjective experience – at some point we’ll have to learn something about the animals’.2 Given this point, it may be problematic to develop a ‘theology of animals’ that does not reference research fields in evolutionary biology and ethology.

See Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). 2 Colin Allen and Michael Trestman, ‘Animal Consciousness’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), accessed 21 May 2021, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/win2020​/entries​/consciousness​-animal. 1

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Of course, if discussions about ‘animals’ are to exceed the mere study of them and delve into questions of morality, science will require the insights of philosophy. The scientific endeavour is, by self-definition, limited to descriptions of how reality is. It does not provide normative insights into how reality ought to be. For this reason, a full-bodied theology of ‘animals’ must pay close heed to contributions from philosophy as well as the sciences.3 Defining the ‘animal’ Given these preliminary issues, what definition of ‘animal’ is at work in this chapter? In a Wittgensteinian sense, the term ‘animal’ commonly functions as shorthand for ‘non-human animal’ – or, more specifically, for either ‘non-human vertebrate’ or simply ‘non-human mammal’. In this sense, ‘animals’ are often understood in juxtaposition to ‘humans’. This understanding of ‘animal’ pervades Christian history. While acknowledging the animal nature of humans, theologians such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas envisioned an essential difference between humans and all other non-human animals. For Augustine, humans excelled over all creatures in their possession of intellect, a gift that all other animals lacked absolutely.4 Aquinas followed Augustine’s (and Aristotle’s) view, maintaining that, of corporeal creatures, only humans possessed a rational soul.5 Furthermore, for both Augustine and Aquinas, these claims carried moral weight. For Augustine, non-human animals existed for the sake of human use.6 Drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas likewise maintained that nonhuman animals existed for the sake of humans and, therefore, humans have a ‘natural right’ to kill them for material benefit.7 Such views continued into the Enlightenment. René Descartes echoed the views of Augustine and Aquinas but also intensified them.8 Descartes argued that all non-human animals lacked thought and reason because they lacked language and the ability to generalize knowledge.9 For this reason, Descartes argued that the souls of ‘beasts’ are ‘completely different in nature’ from the souls of humans.10 In the twentieth century, Donald

For the foundations of this view, see Arthur Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming – Natural, Divine, and Human (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1993); Ian G. Barbour, When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? (London: SPCK, 2000); John Polkinghorne, Scientists as Theologians: A Comparison of the Writings of Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke and John Polkinghorne (London: SPCK, 1996); John F. Haught, Science and Faith: A New Introduction (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2012). 4 See Augustine, The City of God, 12.23. 5 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), I, Q. 93, Art. 6. 6 See Augustine, Responses to Miscellaneous Questions: Miscellany of Eighty-three Questions; Miscellany of Questions in Response to Simplician; and, Eight Questions of Dulcitius, ed. Raymond F. Canning, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: New York City Press, 2008), 44. For a positive reading of Augustine, see Jame Schaefer, ‘Valuing Earth Intrinsically and Instrumentally: A Theological Framework for Environmental Ethics’, Theological Studies 66, no. 4 (2005): 783–814. 7 See Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 96, Art. 1. 8 For a more thorough exploration of historical viewpoints, see Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995); David L. Clough, On Animals: Volume 1: Systematic Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2012); Gary Steiner, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). 9 See Robert Lurz, ‘Animal Minds’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 21 May 2021, https://iep​.utm​.edu​/ani​ -mind. 10 René Descartes, ‘Discourse on the Method’, in Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham and Robert Stoothoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 45. 3

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Davidson published similar arguments.11 Furthermore, neo-Cartesian positions continue to hold sway in certain philosophical and theological circles, for example, in the work of Christian philosopher Michael Murray.12 Overgeneralizing the ‘animal’ Do these understandings of the ‘animal’ fit the best available evidence? Allen and Trestman write that, from an evolutionary perspective, ‘the question, “Are (nonhuman) animals conscious?” is rather strange, because . . . it implicitly groups bats together with rabbits (as “nonhuman” animals) in contrast to humans. In reality, rabbits are more closely related to humans than to bats’.13 This passage captures two problems with the term ‘animal’. First, when it functions as a catch-all term for all non-human animals, ‘animal’ entails a gross overgeneralization in which there is often little concern for the vast differences among non-human animals. The complex social and emotional lives of, for example, elephants and the great apes fall within the same theological category as the less rich lives of worms and flies. Second, this overgeneralization often serves to establish an essential boundary between humans and all other non-human animals, even though some non-humans are more closely related to humans than they are to some other non-human animals. As noted, in Christian history, the overgeneralization of the rich diversity of non-human animals served as a convenient foil for the essentially unique capacities (and moral status) of humans. To demonstrate this problem of overgeneralization and the essential boundary that often results from it, consider the strangeness of this chapter, which is dedicated to the topic of ‘(non-human) animals’ from the standpoint of creation theology. Theological anthropology – a ‘theology of humans’ – will certainly warrant its own chapter (if not several!). But ‘(nonhuman) animals’, from sponges and earthworms to African grey parrots and chimpanzees, are treated in a single entry. This statement is not necessarily meant to decry the reality (as if this book should include a chapter devoted to every species of animal!); it is rather intended to demonstrate the overgeneralizing broadness of a theology of ‘animals’. After all, it seems reasonable that a ‘theology of flatworms’ might take a rather different shape than a ‘theology of bonobos’ and that this difference ought to render an overarching ‘theology of animals’, at the very least, exceptionally nuanced. It also seems reasonable to suggest that, at least intuitively, a ‘theology of bonobos’ should bear more similarity to a ‘theology of humans’ than it does to a ‘theology of flatworms’ since bonobos bear more similarity to the former than to the latter.14

See Lurz, ‘Animal Minds’. See Michael J. Murray and Glenn Ross, ‘Neo-Cartesianism and the Problem of Animal Suffering’, Faith and Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2006): 169–90. 13 Allen and Trestman, ‘Animal Consciousness’. 14 Such thinking may lead to ‘mammalocentricity’. For example, see Andrew Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2016), 84–5. Robert Wennberg describes one form of environmentalism as ‘sentientism’, which comes close to Linzey’s view. See Robert N. Wennberg, God, Humans, and Animals: An Invitation to Enlarge Our Moral Universe (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 36. 11 12

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The interconnectedness of life How might bringing the sciences into this discussion aid in such problems? Four points are worth noting. First, from a scientific perspective, humans are animals. Like other animals, humans are multicellular, eukaryotic, heterotrophic organisms whose cells lack cell walls. Humans are part of the phylum Chordata. Humans are vertebrate Mammals of the order Primate, family Hominidae and genus Homo. In this sense, if one does want to differentiate humans from other animals, one should at least use the term ‘non-human animals’ (bearing in mind that this term also risks ignoring the vast diversity among such animals). Second, along with all other animals, humans are part of the unfolding narrative of cosmic and biological evolution. Like every known creature on earth, humans are mortal, carbonbased life forms. Like most animals on earth, humans have iron in their blood. These elements were formed in the fiery furnace of stars during the process of cosmic evolution. Without these stars producing these elements, life on earth would not exist. Like all mammals, humans are the beneficiaries of the oxygenation of the atmosphere caused by early life on earth, which developed roughly one billion years into the earth’s story. Along with modern mammals, the path to human existence was largely paved by several mass extinction events (e.g. the extinction of dinosaurs).15 Such is the family tree of life, of which humans are a part. Third, humans are profoundly dependent upon and interconnected with other living creatures. Regarding the scientific category of ‘animals’, humans are one part of an intricate balance of life. Even leaving aside issues of hunting and the domestication of animals, human life is dependent upon, among other things, the pollination process of bees, the oxygenation of the atmosphere through ocean life, and the tree-planting efforts of squirrels and birds. Beyond the Animal Kingdom, humans are dependent upon the trillions of bacteria living inside their bodies.16 In short, humans are part of an interconnected matrix of ecosystems. This claim is perhaps the central theme of Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si’.17 For Francis, all things form together to constitute a ‘splendid universal communion’.18 These first three points suggest that humans should be understood as part of a community of life with bonds of kinship tracing back to the stars. The human animal is intimately linked with the non-human in terms of a common story, bodily constitution, and shared environment. It follows that conceptually removing humans from this community, whether theologically or philosophically, violates the human narrative. It is bankrupt theological anthropology. But what about the uniqueness of humans? After all, for many philosophers and theologians, it is the distinctive capacities (e.g. rationality) of humans that essentially separate them from all other animals. This question leads to the fourth point. While claims about the essential

For two excellent reviews of this history, see Sjoerd L. Bonting, Creation and Double Chaos: Science and Theology in Discussion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), chap. 2; Denis Edwards, Ecology at the Heart of Faith: The Change of Heart that Leads to a New Way of Living on Earth (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2006), chap. 2. 16 See Jacob M. Kohlhaas and Ryan P. McLaughlin, ‘Loving the World We Are: Anthropology and Relationality in Laudato Si’’, Journal of Religious Ethics 47, no. 3 (2019): 501–24. 17 See, especially, Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015), 34–5 (§70). 18 Francis, Laudato Si’, 107 (§220). 15

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uniqueness of humans have often rested upon capacities such as reason, language, and consciousness, there is evidence to suggest that humans are not essentially unique in these qualities. At a bare minimum, there is reason to doubt confident claims about such uniqueness. This is not to say that all non-human animals possess rationality (at any rate, depending on one’s definition of the term, not all humans do) or that any non-human animal possesses a degree of rationality comparable to the average human adult. It is merely to say that science has, at the very least, called into serious question the confident assumptions of thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Descartes. Capacities of non-human animals The fourth point – the capacities of non-human animals – is of the utmost importance for a theology of non-human animals. A central reason for this importance is that a great deal may hinge on what capacities non-human animals possess, not the least of which is the moral status of non-human animals.19 As Allen and Trestman note, regarding the morally relevant capacity of consciousness, ‘Arguments that non-human animals are not conscious . . . effectively double as apologetics for our treatment of animals. When the question of animal consciousness is under consideration, our guilt or innocence as a civilization for an enormous body of cruelty may hand in the balance’.20 Because much is at stake here, the question of non-human animal capacities requires a more detailed unpacking. It makes sense first to ask how a particular capacity is relevant regarding theological significance and moral status. The goal here is not necessarily to establish a floor of moral consideration and banish all life that lacks such capacities from moral consideration. It is rather to explore whether a particular capacity, one that might exist beyond the human species, is relevant.21 Philosophy is central to this task. Second, these capacities must be defined. Psychology – especially folk psychology – has provided a number of the prominent terms (e.g. consciousness, belief, and desire) that recur in debates regarding animal capacities.22 But what do such terms mean? Here again, philosophy is important. Third, once the relevant capacities have been identified and defined, reviewing the evidence regarding the boundaries of such capacities within the animal kingdom can begin. Here, science is the dominant source of knowledge. However, science has yet to provide uncontestable data concerning several capacities. Therefore, establishing boundaries is a fluid task based on evidential probability. For a theology of creation, the first question becomes something like, ‘How should humans regard their fellow creatures in God’s world, and why should humans regard them that way?’ The answer must account for the evidence that science has provided regarding humans’ fellow creatures. For they are, after all, actual living entities, not abstract concepts.

On this point, See Clough, On Animals, 1:45–77; Andrew Linzey, Animal Rights: A Christian Assessment of Man’s Treatment of Animals (London: SCM, 1976), 4. 20 Allen and Trestman, ‘Animal Consciousness’. 21 Such is the approach of extensionist ethics. I do not intend here to argue that extensionism is the best way to proceed. I prefer a balance of extensionist and non-extensionist (or ‘holistic’) ethics such as ‘deep ecology’. For a good discussion on holistic ethics and a critique of extensionism, see Marc R. Fellenz, The Moral Menagerie: Philosophy and Moral Rights (Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 2007), chaps. 7–9. 22 See Lurz, ‘Animal Minds’, 1.d.i. 19

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For Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant, some form of rationality (and its requisite faculties) was central. Creatures should be treated as means to ends, but not as ends in themselves, because they lack rationality. In his earlier work, Peter Carruthers argued that it is immoral to ascribe direct moral concern to animals because they lack morally relevant consciousness.23 From his utilitarian perspective, Jeremy Bentham maintained that the ability to suffer was the litmus test for direct moral concern.24 Peter Singer offers a similar estimation.25 On the other hand, neo-Cartesians such as Michael Murray and Glenn Ross maintain that animals might not suffer in morally relevant ways because their suffering is nonconscious.26 From the perspective of rights and obligations, Tom Regan argues that non-human animals warrant direct moral consideration because they experience their lives subjectively and have interests in how that life unfolds.27 This claim is reminiscent of Thomas Nagel’s assumption that there is ‘something’ that it is like to be a bat, even if humans are unlikely ever to know what that something is.28 How is one to proceed, given these vast differences in viewpoints? One promising starting point is to ask: What makes humans morally relevant? As philosophers such as Tom Regan and Martha Nussbaum have pointed out, strict adherence to rationality or consciousness does not protect all humans.29 Infants and many humans with severe mental disabilities do not meet Descartes’ criterion of rationality or Carruthers’ criterion of consciousness. And yet, these humans are routinely included in our moral purview for their own sake. Why? It seems that one reason – aside from the arbitrary criterion of genetic code – is that we sense a degree of sentience.30 It is important to distinguish between sentience and the mere neurological response to external stimuli (i.e. ‘nociception’). All living things, if they are to navigate their environments successfully, require some form of response to noxious stimuli, whether conscious or not. But sentience requires some degree of subjectivity and feeling. In other words, sentience entails a subjective experience of one’s pain.31 From the perspective of creation theology, recognizing that human and non-human animals form a community of life emerging from the evolutionary narrative, there should be a sense of kinship in human and non-human shared trials. To take account of human suffering

See, for example, Peter Carruthers, ‘Brute Experience’, The Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 5 (1989): 258–69. Carruthers’ view has evolved. He still denies that animals are phenomenally conscious but maintains that they warrant moral consideration for other reasons. See Peter Carruthers, Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 24 On Bentham, see Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), 8–9. 25 See Singer, Animal Liberation. 26 See Murray and Ross, ‘Neo-Cartesianism and the Problem of Animal Suffering’, 169–90. 27 See Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 2nd edn (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 243–50. 28 See Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–50. For a critique of Nagel’s assumption (and other assumptions regarding animal capacities), see Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why’, Social Research 62, no. 3 (1995): 691–710. 29 For Nussbaum’s capacity-centred approach to animal ethics, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), chap. 6. 30 On this point, see Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy – and Why They Matter (Novato: New World Library, 2007), 134. 31 It should be noted that both Dennett and Bekoff disagree with this assessment. See Dennett, ‘Animal Consciousness’, 703; Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals, 134. 23

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but ignore similar experiences among non-human animals implicitly tears humans from kinship with God’s non-human creatures. The ironic result is that an impoverished theology of animals (which ignores non-humans’ morally relevant commonality with humans) leads to an impoverished theology of humans (in which humans become isolated aliens in God’s created order). So, if some or all animals are sentient, and sentience matters for human life, then theologies of creation should account for the moral significance of such animal experience. But it is precisely here that neo-Cartesians maintain that pain is not morally relevant because animals experience pain without sentience. For example, Christian apologist William Lane Craig has written that the violence of evolutionary history ‘is something that animals are oblivious to, they’re not aware of being in pain, it’s nothing that they really suffer’.32 For Craig, the payoff for this claim is the exoneration of God in terms of theodicy. Is Craig correct? I do not think so. Evidence from neurology and cognitive ethology (to explore only two) suggest that sentience may reach deep into the animal kingdom. Many animals possess the necessary neurological framework to facilitate something akin to conscious suffering in humans.33 In 2012, a group of neuroscientists gathered at the University of Cambridge to discuss the issue of consciousness. This gathering led to the promulgation of ‘The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness’, in which the participants collectively declared: The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.34 This declaration presents a very broad umbrella of non-human consciousness. Earlier studies that focused more on common neuroanatomical structures in humans and non-humans generally agreed that at least mammals possessed consciousness.35 From the perspective of cognitive ethology, Marc Bekoff notes the growing body of evidence regarding animal emotions and awareness of emotions. For Bekoff, the ‘behavioral flexibility’ of many animals demonstrates sentience because such flexibility is ‘the litmus test for consciousness’.36 Elephants, primates, and dolphins exhibit complex emotional ranges. Apes and birds have demonstrated the ability to use, teach, and even develop complex systems

See William L. Craig, ‘Is Evolution a Threat to Christianity?’, Reasonable Faith, accessed 13 June 2021, https://www​ .reasonablefaith​.org​/media​/reasonable​-faith​-podcast​/is​-evolution​-a​-threat​-to​-christianity. 33 For further considerations, see Allen and Trestman, ‘Animal Consciousness’. 34 See ‘The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness’, accessed 13 June 2021, http://fcmconference​.org​/img​/Cam​brid​ geDe​clar​atio​nOnC​onsc​iousness​.pdf. Not all scientists affirm these claims. Marian Dawkins, for example, remains definitively agnostic on the matter of animal consciousness. See Marian S. Dawkins, Why Animals Matter: Animal Consciousness, Animal Welfare, and Human Well-being (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 35 See Anil K. Seth, Bernard J. Baars, and David B. Edelman, ‘Criteria for Consciousness in Humans and Other Mammals’, Consciousness and Cognition 14, no. 1 (2005): 119–39; Jaak Panksepp, ‘Affective Consciousness: Core Emotional Feelings in Animals and Humans’, Consciousness and Cognition 14, no. 1 (2005): 30–80. 36 Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals, 31. 32

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of communication.37 There is evidence of at least ‘episodic-like’ memory in some animals.38 Other animals, seemingly simple in nature, continue to surprise animal behaviourists. The complex communication system of a honey bee is one example.39 Based on such findings, David DeGrazia writes: ‘The available evidence suggests that most or all vertebrates, and perhaps some invertebrates, can suffer.’40 Clarity requires four important points at this juncture. First, humans are unique animals. It should not be controversial to maintain that there is a significant gap, particularly concerning the degree of mental capacities, between the average adult human and even the most advanced of their closest non-human relatives.41 Second, while science provides evidential probability to support the claim that many animals are sentient, this evidence is neither conclusive nor without counter-evidence.42 Third, while evidence for the sentience of many animals is strong, it does not follow that all animals are sentient.43 Finally, to repeat: I am not here arguing that sentience is the baseline for direct moral concern. I merely maintain that it is a qualifying criterion. It is reasonable to maintain that animals warrant direct moral concern regardless of their self-awareness.44 Still, the fact that the evidence points to a strong probability of sentience beyond the human community suggests the need to revise traditional understandings of animals within creation theology. Such revision would include rethinking human treatment of non-human animals, especially when such treatment entails suffering (e.g. the use of animals for food, clothing, and experimentation). Such revisions have been underway for many years. Two notable examples are work undertaken by Andrew Linzey and David Clough. A summary What, then, can be said? The scientific picture of the ‘animal’ that emerges from these four points is a community of which human beings are a part. Humans share common ancestors

For a general overview, see Kristin Andrews, The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2020); Irene M. Pepperberg, The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Michael D. Hixson, ‘Ape Language Research: A Review and Behavioral Perspective’, The Analysis of Verbal Behavior 15 (1998): 17–39. For a collection of anecdotes and reflection, see Virginia Morell, Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures (Carlton: Black Inc., 2013). 38 See Allen and Trestman, ‘Animal Consciousness’, §7.4. Bekoff maintains that the evidence supports not only this sort of memory but also future planning. Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals, 14; cf. Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 104–11. 39 See Michael Tetzlaff and Georges Rey, ‘Systematicity and Intentional Realism in Honeybee Navigation’, in The Philosophy of Animal Minds, ed. Robert W. Lurz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 72–88. 40 David DeGrazia, Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 123. 41 See Kevin N. Laland, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Holmes Rolston III, A New Environmental Ethics: The Next Millennium for Life on Earth (New York: Routledge, 2011), 52–60; Suddendorf, The Gap, 269. 42 See Allen and Trestman, ‘Animal Consciousness’, §7.5. 43 See Allen and Trestman, ‘Animal Consciousness’, §4.8. 44 Kai Chan argues that humans should extend moral concern to nonhuman animals to varying degrees based on the evidential probability of sentience. Kai M. A. Chan, ‘Ethical Extensionism under Uncertainty of Sentience: Duties to Non-Human Organisms without Drawing a Line’, Environmental Values 20, no. 3 (2011): 323–46. 37

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with non-human others in Darwin’s tree of life. Human and non-human animals are intricately intertwined among the many strands of the tapestry of life. Evidence suggests that many animals share the morally relevant capacity of sentience. These claims challenge the sharp separation of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ mentioned above. And yet, the human species is extraordinary among animals in its mental capacities. The question is: If humans are extraordinarily unique but not unique in deserving direct moral status, how then should the uniqueness of the human be understood? It is precisely here that theology can help.

Revisiting theology: Non-human animals and the image of God Can creation theology accommodate the view that non-human animals are kin and that at least some animals merit direct moral concern? Given that Genesis 1 envisions humans as having a divinely established ‘dominion’ over animals, such a creation theology might seem unlikely, or at least at odds with the biblical narrative. After all, the idea of ‘dominion’ has been used to justify the severe costs that both domestic and wild animals pay for human pursuits.45 However, I maintain that Genesis 1, when read carefully in its historical context, can support the claim that non-human animals are kin and that at least some animals merit direct moral concern. Building this case requires an exegetical exploration of the concept of the ‘image of God’. From very early on in Christian theology, especially after the shift from predominantly Jewish writers in the first century to Greek writers in the second century, there has been a tendency to interpret the ‘image of God’ as expressing an essentially unique quality (e.g. rationality or free will) that humans possess in common with God but in distinction from all other animals. This distinction has often justified the reservation of direct moral concern to humans. In other words, the doctrine of the image of God was instrumental in establishing an anthropocentric world view. Today, theologians refer to this view as the ‘substantialistic’ interpretation since it posits an essential ‘substance’ – here understood philosophically as that which makes a thing what it is – as constitutive of the image of God in humans. This view is historically normative.46 And as Clough notes, this interpretation continues to influence modern readings of the biblical text.47 As one example, the substantialistic interpretation is prominent in magisterial documents of the Roman Catholic Church.48 As noted earlier, however, scientific evidence does not clearly support such essentialist claims. Does it follow that the notion of the ‘image of God’ is at odds with scientific evidence? No. Consider first this question: Why has the substantialistic interpretation of the image of God been so influential in Christian history? Both Stanley Grenz and Norman Habel note

See David Clough, On Animals: Volume 2: Theological Ethics (London: T&T Clark, 2018). For historical considerations, see Stanley J. Grenz, The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 143–73. 47 See David L. Clough, ‘All God’s Creatures: Reading Genesis on Human and Nonhuman Animals’, in Reading Genesis after Darwin, ed. Stephen C. Barton and David Wilkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 145–8. 48 See Ryan P. McLaughlin, Christian Theology and the Status of Animals: The Dominant Tradition and Its Alternatives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), chap. 2. 45 46

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that the impetus for the substantive interpretation was not exegetical but rather philosophical – a product of Hellenistic influence.49 Similarly, Clough traces anthropocentric readings of Genesis 1 back to Philo’s appropriation of Aristotelian natural philosophy.50 Drawing on similar claims about philosophical origins, Douglas Hall reads the historical interpretation of the image of God as evincing a desire to demonstrate the superiority of humans.51 Modern biblical scholars echo such sentiments. J. Richard Middleton states: ‘Most patristic, medieval, and modern interpreters typically asked not an exegetical, but a speculative, question: In what way are humans like God and unlike animals?’52 Based on the world behind the text, with particular reference to Mesopotamian culture in the Ancient Near East, Middleton and W. Sibley Towner argue for a different interpretation of the image of God.53 Based on the syntax of the Hebrew, Towner notes that the best translation of Genesis 1 would be that God creates humanity in God’s image so that humans might have dominion over all non-human life on the earth.54 As Middleton notes: ‘The syntax . . . points to “rule” as the purpose, not simply the consequence or result, of the imago Dei.’55 In this sense, dominion is ‘a necessary and inseparable purpose and hence virtually constitutive of the image’.56 In other words, the image has less to do with singling out an essential characteristic of the human species and more with establishing the function God envisions human beings fulfilling on earth. For this reason, this reading is often referred to as the ‘functional’ interpretation of the image of God. Middleton also explores the cultural milieu of the Ancient Near East in which the authors and redactors completed Genesis 1. In other texts from that socio-historical context, to bear the image of a god (as Mesopotamian kings did) entails being charged with representing that god on earth. So Ellen van Wolde: ‘The human being is created to make God present in his creation.’57 In Genesis, all humans thus bear the responsibility to represent God in the created order. Adding the syntactical and cultural arguments together presents a strong case that, at least with regard to authorial intent, the functional interpretation is more warranted than is the substantialistic one. This claim is further justified by the lack of mention of attributes such as reason or free will in Genesis 1 (or any other passages that refer to the image of God), suggesting that such assumptions about the constitution of the image did indeed find their origin from extra-biblical sources. Not only does this functional interpretation derive from a close exegetical reading of the text, but it can also accommodate scientific evidence in that it does not require an infinite

Grenz, The Social God and the Relational Self, 143; Norman Habel, The Birth, the Curse and the Greening of Earth: An Ecological Reading of Genesis 1–11 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011), 35. 50 See Clough, ‘All God’s Creatures’, 145–8. 51 See Douglas J. Hall, Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 90. 52 J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005), 18–19. 53 See Middleton, The Liberating Image, 50–5; W. Sibley Towner, ‘Clones of God: Genesis 1:26–28 and the Image of God in the Hebrew Bible’, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 59, no. 4 (2005): 341–56. 54 See W. Sibley Towner, Genesis (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 28. 55 Middleton, The Liberating Image, 53. 56 Middleton, The Liberating Image, 55. 57 Ellen van Wolde, Stories of the Beginning: Genesis 1–11 and Other Creation Stories, trans. John Bowden (Ridgefield: Morehouse Publishing, 1997), 28. 49

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gap between human and non-human animals. It permits difference, to be sure, as one may assume that humans are uniquely equipped for their role as God’s co-regent on earth. But this difference embeds humans within God’s created order rather than removing them from it. Humans are animals, part of the natural world, rooted in its unfolding narrative. Humans are unique, but unique as a part of the world, not apart from it. Broadly speaking, the creation myths of Genesis 1 and 2 are quite open to an interpretation that human and non-human animals share a bond of kinship in the community of creation. A few points are worth noting here. First, in Genesis 1, humans and non-human animals share the same day of creation, the sixth day. Second, in Genesis 2, after God creates adam (the ‘earthbeing’), God states that it is not good for Adam to be ‘alone’ (Gen. 2.17). In response to this problem, God seeks to provide a ‘partner’ for Adam. Using the same method God used to create Adam, God made the animals. The purpose of their creation was not sustenance or clothing or any such utilitarian aim. It was rather a companionship. Third, while some translations differentiate between humans as a ‘living soul’ (KJV) or a ‘living being’ (NRSV) and animals as a ‘living creature’, these phrases are translated from the same Hebrew expression (nephesh hayya’), betraying an anthropocentric translation of the text. Both human and non-human animals are nephesh hayya’.58 Furthermore, while Genesis portrays humans as receiving nismat hayyim (the ‘breath of life’), in Genesis 7, ‘all flesh’ (kal-basar), which includes non-human animals, is identified as the recipient of nismat ruah hayyim (‘the breath of the spirit of life’). What, then, of the ethical claims that derive from a substantialistic reading of the image of God? They begin to falter. If human beings represent the presence and rule of God on earth, their actions should reflect God’s nature. From a Christian perspective, human dominion is best informed by the character of the God revealed in Christ. Based on this claim, Linzey argues that humans are the ‘servant species’.59 It is also worthy of note that while Genesis 1 envisions humans as bearing the image of God, this functional concept of rulership does not permit humans to eat animals.60 Ultimately, humans are to rule as gracious fellows within the created order.61 From the standpoint of theological ethics, we may sum up these ideas with a modified Golden Rule: Humans ought to treat animals as we would have God treat us. This task is the beating heart of bearing the image of God. Happily, then, the scientifically supported image of kinship between humans and nonhuman animals finds a comfortable home in at least some biblical texts. Based on this claim, Christian theology should embed the doctrine of the image of God firmly within the doctrine of creation, specifically the doctrine of an interconnected and interdependent creation. In such a creation, non-human animals cannot be reduced to mere objects for human use. Augustine’s sharp distinction between use and enjoyment is harmful and should either be discarded or qualified through a judicious critical retrieval. Aquinas’ Aristotelian claim that animals are ‘natural slaves’ created for the sake of food, clothing, and revelation of God’s goodness should

See Robert K. Gnuse, ‘The “Living Soul” in People and Animals: Environmental Themes from Genesis 2’, Biblical Theology Bulletin: Journal of Bible and Culture, 51, no. 3 (2021): 168–74. 59 See Linzey, Animal Theology, chap. 3. 60 See McLaughlin, Christian Theology and the Status of Animals, chap. 5. 61 See Clough, On Animals, 1:118; Linzey, Animal Theology, 34. 58

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likewise be set aside or filtered through a critical retrieval. The same can be said for the mechanistic view of animals found in Descartes. The anthropocentric leanings of so much of Christian history, including magisterial documents of the Roman Catholic Church, should be reframed in terms of interdependency and kinship. There are hopeful signs that such a directional shift is occurring in Christian theology. Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ provides one such example, despite ample room for improvement.62

Conclusion The variety of non-human animals staggers the efforts of human calculation. In their wide range of diversity, non-human animals, historically overgeneralized and reduced to a single category, accost humans as creatures whose similarity shakes lofty claims of essential uniqueness and whose mysterious otherness resists reduction to mere ‘things’. Recognizing the various points of connection between the human and the non-human animal suggests that humans should be understood as part of a community of life – a community with bonds of kinship tracing back to the stars. The human animal is intimately linked to the non-human in terms of a common story, bodily constitution, and shared environment. Grounded in the natural sciences, these claims collectively provide an impetus to revisit the philosophical and theological assumptions about the place of animals in the doctrine of creation. One fruitful place to revisit such is via the doctrine of the image of God found in Genesis 1. A functional reading of the image of God honours human embeddedness within the animal kingdom while also acknowledging human uniqueness. However, this uniqueness serves the purpose of revealing God to our fellow sentient beings – and indeed, all beings – in a manner that reflects the God whose image we bear.

Further reading Allen, Colin and Michael Trestman. ‘Animal Consciousness’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition). Accessed 21 May 2021. https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/win2020​/entries​/ consciousness​-animal. Andrews, Kristin. The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 2020. Clough, David L. On Animals: Volume 1: Systematic Theology. London: T&T Clark, 2012. Clough, David L. On Animals: Volume 2: Theological Ethics. London: T&T Clark, 2018. Linzey, Andrew. Animal Theology. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995. McLaughlin, Ryan P. Christian Theology and the Status of Animals: The Dominant Tradition and Its Alternatives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Middleton, J. Richard. The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005. Steiner, Gary. Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. Suddendorf, Thomas. The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals. New York: Basic Books, 2013.

On the limitations of Laudato Si’, see Kohlhaas and McLaughlin, ‘Loving the World We Are’, 501–24.

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CHAPTER 49 CHILDREN

David Jensen

Introduction Children are an integral – and oft-neglected – subject in the doctrine of creation. They are critical to understanding the doctrine for innumerable reasons, including their being a significant proportion of the human race, their dependence on others, their frequent symbolic appearance throughout biblical and theological traditions as signs of creation’s blessing and orientation to God’s future, and the fact that the central character of the Christian faith, Jesus Christ, is the gospel story as a child. Yet, because nearly all interpretations of children within Christian traditions come from the hand of adults, understanding children is fraught with difficulty. Rarely in the traditions do children speak in their own words, and sometimes the traditions even condone violence against children. Yet these same traditions also yield abundant resources for promoting the flourishing of children within creation.

Children in the Hebrew Bible References to children occur throughout the pages of the Hebrew Bible, almost from its opening sentences. The book of Genesis addresses both the blessing and trauma of childhood, especially in the stories of Sarah, Hagar, Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac. When Abram and Sarai experience infertility, Sarai instructs her husband to conceive a child with her slave, Hagar. At birth, the son of this liaison, Ishmael (‘God hears’), is yanked from Hagar and given to Sarai. The story in the scriptures reveals horrific realities connected to childbirth in the ancient world: people as property, the rape of a vulnerable woman, and fixation on a male heir.1 The birth of Ishmael, though a sign of blessing, thus also reveals scars of sin in the household. Ishmael thus symbolizes the blessing and vulnerability of being a child. He comes as an answer to prayer but is eventually cast out from his home, almost defenceless, and nearly dies in the wilderness. One of the reasons for Ishmael and Hagar’s banishment is the unexpected birth of another child, Isaac (‘he laughs’). This son’s name echoes Sarah’s disbelief as well as her happiness after waiting for aeons for a child. The arrival of Isaac is thus a gift, a token of God’s favour, a blessing that will also bring laughter to others (Gen. 21.6). But if Isaac seems to be the more favoured son, his story also signals the terror and precariousness of being a child. Without telling his

See Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God Talk (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993), 1–33. Williams does not portray Hagar as a passive victim, but rather stresses her agency in protecting her son and noting that she is the only character in the Hebrew Bible who names God. 1

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son the reason for the journey, Abraham leads Isaac to the land of Moriah, builds an altar, binds his son to it, and lifts his knife to kill him. Only a last-minute intervention spares the son, rescued from the peril of certain death. This story, though often understood as a testament to Abraham’s faith, also turns attention to the violence that haunts children’s lives in both the ancient and the modern worlds. To be a child is also to be threatened. In light of children’s threatened status, the commandments of the Torah consistently emphasize obligations to children, particularly orphans (cf. Exod. 22.22; Deut. 10.18; 26.12). The Shema, one of the most significant prayers in Judaism, links together the love of God, adherence to the commandments, and responsibility for children (Deut. 6.4-8). At times, the Hebrew Bible notes children as exemplars of faith. The Samuel–Saul–David cycle, for example, places children in pivotal roles. As a boy, Samuel is raised not by his biological parents but by the priest Eli. There he learns cultic practice amid the corruption of Eli’s house. When young Samuel hears the voice of God, neither he nor Eli initially recognizes it. But when Eli suspects that Samuel might be hearing the divine, he urges Samuel to listen. Samuel listened to a message of condemnation of Eli’s family (1 Sam. 3.12-14). The boy thus becomes a messenger of an adult’s downfall, heralding a change of leadership. This story complicates traditional roles by suggesting that a child teaches an adult. David’s story contains similar vignettes. God commands Samuel to go to Jesse’s house in Bethlehem, where Samuel will find the appointed king among Jesse’s sons. The chosen one, David, is not even present at the initial encounter because he is the youngest among them. Yet this youngest child, who in the order of primogeniture has the least, gets anointed as the leader. The story inverts the typical patterns of who rightfully inherits the throne. After his anointing, David enters the court of Saul, consoles the king with music, and eventually becomes the warrior who vanquishes the legendary Philistine foe of Israel, Goliath. In each of these accounts, David’s youth and unlikeliness get amplified: he is the last of Jesse’s sons to encounter Samuel and serve in the Israelite army. This child, who seems almost an afterthought, becomes an heir of God’s irrevocable covenant (2 Sam. 7.12-16). In the Samuel– Saul–David cycle, children open our eyes to God’s surprising interventions that overturn established orders and powers. God’s blessing of creation uplifts those that the powerful tend to overlook. Another prominent way of understanding children in the Hebrew Bible is their existence as symbols of God’s reign. Isaiah, for example, envisions an endless reign of peace: ‘The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. . . . The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den’ (Isa. 11.6-8). In this vision, children herald the harmony of creation promised when the Messiah comes. Zechariah contains one of the most memorable images of this symbolic understanding of children. In his vision of the New Jerusalem, Zechariah writes: ‘Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets’ (Zech. 8.4-5). The vitality of Zion is marked by this intersection of Israel’s oldest and youngest, where the delight of the old is their witness to the laughter of children. Child’s play, in this vision, is neither a diversion nor an instinct to be tamed but an integral practice of the new city God blesses. Play symbolizes nothing less than the renewal of creation, where all find a home. 648

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Children in the New Testament The New Testament assumes and repeats many of the Hebrew Bible’s emphases about children: their vulnerability, symbolism, agency, and receptivity to adult instruction. Perhaps its most significant amplification of earlier themes is its claim that God’s anointed One, Jesus Christ, enters the world as a child. In this sense, the centre of the Christian faith begins with a consideration of childhood. Though only two of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke, record anything about Jesus’ birth, their details are significant. These narratives reveal a child on the margins whose birth is not akin to royalty but is more like births that occur amid forced migrations throughout the ages. An emperor’s decree compels an unwed teenage girl to travel away from her home to give birth. Though this birth brings visitors who hear the good news, the family must soon move to another land. Violence surrounds Jesus’ birth, as a mad leader sees in this child a threat to his rule and consequently massacres infants. Joseph, Mary, and Jesus make it to Egypt just in time (Mt. 2.13-18). Jesus’ birth, which heralds a reign of peace, is met from the beginning with ruthless political power. This child, like countless others throughout history, begins life as an immigrant searching for a safe place to live. The infant Jesus thus symbolizes the peril of creatures in a world scarred by sin and God’s promise that all find a home in God’s renewal of creation. Only the Gospel of Luke records anything about Jesus’ life between his infancy and the beginning of his public ministry. But the one vignette it records is significant because it inverts many traditions about children and adults. When Jesus travels to Jerusalem with his parents, he lingers behind, unbeknownst to them. When his parents return to the temple and find him there, Jesus disregards his mother’s understandable worry: ‘Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’ (Lk. 2.49). In the temple, moreover, Jesus sits among the teachers and asks questions, amazing them ‘at his understanding and his answers’ (v. 47). This story both underscores the exceptional nature of the child Jesus and also exposes some of the fractures in the traditional rules among children, teachers, and parents. The flow of wisdom is not always a one-way street; sometimes, the child teaches the elders. In Jesus’ public ministry, children appear at pivotal junctures. They receive his healing touch (Mk 7.24-30; 9.14-29; Jn 4.46-52), including one vignette where Jesus restores life to a dead child (Lk. 8.49-56). These stories call attention to the precariousness of children’s lives at every age and remind readers that Jesus embodies not merely spiritual salvation but also physical healing for life in abundance. This pattern repeats itself in Jesus’ blessing of children. When people bring ‘little children’ to Jesus ‘that he might touch them’ (Mk 10.13), the disciples stand in the way. Jesus, however, becomes angry and announces, ‘Let the little children come to me .  .  . for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs’ (v. 14). Matthew records another incident tellingly. When the disciples argue about greatness, Jesus places a child among them and says, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me’ (Mt. 18.3-5). Interpretations of these stories are legion, but two details are significant. On the one hand, Jesus uplifts the status of children, who then, as well as now, are often on the margins. On the other hand, Jesus is also saying something about the nature of children – their proclivity towards humility, vulnerability, and openness – that invites the conversion of adults. 649

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The New Testament’s household codes fix children’s roles more rigidly. Many New Testament scholars have concluded that these codes represent the domestication of the more radical social implications of the gospel. If Jesus preached an upside-down reign of God, where the lowly (including children) are lifted up, the household codes prioritize existing social divisions as named and blessed by God. Children, in these codes, are to obey parents (Eph. 6.1; Col. 3.20), though fathers are also enjoined not to provoke their children (Eph. 6.4; Col. 3.21). These household codes describe pairings where obligations are reciprocal (wives and husbands; children and parents; slaves and masters), but in each of these pairings the former partner occupies a lower rung on the social hierarchy. On the one hand, the codes rub against some of the strictures of these social hierarchies by emphasizing the obligations that the person occupying the more powerful social position has. Yet, on the other hand, the codes reify these structures by situating them in orders of creation blessed by God. The codes thus express ongoing questions surrounding the doctrine of creation: To what extent do Christian traditions emphasize distinctions among creatures in a diverse creation blessed by God? To what extent do those traditions employ these distinctions to enable the powerful to exploit the vulnerable? The household codes may epitomize the latter question rather than the former. One final observation is worth noting in New Testament portrayals of children: the prevalence of the metaphor of adoption in describing individuals’ relationship to God. Individuals enter that relationship not because of biological birthright but because of the gift of grace. Christ comes so that people ‘might receive adoption as children’ (Gal. 4.5; cf. Rom. 8.15). This metaphor has consequences for how childhood and parenthood are viewed. If the primary image of God as a parent emphasizes that humans are children not by birthright but by grace, then it also stresses the gift of being children and parents. The metaphor, in other words, emphasizes the adoptive nature of all parent–child relationships, whether or not children are biologically related to their parents.2

Children in Christian theology Biblical traditions yield resources for interpreting children that were developed further in subsequent centuries. In the early church, Augustine stands as a particularly influential voice. Confessions, written in the last years of the fourth century, offers reflections on Augustine’s own infancy: Who can recall to me the sins I committed as a baby? For in your sight no man is free from sin, not even a child who has lived only one day on earth. . . . But if I was born in sin and guilt was with me already when my mother conceived me, where, I ask you, Lord, where or when was I, your servant, ever innocent?3 Augustine’s answer to his self-imposed question is that there was never a time when a person was innocent. Indeed, some prime examples of sin, such as desire, jealousy, and covetousness,

See David H. Jensen, Graced Vulnerability: A Theology of Childhood (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2005), 46–7. Augustine, Confessions, 1.7.

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are most prominent in infants. He cites the example of a nursing child: ‘I have myself seen jealousy in a baby and know what it means. He was not old enough to talk, but whenever he saw his foster brother at the breast, he would grow pale with envy.’4 Augustine attributes the baby’s reaction not to hunger but to unbridled covetousness and jealousy – the perceived need to have what someone else has. Turning to experiences in later childhood and adolescence, Augustine offers ample examples of the sin that imperils humanity. He notes his laziness as a schoolboy,5 but the most famous example is his account of stealing pears. Recalling adolescent pranks he committed with friends, Augustine writes that they stole not to enjoy the fruit or for any other reason that might justify their theft. Instead, they stole because it was forbidden: ‘For of what I stole I already had plenty . . . and I had no wish to enjoy the things I coveted by stealing, but only to enjoy the theft itself and the sin.’6 For Augustine, this prank emerges as a chief example of the destructive nature of sin. Childhood thus reveals humanity’s inescapable mess and desperate need for grace as people grow into adulthood. On the one hand, Augustine’s understanding of children is liberating in that it recognizes children’s agency. Children are not passive vessels or blank slates upon which patterns can be drawn. Rather, they are, from birth, capable of actions that have consequences and for which they are accountable. On the other hand, Augustine’s account of childhood tends to see sin everywhere, even in basic patterns of infancy that are survival instincts. Children thus emerge, in Augustine’s account, as depraved but also as recipients of grace. If a modern tendency is to romanticize children, Augustine demonstrates that there is much in childhood that needs redemption. Augustine’s account of sin proved enormously influential in the Christian west. In the east, other patterns emerged, many rooted in John Chrysostom’s account of humanity and its contrasting interpretation of sin. In his account of baptism, Chrysostom rejects the Augustinian view: ‘We do baptize infants. Although they are not guilty of any sins.’7 For Chrysostom, sin is not guilt passed down from generation to generation but is rather an inherited corruption that orients individuals to subsequent sin. The distinction is subtle but makes all the difference since the former counts infants as sinful, and the latter considers them without sin but part of corporate humanity scarred by sin.8 Children emerge in Chrysostom’s account as more malleable and less fixed in their destiny, formed in the human family. As a school of holiness, the family nourishes and instructs children in the image of God: ‘When we teach our children to be good, to be gentle, to be forgiving (all these are attributes of God), to be generous, to love their fellow men, to regard this present age as nothing, we instil virtue in their souls and reveal the image of God within them.’9 Chrysostom posits a trinitarian structure to the family where parents are ‘called upon

Augustine, Confessions, 1.7. Augustine, Confessions, 1.9. 6 Augustine, Confessions, 2.4. 7 John Chrysostom, in The Later Christian Fathers, ed. and trans. Henry Bettenson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 169. 8 See Vigen Guroian, ‘The Ecclesial Family: John Chrysostom on Parenthood and Children’, in The Child in Christian Thought, ed. Marcia J. Bunge (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001), 69–70. 9 John Chrysostom, On Marriage and Family Life, trans. Catherine P. Roth and David Anderson (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986), 57. 4 5

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to emulate God the Father’s love for the Son, while children should love and obey their parents as the Son loves and obeys the Father through the Spirit’.10 This view sees the daily, even mundane, rhythms of childhood and family life permeated by grace (rather than sin). When children take up their roles in the family, they reflect nothing less than the life of God for the world. Chrysostom’s account of childhood is thus more relational than is Augustine’s. Though the role of children might initially seem rather restrictive (their young lives are meant mainly to absorb the example of parents), children nonetheless contribute something distinctive to family and church. Eight centuries later, Thomas Aquinas offers abundant reflections on the development of children. Thomas inherits the Augustinian legacy, which emphasizes children’s sinfulness, but he adds to that legacy a closer consideration of the distinct stages in a child’s life. Aquinas tends to see the value of childhood in light of its supposed end. The primary reason he does this is because he has a distinctive understanding of the purpose of human life: to worship, glorify, and contemplate God. But this purpose requires the proper use of reason, which children do not fully possess. This lack means that children are not fully accountable for every act and must be entrusted to adults for care and instruction. Caregivers teach children the ways of being more fully human. As children mature, their responsibilities, capacities, and accountability increase.11 The consequence of Aquinas’ view is that childhood is a waystation along the road to fuller becoming. The child is incomplete and becomes complete through proper supervision, training, and the grace of God. This is consistent with Aquinas’ general view of grace: it fulfils (rather than overturns) the already given nature. For Aquinas, ‘childhood is not essential to a [human person], and consequently the same identical subject who was a child, becomes a [human person]’.12 Aquinas’ account of childhood thus takes seriously stages of life and differing degrees of accountability based on age. One weakness of his view, however, is its consideration of reason as the primary marker of personhood, an interpretation that invariably marginalizes not only children but also persons with intellectual disabilities and older adults affected by Alzheimer’s and dementia. In the end, Aquinas values children for who they will become rather than who they are. Though his developmental psychology takes seriously distinct stages of life, Aquinas’ interpretation of childhood reinforces hierarchies within creation that view some persons as nearer the imago Dei than others, a danger that any doctrine of creation must strenuously avoid. As the father of six children, Protestant Reformer Martin Luther undoubtedly had much direct experience with children. His observations of his own children yield an honest, earthy, and somewhat conflicted view of childhood that resonates with the experiences of many parents. On the one hand, Luther marvels at the beauty and playfulness of children, seeing in them traces of God’s grace. He delighted in children, calling them God’s ‘little jesters’13

Guroian, ‘The Ecclesial Family’, 64. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), II–II, Q. 10, Art. 12. 12 Aquinas, ST, II–II, Q. 4, Art. 4. 13 Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Tischreden, 1531–46 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1913), 2:89. 10 11

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with ‘fine thoughts about God’.14 Observing his son nursing at his wife Katharina’s breast, Luther notes, ‘He sucks with pleasure at those breasts, is cheerful, is unconcerned about all his enemies.’15 Luther was especially fond of observing children at play, noting their spontaneity, creativity, and laughter. It is hard to read these words and not catch a glimpse of a parent, too, enjoying a laugh. On the other hand, Luther’s understanding of children also reflects the rigid hierarchies of the Middle Ages. Children, though they exhibit playfulness and creativity, are not adequate as they are. Like Augustine and Aquinas, Luther stresses the necessity of instruction and correction. Yet Luther frames the correctional aspects in much stronger terms. Children must be taught the commandments so that ‘the child’s own will is constantly broken’.16 Children manifest sin in distinctive ways, chiefly through disobedience. Parents are entrusted with the responsibility of raising their children correctly, but if children disobey the commandment of honouring father and mother, the punishments are stiff.17 Luther’s portrayal of children is thus multifaceted, stressing the simultaneously sinful and justified nature of each human life. Children are images of grace, enacting such grace in their playfully disruptive lives, but at the same time, they embody sin, and their bodies cry out for redemption and correction. Influenced by Reformation theology and Romanticism, nineteenth-century theologian Horace Bushnell offers one of the most explicit interpretations of childhood in the Christian tradition. In his classic book Christian Nurture, Bushnell revisits the Augustinian legacy and criticizes American revivalism. For Bushnell, the significance of ‘sin’ language is not to label children depraved at birth but rather to emphasize the damaged nature of the world children are born into. Bushnell offers a ‘federal’ interpretation of original sin that had been influential in Puritan theology and which understands sin less as an individual fault and more as corporate culpability. Bushnell thus veers away from overly individualistic understandings of sin and children. Chief among these distortions, in his view, is revivalism, with its emphasis on a dramatic personal conversion experience. Bushnell claims that revivalism relegates children to the sidelines since they are, in his assessment, incapable of such testimony. He compares the revivalist’s concern with children to ‘ostrich nurture’, which leaves children on their own until the age of accountability. In contrast to this approach, Bushnell writes: ‘The child is to grow up a Christian, and never know himself [or herself] as being otherwise.’18 Bushnell argues against individualism by emphasizing the relationship between parent and child: If we . . . examine the relation of parent and child, we shall not fail to discover something like a law of organic connection, as regards character, subsisting between them. .  .  . The character of one is actually included in that of the other, as a seed is formed in the

Luther, Luthers Tischreden, 1531–46, 2:411. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Volume 54: Table Talk, ed. and trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), 159. 16 Luther, ‘Treatise on Good Works’, in Selected Writings of Martin Luther: 1517–1520, ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), 164. 17 Luther, ‘The Large Catechism’, in The Book of Concord, ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), 383. 18 Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 10. 14 15

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capsule; and being there matured, by a nutriment derived from the stem, is gradually separated from it.19 Though Bushnell stresses the formative character of parents (particularly mothers20) on children, he offers an intriguing interpretation of children’s play that is instructive for adults. Childhood, in Bushnell’s eyes, offers a foretaste of heavenly bliss: ‘God has purposely set the beginning of the natural life in a mood that foreshadows the last and highest chapter of immortal character.’21 In an extended interpretation of Zechariah’s vision of the new Zion, Bushnell celebrates play as ‘the symbol and interpreter of liberty. . . . Play wants no motive but play’.22 Play initiates children into the Christian faith by opening them to the surprise of grace: ‘As play is the forerunner of religion, so religion is to be the friend of play.’23 Children, in their natural state, invite others to play with them. In this sense, children have something to teach adults as well: ‘Sometimes, too, the parent, having a hearty interest in the plays of his children, will drop out for the time the sense of his [or her] years, and go into the frolic of their mood with them. They will enjoy no other play-time so much as that.’24 Bushnell thus reframes the Augustinian legacy on sin while offering a novel interpretation of play where children’s lives are central to the life of redemption. Echoes of Bushnell’s symbolic interpretation of childhood continue in the work of the twentieth-century Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, who stresses the openness of children to relationships and mystery. Though deeply informed by Aquinas, Rahner departs from the Thomistic tradition by rejecting the idea that children are persons-in-the-making. Instead, from the very beginning of life (and even life in the womb), children are first and foremost persons claimed and named by God: ‘The child is the [person] whom God has called by a name of his [or her] own, who is fresh and unique in each individual instance.’25 God calls each individual as a child, and Jesus summons each person to change and become like a child (Mt. 18:3). Rahner’s take on Jesus’ suggestive phrase is that we do not ‘lose childhood as that which recedes’ into the past, but rather ‘become the children we were because we gather up time . . . into our eternity’.26 Rahner thus inverts the Thomistic paradigm by suggesting that adults journey into childhood. But if Rahner presents children as a model to adults, he hardly romanticizes childhood. Jesus does not uplift children for his followers because children are pure or innocent but because they are examples of receptivity.27 To be a child is to depend on others and the One who is wholly Other: ‘Childhood is openness. Human childhood is infinite openness.’28 Childhood

Bushnell, Christian Nurture, 26–7. Bushnell claims that the bulk of character formation in Christian faith occurs in the first years of a child’s life, communicated primarily through basic acts of bodily care: feeding, caressing, bathing, and soothing. 21 Bushnell, Christian Nurture, 340. 22 Bushnell, Christian Nurture, 339–40. 23 Bushnell, Christian Nurture, 340. 24 Bushnell, Christian Nurture, 341. 25 Karl Rahner, ‘Ideas for a Theology of Childhood’, in Theological Investigations, Volume 8: Further Theology of the Spiritual Life 2, trans. David Bourke (London/New York: Darton, Longman & Todd/Herder and Herder, 1971), 38. 26 Rahner, ‘Ideas for a Theology of Childhood’, 36. 27 Rahner, ‘Ideas for a Theology of Childhood’, 41. 28 Rahner, ‘Ideas for a Theology of Childhood’, 48. 19 20

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recalls the proper relationship with God: openness to absolute mystery. Adults are each called to embrace this aspect of childhood, regardless of their age. Children, in Rahner’s sense, are the people adults were meant to be all along. Though Rahner’s approach to children hovers above the nitty-gritty details of children’s lives, his interpretation of children as dependent and open to relationships offers a much-needed alternative to western individualism. The work of a contemporary American theologian, Bonnie Miller-McLemore, rounds out this theological survey of children. Her work, by far, is most attentive to the concrete realities of children’s lives. Rather than opting for a symbolic approach, Miller-McLemore offers an empirical theology of childhood informed by feminist perspectives. Her interpretation is threefold: ‘Children must be fully respected as persons, valued as gifts, and viewed as agents’.29 In considering the personhood of children, Miller-McLemore steers between the Scylla of an overly harsh Augustinianism that considers children only as sinful and the Charybdis of benign innocence. Though the pitfalls of the former have become common fodder for critique, the latter, Miller-McLemore argues, is equally as perilous for children because the view of children as innocent lambs renders children passive, robbing them of agency and responsibility.30 Instead of depravity or innocence, Miller-McLemore suggests ‘the imperfect, even potentially volatile, child in an imperfect, volatile world’.31 The actual lives of children are more complex than traditional understandings of children’s depravity and the alternative of innocence would suggest. In this reading, the language of sin plays a powerful role: children are responsible actors in need of grace, accountable to God and to others. Children are also gifts. They do not belong to parents or caregivers, but first and foremost to God: ‘If children are gifts, wholly unearned, they are ours “only in trust” . . . coming from and ultimately returning to God.’32 They are reminders of the gift of life and of the miracle of relationships. Finally, children are agents. They are neither wholly passive nor independent actors but, rather, ‘a complex amalgamation of imperfection and potentiality’.33 Formed by families and society, children also change families and society. Care for children thus involves ‘contemplation in the midst of chaos’34 because children’s agency brings disruption, noise, laughter, tears, and smiles all at once. Miller-McLemore’s understanding of children invites readers to consider more closely the actual lives of children and to work towards a church and a society where children’s agency, gift, and personhood are more fully respected and honoured.

Constructing a theology of childhood Children’s roles and responsibilities vary widely across cultures and churches. Given this present diversity and the radical changes within cultures and churches over time, how does one

Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Let the Children Come: Reimagining Childhood from a Christian Perspective (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), xxiii. 30 Miller-McLemore, Let the Children Come, 14. 31 Miller-McLemore, Let the Children Come, 22. 32 Miller-McLemore, Let the Children Come, 102. 33 Miller-McLemore, Let the Children Come, 144. 34 Miller-McLemore, Let the Children Come, 153. See also Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, In the Midst of Chaos: Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice (San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, 2007). 29

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interpret childhood theologically? Amid these shifts, a monolithic theological view of children is neither possible nor desirable. Instead, the church should attend critically to the biblical and theological heritage foundational to the Christian faith. In light of that heritage, I propose five elements below that are significant for constructing a theology of childhood today. A Christian understanding of childhood must attend to children’s vulnerability, in both the positive and negative senses of that term. On the one hand, children’s vulnerability renders them open to relationships in ways that amplify our understanding of the image of God. Children come into the world dependent on others for life: food, nourishment, shelter, warmth, touch, and care. To be a child is to be-with-another. In children’s lives, it can be sensed that dependence is a blessing rather than a burden and that a full life is radically open to others and God, who grounds all relations. But at the same time, there is danger in children’s vulnerability that makes them uniquely susceptible to the scars of systemic sin. In an interconnected world that celebrates the increase in wealth, children are disproportionately poor.35 Children, furthermore, are often targets of violence. The sexual abuse scandals in Christian churches demonstrate how leaders became more concerned with protecting perpetrators and institutions than seeking justice for the victims. Children’s vulnerability, clearly, is a double-edged sword. It both opens the eyes of others to the mystery of relation with others and illuminates the scar of violence. Children’s vulnerability thus illustrates the fragility of creation, that God’s gift is no guarantee against harm. Rupture and violence infect creation, erupting across the globe. Yet this fragility also renders creation open to its creator and the renewal of relationships. Creation is thus a risk on God’s part: a risk that creatures will turn from the God who is the source of all life and sow destruction. A theology of childhood should also pay attention to the abundant diversity of children’s lives, where each child is irreplaceably unique. In Genesis, the image of God consists not in uniformity but in difference: ‘So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them’ (Gen. 1.27). The divine image is less an isolated trait or essence of humanity (such as rationality or empathy) and more the difference that makes human relationships possible. To understand children in God’s image, furthermore, is to reject any attempt to mould children in the image of an adult. Children’s diversity is a reminder of the difference writ large throughout Christian imagination: in the teeming diversity of creation, in the difference that constitutes God’s triune life. The God who is diverse relation creates a cosmos where difference is a prerequisite for life. Children come into this world not primarily to be shaped into any one prescribed form but to testify in their personhood to the diversity of life that is ‘very good’ (Gen. 1.31). Children also embody promise. One of the recurring themes throughout the Hebrew Bible, in particular, is that children are a gift, a blessing that can come after many years of waiting. Nearly anyone who has cared for a child can attest that children, in some way, orient one’s attention to the future. Parents, teachers, and caregivers work so that children might see tomorrow, that they might grow in wisdom and strength, and that they might have opportunities to share some of their gifts with the world. Rahner’s interpretation of childhood

Katherine Fenz and Kristofer Hamel, ‘More than Half of the World’s Poor Are Children’, Brookings, accessed 26 August 2019, https://www​.brookings​.edu​/blog​/future​-development​/2019​/06​/20​/more​-than​-half​-of​-the​-worlds​-poor​ -are​-children. 35

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consistently emphasizes that childhood is not so much ‘past time’ as it is ‘that which remains’.36 Each child comes into the world as a unique gift of grace. Children are given to their caregivers only for a time. They are not ‘ours’ to keep but belong first and foremost to the God who is ceaseless in giving. As promises rooted in God’s giving, children can encourage adults to receive gifts and to recognize the Giver of all gifts: God gives; individuals receive; they, in turn, give; and God continues giving. This dynamic is ubiquitous in the Christian imagination but perhaps most vividly present at the Lord’s Table: God presents gifts at a table; individuals are fed; and rise to keep giving and sharing with the world. The promise of children turns attention to the promise at the heart of the doctrine of creation: God’s covenant with Israel extended to the whole world in Jesus Christ. Karl Barth understood covenant to be the ‘internal basis of creation’.37 The God who creates is a God who makes covenants, who establishes promises, with creatures. These promises ensure that creation will have a future. If children orient those who care for them to the future, children are also remarkably present-oriented. The younger the child is, the more intense this focus on the ‘now’ becomes. In one of Jesus’ teachings, he urges his audience not to ‘worry about tomorrow’ (Mt. 6.34) but to pay attention to the beauty of the lilies of the field (v. 28). When attention is only focused on tomorrow, we become blind to the majesty of today. Children call out for attention now: to immediate needs of food, shelter, and human touch; in their often-insistent calls for meeting those needs (or desires for things beyond basic needs). Tomorrow is too long to wait for a child experiencing hunger and malnutrition; they must be fed now. This present-focus, however, goes well beyond immediate needs. Children can also get lost in attention to things that adults overlook: the insect on the sidewalk, the budding flower on the lawn, and the squirrel on the tree’s highest limb. This present-attention cannot simply be rushed along. At its best, such attention to the present opens other eyes as well – to the mystery of relationships and to the earth’s beauty. Children invite others to inhabit the present, reminding them that this world is their home. The earth is not a temporary, disposable waystation until a true home in the heavens is found. That was the error of a Gnosticism that wound up despising creation. Home is in the creation that God establishes, blesses, and promises to redeem so that all might have life and have it abundantly (Jn 10.10). Finally, children evoke the re-creation and reorientation of life under grace. Children change things. They immediately require a re-evaluation of priorities in caregivers and the need to look outside oneself or one’s partnership. Each child brings novelty to the world with each moment. Christians confess a God who makes all things new (Rev. 21.5). Children put flesh on that confession, bringing newness with each breath. One of the near-universal practices of childhood – play – offers a vivid image of this novelty. Across cultures, children play with others. When children flourish, they play, creating imaginary worlds and characters. Their play brings new possibilities to creation. Much of this is serendipitous because, as Bushnell has noted, play ‘wants no motive but play’.38 Play is less goal-oriented than many other forms of human activity since the focus is mainly on the delight of the moment. When children play,

Rahner, ‘Ideas for a Theology of Childhood’, 35–6. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.I, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 228–329. 38 Bushnell, Christian Nurture, 340. 36 37

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however, they imagine a world that might be. The joy that comes in play is not so much the game that has been structured, but rather the surprise that comes amid play – the tumble in the grass, the bout of laughter as the game is played. To delight in the joy of a child at play is to rejoice in the mystery and grace that the child simply is. Children’s play invites adults to work towards a different world where all God’s creatures flourish. Such play envisions nothing less than the re-creation of the world. If there is much in creation that presently cannot flourish, the abiding promise of the Christian doctrine of creation is the renewal of heaven and earth, where God makes a home among mortals, where all tears are wiped away, where death no longer reigns, and where all things will be made new (Rev. 21.3-5). Any theology of creation that seeks to address human flourishing in community and how humans malign and injure other creatures needs to attend to children. If theologians have focused rather little on children in the past, children’s present voices cry out for renewed attention today. When theologians incline their ears to children, nothing less than the renewal of the doctrine of creation becomes possible.

Further reading Berryman, Jerome W. Children and the Theologians: Clearing the Way for Grace. New York. Morehouse Publishing, 2009. Bunge, Marcia J. The Child in the Bible. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008. Bunge, Marcia J., ed. The Child in Christian Thought. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001. Jensen, David H. Graced Vulnerability: A Theology of Childhood. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2005. Miller-McLemore, Bonnie J. Let the Children Come: Reimagining Childhood from a Christian Perspective. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003.

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CHAPTER 50 DISABILITY AND CREATION

John Swinton

The relationship between human disability and interpretations of the doctrine of creation is complex and, at points, quite fraught. One of the main areas of contention revolves around whether the Genesis account of creation and fall can appropriately be drawn upon as a plausible explanation for the existence of disability. The tension lies between whether disability is an expected part of God’s good creation, as outlined in Genesis 1, or an undesirable product of the fall, as presented in Genesis 3. If disability is the product of the fall, people with disabilities can be (and often are) perceived as special manifestations of the fallen human condition. This tends to draw out feelings of alienation and pity and tempts people to turn to healing rather than to acceptance. If disability is framed as a desirable part of God’s good creation, the conversation moves towards the significance of valuing human diversity rather than singling out one form of difference as good and another as in need of fixing and mending. These kinds of conversations are not merely theoretical. They have profound significance for practice and how the church responds to people living with disabilities. While recognizing the importance of Genesis 3 and Paul’s assertion that all human beings have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (Rom. 3.23), the focus in this chapter is on the significance of Genesis 1 and 2 – life prior to the fall – for understanding human disability. If disability is present in the prelapsarian life, then ascribing the fall as an explanation for the presence of disability becomes less plausible, and the experience of disability is less spiritually stigmatic. Reading Genesis 1–2 using a hermeneutic that incorporates the perspective of the experience of human disability brings important new insights and fresh possibilities. This chapter does not attempt to deal with the historicity of Genesis 1 and 2. Rather, it assumes that the basic intention of these passages is to provide deep insights into who God is and who human beings are before God. These chapters, read reflectively in the light of the experience of disability, can illuminate the human condition in ways that bring about fresh revelation, deeper understanding, and more faithful practice. This chapter sits within the field of enquiry that has come to be known as disability theology. Disability theology is a theological enterprise by people with and without disabilities. It intends to foreground the theological issues, challenges, and questions that emerge from reflection on the presence of human disability. Disability theology allows such questions and concerns to creatively and dialectically sit alongside the ‘standard’ questions that are asked of scripture and tradition so that the church and the world can develop a fuller understanding of God and of how human beings should be understood and responded to in the light of what is known about God.

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What is disability? Disability is a complex and contested concept. For current purposes, the description of disability provided by the World Health Organization will be used: Disability is part of being human. Almost everyone will temporarily or permanently experience disability at some point in their life. Over one billion people – about 15% of the global population – live with some form of disability and this number is increasing. Disability results from the interaction between individuals with a health condition such as cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and depression as well as personal and environmental factors including negative attitudes, inaccessible transportation and public buildings, and limited social support.1 Two aspects of this description are important for the purposes of this chapter. First, suggesting that disability is part of being human is vitally important. Disability is not something that happens to a particular group of people who can be singled out and named ‘the disabled’ in the way that people can be named Londoners, New Yorkers, Canadians, Parisians, or Koreans. Disability is something that all human beings experience to varying degrees as they move on in life. Second, the ascription of the label ‘disability’ is an interactive process. It occurs when a particular form of human difference rubs up against social and cultural barriers that cause it to appear different and problematic. For example, living with Down syndrome or, indeed, any kind of developmental disability is not inevitably problematic. People can and do live well with all sorts of developmental disabilities. The experience of developmental disability becomes problematic when it rubs up against a society which prizes intellect, reason, competitiveness, and power above love, companionship, acceptance, and community. A disability becomes disabling when encountering certain cultural, relational, social, and spiritual barriers. The experience of using a wheelchair may result from a physical impairment, but it becomes disabling when it encounters a built environment that takes no cognisance of the experience, geography, or logistics of wheelchair use. Theology can also be disabling. Framing disability as a product of human sinfulness and prioritizing healing – which usually means attempting to rehabilitate someone into cultural, bodily, and/or psychological norms – over acceptance and love makes it very difficult for people living with disabilities to feel they are living life in all of its fullness (Jn 10.10). It is hard to live well when people think you are somehow spiritually unwell.2

Genesis 1: Unity in diversity Genesis 1 presents a magisterial account of God creating the world and declaring it ‘good’, and indeed ‘very good’ (Gen. 1.31). The first thing to notice here is that God does not state that

World Health Organization, ‘Disability’, accessed 25 August 2021, https://www​.who​.int​/health​-topics​/disability​#tab​ =tab​_1. 2 See Sharon V. Betcher, Spirit and Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007). 1

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creation is perfect. It is ‘very good’. It is fit for God’s purposes. This point is discussed in more detail later in the chapter when we will reflect on Genesis 2. There are two things to be noted in Genesis 1 relating to disability. The first is the incredible diversity of creation: God creates a physical world filled with every kind of creature: the magnificent giant sequoia, the baffling platypus, the playful dolphin, the ever-curious human. And all of these physical creatures whom God speaks into being are good. The light and the land, the birds and the fish, the cattle and the people, all of them are just what God said they would be; they are individually good and together ‘very good’.3 There is no dualism here between good and evil. Creation is good because it is made by God. It has no other source than God. Creation is very good and, importantly, hugely diverse. Human beings are made in God’s image (Gen. 1.27). However, the scriptures do not say humans all look alike or that they are exactly alike in body and mind. They are all equally in God’s image, but that equality does not manifest itself in homogeneity. As Kendra Hotz and Matthew Mathews point out: ‘Our bodily differences are crucial to our identities, but not the basis of any kind of hierarchy. . . . These differences are built into our bodies, written into the fabric of creation, and celebrated as good by a God who intended us to be as different in our bodies as we are alike in God’s image’.4 Humans are all made equally in God’s image, and all are given breath through the same spirit. The term ruach (spirit) is a Hebrew noun that can refer to the natural wind, to breath, or to spirit. David Fergusson points out that ruach is ‘an important bridge term between God and creation’: It is God’s ruach that broods over the waters at the dawn of creation (Gen. 1.2). Ruach denotes the life-giving power that proceeds from God. ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath (ruach) of his mouth’ (Ps. 33.6). Ruach is something that can be given by God to human beings. Indeed all human life is in some sense an expression of the ruach of God; we live on borrowed breath. ‘When you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground’ (Ps. 104.29-30).5 All breathe the same spirit. Every body is held and sustained by God’s ruach. Ruach is the principle of unity amid diversity.

Disability and Genesis 1 All human beings are part of God’s creation, and every human being is created to image God. Likewise, all are radically dependent on God. At a certain level, it appears that some people

Kendra G. Hotz and Matthew T. Mathews, Dust and Breath: Faith, Health, and Why the Church Should Care about Both (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2012), 5–6. 4 Hotz and Mathews, Dust and Breath, 7. 5 David Fergusson, Creation (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014), 6–7. 3

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are more dependent than others, but at the level of basic creatureliness, radical dependency is an experience shared by all human beings. Dependence may manifest itself acutely in certain circumstances, but that manifestation is simply a reminder of what it means to be a creature. Creaturely dependency is built into the fabric of creation. God is the creator, and human beings are creatures. To be dependent on God and others is the creature’s natural state, not a consequence of human sin or any kind of primal fall. However, care must be taken here. Dependency is a natural state. Nevertheless, it is important not to ignore how dependency is constructed and fabricated in ways which disproportionately affect disabled people beyond just the inherent link to the dependency that all created beings share. For example, everyone depends on others for food sources, but global logistical choices, economics, warfare, and climate change produce areas that are incapable of providing a sufficient amount of food, leading to disabling conditions and long-term disability in the present and for future generations. The idea that those in South Sudan have an inherent dependency in exactly the same way as people in Edinburgh is certainly true, and both rely on God as a foundational aspect of their being. However, food supply–related disabilities will emerge in South Sudan thanks to global inequalities in a different and more pronounced way than they do in Edinburgh. There is, therefore, an important political element to a disability reading of creation that is brought sharply to the fore when creation is contemplated in the light of disability. The tyranny of the normal Creation conceived of in terms of diversity and dependence helps overcome what Dawn DeVries has described as ‘the myth of an original uniformity that preceded diversity’.6 There was never a time when creation was homogeneous and independent. In turn, this focus challenges what Stanley Hauerwas has called ‘the tyranny of the normal’7 – how certain assumptions about what is and is not normal function to the detriment of people with disabilities. If it is assumed that normality should be gauged according to a homogeneous ideal norm usually determined by the standards of culture, people with disabilities will inevitably be seen as ‘abnormal’. However, if this creation dynamic is used,8 the dangers of oppressive forms of norming are minimized, love is released, and difference can be embraced without pathologizing it or feeling obliged to try to ‘fix’ it. The image of God If humans are diverse, different, and held together in the equality of being created to image God, how the image is defined must take cognisance of the breadth of human experience. It is God’s ruach that holds and sustains creation. Phenomenologically, creatureliness is a state

Dawn DeVries, ‘Creation, Handicappism, and the Community of Differing Abilities’, in Reconstructing Christian Theology, ed. Rebecca S. Chopp and Mark Lewis Taylor (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 129. 7 See Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Community and Diversity: The Tyranny of Normality’, in Critical Reflections on Stanley Hauerwas’ Theology of Disability: Disabling Society, Enabling Theology, ed. John Swinton (Binghamton: Haworth Pastoral Press, 2004), 37–43. 8 A perspective that is also central to Paul’s image of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12) within which diversity and difference in unity is the norm. 6

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of being that is common to all who have been given a ruach by the creator. This is important. It is not something within the human creature that differentiates human beings from the rest of creation. That which marks humans out from the rest of creation is found in the sixth day experience whereby God begins to communicate with human beings and enters, for the first time, into a personal relationship with them (Gen. 1.28). It is this dynamic, relational movement of God towards human beings that marks them out from the rest of creation. As David Wilkinson has put it: [T]he image of God is not part of the human constitution so much as it is a description of the process of creation that makes human beings different. The image should not be imagined to be a ‘part’ of us, whether our body, our reason or our moral sense. It is not about something we have or something we do; it is about relationship. The Old Testament scholar Claus Westermann writes, ‘human beings are created in such a way that their very existence is intended to be their relationship to God’. The ‘image of God’ means that we are sufficiently like God that we can have an intimate relationship with him. This is often emphasized later in the Genesis account. God walks in the garden with Adam and Eve, and he speaks in a different way to them than to the rest of creation. He speaks personally, while they understand and respond. This is how the Bible understands the special nature of human beings. Not primarily that we are physically different from the rest of creation, though in many ways we are, but in the fact that he has given us an intimate relationship with himself.9 The imago Dei might then best be understood in terms of God’s relational movement towards human beings. As such, it is an extrinsic rather than intrinsic dimension of human experience: A gift rather than a faculty. To be human is to be made for relationships, to love and to be loved by the God who created human beings.10 Importantly, reflecting God’s relationality does not demand that humans do anything. To be loved is not a human ability or capacity. If one looks at their reflection in a mirror, one doesn’t have to do anything to see it. Likewise, it does not disappear because one can’t see it or because one doesn’t understand what it is. The image then is an orientation towards connection initiated, held, and sustained by God’s gift of relationship. This opens important space for understanding the situations of people who are not able to respond to relationships in conventional ways, such as those with severe intellectual disabilities or profound autism, but who are no less desirous of relationships. More will be said about this later. For now, the point to bear in mind is that the theological framework of creation presented in Genesis 1 opens possibilities for understanding disability (and all of humanity) differently and, potentially, more positively.

Genesis 2: Perfection in paradise? The problem around the disability–sin connection was noted earlier. One reason why some people link disability with sin is the assumption that creation was originally perfect. DeVries

David Wilkinson, The Message of Creation (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2020), 41–2. Wilkinson, The Message of Creation, 44.

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notes that ‘the Christian doctrine of creation is often used to assert the notion of an originally “perfect” and “normal” world, beside which all impairment and disease are seen as evil deviations – the result of sin’.11 Joel Estes points out that this idea has been prevalent in the history of the interpretation of Genesis: Nothing in Genesis 2 or in the history of its interpretation suggests that the first humans were anything other than fully ‘abled’ individuals. Indeed, in the history of exegesis and art they are not only perfect humans but, in some cases, depicted as superhuman. In numerous Rabbinic texts, for example, Adam’s body is gigantic, embodies all of the physical perfections of Israel’s historic heroes, and displays a splendor that eclipses even the sun.12 However, he notes that these kinds of interpretations ‘miss something important that Genesis 2 reveals is at the heart of what it means to be human. Just as humans are necessarily embodied, they are also imperfect’.13 Is the idea of original perfection, in fact, a myth? Could Adam and Eve have been disabled? In her essay ‘Could Adam and Eve Have Been Disabled?’, the French theologian Talitha Cooreman-Guittin pushes against the myth of original perfection by asking why it is that images of disability are never used to illustrate the creation narrative in Roman Catholic religious educational textbooks in France. She notes that beauty and perfection are simply assumed to relate to standard western conceptions. Her challenge is whether the Bible really does indicate that there was no disability in Eden. She concludes that it does not: Even after humanity disobeyed God and ate the forbidden fruit, there is no mention in the Bible of disability as a consequence of humankind’s sin, in fact there is no reference in the creation stories (Gen. 1–3) to disability whatsoever. This is not to deny the reality of the Fall and its consequences. We should however clearly reconsider our understanding of the account through the lens of theologies of disability.14 Cooreman-Guittin argues that current images of beauty and perfection reflect cultural ideas that are read into the text via what might be described as a hermeneutic of original perfection. Arguing against Adamic perfectionism, she points out: [T]here is no mention of humankind being pure or unblemished or perfect neither in Gen 1 nor in Gen 2–3. Paul Ricœur put it this way: ‘All the speculations about the supernatural perfection of Adam before the fall are adventitious arrangements that

DeVries, ‘Creation, Handicappism’, 127. Joel D. Estes, ‘Imperfection in Paradise: Reading Genesis 2 through the Lens of Disability and a Theology of Limits’, Horizons in Biblical Theology 38, no. 1 (2016): 10. 13 Estes, ‘Imperfection in Paradise’, 9. 14 Talitha Cooreman-Guittin, ‘Could Adam and Eve Have Been Disabled? Images of Creation in Catholic Religious Education Textbooks in France’, Journal of Disability and Religion 22, no. 1 (2018): 92. 11 12

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profoundly alter the original meaning, naïve and crude; they tend to make Adam superior and therefore foreign to our condition, and thereby reduce the Adamic myth to a genesis of man from primordial superhumanity’.15 The dangerous myth, then, is that Eden was a place of perfection and that the task of redemption is to move backwards towards that lost ‘perfection’. Within this myth, disability can only be understood as a form of imperfection that will be overcome through the process of redemption. The Genesis accounts of creation do not refer to the first humans as perfect or somehow clothed in God’s glory. The problem that Cooreman-Guittin and Estes highlight is projection: externalizing one’s ideas about how something should be and then assuming that that is what it is. Such reified projection may feel ‘normal’ and ‘natural’, but it is open to challenge. As has been described, scripture does not claim that the world was perfect when God created it. If it were perfect, there would be no need for the new creation and no need for Isaiah to proclaim: ‘For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; And the former things will not be remembered or come to mind (Isa. 65.17)’. As Fergusson puts it: Creation is imperfect and incomplete. The making of the world is only the first of God’s works. As the beginning of a history, it sets in motion a narrative that has a focal point in the coming of Jesus. The ordering of the Christian canon itself suggests a pattern of promise and fulfilment. God’s creative work is ongoing throughout the history of Israel and the church, even embracing resistance and struggle in its dealing with people and natural forces. Yet this work of renewal embraces rather than abandons creation. It has been said that the Bible offers us not so much a doctrine of creation as a doctrine of the creator. This remark reminds us of the ways in which the description of the world’s creation is deeply related to God’s other works of preservation and redemption. The expression of creation is a doxological act. The making of the world by God is a cause for celebration and praise. Creation is an article of faith that engages both heart and mind, and elicits an attitude of trust and confidence.16 Rather than attempting to single out some things as imperfect, when everything is imperfect, a better strategy might be to love everything within creation in the way God loves creation. ‘It is not good for the man to be alone’ Genesis 2.18 at first seems like a straightforward statement: ‘The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him”’. This seems to indicate the human need for relationality mentioned previously and further points towards a relational understanding of the image of God. However, deeper reflection reveals an important point of dissonance. Genesis 1 declares that God created a very good world.17 And yet, in Genesis 2,

Cooreman-Guittin, ‘Could Adam and Eve Have Been Disabled?’, 91. Fergusson, Creation, 9. 17 Here I am intentionally reading the two creation stories as a single narrative. 15 16

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there seems to be something lacking. Adam has a relationship with God and talks with God, but he remains relationally unfulfilled. Something is missing from his life. More than that, God says that Adam’s unfulfillment is ‘not good’. It seems that disappointment was present even within the primal goodness of God’s creation. Adam tried all the animals, but none of them fit his needs. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: ‘It was Adam’s first occasion of pain that these brothers and sisters [i.e. the non-human animals] whom Adam loved did not fulfil the human being’s own expectation’.18 Estes cautions against moving too quickly towards God’s intervention in verses 21-25. To do so is to miss out on the implications of verses 18-20: The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him’. Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. ‘[D]isappointment existed in Eden before Genesis 3. Pain and loss – a certain kind of “imperfection” – are part of Adam’s experience in the garden.’19 Within God’s very good creation, even before the fall, there was a need for further development. Contrary to those who assume that Christian spirituality simply has to do with a relationship between self and God, the Genesis account seems to indicate that relationships with other human beings are of profound (but not, of course, ultimate) importance to God and for human beings. This resonates in an interesting way with Jesus’ statement that the sum of the law and the prophets is to love God, love neighbour, and love self (Mt. 22.40). All of these dimensions of love are necessary aspects of life in all of its fullness. God creates a dynamic world within which human beings are called to participate and within which there is scope for change, development, and innovation. This leads to the final point that Genesis 2 makes in relation to disability – how God chooses to create Adam. The perfection of broken bodies Reflecting on the creation of Adam in Genesis 2, Estes makes a quite startling observation: ‘In order to create a companion, God inflicts a wound’:20 [W]e cannot escape the fact that God’s activity is located in Adam’s body. God is building something new, but his construction site is Adam’s body, and his raw materials are Adam’s bone and flesh. . . . However we are to understand this scene, at least on a symbolic level God’s action entails a removal from Adam’s body. In order to make Eve, Adam’s body experiences loss.21

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall; Temptation: Two Biblical Studies, trans. John C. Fletcher and Kathleen Downham (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 52. 19 Estes, ‘Imperfection in Paradise’, 13. 20 Estes, ‘Imperfection in Paradise’, 13. 21 Estes, ‘Imperfection in Paradise’, 14. 18

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God has to break open Adam’s body so that Eve can come into existence. The formation of communion required the breaking of a body. Although Adam was asleep when God was doing this, presumably, he had to recover in the same way as anyone else. Unless his body was radically different from our bodies, his wounds would have been painful and would have needed to heal. Estes observes that ‘reading this action [God’s breaking open Adam’s body] through the lens of disability calls into question many of our assumptions about what constitutes the ideal human. For many in our society, the perfect human is powerful, independent, unblemished, and selfsufficient – supremely able. Yet these are the very values that Genesis 2 undercuts’.22 This raises important issues with regard to theological anthropology. In a social climate where individualism and radical autonomy seem to rule – a climate within which many people with disabilities are stigmatized and alienated because of their lack of conformity to this ideal – the Genesis story goes to another place. Estes sums up the implications of this way of thinking: Countering modern notions of the ideal independent human, Genesis 2 unabashedly asserts that it is not good for humans to be alone and lifts up the ways in which weakness, vulnerability, and interdependency lie at the center of what it means to be human. Attending to Genesis 2 . . . invites us to consider the ways that human differentiation – including ‘able’ and ‘disabled’ bodies – involves pain and loss but also creates the possibility for genuine relationship. In the face of the modern ideal of human autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency, Genesis locates pain and loss within Eden precisely because it is only through these ‘imperfections’ that humans can experience a more perfect union based on differentiation, limitation, and companionship.23 Genesis 2 thus thickens and clarifies key issues around disability that are raised by Genesis 1 and, once again, provides a challenge to think about disability in a frame that is not overly determined by sin and human fallenness.

Creation, care, and climate change: ‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it’ There is one further set of insights into disability and creation that can be gleaned from further reflection on Genesis 2. It is striking how God is involved with creation in the Genesis accounts. Not only does God create the world, but God also cares for it: Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground – trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden. (Gen. 2.8-10)

Estes, ‘Imperfection in Paradise’, 14. Estes, ‘Imperfection in Paradise’, 15.

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God is deeply involved with creation – tending, shaping, forming, and caring for the world. As consubstantial with the earth, humans are seen here as very much part of and responsible for creation. This has at least two important implications for developing theologies of creation and disability. First, in Gen. 2.15 is this passage: ‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it’. Genesis 1.26, where God gives human beings dominion over the world, gives the impression that the task is to crush down creation, to hold it in its place. But here in Gen. 2.15, God gives human beings responsibility to work with and care for creation. A primal responsibility of human beings is to tend and care for the world. A necessary consequence of the human command to care for creation is that it is natural and normal to receive care. Caring and receiving care are part of the same dynamic. This is a very important point with regard to disability as it relates to the life trajectory of all human beings. Part of being human and walking faithfully with God is to care for one another and creation. Part of being human and walking faithfully with God is to receive care. When it comes to the time in life when one can do nothing but be cared for, a person does not lose their dignity, value, worth, or personhood. One simply realizes an aspect of being human often occluded by cultural pressure for individualism, independence, and autonomy. To be human is to care and to be cared for. Second, God’s earthy involvement with creation and God’s desire for humans to care for and to tend to the world also have important ecological implications. With thousands of animals becoming extinct, pollution levels increasing, global temperatures rising, and sea levels increasing in harmony, the crucial importance of taking seriously God’s call to care and tend for the world has never been more important. But there is an aspect of the ecological conversation that applies directly to the lives of people with disabilities. Aleksandra Kosanic, a geography researcher at the University of Konstanz who lives with cerebral palsy, recently wrote, along with others, a letter to the journal Science.24 In that letter, she notes that the disabled population needs to be taken into consideration when discussing climate change and the risks that it brings: ‘Climate change and the loss of ecosystem services are likely to disproportionately affect the world’s disabled populations by accentuating inequalities and increasing marginalization of the most vulnerable members of society. Disabled populations may experience a limited access to knowledge, resources, and services to effectively respond to environmental change.’25 How can a person escape from a bushfire if they are in a wheelchair and nobody has considered the logistics of getting them out? How can a person survive climactic changes that bring about hurricanes, cyclones, and floods when they don’t have an income that allows them to build housing that can sustain 150 kilometres per hour winds? How can a person escape such catastrophes when they cannot afford advanced transportation to take them out of danger? The economic challenges of not caring for creation and their impact on people with disabilities worldwide are immense. While it is not possible to expand on this point here, it is clear that the theology of creation, ecological theology, and disability theology are deeply

Aleksandra Kosanic et al., ‘Climate Concerns and the Disabled Community’, Science 366, no. 6466 (2019): 698–9. Kosanic et al., ‘Climate Concerns and the Disabled Community’, 699.

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intertwined and, as such, require to be thought about together. If God cares for the earth, so should human beings.

Further reading Brock, Brian. Disability: Living into the Diversity of Christ’s Body. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021. Cooreman-Guittin, Talitha. ‘Could Adam and Eve Have Been Disabled? Images of Creation in Catholic Religious Education Textbooks in France’. Journal of Disability and Religion 22, no. 1 (2018): 89–95. DeVries, Dawn. ‘Creation, Handicappism, and the Community of Differing Abilities’. In Reconstructing Christian Theology, edited by Rebecca S. Chopp and Mark Lewis Taylor, 124–40. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994. Estes, Joel D. ‘Imperfection in Paradise: Reading Genesis 2 through the Lens of Disability and a Theology of Limits’. Horizons in Biblical Theology 38, no. 1 (2016): 1–21. Hauerwas, Stanley. ‘Community and Diversity: The Tyranny of Normality’. In Critical Reflections on Stanley Hauerwas’ Theology of Disability: Disabling Society, Enabling Theology, edited by John Swinton, 37–43. Binghamton: Haworth Pastoral Press, 2004. Yong, Amos. ‘Reimagining the Doctrines of Creation, Providence and the Imago Dei: Rehabilitating Down Syndrome and Disability’. In Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity, 155–92. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007.

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CHAPTER 51 HUMAN SEXUALITY

Eugene F. Rogers Jr.

Genesis trouble In over twenty-eight years of teaching theology, the most frequent reason that students put forward for wanting to visit me during office hours is to talk about the Bible. That’s strange because I don’t teach Bible. What’s not strange is they want to talk about biblical interpretation because they find themselves in the midst of controversy. They find the Bible being used in a way with which they disagree or about which they experience conflict. When they get into my office, the controversy that excites their interest in the Bible has invariably been about sex and gender. Every time. Without exception. For twenty-eight years. How does it come that ‘the Bible’ reduces to controversies over sex and gender? The students come in to talk about what Mary Douglas describes as patterns of reasoning in which ‘the final answer refers to the way in which the planets are fixed in the sky or the way that . . . humans or animals naturally behave’.1 Sociologically speaking, arguments within and among churches are not finished – do not reach their final rootedness – until they make their appeals to the will of God in creation. It is predictable, therefore, that commonplaces of sexuality and gender put down roots in interpretations of Genesis. Because of their sociological function, most of those commonplaces are conservative; they serve to uphold the society in which they occur. The society that classifies together stays together. Among those (suspect) commonplaces are these: ●

● ●

●

Genesis is about binaries: light and darkness, land and water, the waters above the earth and the waters below the earth, humans and animals, male and female. Genesis is about unchanging states: species and genders fixed in the beginning by God. Genesis is about hierarchy: God over creation, humans over animals, man over woman. Genesis is about nature, especially human nature: getting it right is key to finding out who we are.

But conservative uses of Genesis do not exhaust its possibilities – especially if you believe it is the Word of God. Precisely if God is the author, new possibilities arise. Medieval Christians thought that – precisely if the Holy Spirit is the author – the Bible could mean more things than one at the same time, as well as different things at different times. It turns out that none of those verities is necessarily so.

Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 47.

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Creation is a mystery of grace God, on the Christian account, does not have to create. The famous sermon is wrong that begins, ‘And God stepped out on space, and said, “I’m lonely. I’m gonna create me a world”’.2 The Christian God is not lonely, but Trinity. Before and apart from creation, God is already Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God has all riches, all companionship, and all love already in God’s own self.3 The sermon has it the wrong way around: it is just because God is already the mystery of difference and love that it is gracious and characteristic – not necessary – for God to create extra, unnecessary others, outside of the Trinity, to love.4 On the Christian account, difference within God (the Trinity) first enables difference from God (creation). In the Trinity, there is one who loves, one who receives and returns love, and one who witnesses, celebrates, and guarantees love. That trinitarian community between Father, Son, and Spirit makes possible the inclusion of superfluous, gratuitous others, unnecessary but welcome in the trinitarian fellowship: deified human creatures.5 In the image of the Son, they come to receive and return the love of the Father; at the inspiration of the Spirit, they become further witnesses and celebrants of love. This unnecessary initiation and inclusion into the trinitarian life is without cause in the creature; it is a mystery, a mystery almost too good to be true; the mystery of love, the mystery that God has created humans as occasions of joy.6 Human beings are created and converted to the mystery that God desires and enjoys them; they are created in the image of God so that the Father may see them in the image of the Word, the beloved, with whom God is well pleased. They are created in the image of a mystery, the image of one who loves without need. It comes not amiss, therefore, that creatures created in the image of a mystery, the mystery of love, should carry in themselves some echo of joy and might find it in life with another. We reach our calling and our home first and finally in the ‘causeless, loving delight of God’,7 and God may prepare us for life with God by binding us for life with another. We are created in the image of a mystery,8 one who loves us without cause and whom we cannot control: we may find ourselves in relationship with a mystery. The mystery of Genesis 1 is that I am made in the image of an Other not my own. I am destined to find my greatest good in one beyond my control. God is a mystery, as a good too great for me to grasp, and I am a mystery to myself, as having my true good there,9 elsewhere, outside of myself and of my control. Genesis 1 portrays sexuality as a reflection or image of that mystery: ‘in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them’ (Gen. 1.27). That is, God created them in the image of a mystery. The fact that the mystery of God is a mystery of three also suggests that we ought not to take apparent binaries as final. I don’t mean

James W. Johnson, ‘The Creation’, in God’s Trombones (New York: Penguin, 1955), 17. See Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thompson (London: SCM Press, 1949), 53–4. 4 See Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters, trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 38. 5 See Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 38. 6 I owe the phrase ‘occasions of joy’ to Rowan Williams, ‘The Body’s Grace’, in Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Eugene F. Rogers Jr. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 312. 7 Williams, ‘The Body’s Grace’, 317. 8 See Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 56. 9 I first used these words to different effect in Deirdre Good et al., ‘A Theology of Marriage Including Same-Sex Couples’, Anglican Theological Review 93 (2011): 84. 2 3

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that we should simply read the Trinity into created triads; I mean that if God is Trinity, we cannot simply read any apparent binaries in creation back into God.

How God makes difference Interpreters make much of a Hebrew verb that recurs in Genesis, badál meaning ‘to separate, to divide, to make different, to select’. Does God create by making binaries? If God creates by making binaries, do ‘male and female’ count as a hard binary intended by God in creation? Or is it more complicated than that? Consider these passages: And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. (Gen. 1.4) And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters’. (Gen. 1.6) And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. (Gen. 1.7) And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years’. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. (Gen. 1.16-18) ‘You shall be holy to me; for I the Lord am holy, and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.’ (Lev. 20.26) ‘Thus you shall separate the Levites from among the people of Israel, and the Levites shall be mine.’ (Num. 8.14) Now then make confession to the Lord the God of your fathers, and do his will; separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign wives. (Ezra 10.11) Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, ‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people’; and let not the eunuch say, ‘Behold, I am a dry tree’. (Isa. 56.3) When God separates the light from the darkness, is that a hard binary? Well, first, it doesn’t seem as if light and darkness are equal things. God is more interested in light. God seems to be selecting light, choosing for light: God’s first command is, ‘Let there be light’ (Gen. 1.3). In ‘separating’ the light from the darkness, God is pulling it out of a mass, and God is doing so to create goodness. God is not creating a binary: God is creating light. God does not create the cosmos as a binary: the cosmos consists of three parts: the firmament, the waters above it, and the waters below it (Gen. 1.7). Furthermore, God separates animals into threes: ‘the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and those that move on the earth’ (Gen. 1.28). Then the ones on the earth are again in three or four, depending on how you count (Gen. 1.30). Not even the sun 672

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and the moon make a simple binary: God creates them, not as a pair alone, but together with multitudes of stars (Gen. 1.16).10 When, later, God pulls the woman out of Adam, God also seems to be pulling something out of a mass, selecting, choosing for something. On the model of light, the woman would seem to be superior to the man. As the famous saying goes, When God created man, She was only practising. Furthermore, when we read about what God intended in creating the world, surely we are entitled to look around in the world, at least where there is no suspicion of sin. If we believe, for example, that God created only straight cis men and straight cis women, no trans or intersex or gay people, that would, on the conservative reading, go along with light and darkness, day and night, sun and moon, waters above and waters below, and so on. Let’s test. Do we, in fact, find that day turns to night, or night to day, with nothing in between? Well, no. We find dusk and dawn and twilight. On the contrary, the somewhat more sudden separation of a full solar eclipse interrupting bright daylight is quite rare. In addition to the sun and the moon, we explicitly read that God ‘made the stars also’. The waters above and below the earth are explicitly plural, not monolithic, and between the waters and the land, we find not a sharp boundary but beaches that come and go with the tides, marshlands, estuaries, tidal basins, mudflats, mangrove swamps, inlets, islets, and sandbars: myriads of intermediate things.11 And no one thinks they are occasions of sin. Everyone thinks they are miracles of creation, matched only by the colours of the dawn that come between night and day, of the sunset that comes between day and night, and of the rainbow that comes when the waters escape the firmament of heaven. Apparently, when God separates, God glories in the in-betweens, God varies and makes differences, not in twos, but in infinite multiples, in spectra and archipelagos. What is really going on is that (in one of the possible translations of badál) God is ‘making difference’. In the text, God is making difference not only between light and darkness but among the lights, not only between land and water but among the waters. In the world, God is making difference not only between light and darkness but among the colours of light at dawn and dusk, the intensities of light over the course of a day, the angle of the light over the course of a year, the changes of cloud cover; and among the intensities of darkness over the phases of the moon, the appearance of the aurora, the showers of meteors, the blue of Venus, and the red of Mars. What is really going on is that God is (in another translation of badál) ‘selecting’. Given the observable shape of the world, this is evidently not so much like distinguishing a mere binary. This is like choosing something specific, as specific as a romantic partner. God chooses this star, this moon, this length of day, and this declination of the axis towards the sun. Judaism celebrates the multitude of differences in Havdalah, a ritual whose name arises from the same root and which celebrates the in-between, the non-momentary arrival of the evening that ends the sabbath and requires a candle of multiple wicks and spices in great variety. Havdalah is only apparently binary. In Havdalah, more wicks and more spices are better. Like the structure of creation, Havdalah ‘gets culturally read as binary’, and its prayers, like the text

I owe the non-binary examples to a conversation with Ellen Haskell, 20 October 2020. A version of this argument appears in Austen Hartke, ‘God’s Unclassified World: Nonbinary Gender and the Diverse Beauty of Creation’, Christian Century 135, no. 9 (2018): 27–9. It may originate with Justin E. Tanis, Trans-Gendered: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003), 59. 10 11

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of Genesis, use binary language, but the details, especially in its ritual expression, do not. So the ritual expression of separations of Genesis, like the details of the creation narrative, makes creation ‘less binary than you think’.12 Consider the days of the week, the days of creation. They are seven. Seven does not divide into pairs. Seven does not divide at all. It is prime. Like God, it is indivisible, except by one and itself. Christian theology has long held (at some tension with the text of Genesis!) that God does not create out of pre-existing primordial matter but ex nihilo, out of nothing. But not random, incongruous things. The reference to ‘without form and void’ (Gen. 1.2), to chaos, indicates that what God creates out of nothing also belongs to a whole and a plan. God both says, ‘Let there be light’, and seems to draw, to pull light out of the darkness, because, once the world is made, the light and the darkness belong together. And they belong together not as two only but accompanied and glorified by dawn and dusk and stars and all manner of twilit colours. This pattern of both ex nihilo and belonging recurs when God creates the human being, whose creation Genesis narrates twice (in 1.26-31 and 2.4-25). In Genesis 1, God creates the man and the woman both together out of nothing: Let us make the earthling (ha-adamah) in our own image, after our likeness13 . . . and God created the human being in God’s own image; in the image of God God created the human being; male and female God created them. (Gen. 1.26-27) In Genesis 2, God draws the woman out of the man so that they belong together: [T]he Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. . . . Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him’. So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast 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 called every living creature, that was its name . . . but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man’. Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. That paragraph means a multitude of things. The man belongs to the earth and is kin to the animals. The man and the woman belong together; they are not human alone but exemplify co-humanity. It does not mean that the woman is subordinate, and it does not mean that all pairs have to be male–female. The woman is not subordinate because the man comes first in Genesis 2. The creature that comes first (in Genesis 1) is androgynous. Furthermore, the Hebrew word, ʻêzer, related to a

Ellen Haskell, in personal conversation with the author, 20 October 2020. From the plural ‘let us make the human being’, the great medieval Jewish commentator Rashi declares that ‘we learn of the humility of God. . . . [T]he great one should consult with, request permission from the small one . . . the angelic court’. Cited in Avivah G. Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 4–5. 12 13

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verb meaning ‘to help’, does not imply female subordination. Five times the same word appears as or in the proper name of a man (Exod. 18.4; 1 Chron. 4.4; 12.9; Neh. 3.19; 12.42; and the prophet Ezra); it describes a woman only twice. Most often, however, the word describes God (at least thirteen times: Exod. 18.4; Deut. 33.7, 26, 29; Pss. 33.20; 70.5; 84.19; 115.9-11; 121.2; 124.8; Hos. 13.9) with epithets like ‘shield’ (five times), ‘deliverer’ or ‘saviour’ (twice), ‘mighty, chosen, exalted’ (Ps. 84.19), and ‘creator’ (Pss. 121.2; 124.8). So, this helper is no subordinate, but overwhelmingly God; a mighty shield and an exalted saviour; and if human, most often male. Those usages make clear that the helper fit for any particular adamah, earthling, human being, is primarily God. They suggest that the best analogue for the role of the woman is not a subordinate but God in whose image God created her. The older language of the English marriage rite (from the Book of Common Prayer, 1552) seems almost to remember that the ‘helpmeet’ needed by the human being is first of all God when it requires the groom to ‘worship’ his wife: ‘With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow’. The usages of the word ʻêzer suggest that, apart from and under God, the human partner for a particular human being may be of any gender fit for that person. Because in the text an ʻêzer is most often gendered male, we see that it ought not to be limited to women, but that the pair male–female, like all the other pairs – light–darkness, day–night and land–water – must not be read exclusively, like a binary, but rather inclusively, as a spectrum, where the creative agency of God extends to everything in between. Thomas Aquinas sums up our account like this: It is said [in Gen. 1.4-7] that God ‘distinguished the light from the darkness’, and ‘divided (divisit) the waters from the waters’. Therefore the distinction and multitude of things is from God. . . . For God brought things into being in order that God’s goodness might be communicated to creatures, and be represented by them; and because God’s goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, God produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which exists in God simply and uniformly, in creatures exists manifoldly and separately (divisim), and hence the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever.14

New Testament interpretations of ‘male and female’ So the difference-making of Genesis has been misunderstood. It is not binary. But even more is going on with the pair ‘male and female’, as the New Testament insists. Galatians 3.28, as will be seen, treats it differently even from other apparent binaries. And Ephesians explicitly calls it the image of a mystery. So, if you take the Bible seriously, there is much to resist 1950s-style heteronormative interpretations.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), I, Q. 47, Art. 1. Modified to avoid pronouns for God. 14

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Perhaps the most important verse to late twentieth-century exegesis, Gal. 3.28, says, ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’. The first two pairs have ‘neither . . . nor’ (ouk . . . oude); the last pair correctly quotes the Septuagint (ouk . . . kai) to read ‘no longer male and female’. The last pair is different from the first two. The first two deny a binary with ‘or’. The third pair denies, not an ‘or’ but an ‘and’. It does not want male and female to go away, but it denies the exhaustiveness of the pair ‘male and female’, or what we would now call heterosexism. Just as other Genesis pairs – light and dark, day and night, land and water, heaven and earth – include manifold differences and distinctions and do not reduce to a binary, so too ‘male and female’. Galatians goes a further step to place a denial before the whole male/female system. Christ, Paul, the singleness of missionaries, the expectation of the End, and the whole Christian experiment with monasticism all opt out of the ancient expectation that a man would pair up with a woman to produce children. Neither Jesus nor Paul quotes ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen. 1.28), although Colossians invites Christians to be ‘fruitful in every good work’ (Col. 1.10). Chrysostom observes that the verse (Gen. 1.28) continues ‘and fill the earth’ and declares that the command has been comprehensively fulfilled because the earth is now (already in the fourth century) full.15 Baptism, on the other hand, is a rite of adoption. ‘To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of the human being, but of God’ (Jn 1.12-13). Indeed, the Gospel of John, with the words ‘in the beginning was the Word’, seeks to rewrite Genesis in a christological direction. Those are all radical reorientations of Genesis away from creation and towards the eschaton, away from compulsory procreationism and towards the non-procreative sociality of Jesus and Paul.16 Ephesians 5 uses gendered language to carry that christological reorientation both further than and back to creation’s mystery. In both Galatians and Ephesians, the New Testament writer subjects the Genesis ‘male and female’ to what Stanley Hauerwas has called christological discipline. ‘In Christ there is no male and female’, says Gal. 3.28, interpreting Genesis. Ephesians too subordinates Genesis to Christ in describing how a man leaves his mother and father and is joined to his wife: ‘This mystery [the creation of the human being as male and female] is a profound one, and I am saying it refers to Christ and the church’ (Eph. 5.32). Ephesians makes Christ and the church the realities referred to, and husband and wife the signs that refer. It interprets male-and-female typologically, as an icon or symbol, even if it uses gendered language. In the words of the wedding rite, the covenant of marriage ‘signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and his church’. The analogy recognizes Christ and the church as the realities, not male and female gender.17 The passage invokes male and female not to confine them, but to explode them, to make them point to something else, something more transcendent. Thus the passage does not reify them: it relativizes and transcends them.

See John Chrysostom, ‘Sermon on Marriage’, in On Marriage and Family Life, trans. Catharine P. Roth and David Anderson (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 85. 16 See Eugene F. Rogers Jr., Sexuality and the Christian Body (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 195–218. 17 Here I draw from Eugene F. Rogers Jr., ‘Same-Sex Complementarity: A Theology of Marriage’, The Christian Century 128, no. 10 (2011): 26. 15

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Is Genesis about unchanging states? The idea is widespread that if God ‘made’ trans people in accord with their body shape or hormonal disposition, they ‘ought not’ to change. But the whole being of a creature is to change. God alone is an unmoved mover; creatures are moved movers: they live by growing. According to Irenaeus, the earliest major Christian theologian of creation, writing about the year 180 ce, trying to trap human beings in the ‘state’ in which they began is to misunderstand what it means to be created. To be created is not a ‘state’ at all: to be created is to grow. For something created to remain unchanged is a self-contradictory idea; in fact, he writes that those who hold it ‘are dumber than the dumb beasts’. Irenaeus was talking about Gnostics, but he might have been talking about trans people when he explained: Someone [someone transphobic] might say, ‘Why is this? Was God unable to make [this human being] perfect from the start?’ [The complainer] should realize that . . . the things [God] made had to be lesser than God . . . precisely because they were to be made and have a beginning. . . . God himself certainly could have provided humanity with perfection from the beginning. Humanity, however, was immature and unable to lay hold of it. . . . Through God’s immense goodness, some [creatures] develop, continue for a long time, and reach the glory of the uncreated. . . . The perfect is the uncreated, God. It was therefore appropriate for humanity first to be made, being made to grow, having grown to be strengthened. . . . People who do not wait for the period of growth, . . . are completely unreasonable . . . they are ungrateful and never satisfied . . . they override the law of human nature; they already want to be like God the Creator before they even become human beings . . . they are more unreasonable than the dumb animals. The beasts do not blame God for not making them human; rather, by the fact of its creation each gives thanks for being made. We, however, complain that instead of being made gods from the beginning, we are first human and then divine.18 At the other end of Christian history, in 2018, we read something similar in the queer theory of Judith Butler. According to Gerard Loughlin, Butler argues: ‘To be gendered is to be caught up into becoming, into the body reaching for what it will be.’19 He explains: But this thought, while perhaps obscure, is not so difficult for Christian theology. As creatures we are called out of nothingness. We have no being of our own, so must become

Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, 4.38.1, 3–4, in Theological Anthropology, ed. Patout Burns (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), 23–5. 19 Gerard Loughlin, ‘Being Creature, Becoming Human: Contesting Oliver O’Donovan on Transgender, Identity and the Body’, ABC Religion and Ethics, accessed 17 January 2021, https://www​.abc​.net​.au​/religion​/being​-creature​-becoming​ -human​-contesting​-oliver​-odonovan​-on​-tran​/10214276. The quotation comes from Loughlin, not Butler. My student Miller Faw has asked how it includes agender identified people in becoming. I think Butler anticipated that question when she wrote that words like ‘gender’ should not be banished but should be ‘repeated, repeated subversively, and removed from contexts of oppression and violence to mobilize the signifier for an alternative production’. Agender identified people repeat the word ‘gender’ in negating the word; in so doing they subvert it, attempt to remove it from contexts of oppression, and mobilize it to do something new. In that way they too use (subvert and remobilize) gender in the process of becoming – for everyone. 18

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what we are to be. But as creatures who are made in the image of God – which is to say, for Christian thought, in the image of the image of God, Jesus Christ – we are called and given to union with God, to reflect God to God. This is what it is to be human; and becoming human is what we are given to be as creatures of God. ‘Becoming’ becomes the vehicle for humanity, a humanity that is as unknown as the God who calls it to be, but in which we live and move and have our being.20 Thus, from one end of Christian history to another, it is a fundamental and heretical (Gnostic) misunderstanding that humans are to remain as they are made. Creation, to repeat, is not a state; it is a principle of change; it is a dynamism; it is a vocation to grow. The parable of the talents (Mt. 25.14-30) suggests that the danger lies rather in failing to grow rather than in avoiding change. Those who remain as they were born may be like the poor servant who buried his lord’s treasure, his talents, in the ground, and said: ‘“I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours”. But his master answered him, “You wicked and slothful servant! . . . Cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”’ (Mt. 25.25-26, 30).

Is Genesis about hierarchy? Genesis is also used to defend hierarchy between men and women on two grounds: the creation of Eve, in one of the stories, out of the side of Adam (Gen. 2.18-25), and the prediction of God that ‘your husband shall rule over you’ (Gen. 3.16). Both arguments for divinely-appointed hierarchy are overblown. The story of the creation of Eve out of Adam’s side is just one of two accounts. In the earlier account (Gen. 1.27), God creates the man and the woman equally and at the same time out of the earth creature (ha-’adam). We cannot favour a hierarchical reading of Genesis 2 and still honour Genesis 1. One may well ask whose interests it serves to favour the hierarchical reading.21 We have already seen that the word for a ‘helper’ or ‘helpmate’ (ʻêzer) used in Gen. 2.18 is more often a man than a woman and far more often God than a human being. From the overwhelming number of usages identifying the one who helps the human being as God, we see that the word most often denotes a superior – the better to help us. Many traditional interpretations make the obvious point that the creation of Eve out of Adam’s side places her by his side, that is, as a companion, an equal, if not (as other instances of the word would suggest) a superior come down to help him. Indeed, the Christian Bible exhibits not one but two cases in which God produces a second human being asexually from a single progenitor; the other case is the birth of Jesus from Mary the virgin. To make Adam superior to Eve because he came first makes about as much sense as to make Mary superior to Christ because she comes first. Christianity has called Mary the ‘Mother of God’, but it has not made her superior to her son; rather, the reverse.

Loughlin, ‘Being Creature, Becoming Human’. I owe this question to Miller Faw, via personal communication.

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I have emphasized the reasons to suppose that the text elevates rather than subordinates the woman primarily as a provocation. We have rightly come to suspect men’s elevation of women as a false superiority, putting women on a pedestal from which they cannot climb down.22 That false, ironic superiority men have so often awarded to women is clearly a sign of the fall. Whatever we egalitarian, Enlightenment readers may think, the text of Genesis plays with tropes of hierarchy in order to subvert and reverse them: God in Genesis is a trickster who prefers second sons, clever daughters, and the halt of speech (Moses) to lead God’s people. The text of Genesis opens the possibility that the joke is on the man so that the pedestal plays unwitting witness to the qualities that the narrative actually or puckishly ascribes to Eve. Genesis 3 suggests that there, too, the second human being is higher than the first. In Gen. 3.6, it is the woman who is described as seeing that ‘the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise’; Genesis does not describe Adam as noticing anything. It is Eve who ‘took of its fruit and ate’, and Eve who ‘gave some to her husband, and he ate’ (Gen. 3.6). Thus, Eve shows intelligence, agency, and leadership; Adam is entirely passive. Adam is a milquetoast. But wait, you may say, Eve sinned. Yes, she did; and Adam sinned also. Genesis characterizes the sinners differently: Eve has qualities; Adam has none. Eve shares, Adam receives. Eve has character; Adam remains blank. There is nothing in the story to suggest that Eve’s intentions are worse. If so, God might have accepted Adam’s excuse: ‘The woman whom thou gavest to me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate’. But God does not excuse Adam. God holds both guilty. Adam is guilty because he ‘listened to the voice of his wife’ instead of thinking for himself, because of his passivity, his failure to use the intelligence, agency, and leadership that presumably God had made available also to him. In the reverse of the usual gendering of sins, it is Eve who shows pride, while Adam’s sin is sloth. Because they mislead and blame one another, they shall both ‘eat dust’ (Gen. 3.14) and experience ‘enmity’ (Gen. 3.15). Those are signs of their fall; or, as Phyllis Trible describes it, ‘a love story gone awry’.23 God does predict that Eve’s husband ‘shall rule over you’ (Gen. 3.16). The passage is clearly aetiology. Its role is to explain, after the fact, why women labour in childbirth and men sweat in the field. There is much to explain here. But the heart of the explanation is: by comparison with life in the Garden, it appears that pain, suffering, and enmity need not be. They are consequences of sin. Likewise, the resulting superiority of men over women is no part of God’s good creation. Sexism does not belong to the order of creation. It belongs to the reign of sin. No one interpretation can exhaust the riches of this passage. Myriads of interpretations exist. And yet a hallmark of good interpretations is the ability to detect irony. It is ironic that the character with less apparent intelligence and initiative, Adam, should come to rule over the character to whom the story ascribes more. It is ironic that the one marked by sloth, Adam, should come to work in the field. It is ironic, finally, that God issues two curses – ‘in pain you shall bring forth children’ and ‘in the sweat of your face you shall eat bread’ – that both Jewish

For examples of this tendency in nineteenth-century German romanticism, see Marilyn C. Massey, Feminine Soul: The Fate of an Ideal (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985). 23 Phyllis Trible, ‘A Love Story Gone Awry’, in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 72–143. 22

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and Christian traditions suggest will come to be for a blessing.24 Birth leads to the patriarchs and Israel, God’s chosen people, as well as, for Christians, to God’s chosen Child; bread becomes for the Israelites the blessing of manna, for rabbinic Jews the occasion of the most frequent blessing, and, for Christians, the occasion of the Eucharist, the most powerful sacrament. The fruit of Eve’s womb becomes God’s people, and the sweat of Adam’s toil becomes the sign of their blessing. We would not now want to reduce women to childbearing or men to farming, but we can still recognize that the story ironizes both those curses for good. In that context of so many ironies, we cannot suppose that God’s curse shows how God wants things to be or how they must remain. Genesis 3 identifies sexual hierarchy, like other types of pain and suffering, as part of the problem with human beings, something that God is working to redeem. If we misread the story as if it instituted a hierarchy willed by God (or a binary differentiation that exhausts the possibilities of gender), the misreading exhibits sin rather than repairing it. All interpretations of the fall are affected by the fall.25 God’s intention is that distinctions ‘many and various’ (Heb. 1.1) should be for blessing. Ephesians 5 paints a gendered picture of redemption, in which the man and woman in a cross-sex marriage represent Christ and the church: ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church’ (Eph. 5.31-32). The author writes that Christ and the church are the transcendent realities. They are more real than the gender that the author uses to point to them. The passage does not stabilize gender; it relativizes it. People of all genders may be Christians and represent Christ. People of all genders may be baptized and belong to the church. The passage refers the couple to the two great commandments. They symbolize the love of God (Christ and the church), and they enact the love of the nearest neighbour (‘let each one of you love your spouse as yourself ’).26 In order to represent Christ and the church, they must love each other as they love themselves. They are to symbolize love and practise it. Since any couple can symbolize love if they enact it, the passage uses gender in a way that passes beyond it and leaves it only a stepping stone. Judith Butler says that the way to use the language of gender is not to avoid, freeze, or banish it, but ‘to continue to use it, to use it subversively’, to free it of connections to oppression and violence, and ‘to mobilize the signifier in the service of an alternative production’.27 This is what Ephesians 5 does with gender. It turns the gendered hierarchy left behind by sin into a relationship of love wherein the partner gendered male lays down his sinful power for the sake of the partner gendered female, reversing the power relations to overcome them. The couple come to symbolize not rebellion but love of God; they come to enact not mutual blame but love of nearest neighbour. Genesis does not teach hierarchy, and Ephesians, properly understood, uses the imagery of hierarchy to upend and undo it.

See Eugene F. Rogers Jr., After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 40–44. 25 See Aminah Bradford, ‘Symbiotic Grace: A Holobiont Theology’ (PhD diss., Duke University, 2020). 26 Implying a male reader and a gendered metaphor, the passage reads literally: ‘Let each one of you love his wife as himself ’ (Eph. 5.33a). For more about this passage, see Rogers, ‘Same-Sex Complementarity’, 26–7; Good et al., ‘A Theology of Marriage Including Same-Sex Couples’, 70. 27 Judith Butler, ‘Contingent Foundations’, in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. Seyla Benhabib et al. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 51–2. 24

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Is Genesis about an abstract nature or essence? We have already answered this question. Created nature is about a principle of change. Gerard Loughlin puts it this way: [I]n reading [a conservative moralist] Oliver O’Donovan in the light of [queer theorist] Judith Butler, I am attempting to show that in one sense she is a better theologian than he, because she has not sought to stabilize the movement of bodily desires against what they are called to be. She is open to a becoming that he forecloses, and forecloses not in the name of a revealed order, but in the name of a contingent and counter-factual imagining of nature that occludes the one order that theology discloses: the movement of all being toward its end – and, in particular, the movement of human being toward God, the becoming other that theology names theosis.28 Theosis is change for the human being, change into true fellowship with God. To be made in the image and for the likeness of God is to have a nature that is not fixed, not stable, but radically plastic29 and oriented to not a gender but a mystery. To be in the image of God is to find my destiny in an Other who is not my own, to find my good in an Other outside my control. In the helpmeet – in my ʻêzer who can help me, because my helpmeet is, like God, my aid, who can be my destiny and my good and, in that sense, no subordinate but my superior – I find the human echo with whom I may practise the love of neighbour to prepare for life with God. That is what it means for the human being to be made in the image of God. More precisely, that is what it means for the human beings, plural, to be made in the image of God, together (Gen. 1.27; Ephesians 5). I am made in the image of God because I am destined there. I am made in the image of God not alone but together with others because we are destined there together. My fellow humans are made in the image of God because only they can draw me there – or, amazingly, because only I can draw them there. I find the image of God, and thus I find myself, in my fellow human beings. The other miracle would be if my fellow human beings should find the image of God, and thus themselves, in me. The examples of Jesus and Paul, who neither paired up with anyone nor bore children; the practice of Christian monasticism; and the vision of a heaven in which ‘they neither marry nor or given in marriage’ all suggest that the togetherness cannot be limited to the romantic love of an égoïsme à deux, a selfishness for two. The fact remains that both Genesis and Ephesians make gendering prominent in the creation of human beings in the image of God. That prominence of gender, together with those counterexamples, suggests that gender and sexuality are not final but rather pointing realities. They are signs, signs that diversity and connection are necessary to enter the mystery. They say that God binds us for life with one another to prepare us for life with Godself.

Loughlin, ‘Being Creature, Becoming Human’. See Tanner, Christ the Key, 40–52, 70.

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Further reading Good, Deirdre J., Cynthia B. Kittredge, Willis J. Jenkins, and Eugene F. Rogers Jr. ‘A Theology of Marriage including Same-Sex Couples: A View from the Liberals’. Anglican Theological Review 93, no. 1 (2011): 51–87. Good, Deirdre J., Cynthia B. Kittredge, Willis J. Jenkins, and Eugene F. Rogers Jr. ‘The Liberal Response’. Anglican Theological Review 93, no. 1 (2011): 101–10. Hartke, Austen. ‘God’s Unclassified World: Nonbinary Gender and the Diverse Beauty of Creation’. The Christian Century 135, no. 9 (2018): 27–9. Loughlin, Gerard. ‘Being Creature, Becoming Human: Contesting Oliver O’Donovan on Transgender, Identity and the Body’. ABC Religion and Ethics. Accessed 17 January 2021. https://www​.abc​.net​.au​/ religion​/being​-creature​-becoming​-human​-contesting​-oliver​-odonovan​-on​-tran​/10214276. Moore, Sebastian. ‘The Crisis of an Ethic without Desire’. In Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by Eugene F. Rogers Jr., 157–69. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002. Trible, Phyllis. ‘A Love Story Gone Awry’. In God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 72–143. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978.

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CHAPTER 52 RACE

Willie James Jennings

God did not create races. Humans did. Indeed, humans should understand the creation of race as an act of privation, taking something that is good, distorting it and then presenting the distorted thing as if it were the way things were supposed to be. Peoples forming themselves into groups of family, kin, or clan based on their ways of living in places – this is good. Peoples forming different ways of seeing the world and speaking to and about the world – this is also good. Peoples building different habitats for living and negotiating life in their environments and with other animals; peoples changing and adapting to new conditions to survive and thrive – all this is good. None of these goods needs an idea of race. Peoples have, however, always had ways of distinguishing their group from others, yet these ways did not need an idea of race; that is, they were not isolated to the body and physical appearance, nor were they often very precise, and, most importantly, they were not comprehensive, capturing all peoples in a comparative somatic logic. The modern idea of race represents processes of identification that focus attention on the body as the basis for organizing how one perceives human difference while shifting attention away from land and animals as essential elements in how people identify and know themselves. Modern racial identity, however, is more than an unfortunate development in the history of how people perceive difference. Race is a placeholder for fundamental changes in the way people perceive reality that continues to have devastating effects on the ecosystem and on human relationships. The idea of race as understood today emerged from the fifteenth century onward as peoples, who would now be called Europeans, entered what for them were the unfamiliar worlds of subSaharan Africa, the Americas, the Pacific Islands, Terra Australis, and many other unfamiliar parts of the world. They entered these new places with a strange mixture of vulnerability and great power. The vulnerability showed itself immediately as they were overwhelmed by the immensity of places, the abundance of plants and minerals, the vast variety of animals, the multiplicity of peoples, languages, and ways of life, and the multiple ways indigenous peoples knew, understood, and inhabited their worlds; none of which these Proto-Europeans could quickly comprehend or easily explain. The power of these early Europeans was evidenced in their nautical technology, weaponry, and refined warrior cultures. They also came in feverish greed. It was greed that merged their vulnerability and their power into two desires that would govern the ways these early Europeans engaged the new worlds. They desired to know, and they desired to control. Such desires are not new in the history of the world and of colonialism, but, in this case, these joined desires were embedded in a Christian vision of the world. It was that vision that served as the coalescing energy that allowed modern race to form. The Christians who came to the new worlds understood themselves as the people of God. For a people to imagine themselves as belonging to their deities is not the new thing. What is crucial here is how these Christians came to understand themselves as the people of God. They were the church, a community gathered by God, and destined to replace Israel as the

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people of God. It was God’s intent – in their way of thinking – to move beyond Israel like one removes the shell of something to reach its inner core. God having rejected and replaced Israel with the church, these Christians understood themselves to be at the heart of God’s plan of salvation for the world. This meant that these Christian colonialists believed that they were now at the very centre of what God was doing in the world. This tragic way of thinking has been called ‘supersessionism’, and it simply means to supersede or replace something or someone else. Supersessionism in this regard was not first a doctrine but rather a positionality that framed the way these Christians read scripture, understood doctrine, formulated theologies, and performed Christian practices. Whether one is talking about the Portuguese, or the Spanish, or the Dutch, or the French, or the English, or the Germans, or Catholics, or Protestants – they all imagined the new worlds from a position of centredness. They were at the centre of God’s providential actions in the world and charged by God with a task. They believed that God had given them the responsibility to bring the new worlds to maturity – to mature the body, the soul, and the environment – to make them all productive and able to yield their proper and full fruit in due season. Taking on this divinely assigned task yielded a vision of themselves as teachers and the peoples they encountered as students – always students. The task of teaching requires the work of explaining, and it was precisely in the efforts to make sense of these unfamiliar worlds and peoples, plants and animals, landscapes and horizons that they began to organize their world both conceptually and materially. Organization is the key term here, as these early European colonialists began to describe the differences in the bodies of the indigenes – skin colour, physical features, clothing, customs, languages, and writing systems – in relation to their own bodies. Marking distinctions between bodies based on such things was not new, nor was it new for these early Europeans to have made aesthetic judgements about the beauty or ugliness, appeal or repulsion, of bodies based on appearance. What was new at this moment in human history was the scale and scope of the organization of those differences and who was at the controlling centre of that organization. These colonialists unleashed a comparative logic on indigenous worlds that drew everyone, including themselves, inside that logic. They produced a scale of existence drawing on the existing terminologies of colour to stabilize the plotting of people within this comparative logic. They, the colonialists, were white, and the peoples they encountered could be organized from this whiteness all the way to its opposite – blackness. ‘Whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ were designations that did extraordinary work far beyond describing what would come to be called ‘Europeans’ and ‘Africans’. Whiteness and blackness were framing designations with breathtaking flexibility that could cover multiple peoples, individuals, behaviours, and ways of life. Whiteness and blackness gained this flexibility because these designations were deployed inside a soteriological vision that meant that they borrowed from the flexibility of designating someone or anyone ‘a sinner’ or ‘a saint’, ‘reprobate’ or ‘elect’. All people could be captured in those soteriological designations; so, too, all people could be captured inside racial designation. Such capturing did not mean that everyone could or would be called white or black. It meant that every people and everyone could be descriptively calibrated relative to whiteness or to blackness. That descriptive calibration constituted a racial hermeneutic lens through which to evaluate human physiology and behaviour. It is important to note that these comparative and universalizing designations were not generated by indigenous peoples but were rather imposed on them. Such racial imposition in and of itself 684

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could not stick and become decisive until something else was added – processes that disrupted the identity forming and sustaining realities of peoples. The colonial settlers took the land and shattered the identities of so many indigenous peoples. This is not to say they eradicated the identities of indigenes or that native peoples immediately upon conquest forgot who they were. Indigenous worlds were shattered into pieces because their relationships with the land and animals were broken up into pieces. Colonial settlers enacted a very different idea of possession in their colonial sites than the indigenes did (and do). The idea of ‘possession’ is as ancient as is social life for plants, animals, and humans. But from the beginning of the modern colonial era, that idea in the hands of colonial settlers articulated the logic of their centredness. That centredness issued a sense of responsibility or stewardship that meant the world would become possession in an absolute sense – manageable and controllable. These invading European Christians saw possession through break, separation, and enclosure, whereas native groups saw possession through continuum, connection, and overlap.1 The former is a possession of, the latter a possession by; the former made a claim on something, the latter was claimed by something. This is no small difference because between these two ways of imagining possession, one world is being destroyed, and another world is being created. The indigenous world being destroyed articulated claims to things inside the logic of ‘a commons’, but not a commons in the sense of early Europeans to the new worlds who imagined the commons as small islands of shared land in a sea of feudal holdings.2 This indigenous commons is everywhere, and each people may have claim to this or that place to hunt or gather foods or celebrate or deliberate or listen to the ancestors and/or animal kin. This form of a commons touches tools for use in a logic of sharing, and it touches bodies in shared concern. It also involves a kind of reciprocity with animals, plants, and seasons – each requiring attentiveness and respect. It does not preclude violence or theft or dispute over lands or oppression. It narrates such horrors (when narrations are given) through violations of the commons and attacks on communal or even covenantal bonds.3 The world being created by the colonialists articulated claims to things inside the logic of ‘control’ and ‘commerce’. Commerce, in this regard, follows control, and control has to do with making a world manageable, understandable, and containable. These are the terms through which to see the long deployment of European pastoral practices and agricultural sensibilities in the new worlds.4 It was these practices and sensibilities that shaped their aggressive reformatting of the landscapes of the new world and determined their assessment of native life. The colonial settlers reached two ominous conclusions about native life in the land. First, native peoples did not know how to cultivate specific lands to make them productive; that is,

See Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Robert Nichols, Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). 2 See David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, eds, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (Amherst: Levellers Press, 2012), 114–40. 3 See Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1–64; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 54–81. 4 See Christine M. Delucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 1

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they did not know how to properly farm or build a habitat. And, second, native peoples should be seen in possession of only those lands that were being cultivated and improved. The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) summarized this way of thinking in his Second Treatise of Government, wherein he captured this colonialist sense of possession. In his discussion of property, Locke offered an elegant argument for private property and the taking of land. He said whether one understands it through reason or revelation, God has given to humans the world as resource, as possession in common. Just as humans claim themselves as their first property, so too God commands that humans claim the world. That claim over body and land is enacted through labour. Humans work through their bodies to live, and they work the land for the same purpose. It is that labour that gives life to human claims to life in specific places. As Locke says: ‘Thus Labour, in the Beginning, gave a Right of Property, whereever any one was pleased to imploy it, upon what was common.’5 Locke, in fact, writes of two beginnings, the beginning of God’s creation described in Genesis and the beginning of private property that emanates out of the commons. The human creature may create through labour what God created through grace – life indwelling and life in dwelling. For Locke, anyone who labours may extend their self-possession through the possession of land. Through labour, they may create a space that links ownership to establishing identity. This, according to Locke, is what indigenous peoples did not understand. They did not understand the cultivation and improvement or, in more current language, the development of the land, and therefore they did not understand how to cultivate themselves. ‘Thus’, he says, ‘in the beginning all the World was America’.6 What he means by America, of course, is pre-colonial America – uncivilized, raw, untamed, a world in its natural state and thereby undefined. More importantly, indigenes cannot claim all of America as their own because it is the commons given by God, and only labour secures it to any individual or people. Locke believed he was on solid moral ground because he argued that no one could claim more than that person could use and make productive. No hoarding, unless you plan to sell what you produce; then you may enlarge your possessions, as long as you are turning it towards productivity. Modern racial identity emerged through this new configuration of land and body inside the formation of private property and a vision of a self-constituted by ownership. This shattering of indigenous worlds through conquest and seizure of land and animals recreated the ground, turning it into nameless dirt ready to be given life and purpose. Yet the land, the waterways, the landscape, and the animals all already had names, purpose, and life for indigenous peoples. Indeed, the land was animate and communicative, and animals were kin, connected to the indigenous ancestors and those yet living. The reciprocal relationship between peoples and the land formed the connective tissue that sustained and helped constitute identity. It was the transformation of the land into private property and the denial of its profound connection to identity and the way identity should be formed that allowed racial designations to take root as the new basis of identity. For the colonialists, designating people racially – calibrated to whiteness at the highest end of development and blackness at the sub-human level – coincided with designating the land as fragmentable, sellable plots that may be used in whatever manner the owner saw appropriate and named whatever the owner decided.

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 299. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 301.

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Racial identity replaced the land as the central signifier of identity. Land was made inconsequential in identification processes, and ‘land’ includes water, waterways, animals, landscape, horizons, seasons, wind, and elements. Indigenous peoples were told that none of these environmental realities carried their identities. Their identities were carried wholly on their bodies without remainder. No aspect of identity required essential connection with any particular place for its viability. For the colonialist settlers, all connection to land was voluntary and optional – a fiduciary reality within the logics of transatlantic exchange. Land and body both came to exist inside this voluntaristic schema as mappable objects open to various categorizing regimes. Just as peoples could be plotted between white and black in terms of their potentiality for growth – salvific, moral, and cultural – so too could the land and built environments be calibrated in terms of their utility, beauty, potentiality, and value. Colonial settlers’ connection to and appreciation of the land was formed on top of this voluntarism and commodification. It is crucial to understand the reversal that came with the emergence of racial identity and modern private property – connection to land followed volition, and attachments to place were fundamentally sentimental rather than connection and attachment being constitutive of one’s being and action. Racial identity represented the stripping away of the connective tissue between people and land, bodies and animals, self-perception and perception of life in places, and in so doing, also distorted forms of becoming, critical to establishing realities of belonging. Racial identity at one level formed as an organizing optic, a way of establishing an expansively colonializing regime of evaluation that covered every aspect of existence for peoples. Yet at another level, racial identity formed as a way of organizing ways of becoming; that is, it organized what it meant to achieve human maturity. What does maturity look like – maturity of mind and body, land and animal (use), landscape and building, family and government? The colonialists drew the answer to those questions solely from their own lives and their own bodies. Whiteness solidified as the horrific answer to that question, a question formed exactly at the site of Christian missions. To speak of whiteness is not to speak of particular people but rather of people caught up in a deformed building project aimed at bringing the world to its full maturity. Whiteness was, from the beginning, enacted as a deformed tutelage towards maturity. This deformed tutelage towards maturity functioned like a jealous god, allowing no other visions of maturity to exist in its presence. Colonialists destroyed the visions of maturity of so many peoples by destroying the connection of those visions to land and animal. Every people have a process of becoming – becoming adult, becoming leader, and entering their calling, their vocation – and all of this is made visible by their life in the land. For so many peoples, the process of becoming aligns with life with the land. Children learning from their elders how to listen to the land and the animals become the leaders of their people, then they become the elders that guide; then, when they die, they become stories that are told as they join the eternal presence that covers the ground and surrounds the people. The ancestors speak from the ground, move through the wind and sky, and are felt in the rain. They sound with the animals. From the ground, humans come, and to the ground, humans return. The quality and character of a life are calibrated by that movement from, through, and to the earth. For so many peoples of the world, ‘becoming’ required the earth, the ground, the water, the sky, the animals, the days and seasons, the snow and rain, sun and heat, morning and evening, stones and mountains, trees and forests, lakes and rivers. The becoming that they lived moved 687

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in and out of these things and more. But if all these things and more are taken away – if land and animal, earth and sky as they knew it are taken away – how will they become, become fully aware, fully alive, fully attuned to the wisdom of their people, fully mature? The Christian settlers had an answer to that question because they (thought they) knew what all indigenous peoples needed to become – Christian, civilized, and thereby marked by a salvific progress, positioned as close to whiteness as possible. The most important thing in the world, in this Christianized way of thinking, was to allow oneself to be moved towards the maturity of whiteness. It was precisely this commitment to a life aimed at maturity that joined visions of salvation to ideas of the transformation of lands and peoples and together formed visions of Christian missions. From the beginning of colonialism, salvation and the transformation of land and peoples were coupled together, and that coupling turned Christianity’s creative powers against itself. Christian faith is about new life in Christ and forming life inside that newness. Now the new situation of colonial power enfolded the newness that is Christian faith within the newness that was the transformation of land and people, earth and animal, that would be signified by racial existence. Racial identity was not simply a change in how people perceived human differences. It was a difference in how people perceived change. The problem is not that things change. Things change; one could even say things evolve. Nor is the problem the impulse to transform; transformation is not inherently evil. The horror here begins in denying the voice and vision of peoples who inhabit place and their wisdom regarding what should be the shape of change and transformation. The horror continues in the emergence of a form of creating that destroys creation. This is not the logic of breaking eggs to make omelettes, that is, recognizing that some destruction is always inherent in creation. The logic of this trajectory destroys the life of chickens by distorting their bodies to maximize egg production. It drives creation and processes of creating towards death. This trajectory of transformation captured the good energy of Christian conversion, redirecting it towards the destructive operations of commodification and fragmentation that would shape the ways people saw themselves – their bodies, their minds, their sexualities, and their souls – and their growth towards maturity.

Raced bodies Racial bodies were, first and foremost, saleable bodies. New world slavery was not new slavery but a new formation of people into slaves. Colonial settlers in the new world and their collaborators in the old worlds of Europe established a new justification for enslaving African and indigenous peoples rooted in racial difference. Enslaving, in this regard, followed the logic of the racial scale and the illogic of racial existence. It was fundamentally illogical to believe that dark bodies should be enslaved, but it was logical, given the racial scale, to believe that such bodies could and should be instrumentalized to realize their value and their potential. This meant that new world slavery promoted less a conquest logic of war and more a resource logic of conquest. Slavery, in this regard, did not result from being the losers of a war but was a condition of one’s very being. Seeing the black body as ‘resource’ – poised for constant exploitation, remaking, and deployment – bound Africans and all who were deemed like them to a permanent slave condition. This also meant that manumission and freedom existed in a strange space – legally, economically, physically, and spiritually. One could be freed from 688

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slavery but not from racial existence, and therefore the body remained captured within the racial scale that defined life between white and black. Bodies within the racial scale were constantly subjected to economic and developmental calculations, with European colonial settlers being the ones generating the calculus. Being both source and point of reference for the calculation, Europeans placed themselves in the supreme position as judges and adjudicators. For African slaves and for indigenous peoples, their worth had to be waged – argued for, demonstrated, and justified. It was never assumed. This racial works-righteousness was comprehensive, moving from labour to life, from vocations to visions of the true, the good, the beautiful, and the noble. The racial body formed as a body in measure – or, more precisely, in mismeasure – is always oriented by whiteness towards the image of the white body. As the centuries unfolded, the racial body has come to exist in an aesthetic hierarchy with white bodies and lighter-skinned black bodies (with classically understood European features) positioned at the pinnacle of preference – of beauty, of attraction, of veneration. Flowing from that pinnacle of preference have been the currents of exotica moving more or less strongly through nonwhite bodies depending on how they are positioned in relation to the black body. These currents mean that nonwhite bodies have been attributed with characteristics that express the volatility, wildness, passion, and danger of undomesticated animals, and they have been assigned the task of assimilating towards a whiteness that would mitigate the signatures of bodies associated with the animality of blackness.

Raced minds What is the mind? This classic philosophical question received a diabolical answer through the European colonial settler. The mind is whatever the European colonial settler said it was, and in this way, the mind, for all intents and purposes, was the creation of the European. More precisely, the European created the category of intelligence, created the means through which intelligence is cultivated and expressed – that is, education – and provided the means through which that intelligence is identified and measured – that is, modes of evaluation. This is not to say that indigenous peoples and all those who were to be made colonial subjects had no idea of intelligence, no forms of education, and no practices of evaluation before the European arrived in their lands. But, as noted earlier, those realities of knowledge and knowledge formation were, for the most part, set aside or, worst, denounced and destroyed as colonial settlers established a new order of knowing and understanding things. This new order was fundamentally a new order of evaluation rooted in the basic realities of languages and writing systems. As the European colonial settlers looked out on their new worlds, they determined which indigenous peoples and individuals not only had the ability to learn but also who it was appropriate to educate. Indigenous peoples were brought under heavy tutelage that exaggerated the rote character of education, pressing into them a reality of repetition that aimed to have them mirror the European beyond thought and into their dispositions, manners, and moods. Such repetition was the prerequisite to being recognized as a human being and even to selfrecognition. In this regard, learning the languages of the European and unlearning indigenous languages served as the gateway to knowledge and intelligence. For so many indigenous peoples, a terrible task lay ahead for them: they would need to learn the languages of the colonialists and, by doing so, step into a world that had already formed images of who they 689

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(as indigenous people) were, images both derogatory and damaging, formed by some of the most articulate and powerful European intellectuals of their times. Indigenous peoples would have to wrestle against those images while working hard not to succumb to Eurocentric world views. But how do you free yourself from derogatory images while existing in a vision of freedom constituted in whiteness? Whiteness, in this regard, refers less to European languages and writing systems themselves and more to the evaluative frameworks they enable that determine who is authorized to speak and to be heard. Racial minds signify visions of intelligence and intellect that centre on Europe and Europeans and drive forward educational endeavours that continue to canonize Europeans’ thoughts, writings, insights, and perceptions while excluding, marginalizing, and devaluing the knowledges and ways of knowing of nonwhite peoples. It is difficult to grasp the racialized character of colonially formed western education because one is always inside its results as well as in the historic heroic work and ongoing efforts of so many people to turn education from a tool of racial assimilation into a weapon of liberation for all people. Yet this honourable work stands within the continued legacy of racialized bodies and minds.

Raced sexualities The sexualities of indigenous peoples, especially the African, were fabrications of the European. Much like bodies and minds, the sexuality formed in the vision of colonial settlers and their supporters in the old world of Europe emerged between the operations of commodification and fragmentation. This was sexuality that was sellable, not simply in terms of the logics of prostitution but also in ways that were manageable, portable, and translatable into various domestic schemas of the European. The domestic schemas formed by the white colonial settlers negated the complex ways indigenous peoples loved and negotiated love, struggled with and cared for each other, and lived together. In place of these ways, colonial settlers inserted heteronormative regimes. Those regimes established a racial patriarchy in which indigenous peoples would be pressed to conform to an idealized domestic arrangement that positioned the father as the fount of authority and order for the home, an order that flowed from him through the wife down to the children, and to the servants and slaves all the way to the animals and the ground itself in its cultivation and productivity. Thus, normative sexuality was productive sexuality that would yield children, control the modes of production and labour of women, and turn animals and the land itself into sites of constant exploitation. This was sexuality as a resource that needed monitoring, control, and proper deployment for its most effective use – from pleasure to production. The sexualities of nonwhite bodies in this regard presented a somatic wilderness that, if left untamed and unchecked, would corrupt white bodies, drawing them back towards their most primitive impulses evacuated of the controlling power of reason. Christianity served as the controlling centre of these domestic schemas and presented the faith, especially to indigenous peoples, as a set of spiritual technologies created by God to discipline the body. This meant that Christian missionaries and other colonial settlers presented sexuality in a derogative mode, and indigenous peoples’ cultural expression, practice, and being were forced to be abandoned and reconceptualized within Eurocentric mores. Having sexuality presented between racial fabrication and exploitation on the one side and policing and controlling Christian regimes on the other side meant that many nonwhite 690

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peoples were forced into a strange negotiation with practices of love and self-love. Given the racial formation of bodies, minds, and sexualities, many nonwhite peoples would have to face the relentless challenge to not hate themselves and venerate white people. Of course, love and self-love have been powerful realities among nonwhite peoples, but too many African diaspora and indigenous communities continue to be menaced by legacies of the sexual politics of racial existence. This is not to suggest that patriarchal practices and destructive sexual politics are solely the inventions of the colonial moment. The colonial moment presents a fresh rearranging and multiple reconfigurations of those practices and politics, as well as the introduction of new toxic elements.

Raced souls The Christianity formed in and by colonialism, as noted earlier, enacted a pedagogical imperialism that looked at the peoples of the world as perpetual students, needing constant instruction in the faith and in how to live life. By mapping the distinction of teacher/student across racial difference (white/nonwhite), Christian colonial settlers formed a vision of Christian community that cultivated racial difference at the site of faith and theological education and thereby perpetuated a relentless segregation even in colonial communities where people worshipped together.7 This was a segregation first of the mind and the spirit whereby even a shared faith did not translate into a shared and equal existence in God but nurtured a racial hierarchy resourced by a relentless Eurocentrism. This left indigenous peoples and Africans of the colonial diaspora with a tragic choice – aim their lives towards assimilation in a faith that meant assimilation into whiteness or enact, if possible, a segregation of the body that was consistent with the segregation of the mind and spirit that they experienced in the presence of white Christians. The possibility of separated sabbaths, that is, separate congregations formed in racial difference, depended on their legality. Even though some did, many colonial sites did not allow African slaves or indigenous people to gather in worship or as church alone and without white supervision. African diaspora slaves in North America and elsewhere, however, formed hush harbours or bush arbours, places in secluded wooded areas where they could worship freely beyond the surveillance and control of white masters and their allies. As the illegality of separate African diaspora and indigenous churches gave way, white colonial settlers and their progeny strengthened the logics of segregation as they deepened their commitment to racial difference through social, economic, geographic, and educational policies and practices that codified that racial difference. This has meant that racial difference has been an inner logic in the common life of churches in the western world around which has coalesced a sense of what is normal or natural, what is comfortable, and what is safe, all within an abiding homogeneity. Racial homogeneity modulated into cultural homogeneity, and now vast numbers of Christians imagine that monocultural or quasi-monocultural churches are a signature of creation itself – just as God created peoples, God wills the formation of churches

See Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2020). 7

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of separate peoples. There has always been a pragmatic side to this belief as many people of colour developed separate (though rarely rigidly segregated) spaces of support, affirmation, and safety from racial oppression and violence. Yet these developments connect the formation of racial difference to the structures of antagonism and violence aligned with that difference. People justify segregated sabbaths with rationales drawn from implicit doctrines of creation that locate human difference very close to racial difference. There has always been conceptual slippage between the ideas of race, culture, and ethnicity because concepts of race are, in fact, the progenitors of modern ideas of culture and ethnicity. Such ideas inevitably are proxies for the idea of race and often serve as crucial linchpins in arguments for the appropriateness of segregated churches and communities. To say that people prefer to be with people of their own culture or ethnicity remains a powerful racial argument. Conclusion Race is real because it is a way of seeing the world, and in this regard functions like a shadow doctrine of creation. Christians and their theologians face three dilemmas in trying to address the continuing power of the racial imagination in the western world. First, there is the problem of racial vision’s optical power. How do you show people that the way they see is itself destructive? The racial optic is not simply of the body, but it is also simultaneously of the land and animal. The extent to which humans have been trained to see themselves as bodies separated, distanced, and displaced from land and animal and, to a certain extent, the ecosystem itself, is also the exact depth within which humans are trapped in racial vision. Racial vision turned difference (of bodies) into distance (between bodies and between the rest of creation). This means that the fundamental reality of connectivity to land and environment through which identities should be constituted as porous realities of relationality – open to expansion through meeting, touch, and communion – has been loss to so many people and completely unknown or unimagined by many others. Second, there is the problem of whiteness as a preferred way of being-in-the-world. Europeans formed whiteness as an imperial position from which to imagine the world and to enact, by means of violence and control, that imagination. Yet whiteness as a way of beingin-the-world is also a way of seeing the world that exists comfortably in its concealment. This means that those who identify as white tend to have an exceedingly difficult time identifying and addressing the problem of whiteness because they often have an exceedingly difficult time seeing whiteness as a problem, given its historical advantages as a form of identity. Third, racial identity has made it very difficult for people to imagine a life together that is neither assimilated life nor segregated life, but a form of togetherness that joins humans in ways that create a shared project of living, learning, and becoming. Too many parts of the world are still captured in forms of becoming and maturing, still governed by whiteness, and reveal the legacies of colonialism. Further reading Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 692

Race Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Lake, Marilyn and Henry Reynolds. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Sechrest, Love L., Johnny Ramírez-Johnson, and Amos Yong, eds. Can ‘White’ People be Saved? Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2018. Strings, Sabrina. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Sullivan, Shannon and Nancy Tuana, eds. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Vial, Theodore. Modern Religion, Modern Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

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CHAPTER 53 CREATION AND DAO A THEODAOIAN PERSPECTIVE Heup Young Kim (Kim Hŭb-yŏng)

Like the logos (word, speech, reason) in western theology, the Dao (the Way) is the overarching concept in East Asian religious thinking, as expressed in Confucianism and Daoism. Unlike other theistic world religions, Confucianism and Daoism arise from a sapiential paradigm centred on Dao’s thought and spirituality. Furthermore, they have views on the creation (precisely, cosmogony) of the universe akin to the Christian doctrine of creation but with different nuances. This chapter discusses the challenges and complementary measures that the Daoian view of cosmogony can contribute to a Christian doctrine of creation. First, it introduces Confucianism and Daoism as the third paradigm of world religions, considering western scholarship’s interpretations of Dao. It presents theo-dao (a theology of Dao) as an East Asian contextual theology that adopts the Dao as its root metaphor, as western theologies (theo-logos) have done with the logos. It then explicates early Daoist and Neo-Confucian thoughts on creation, examining their challenges and alternative insights into the traditional Christian doctrine of creation and highlighting the following topics: meontology of nothingness, complementary opposites (the Great Ultimate), primordiality of chaos, preferential option for yin, and humanity as cosmic/ecological being-in-togetherness.

Confucianism/Daoism: Third great paradigm of world religions Although long neglected by the dominant dipolar view of world religions, Confucianism and Daoism, broad and complex religio-cultural traditions with a history longer than Christianity by about five centuries, represent a distinctive feature of East Asian religious culture. More precisely, Neo-Confucianism, a reformed Confucianism in synthesis with Daoism, is recognized as ‘the common background of the peoples of East Asia’ and ‘the most plausible rationale’ in attempting to understand the attitude of ‘the inward-looking civilization of East Asia’,1 namely, Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore. So Tu Wei-ming states: ‘East Asians may profess themselves to be Shintoists, Taoists, Buddhists, Muslims, or Christians, but by announcing their religious affiliations seldom do they cease to be Confucians.’2

Wm. Theodore de Bary, East Asian Civilizations: A Dialogue in Five Stages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 44. 2 Tu Wei-ming, Confucianism in a Historical Perspective (Singapore: The Institute of East Asian Philosophies, 1989), 3. 1

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Accordingly, Hans Küng made a helpful correction to the geography of world religions. Instead of the generally accepted dipolar view of Middle Eastern (West Asian) and Indian (Middle Asian) religions, he argued for a tripolar view that includes East Asian religions such as Confucianism and Daoism. He claimed that Confucianism and Daoism are the third great paradigm of world religions (‘a third independent religious river system’) of East Asian origin and sapiential character, comparable to the other two great religious paradigms.3 In contrast, the first great paradigm (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) is of West Asian (Semitic) origin and prophetic character, and the second paradigm (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc.) is of Middle Asian origin and mystical character.

Dao (Tao) Like the logos in western thought, the Dao4 (usually meaning ‘the Way’) is a central concept in East Asian (traditionally, Neo-Confucian) countries.5 It is a holistic notion with multiple meanings that are hard to define and that are challenging to modern people accustomed to analytical and critical thinking. Although many misunderstand that Dao is only related to Daoism, Dao is an all-embracing umbrella concept that other religions in East Asia widely use – the Dao of Confucianism, the Dao of Buddhism, and the Dao of Christianity are among such uses. Among western scholars, Herbert Fingarette and C. S. Lewis have presented valuable definitions of Dao in English. On the one hand, Fingarette defined the Dao in a Confucian way, interpreting Confucius’ Analects: ‘Tao [Dao] is a Way, a path, a road, and by common metaphorical extension it becomes in ancient China the right Way of life, the Way of governing, the ideal Way of human existence, the Way of the Cosmos, the generative-normative Way (Pattern, path, course) of existence as such.’6 Conversely, Lewis presented a more ontological understanding in a Daoist way: The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or . . . ideologies . . . all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from

See Hans Küng and Julia Ching, Christianity and Chinese Religions, trans. Peter Beyer (New York: Doubleday, 1989), xi–xv. 4 Generally, its character (道) is romanized as ‘Dao’ (Pinyin) or ‘Tao’ (Wade-Giles). For Chinese characters in what follows, I basically follow the Pinyin romanization system but also use romanizations according to Korean pronunciation for some terms special in the Korean context, such as T’aegŭk (太極, Taiji; the Great Ultimate). 5 Although Dao is an all-embracing term in East Asian thought, what follows arises primarily from Korean Daoist and Neo-Confucian contexts. 6 Herbert Fingarette, Confucius – The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 19. 3

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their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.7 Lewis’ thought has attracted attention under challenges from transhumanism that urge the maximum use of science and technology to engineer human enhancement and evolution to the next stage of Homo sapiens – the post-human.8 However, such movements utilizing radical biohacking were anticipated even at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1940s, Lewis had already foreseen the danger of such arising scientism, emboldened by an Enlightenment mentality. In response to this particular challenge, Lewis proposed a turn to the thought of Dao rather than that of western Christianity.

Theo-dao: An East Asian contextual theology As a twenty-eighth-generation descendant of a Korean Confucian family converted to Christianity, I have engaged in Confucian–Christian dialogue since undertaking doctoral studies. The first study defended the thesis that ‘in the light of Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529) and Karl Barth (1886–1968), Neo-Confucian self-cultivation and Christian sanctification are thickly resemblant views of a common issue – how to be fully human’. It also showed that both of them used the Dao mode of theology, namely, ‘in search for the Tao of a new cosmic humanity’.9 This led to the formulation of theo-dao (a theology of Dao) by applying the Dao as theology’s root metaphor. It represented a way of owning up to one’s own metaphors.10 If theo-logy (theologos) entails the relationship between ‘God and logos’, theo-dao does likewise between ‘God and Dao’. Since its character (道) consists of two parts, the head (首) and movement (辶), Dao, etymologically, means the unity of knowing and acting (知行合一). It converges with Barth’s insistence on the unity of theology (knowing) and ethics (acting). The dualism between logos (word) and praxis (deed) is a central problem in western theologies inherited from dualistic Greek thought and subsequently promotes a dilemma in contemporary global theology between theo-logos (classical theologies) and theo-praxis (liberationist theologies). Therefore, I advocated a constructive theology of Dao (theo-dao) as a third paradigm for advancing global theology by overcoming this persistent dualism.11 Put simply, both theo-logos and theo-praxis are related to the substantialist-essentialist and either–or (either logos or praxis) mode of western thinking. Theo-logos is doctrinal (knowledge-oriented), while theo-praxis is ideological (action-oriented). By contrast, the Dao, referring to the unity of knowing and acting, transcends the dualism of logos and praxis. To summarize in terms of the three cardinal virtues in 1 Corinthians 13: faith is for theo-logos (a faith-seeking-understanding, focusing on ortho-doxy, on right doctrine for the church), hope

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man: Or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 28–9. 8 See Heup Young Kim, A Theology of Dao (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2017), 238–59. 9 See Heup Young Kim, Wang Yang-ming and Karl Barth: A Confucian-Christian Dialogue (Lanham: University Press of America, 1996), 175–88. 10 See Kim, A Theology of Dao, 3–13. 11 See Kim, A Theology of Dao, 14–33. 7

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is for theo-praxis (a hope-seeking-action, focusing on orthopraxis, the right action for the reign of God), and love is for theo-dao (a love-seeking-dao, focusing on ortho-dao, the right way/wisdom of life).12 Furthermore, the term ‘Dao’ is biblical (at least for the concerns of christology), as it is homologous to the biblical Greek term hodos (‘way, road, highway’ as a place; ‘way, journey’ as an action; ‘way of life, way of acting, conduct’; ‘the whole way of life’).13 Jesus never identified himself as the logos but rather as the hodos, saying, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life’ (Jn 14.6). Although John used the term logos (the Word) in Jn 1.1, it does not refer to its logos-centric reductions but rather has a closer connotation to the Hebrew term dabar, which underlines action. Although both terms express ‘the Word’, dabar focuses more on the deed (wisdom), whereas logos focuses on reason (knowledge and order).14 By using logos as the root metaphor, western theology became doctrinal, intellectual, and theoretical, overlooking the importance of praxis (deed and action), a hermeneutical root cause for the rise of liberation theologies (theo-praxis). Even in Jn 1.1, hence, Dao, with the meaning of the unity of knowledge and action, could be said to be more appropriate than is the term logos.

Daoian creation: Cosmogony Theology divides the creation narratives into two stages, the first creation (creatio prima) and the second creation (creatio secunda). The first creation refers to Gen. 1.1-2, whereas the second designates the further specific creation, including humans. The first creation depicts the creation of heaven and earth from nothing, the situation described as formless and void (ṯōhū wā-ḇōhū) and marked by darkness or obscurity (wəḥōšeḵ) over the face of the deep (alpənê ṯəhôm), and by the activity of a wind or spirit or breath (wərûaḥ) from God. Hence, the creatio prima entails four important themes comparable to the Daoian15 cosmogony – creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo), chaos before forming the cosmos, the duality of light and darkness (heaven and earth), and the mysterious work of ruach (breath, wind, and spirit).

The three theological paradigms with the three root metaphors can be compared as following:

12

Root metaphor

Theology

Christology

Metaphor

Character

Objective

Logos

Theo​-logy​

Chri​sto-l​ogy

F​aith

​Under​stand​ing (doctrine)

Orthodoxy

Praxi​s

The​o-pra​xis

C​hrist​o-pra​xis

H​ope

A​ction​ (ideology)

Orthopraxis

Dao

Theo-dao

Christo-dao

Love

Living (way of life)

Orthodao

William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature: A Translation and Adaptation of the Fourth Revised and Augmented Edition of Walter Bauer’s ‘GriechischDeutsches Wörterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments und der übrigen urchristlichen Literatur’, 2nd edn (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 553–5. 14 See George R. Beasley-Murray, John (Waco: Word Books, 1987), 9. 15 This chapter uses ‘Daoian’ as a term distinct from ‘Daoist’. ‘Daoian’ is an adjective and refers to the Dao as a general East Asian (and Korean) concept beyond Daoism, while ‘Daoist’ is related to Daoism, especially as a structural religion. 13

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The first chapter of Dàodéjīng, a Chinese text traditionally credited to the sixth-century bce sage Lao Tzu, states: ‘Non-being is the origin of Heaven and Earth; Being is the mother of all things’.16 Another ancient Chinese text, Zhuangzi, dating from around 476–221 bce, also states: ‘In the Great Beginning, there was non-being; there was no being, no name. Out of it arose one, but it had no form. Things got hold of it and came to life, but it had no form.’17 Thus, the first tenet of the Daoian vision of creation is analogous to the Christian notion of creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo), although the notion of nothing (non-being) has some different subtle nuances. The Daoian cosmogony also has a similar structure to the creation account in Genesis (especially the creatio prima). Dao is the origin of all things, which are produced by three steps. Dàodéjīng explains it in terms of a trinitarian process of one, two, and three. First, Dao produced One. Second, the one produced Two (dualities such as light and darkness). Third, the two produced Three, and the three continuously produce myriad things by interacting yin and yang via the material force (氣).18 Tao produced the One. The One produced the two. The two produced the three. And the three produced the ten thousand things. The ten thousand things carry the yin and embrace the yang, and through the blending of the material force (ch’i) they achieve harmony.19 Although the structure is similar to Genesis 1, there are also some critical differences. The Daoian cosmogony is not based on the view of linear time like an arrow flowing straight to the end of time (eschaton), as in Christianity. Rather, the Daoian view understands that the universe’s generation is continuously produced by the interaction of yin and yang, which is analogous to men and women combining to produce children. With bio-cosmic imageries, ‘cosmogony’ is a more appropriate term than is ‘creation’. The Daoian cosmogony presents some crucial insights into themes often neglected in the Christian doctrine of creation. What follows will focus on these themes.

Meontology of nothingness Daoian cosmogony unequivocally views non-being as more primordial than is being. The opening chapter of Dàodéjīng states: The Tao (Way) that can be told of is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. Non-being is the origin of Heaven and Earth; Being is the mother of all things.

Cited in Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 139. Chuang Tzu, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 131. 18 The material force has various meanings such as vital force, breath, and meta-cosmic energy, which are parallel to the Hebrew ruach (wind, breath, spirit) and the Greek pneuma (wind, breath, spirit). Its romanizations are also various: ch’i in the Wade-Gile system, qì in Pinyin, and ki in Korean. 19 Cited in Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 160. 16 17

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Therefore, let there always be non-being so we may see their subtlety. And let there always be being so we may see their manifestation.20 Although the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo endorses the primordiality of nothingness, it does so primarily in the service of an ontology of being rather than of non-being. Western theological ontologies tend to disregard non-being or consider it only as a negative dialectic to being, which inevitably entails a conflict (rather than harmony) paradigm when the necessity for change (or becoming) occurs. For example, early Tillichian theology dealt with non-being, but it was with reservation or, more likely, as a negative or inferior antithesis (finitude or the estrangement) of being.21 Thus, Tillich also claimed the Protestant principle as ‘eternal and a permanent criterion of everything temporal’.22 It would be a Tillichian way of justifying Protestant theology’s ontological weakness that denies the ontological possibility of change to insist on his static and essentialist ontology of being. In this regard, David Chai offers a helpful comparative study between Tillich and Zhuangzi: Herein is where Zhuangzi’s meontology surpasses Tillich’s ex nihilo hybrid. Unlike Tillich, Zhuangzi does not ‘weaponize’ non-being by turning it into the ultimate threat facing being; on the contrary, he takes non-being to be the root and mutual partner of being. In this way, the world is nourished, not harmed, by non-being, living freely and without despondency.23 As Dàodéjīng has it: ‘All things come from being. And being comes from non-being. . . . The Tao is hidden and nameless. Yet it is Tao alone that skilfully provides for all and brings them to perfection.’24 The notion of the ineffable Dao as the non-being parallels that of the ‘supraessential Trinity’ in eastern apophatic theology. Reminiscent of the opening lines of the Dàodéjīng, John of Damascus states: ‘The Deity being incomprehensible is also assuredly nameless. Therefore, since we know not His essence, let us not seek for a name for his essence.’25 In their points of contact, eastern apophatic theology and the East Asian theology of the Dao (theo-dao) have a valuable contribution to make to the development of a truly global theology.26

Complementary opposites Dàodéjīng also equates non-being ontologically with being: ‘The two are the same. But after they are produced, they have different names. They both may be called deep and profound.

Cited in Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 139. See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), 1:186–203. 22 Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, trans. James L. Adams (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948), xii. 23 David Chai, ‘Paul Tillich, Zhuangzi, and the Creation Role of Nonbeing’, Philosophy East & West 69, no. 2 (2019): 352. 24 Cited in Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 160. 25 John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith, 1.12. Cited in Thomas Hopko, ‘Apophatic Theology and the Naming of God in Eastern Orthodox Tradition’, in Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenges of Feminism, ed. Alvin F. Kimel Jr. (Leominster/Grand Rapids: Gracewing/Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1992), 157. 26 For a discussion on Dao and the Trinity, see Kim, A Theology of Dao, 57–74. 20 21

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Deeper and more profound. The door of all subtleties!’27 Neo-Confucianism further validates that non-being and being form one as yin and yang to compose the Daoian onto-cosmology of the Great Ultimate (太極). It reaffirms the primordiality of the Non-being (無極) as the foundation of the Great Ultimate.28 Zhou Dunyi (1017–73) summarized the complementary paradox of opposites in An Explanation of the Diagram of the Great Ultimate: The Ultimate of Non-being and also the Great Ultimate! The Great Ultimate through movement generates yang. When its activity reaches its limit, it becomes tranquil. Through tranquility the Great Ultimate generates yin. When tranquility reaches its limit, activity begins again. So movement and tranquility alternate and become the root of each other, giving rise to the distinction of yin and yang, and the two modes are thus established.29 The Great Ultimate is symbolized by a circle enclosing yin and yang, denoting the complementary opposites. The circle signifies ‘an inexhaustible source of creativity, which is one and undifferentiated’, and the dynamic process of yin–yang interaction is ‘always ready to be differentiated into concrete and individual things’. It is ‘the constant fountainhead amidst all things and provides the integrative and purposive unity of any type or any individual token while, at the same time, it also serves as the impetus for the diversity of things as types of tokens’.30 Furthermore, the yin–yang mode of thinking entails the ontology of change, compared with the ontology of substance so dominant in the west. In fact, the yin–yang relationship characterizes continuous change, a change that is primary to an ontic being or substance. Change is ‘the matrix of all that was, is, and shall be. It is the ground of all being and becoming’.31 In this onto-cosmology of the Great Ultimate, change is not a function of being, as western ontologies generally assume. On the contrary, change is the ultimate itself, whereas being or substance is a penultimate manifestation of change. Moreover, in the yin–yang relationship, the two opposites are not in conflict but rather complement each other to attain harmony and equilibrium. In western models of conflict, one must choose one of the two alternatives and eliminate the other (‘either–or’). In the East Asian model of harmony, the two opposites are complementary and belong to each other (‘both–and’). So Wilfred Cantwell Smith: ‘We in the West presume that an intelligent man must choose either this or that. . . . [But] in all ultimate matters, truth lies not in an either-or, but in a both-and.’32 By applying a Daoian thought of the Great Ultimate, theo-dao can overcome western christologies’ impasse due to the inherited dualism between divinity and humanity. Theo-dao

Cited in Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 139. Romanizations of Non-being (無極) include Mugŭk (Korean), Wú jí (Pinyin), and Wu chi (Wade-Giles). Romanizations of the Great Ultimate (太極) include T’aegŭk (Korean), Tài jí (Pinyin), and T’ai-chi (Wade-Giles). 29 Cited in Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 463. 30 Chung-Ying Cheng, ‘The Trinity of Cosmology, Ecology, and Ethics in the Confucian Personhood’, in Confucianism and Ecology: The Interrelation of Heaven, Earth, and Humans, ed. Mary E. Tucker and John Berthrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 219. 31 Jung Young Lee, The Theology of Change: A Christian Concept of God in an Eastern Perspective (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1979), 20. 32 Wilfred C. Smith, The Faith of Other Men (New York: New American Library, 1963), 72. 27 28

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can articulate Christ as the ultimate Dao (Christo-dao) by a both–and and neither–nor mode of thinking. The Nicene–Chalcedonian formula’s genius lies in articulating the ultimate and cosmogonic nature of Christ in such a way that presses beyond the Greek dualistic framework. The Nicene Creed (325) adopted the both–and mode to articulate Christ as both vere Deus and vere homo. The Chalcedonian formula (451) used the neither–nor mode to express that the two natures in Christ are neither confused, changed, divided, nor separated. In terms of theo-dao, the fourth-century Christians intuitively perceived the cosmogonic nature of Christ as the supreme paradox of the Great Ultimate (total affirmation of the both–and) and the Non-being (total negation of the neither–nor).33 This theodaoian mode of paradoxical thought also appeared in creative early Christian theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–95) and Dionysius the Areopagite (fl. c. 500), in Christian mystics such as Francis of Assisi (c. 1182–1226), Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), and Julian of Norwich (c. 1343 to after 1416), and is explicitly formulated by Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) in the principle of coincidentia oppositorum.34 Yu Yŏng-mo (1890–1981), a Korean Christian-Daoian thinker, formulated the cosmogonic Christ from the heart of the East Asian hermeneutical universe of Dao. Zhou Dunyi’s explanation of the Great Ultimate denotes the ultimate complementary and paradoxical opposites of the ineffably vacuous Non-being and the cosmogonic Being (the Great Ultimate). From the vantage point of this supreme paradox of Dao, Yu ‘understood the cross as both the Ultimate of Non-being and the Great Ultimate. . . . Jesus is the One who manifested the ultimate in Asian cosmology. Through the sacrifice of himself, he achieved genuine humanity (rén). By offering himself as a sacrifice, he saved humans and opened the kingdom of God for humanity’.35 Moreover, he presented a unique Korean apophatic Christo-dao. Jesus is the One who ‘Is’ despite the ‘Is-Not’. In other words, whereas human persons are ‘non-being-in-being’, Jesus is the One of ‘Being-in-Non-Being’ (Ǒpshi-gyeshin nim)’. Whereas human persons are the ‘forms’ that are ‘none other than emptiness’ (空卽是色), Jesus is the ‘emptiness’ that is ‘none other than form’ (色卽是空).36 The primordiality of chaos Genesis 1.2 bears witness to a chaotic situation before the creation of the cosmos, with terms like ‘formless’ (ṯōhū), ‘void’ (wā-ḇōhū), ‘darkness’ (wəḥōšeḵ), and ‘the deep’ (ṯəhôm). Likewise, Dàodéjīng also describes the state of precosmic chaos (混沌): We look at it and do not see it; Its name is The Invisible. We listen to it and do not hear it; Its name is The Inaudible. We touch it and do not find it; Its name is The Subtle (formless).

On Christo-dao, see Kim, A Theology of Dao, 34–56, 147–68. For an introduction to Nicholas of Cusa, see Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers: The Original Thinkers: Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Anselm, Nicholas of Cusa, Spinoza, Lao-Tzu, Nagarjuna, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 2:116–272. 35 Kim Heung-ho, ‘Ryu Yŏng-mo’s View of Christianity from the Asian Perspective’, in Dasǒk Ryu Yŏng-mo, ed. Park Young-ho (Seoul: Sungchun Institution, 1994), 299. 36 Kim Heung-ho, Jesori (Seoul: Pungman, 1985), 68. On Yu Yŏng-mo’s concept of Christo-dao, see Kim, A Theology of Dao, 147–68. 33 34

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These three cannot be further inquired into, and hence merge into one. Going up high, it is not bright, and coming down low, it is not dark. Infinite and boundless, it cannot be given any name; It reverts to nothingness. This is called shape without shape, Form (hsiang) without object. It is the Vague and Elusive. Meet it and you will not see its back. Hold on to the Tao of old in order to master the things of the present, From this one may know the primeval beginning [of the universe]. This is called the bond of Tao.37 In this way, Dàodéjīng emphasizes the primordiality of chaos, prioritizing subtlety over manifestation. Although Genesis explicitly states it, western theologies have not paid much attention to the importance of chaos in creation.38 The natural sciences continuously uncover unseen places and elements of the universe, such as dark matter and dark energy, and reveal the significance of chaos.39 Dàodéjīng insists that this chaotic primeval beginning should be taken seriously. Everything is ready in this state of chaos. Dàodéjīng argues that, though it is undifferentiated, nothing has been achieved, but everything has already been completed; namely, ‘Something Chaotic and Yet Complete’:40 There was something undifferentiated [chaotic] and yet complete, Which existed before the creation of heaven and earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao. If forced to give it a name, I shall call it Great. Now being great means functioning everywhere. Functioning everywhere means far-reaching. Being far-reaching means to returning to the original point.41 The preferential option for Yin Dàodéjīng describes Dao with basically feminine metaphors such as ‘mother of all things’, ‘the root’, ‘the ground’ (of Being), ‘the uncarved block’ (the original nature), or ‘mysterious female’: The spirit of valley never dies. This is called the mysterious female [or mother].

Cited in Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 146. One notable exception is found in Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003). 39 See Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, 5th edn (Boston: Shambhala, 2010). 40 N. J. Girardot, Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism: The Theme of Chaos (hun-tun) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 49–56. 41 Cited in Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 152. 37 38

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The gateway [or womb] of the mysterious female [mother] Is called the root of Heaven and Earth. Dimly visible, it seems as if it were there, Yet use will never drain it.42 As such, Dàodéjīng prioritizes the female and weakness over the male and strength. A. C. Graham argued that Dàodéjīng always puts the preferential option to yin rather than yang in the series of complementary oppositions.43 This reversal principle is a clue to understanding the mystery of the Dao’s hidden but unquenchable power. Jesus occasionally spoke of a similar principle of reversal: ‘Blessed are you that are hungry now, for you will be filled. . . . Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry’ (Lk. 6.21, 25). Also, Saint Paul said: ‘Whenever I am weak, then I am strong’ (2 Cor. 12.10). The paradoxical power of weakness and emptiness entails the Daoian principle of wú wéi (無爲; non-action action). Bede Griffiths (1907–93), a Benedictine monk who lived for many years in Indian ashrams, reflected thus on the implications of Dàodéjīng to western religion: The most typical concept in the Tao Te Ching is that of wu wei, that is ‘actionless activity’. It is a state of passivity, of ‘non-action’, but a passivity that is totally active, in the sense of receptivity. This is the essence of the feminine. The woman is made to be passive in relation to the man, to receive the seed which makes her fertile. But this passivity is an active passivity, a receptivity which is dynamic and creative, from which all life and fruitfulness, all live and communion, grow. The world today needs to recover this sense of feminine power, which is complementary to the masculine and without which man becomes dominating, sterile and destructive. But this means that western religion must come to recognize the feminine aspect of God. This leads to the paradox of the value of emptiness. ‘We make pots of clay’, it is said, ‘but it is the empty space in them which makes them useful. We make a wheel with many spokes joined in a hub, but it is the empty space in the hub which makes the wheel go round. We make houses of brick and wood, but it is the empty spaces in the doors and windows that make them habitable’. This again is the value of ‘non-action’, what Gandhi called ahimsa.44

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), 62. See Angus C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (Chicago: Open Court, 1989), 223: 42 43

Yang

Yin

Yang

Yin

Something

Nothing

Before

Behind

Doing something

Doing nothing

Moving

Still

Knowledge

Ignorance

Big

Small

Male

Female

Strong

Weak

Full

Empty

Hard

Soft

Above

Below

Straight

Bent

Bede Griffiths, Universal Wisdom: A Journey Through the Sacred Wisdom of the World (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), 27. 44

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Humanity as cosmic/ecological being-in-togetherness While Gen. 1.27 states that God created human beings in the image of God (imago Dei), the Confucian scripture Doctrine of the Mean, or Zhongyong, also declares: ‘What Heaven (T’ien, Nature) imparts to [hu]man is called human nature. To follow our nature is called the Way (Tao). Cultivating the Way is called education.’45 Therefore, Christianity and Confucianism have similarities in understanding ontological humanity – imago Dei and Heavenly endowment, respectively. Furthermore, the Confucian notion of rén (仁, benevolence) and Barth’s understanding of the imago Dei show many points of convergence. The cardinal Confucian virtue, rén, implies benevolent co-humanity, as its etymology denotes two people. Likewise, Barth also interpreted the creation of two humans according to God’s image as ‘joyful Mitmenschlichkeit’ (co-humanity).46 Hence, both Barth and Neo-Confucianism concluded that the ontological definition of humanity is benevolent or joyful co-humanity, being-with-others, or being-in-togetherness.47 Confucianism and Christianity (or at least that of Barth’s type) share a congruent understanding of what it means to be human. To be human means to realize a radical beingin-togetherness in one’s total unity of body and soul. Being a Confucian or a Christian means being radically human, being co-human. Although this congruence establishes a material point of convergence, it also shows differences due to their divergent visions (anthropo-cosmic vs. theo-historical).48 Whereas Confucianism extended the notion of togetherness to the cosmic dimension, Christianity focused on the meaning of co-humanity to the historical situation. In this encounter, the Christian historical consciousness challenges Confucianism to move beyond an innocent dream of anthropo-cosmic vision. Conversely, the Confucian understanding of the human as a cosmic being-in-togetherness challenges Christian theology to move beyond the modern inclinations of anthropocentric, anthropomorphic, and history-centred understandings, which, not a few would argue, share responsibility for the present ecological crisis.49 Zhang Zai (1022–77) brilliantly expressed Neo-Confucian ecological thought in terms of the Confucian Trinity – Heaven, Earth, and Humanity: Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst. Therefore, that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.50 Conclusion The Daoian view of cosmogony can provide the Christian doctrine of creation with significant challenges and complementary insights. First, although western theologies advocate for the

Cited in Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 98. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Harold Knight et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 265. 47 For comparison of ren and imago Dei, see Kim, Wang Yang-ming and Karl Barth, 43–6, 86–90, 158–60. 48 See Kim, Wang Yang-ming and Karl Barth, 175–8. 49 For an example for Daoian ecological theology (eco-dao), see Kim, A Theology of Dao, 204–22. 50 Cited in Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 497. 45 46

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doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, such tend to denigrate Non-being in favour of being. An invitation and challenge arising from theological engagement with Daoian thought may be that Christian theology could take much more seriously the primordiality of nothingness and the ontology of Non-being. This could be made possible by reinterpreting apophatic spirituality and negative theology traditions through dialogue with Daoian insights into cosmogony and natural sciences, namely, a trialogue between Christian theology, East Asian religions, and the natural sciences.51 Second, new scientific discoveries related to chaos theory, dark matter, and dark energy call forth more developed understandings of chaos in the creation and a revision of a longstanding commitment to unsustainable dualism, such that these define the chaos as evil and the cosmos as good. Daoian views of cosmogony and the Great Ultimate yin–yang theory offer an alternative solution to overcome this dualism in ways that might avoid some pitfalls typically associated with its Manichean and other expressions. For them, chaos and the cosmos are not in conflicted relationships like good and evil but are rather complementary opposites like two sides of a coin. Furthermore, the developments of physics and mathematics since the time of Einstein evoke a theological paradigm shift to the both–and paradigm from the old either–or paradigm that divides Non-being and being, chaos and cosmos, day and night, spirit and flesh, male and female, humanity and nature, and so on. The early Christians solved this problem by developing wholistic doctrines of the Trinity (both one and three) and of Christ (true divinity and true humanity). Unfortunately, the deep-seated dualisms that remain characteristic of western approaches to theology have largely ignored these significant breakthroughs of the early Christian faith. Third, western Protestant theologies have tended to neglect the significance of the body and ecosystem by predominantly focusing on the salvation of the individual soul. Human beings were created when God breathed into the human body, which was called forth from the earth. The creation of humanity in the image of the Trinity denotes co-humanity (Mitmenschlichkeit) and being-in-togetherness, parallel to rén, the cardinal virtue of Confucianism. In dialogue with Daoian insights of cosmogony and the Neo-Confucian anthropo-cosmic vision, Christian theology can further develop the doctrine of creation and eco-theologies with more updated and comprehensive views of the universe and creation, liberated from the persistent dualism of ‘either–or’. These are some examples that theo-dao could contribute to the Christian doctrine of creation to move global theology beyond the limits of theo-logos. However, theo-logos and theo-dao no longer need to be seen as conflicting but rather as complementary, like the yang and the yin dimensions of creation and cosmogony. On the one hand, the Christian doctrine of creation underscores the yang dimension of creation, such as the ontology of being, duality, the cosmos, and its theo-historical aspect. On the other hand, the Daoian view focuses on the yin dimension, the meontology of nothingness, wholeness in duality, chaos, and the anthropocosmic aspects (humanity as cosmic/ecological being-in-togetherness). The continuous discoveries of natural sciences may further explain this holistic understanding of the universe. Hence, Christian theology should recover the long-overlooked path of yin by effectively engaging in a trialogue with East Asian religions (Dao) and natural sciences, reappreciating

On the possibility of such a trialogue, see Kim, A Theology of Dao, 189–203.

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the traditions of apophatic spirituality and negative theology. For this, Griffiths proposed a macro-paradigm shift: This may sound very paradoxical and unreal, but for centuries now the western world has been following the path of Yang – of the masculine, active, aggressive, rational, scientific mind – and has brought the world near destruction. It is time now to recover the path of Yin, of the feminine, passive, patient, intuitive and poetic mind. This is the path which the Tao Te Ching sets before us.52

Further reading Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics III.2. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance. Translated by Harold Knight, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, J. K. S. Reid, and R. H. Fuller. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960. Chan, Wing-Tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Girardot, N. J. Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism: The Theme of Chaos (hun-tun). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Kim, Heup Young. A Theology of Dao. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2017. Kim, Heup Young. Wang Yang-ming and Karl Barth: A Confucian–Christian Dialogue. Lanham: University Press of America, 1996. Küng, Hans and Julia Ching. Christianity and Chinese Religions. Translated by Peter Beyer. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Griffiths, Universal Wisdom, 27–8.

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CHAPTER 54 CREATION AND TIAN

Xiaoli Yang

Introduction Facing creation’s majesty, ancient Chinese exclaim: ‘[The operations of] Heaven (Tian) and Earth proceed in the most admirable way, but they say nothing about them’ (天地有大美而不言).1 They thus echo the Hebrew poet: ‘The heavens are telling the glory of God. . . . There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world’ (Ps. 19.1-4). Instead of propositional statements, such poetic utterances offer mystical insights from inexpressible groanings and awe towards creation. This chapter focuses on the concept of Tian (heaven, 天) in Chinese tradition and its relationship to the understandings of creation in Christian scriptures and western theological traditions. The Chinese concept of Tian originated and developed within the context of a different cosmology from that of the Judeo-Christian framework. The comparison has been denied as meaningful by several Chinese philosophical secularists who take the world view of classical and pre-modern Confucian traditions as being non-theistic or atheistic. However, as Confucius (孔子, 551–479 bce) says: ‘When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teachers. I will select their good qualities and follow them, their bad qualities and avoid them’ (‘三人行, 必有我师焉. 择其善者而从之, 其不善者而改之’).2 To bridge two vastly different traditions and cosmologies, what follows creates a twoway conversation between Chinese Tian and a Christian theology of creation. The chapter introduces a myriad of understandings of Chinese Tian and discusses Tian’s nature and how it alludes to the Christian Godhead and humanity in creation. It follows neither affirmative nor negative responses towards the assimilation of Tian in both Confucian and Christian circles, as scholars in the past attempted to do from various philosophical and religious perspectives. Instead, it offers a dialogue between Chinese Tian and a Christian understanding of creation.3 In doing so, it expands and enriches the understanding of both without compromising either.

Zhuangzi, ‘Waipian, Zhibeiyou, 外篇, 知北游’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 8 October 2021, https://ctext​.org​/ zhuangzi​/knowledge​-rambling​-in​-the​-north​/ens. The English translations of the Chinese classics in this chapter are provided by the author, or by James Legge with minor revisions by the author. I am aware of Legge’s accommodating attitude towards classical Chinese traditions with his mission impulse and movitation. 2 Confucius, ‘Lunyu, Shuer, 论语, 述而’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 19 October 2021, https://ctext​.org​/analects​/shu​ -er​/ens. 3 Recent examples of such dialogue can be found in Christopher Hancock, Christianity and Confucianism: Culture, Faith and Politics (London: T&T Clark, 2021); Michael R. Slater, Erin M. Cline, and Philip J. Ivanhoe, eds, Confucianism and Catholicism: Reinvigorating the Dialogue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020); Xiaoli Yang, A Dialogue Between Haizi’s Poetry and the Gospel of Luke: Chinese Homecoming and the Relationship with Jesus Christ (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 1

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It also considers some ways that the concept of Tian can enrich Christian understandings of creation.

What is Tian? Etymologically, the pictographic (xiangxing, 象形) construction of the word Tian (天), as carved in ancient oracle bones in the Shang Dynasty (1766–1122 bce) and the bronze ritual vessels of the Early Zhou Dynasty (1122–249 bce), is that of a human person with a big head. Later, the head became a line, symbolizing what is on the top of a person. An ancient Chinese dictionary explains: ‘Tian is Dian, the supreme, a stroke above a person’ (‘天: 颠也. 至高無上, 从一、大’).4

The concept of Tian is treated as central in China’s long intellectual history. It functions as ‘a transcendental power that guarantees harmony between the metaphysical and the physical, between the spiritual and the secular, and between human nature and human destiny’.5 The term appears throughout the Five Classics and the Four Books (sishu wujing, 四书五经). The Book of Changes (I-Ching, 易经) and the Doctrine of the Mean (中庸) begin with the word Tian. The Book of Poetry (诗经) contains the term Tian (heaven) 114 times and Shangdi (Supreme Deity, 上帝) forty-four times. There are, however, many different interpretations of the terms. The word Tian is connected to several terms. It is developed from the word Di (帝). The two terms remind one of two divine names employed in the Hebrew Bible – YHWH (Exod. 6.6) and Elohim (Deut. 4.35).6 The Scottish missionary James Legge (1815–97) insisted on using Shangdi (上帝) as the translation for Elohim and Theos in the Bible, for it carries distinctively monotheistic characteristics.7 Archaeological evidence has shown that the ancient Chinese believed in a supreme God called Di, or Shangdi, meaning the ruler above or the Lord of the Shang. Later, Di was called Tian by the Zhou (周, 1046–256 bce) invaders. The Zhou founders proclaimed that Tian had chosen them to replace the Shang (商, 1600–1046 bce) because the last Shang kings were corrupt and no longer took proper care of the people, who were really the people of Tian. According to this new understanding, the Decree or Mandate of Heaven (tianming, 天命) gives legitimate authority to the emperor as ‘Son of Heaven’ (tianzi, 天子) to rule over all people, but only as long as he is compassionate and just, and his kingdom prospers. Otherwise, he loses the mandate and revolt is justified. The emperor embodies the

The Dictionary of Han Language, ‘s.v. 天 (Tian)’, accessed 16 August 2021, https://www​.zdic​.net​/hans/天. See also Shuowen Jiezi, ‘Juaner, Yibu, 说文解字,卷二, 一部’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 16 August 2021, https://ctext​.org​/ shuo​-wen​-jie​-zi​/zh​?searchu=天&en=on. 5 Xinzhong Yao, An Introduction to Confucianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 143. 6 See Julia Ching, Chinese Religions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 34. 7 See Lauren F. Pfister, ‘The Legacy of James Legge’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 22, no. 2 (1998): 80. 4

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principles of heaven, so people should obey him. The mutuality between rulers and people regarding their responsibilities holds them together in a society. Tianxia (天下), a geographical and metaphysical term, denotes the entire space and land appointed by the mandate to the emperor, forming a political centre to rule both officials and commoners. As ‘Tian does not speak’, the loss of the mandate is revealed through actions and affairs only.8 Scholars generally accept that Tian has the same connotations as Di, Shangdi, Huangtian (皇天), Huang Shangdi (皇上帝), and Huangtian Shangdi (皇天上帝), pointing to a unique supreme God in ancient China. When Tian is used alone, however, it can refer to a philosophical idea or a phenomenon of nature. Shangdi is often understood in a more anthropomorphic way than is Tian. According to the Neo-Confucianists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Tian refers to a supreme power that governs the world and the affairs of human beings in a broad, impersonal sense. There are, however, a wide range of interpretations of Tian in various Chinese traditions. Feng Yu-lan (冯友兰, 1895–1990) offers five classic distinguishing meanings of the term: a physical sky, a personal ruler, a fatalistic destiny, the realm of nature, and the highest principle.9 In general, three definitions of Tian can be found in Chinese classics, as highlighted in the following examples. ‘Huang Yi’ in the Book of Poetry records:10 皇矣上帝、

Great (Huang) is Shangdi.

臨下有赫。

Beholding this lower world in majesty.

監觀四方、

He surveyed the four quarters [of the kingdom].

求民之莫。

Seeking for someone to give settlement to the people.

Here Huang is combined with Shangdi, pointing to a supreme sovereign God who watches over the world and those seeking the benefit of people. Likewise, the verse that ‘Tian made the lofty hill’ (天作高山) signifies the creator of the universe.11 The distinct personality of Tian is referred to as someone who appointed King Wen (有命自天, 命此文王) as the Mandate of Heaven, and King Wen in turn ‘with entire intelligence served Shangdi’ (昭事上帝).12 This monotheist understanding of Tian with personality and power resonates with the God of Israel as depicted in the Hebrew scriptures. Tian also refers to the highest philosophy in the universe. The Book of Changes begins with ‘Qian’ (the Creative), representing ‘what is great and originating, penetrating, advantageous, correct and firm’ (乾: 元亨, 利贞). ‘Qian’ renders all meaning to Tian (乃统天). It is Tian that

Mengzi, ‘Wan Zhang, 万章上’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 15 August 2021 https://ctext​.org​/mengzi​/wan​-zhang​-i​/ zh: ‘天不言, 以行與事示之而已矣’. 9 See Feng Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, Volume 1: The Period of the Philosophers (From the Beginnings to Circa 100 b.c.), trans. Derk Bodde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 31. 10 ‘Book of Poetry, Huangyi, 诗经, 皇矣’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 21 September 2021, https://ctext​.org​/book​-of​ -poetry​/huang​-yi. 11 ‘Book of Poetry, Tian Zuo, 诗经, 天作’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 21 September 2021, https://ctext​.org​/book​-of​ -poetry​/tian​-zuo​/ens. 12 ‘Book of Poetry, Da Ming, 诗经, 大明’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 21 September 2021, https://ctext​.org​/book​-of​ -poetry​/decade​-of​-wen​-wang​/en. 8

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‘in its motion, [gives the idea of] strength, and the superior man exerts himself to ceaseless activity’ (天行健, 君子以自强不息).13 This highest principle or philosophy as the source of the universe gives all beings existence, understood in a way not dissimilar to the idea of logos in Greek philosophy. Tian can also refer to a phenomenon of nature, especially when used as a parallel with the earth. In the section titled ‘Yu’, in the Book of Changes, is the following: ‘Tian and earth show that docile obedience in connection with movement, and hence the sun and moon make no error (in time), and the four seasons do not deviate (from their order)’ (天地以顺动, 故日月不过, 而四时不忒).14 Tian, therefore, can refer to a personal God in the religious sense, to an abstract principle or law in the philosophical sense, or to a physical phenomenon of nature in the scientific sense. Zhang Dai-Nian explains: ‘What is called Tian in ancient China had various implications, but after the middle period of the Warring States most thinkers mean mainly nature by Heaven (Tian).’15 Wu Kang classifies Tian as the personified heaven, the Non-Voluntary Transfigured Heaven, and the Impersonal and Natural Heaven.16 Scholars also debate whether the concept of Tian developed from original theism to deism or pantheism and, later, to atheism.17 According to different definitions of Tian, the nature of Tian has three aspects: the transcendent, the moral, and the intrinsic. It can be said that the transcendent Tian is Confucian ontology, the moral Tian is Confucian anthropology, and the intrinsic Tian is Confucian epistemology. Given this understanding, one can enter into dialogue with a Christian understanding of creation in three parts – Tian in relation to the creator God, Jesus Christ, and the imago Dei.

The transcendental Tian Modern Christian Confucians stress that Chinese Tian has never lost the sense of transcendence of Shangdi.18 It illustrates a dimension of primary cosmology comparative to the idea of creatio

‘Book of Changes, Qian, 周易, 乾’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 21 September 2021, https://ctext​.org​/book​-of​ -changes​/qian​/ens. 14 ‘Book of Changes, Yu, 周易, 豫’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 21 September 2021, https://ctext​.org​/book​-of​-changes​ /yu​/ens. 15 Zhang Dai-Nian, ‘Theories Concerning Man and Nature in Classical Chinese Philosophy’, in Man and Nature: The Chinese Tradition and the Future, ed. Tang Yi-Jie, Li Zhen, and George F. McLean (Lanham: University Press of America, 1989), 3. 16 Kang Wu, Zhonghua Shenmi Wenhua Cidian [Dictionary of China’s Mystical Culture] (Haikou: Hainan, 2002), 3–4. 17 From a Lutheran perspective, Paulos Huang argues that there has been in Chinese intellectual history degeneration from theism to humanism, from a personal deity to an impersonal Tian, a natural principle and a human nature. See Paulos Z. Huang, Confronting Confucian Understandings of the Christian Doctrine of Salvation: A Systematic Theological Analysis of the Basic Problems in the Confucian–Christian Dialogue (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 82–119, 283–7. This general understanding of degeneration by Chinese and western scholars alike, however, has been challenged by some Catholic scholars. See, for example, Umberto Bresciani, ‘Explorations and Responses: Paulos Huang on Confucian–Christian Dialogue’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 50, no. 4 (2015): 606–11. 18 See Hans Küng and Julia Ching, Christianity and Chinese Religions (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 61–91; Robert C. Neville, Behind the Masks of God: An Essay Toward Comparative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 73–83. 13

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ex nihilo developed in western theism, although debates over the ‘interminable question’ related to which Chinese terms might be best used to translate the Hebrew term Elohim and the Greek term Theos continue. However, to enter a meaningful dialogue between these two traditions, one needs to temporarily put aside traditional western conceptions of ‘transcendence’ as a self-defining external source that created the world. From the ancient Confucian texts, the transcendental Tian is reflected within Chinese cosmology in its supreme, generative, everevolving and just nature. Tian is supreme The connection between Chinese Tian and the Christian creator God was made by crosscultural missionaries from the far west: the Nestorians and, later, the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). Strategically, Ricci identified the ancient Chinese term ‘Shangdi’ as the supreme God and created the term ‘Tianzhu’ (‘Lord of Heaven’) to represent the God of the Hebrew Bible. Ricci and his Confucian followers, such as Yang Tingyun (杨庭筠, 1562–1627), believed that the ancient Chinese classics speak of a monotheistic personal deity. Yang’s unique contribution is to replace Shangdi with Tian as the personal master of the universe, who has a perfect character and possesses unlimited power and authority. As The Confucian Analects states: ‘It is only Tian that is grand’ (唯天为大).19 Confucius espouses the doctrine that one should wait upon the decree of Tian: that is, one has faith that, by and large, Tian favours the good but that adversities occur and that the virtuous must endure patiently. Being asked by his disciples about his silence, Confucius said: ‘Does Tian speak? The four seasons pursue their courses, and all things are continually being produced, but does Tian say anything?’ (天何言哉? 四時行焉, 百物生焉, 天何言哉?).20 In other words, creation speaks silently through the seasons and all living beings. Confucius’ patient attitude is demonstrated in his saying: ‘I do not murmur against Tian. I do not grumble against people. My studies lie low, and my penetration rises high. But there is Tian that knows me!’ (不怨天, 不尤人. 下学而上达. 知我者, 其天乎!).21 For Confucius, Tian is omniscient – knowing all there is to know, and all that can be known. Humanity should, therefore, maintain an attitude of respect and awe towards Tian. ‘He [or she] who offends against Tian has none to whom he [or she] can pray’ (获罪于天, 无所祷也).22 Tian is shown to be a powerful supreme being functioning as an object of human prayers but who ceases to respond when offended. Tian’s silence finds resonance in the Christian apophatic tradition, where one can only say what God is not, not what God is. Both traditions understand that human language is finite and that God is hidden. The transcendental understanding of Tian that cannot be uttered but needs to be respected and treated with patience and awe enriches the Christian concept of God as otherness. This contrasts with Christianity’s kataphatic tradition, which emphasizes God’s

Confucius, ‘Tai Bo, 泰伯’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 9 October 2021, https://ctext​.org​/analects​/tai​-bo. Confucius, ‘Lunyu, Yanghuo, 论语, 阳货’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 26 November 2020, https://ctext​.org​/ analects​/yang​-huo. 21 Confucius, ‘Lunyu, Xianwen, 论语, 宪问’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 26 November 2020, https://ctext​.org​/ analects​/xian​-wen​/ens. 22 Confucius, ‘Lunyu, Bayi, 论语, 八佾’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 26 November 2020, https://ctext​.org​/analects​/ ba​-yi​/ens. 19 20

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intimacy and continuity with creation. The kataphatic tradition, in turn, complements Chinese Tian in that God reveals God’s self through speech and action and actively participates in the world and its history. Through the work of Christ, offences are removed, and one can commune with God in prayers (Jn 14.13; 16.23), achieving the ultimate goal of the embodiment of truth in the sage (tianrenganying, 天人感应). Tian is generative The oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry, The Book of Poetry, whose compilation is traditionally ascribed to Confucius, exemplifies that Tian creates heaven and earth and all the living beings, including humanity upon whom Tian bestows ‘nature’ and ‘virtue’.23 天生烝民、

Tian, in giving birth to multitudes of People,

有物有则、

To every faculty and relationship annexed its law.

民之秉彝、

The people possess this normal nature,

好是懿德。

And they [consequently] love its normal virtue.

Similar to the creation narrative in the Christian tradition, where the Hebrew word for ‘Spirit’ ( ַ‫רּוח‬, ruach) is feminine in form (Gen. 1.2), Tian is portrayed as a productive being giving birth to all the material beings. Shun Ming (顺命) says: ‘Tian is the origin of all creatures, none were not born of Tian’ (天者万物之祖, 万物非天不生).24 Mengzi (孟子, 372–289 bce) echoes: ‘Tian gives birth to creatures in such a way that they have one root’ (且天之生物也, 使之一本).25 Tian, through the creative act of giving birth, is inclusive and encompasses every faculty and relationship, symbolizing eastern spiritualities of indeterminateness in ways reminiscent of various expressions of Christian panentheism. And because Tian imparts their nature to humanity substantially, humanity can fulfil the potential and achieve oneness or identity with Tian. In his attempt to provide a bridge between the foregoing concept and the Christian God, Yang Tingyun considers Tian as the giver of Principle, calling God ‘Great Father–Mother’ (dafumu, 大父母) based on yin–yang cosmology and the idea that Jesus is ‘the older brother’.26 The representation of God in close and relational terms provides clarity and the presence of a lofty and unfathomable Tian in daily human life. It also contributes to Christian creation theology in several ways. While supreme, the creator is also deeply personal and intimate. This

‘Book of Poetry, Zheng Min, 诗经, 烝民’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 19 November 2020, https://ctext​.org​/book​ -of​-poetry​/zheng​-min​/ens. 24 Chunqiu Fanlu, ‘Shun Ming, 春秋繁露, 顺命’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 30 November 2020, https https://ctext​ .org​/chun​-qiu​-fan​-lu​/shun​-ming​/ens. 25 Mengzi, ‘Teng Wen Gong I, 滕文公上’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 14 October 2021, https://ctext​.org​/mengzi​/ teng​-wen​-gong​-i​/ens. 26 Gianni Criveller, Preaching Christ in Late Ming China: The Jesuits’ Presentation of Christ from Matteo Ricci to Giulio Aleni (Taipei: Taipei Ricci Institute, in collaboration with Fondazione Civiltà Bresciana, 1997), 361–2. See Huang, Confronting Confucian Understandings, 90–2. 23

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way of imagining the creator overcomes the patriarchal bias of many traditional images of God in western theology, particularly those undisciplined by trinitarian thought and uninformed by the Hebrew understanding of God as plural (see Gen. 1.26; 3.22). Such commitments underscore the relational nature of the divine community and have implications for those claiming to be made in God’s image. Tian also rules over the order of the universe. Tian is the source of blessing and as such relates to human flourishing, agricultural harvests, and urban buildings. In the Book of Poetry, Tian created the earth (天作高山),27 surveyed this world, and made a mate for the king (天监在下 . . . 天作之合).28 This is similar to the creation account in Genesis 2, where God made a helper for Adam. Conversely, Tian is also the source of various curses, which include famine, flood, and other disasters. Tian also controls the destiny of human history through kings: ‘The favoured appointment was from Tian. . . . She was blessed to give birth to King Wu’ (有命自天. . . . 笃生武王).29 The supreme Tian sees the state and rules over the fate of dynasties or kingdoms: ‘When Tian by its will is inspecting the kingdom, the lower people are to be feared’ (天命降监, 下民有严).30 Tian functions as the basis and guardian of the sociopolitical order, thus preserving social harmony and morality. Tian is ever-evolving The Book of Changes says: ‘The way of Tian and earth is to be long continued in their operation without stopping’ (天地之道, 恒久而不已也).31 This shows that the way of Tian has control over the laws of nature. Here, the ceaseless and eternal Chinese Tian is comparable to the Greek λογος (logos). The ever-evolving process that embodies the essence of life’s origin and ultimate meaning reveals that creation discovers its ontological ground and soteriological telos in unity with the creator Tian. Here, the idea of Tian as ever-evolving is connected with the idea that Tian is profoundly generative. The constant renewal and continuous change of Tian are connected with human origins. Qu Yuan (屈原, 340–278 bce), a legendary poet in ancient China, says: ‘Tian, the beginning of humanity; Parents, the origin of humanity. Extreme poverty calls for people to return to the origin, so how can extreme weariness not call for Tian and extreme pain not call for parents’ (夫天者, 人之始也; 父母者, 人之本也. 人穷则反本, 故劳苦倦极, 未尝不呼天也; 疾痛惨怛, 未尝不呼父母也).32 It is clear that Chinese Tian, as the beginning of humanity, is connected with genealogy. Tian is not only a transcendental being but is also earthly, paralleling generational relationships. While Ricci successfully found a vital

‘Book of Poetry, Tian Zuo’. ‘Book of Poetry, Da Ming’. 29 ‘Book of Poetry, Da Ming’, 6. 30 ‘Book of Poetry, Yin Wu, 诗经, 殷武’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 19 November 2020, https://ctext​.org​/book​-of​ -poetry​/yin​-wu​/ens. 31 ‘Book of Changes, Heng, 周易, 恒’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 19 November 2020, https://ctext​.org​/book​-of​ -changes​/heng​/ens. 32 Shishu, ‘Quyuan Jiasheng Liezhuan, 史书, 屈原贾生列传’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 19 November 2020, https:// ctext​.org​/shiji​/qu​-yuan​-jia​-sheng​-lie​-zhuan​/zhs. 27 28

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connection between Confucian ethics of ‘self-cultivation’ and the Christian moral code, his fidelity to Thomas Aquinas’ premise of a static creation within limited space and time led to his failure to understand the ceaseless evolving circular world view beyond time and space in the Chinese tradition. Similar to Hebrew genealogies, Chinese family trees speak of collective memory and of life shared. When Chinese people respect their ancestors, it is intended to show fear and awe towards the origin of all things – the creator-like Tian. In doing so, people may practise virtues, and society may find peace.33 The Gospel writers Matthew and Luke also show their concern with Jesus’ relationship with the origin of humanity by considering details of his genealogy (see Mt. 1.1-17; Lk. 3.23-38). Luke, with his universalistic concern, goes back to the origin of the human race and shows that the incarnation of Jesus is deeply connected with the creation of humanity. The point of resonance in genealogy opens ways for the ever-evolving Tian to be substantiated in the person of Jesus Christ. Chinese Tian can also offer a soteriological path, a way of returning to the origin of life. The respect and awe towards Tian through ancestor worship and filial piety can also contribute to Christian ethics and its practices of honouring parents and ancestors. Tian is just Tian rewards the righteous and punishes evil ones. Tian’s justice is evident in the Canon of History and the Book of Poetry. For example: ‘For the many crimes of the sovereign of Xia, Tian has given the charge to destroy him’ (有夏多罪, 天命殛之).34 Also: ‘Tian truly showed its favour to the inferior people, and the criminal has been degraded and subjected. What Tian appoints is without error . . .’ (上天孚佑下民, 罪人黜伏, 天命弗僭 . . .).35 The way of Tian resembles the law of the Pentateuch, where the free choices of human beings in obedience or rebellion bear consequences of blessing or cursing (see Deuteronomy 28, 30). Meanwhile: ‘The ordinance of Tian rewards the good and punishes the wicked. The governors should not violate or indulge self. Members should follow the order to receive the blessings of Tian’ (天道赏善而罚淫, 故凡我造国, 无从非彝, 无即慆淫, 各守尔典, 以承天休).36 The ordinance of Tian emphasizes judgement regarding the right behaviour of those who govern and the responsibilities of those who follow. The law of Moses does not appear to strongly emphasize human government, but a theocentric social order and ethical behaviours directly given to the people of Israel through their leader Moses. Although both traditions show the divine’s abiding commitment to human welfare, scholars argue that Tian differs from YHWH significantly in being quite free from ‘a racial bias and a taste for blood sacrifice’.37

Confucius, ‘Lunyu, Xueer, 论语, 学而’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 14 August 2021, https://ctext​.org​/analects​/xue​ -er​/zhs​?en​=on: ‘Let there be a careful attention to perform the funeral rites for parents, and let them be followed when long gone with the ceremonies of sacrifice – then the virtue of the people will resume its proper excellence.’ 34 Shangshu, ‘Tangshi, 上书, 汤誓’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 19 November 2020, https://ctext​.org​/shang​-shu​/ speech​-of​-tang​/ens. 35 Shangshu, ‘Tanggao 上书, 汤诰’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 19 November 2020, https://ctext​.org​/shang​-shu​/ announcement​-of​-tang​/ens. 36 Guoyu, ‘Zhouyuzhong, 史书, 国语, 周语中’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 6 August 2021, https://ctext​.org​/guo​-yu​ /zhou​-yu​-zhong​/zhs​?en​=on. 37 Chi Yun Chang, Confucianism: A Modern Interpretation, trans. Orient Lee (Singapore/Hangzhou: World Scientific Publishing/Zhejiang University Press, 2013), 270. 33

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Confucius believes that Tian can and does contribute to the forming of human character: ‘Tian produces the virtue that is in me’ (天生德于予).38 Mengzi also associates human character with that of Tian but underscores that human nature is inherently good and that the doctrine of universal love corresponds to the will of Tian. Because natural calamities occur, he attempts to prove that Tian loves righteousness and hates wickedness. While the just nature of Tian evokes a sense of fear of evil and awe towards good, in the Christian scriptures, God’s justice is always coupled with God’s unconditioned love. This is evident in God’s compassionate response to, and concerned provision by way of clothing, the primal couple after their first sin (Genesis 3), and is ultimately demonstrated in one whose own clothes were stripped off him (Mt. 27.31; Mk 15.24; Jn 19.24) so that humanity may be clothed with the new self in righteousness that corresponds to the holiness of the new creation (Eph. 4.24). Here, the just nature of Chinese Tian is complemented with unceasing grace. In sum, the transcendental Tian in Chinese cosmology functions as a supreme, generative, ever-evolving power that is the origin of all things, an omnipotent and omniscient ruler and a just judge over human behaviour. Tian’s generative nature in the creative act of birth-giving, its earthly parallels to genealogy and social order, and inherent virtue within humans enrich the western understanding of a transcendental God–creator.

The moral Tian When humanity applies a spirit of fear and imitation of Tian, the transcendent Tian is transformed into the moral Tian, personified as sages (shengren, 圣人). It is the highest ideal of Confucianism to reach ‘perpetual unity of the Self with Tian’ (tianrenheyi, 天人合一). Through human cultivation of this life, Confucianism pursues the embodiment of truth in the sage. So Confucius: ‘Three things a sage should stand in awe of: the Mandate of Heaven, great men, and the words of holy men’ (君子有三畏: 畏天命, 畏大人, 畏圣人之言).39 As Tian reveals the order or principle of nature and possesses perfect character, Chinese tradition, as articulated in the Analects and in the Canon of History, believes that human beings ought to obey, fear, and respect Tian. Humans must also learn from Tian’s character and strive to become a sage – an ideal human who practises ren (仁). The Mandate of Heaven applies not only to the kings and rulers but also to the sage – Renren (仁人) – a real human being who practises love towards others as to themselves. The Book of Changes too records how humanity should follow the way of Tian: Tian produced the spirit-like things, and the sages took advantage of them. [The operations of] Tian and earth are marked by [so many] changes and transformations, and the sages imitated them [by means of the Yi]. Tian hangs out its [brilliant] figures from which are seen good fortune and bad, and the sages made their emblematic

Confucius, ‘Lunyu, Shuer’. Confucius, ‘Lunyu, Jishi, 论语, 季氏’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 26 November 2020, https://ctext​.org​/analects​/ji​ -shi​/zhs​?en​=on. 38 39

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interpretations accordingly (. . . . 天生神物, 圣人则之; 天地变化, 圣人效之; 天垂象, 见吉凶, 圣人象之).40 The Book of Poetry also affirms that humanity is endowed with virtue, the principle or essence given by Tian. As a result, the way of Tian and the way of sages converge, the latter functioning as something of a sign of the potential within all humans to share in the ontological structure of being itself. The shades of monist Confucian understanding of human nature resemble the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of theopoiesis (or theosis, deification), where union with God is achieved through a synergy between human cooperation and God’s unending energies. The ability of self-transcendence in the orthodox tradition is about transcending one’s own natural power and growing closer to God’s transcendental power. For Protestants, the union is a process of justification and sanctification where the transforming power takes place in a believer by the atonement of Christ. For Catholics, such as Ricci, Tianzhu (天主, Lord of Heaven) came to save the world and re-ascended to Tian following the sages of the past. There are, however, some stark contrasts between the Confucian hesitant metaphysic (in the Analects) and the theological ontology assumed in Christian traditions. In Confucianism, humanity is seen in ‘functional, relational, and moral’ terms; in Christianity, humanity is ‘transformed and energized’ by the Spirit to be in Christ-likeness.41 Rather than the ‘either–or’ approach of the substantial or relational, which is the functional or ontological aspect of sages, what if the ‘both–and’ thinking that focuses on the God– human Jesus can help to resolve the intercultural divide? As Jesus is a person of the Godhead inaugurating the new humanity, the Confucian term Renren can explain his identity as the true sage, the perfect manifestation of an I–Thou relationship in two dimensions – with God and with human beings.42 As the uncreated supreme Sage, Jesus is simultaneously the creator God and in relationship with the creator God. He is, therefore, the object of worship and imitation for Chinese Christians. The Book of Changes states: The great man is he who is in harmony, in his attributes, with heaven and earth; in his brightness, with the sun and moon; in his orderly procedure, with the four seasons; and in his relation to what is fortunate and what is calamitous, in harmony with the spirit-like operations [of Providence]. He may precede Tian, and Tian will not act in opposition to him; he may follow Tian, but will act [only] as Tian at the time would do. If Tian will not act in opposition to him, how much less will men! how much less will the spirit-like operation [of Providence] (夫 ‘大人’ 者, 与天地合其德, 与日月合其明, 与四时合其序, 与鬼神合其吉凶, 先天而天弗违, 后天而奉天时. 天且弗违, 而况于人乎? 况于鬼神乎)!43

‘Book of Changes, Xi Ci I, 周易, 系辞上’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 27 November 2020, https://ctext​.org​/book​ -of​-changes​/xi​-ci​-shang​/ens. 41 Hancock, Christianity and Confucianism, 179–80. 42 See Khiok-Khng Yeo, ‘Chinese Christologies: Images of Christ and Chinese Cultures’, in The Oxford Handbook of Christology, ed. Francesca A. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 393–407. 43 ‘Book of Changes, Qian’. 40

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‘The great man’ is in harmony with the created order, nature, and seasons. He also acts in harmony with spirit-like operations. However, there is a mutual submission between Tian and the great man: he precedes Tian, who submits to him; he also follows Tian and acts in accordance with Tian’s time. The ancient Chinese understanding of creation is seen here – the great man and Tian yield to each other and subordinate the spirit and the created order. This resembles the trinitarian understanding in Christianity wherein the Son yields to the Father through the Spirit. Apparently, ‘the sages persevere long in their course, and all under the sky are transformed and perfected . . . the natural tendencies of heaven, earth, and all things can be seen’ (圣人久于其道, 而天下化成; . . . 而天地万物之情可见矣).44 The perseverance of the sages brings about the transformation of all things. Qing (情), meaning the natural tendencies or love/sentiment of all things, will be demonstrated in and through the determination of the sages. The emphasis on the perseverance of the sages in Confucian tradition expands on the Christian understanding that it is through Christ’s endurance that creation is transformed and made new. The Chinese understanding of Tian in a personified form concerns the transformation of ‘all things’ in heaven and earth, providing a cosmic perspective of creation and recreation. Christian tradition, in turn, expands the Confucian understanding by asserting that the cosmic Christ, in his resurrection from the dead, promises the restoration of the whole universe. The intrinsic Tian In Confucian thought, Tian is recognized principally in human experiences that are given priority over that of other creatures. The concept of Tian changed from that of moral to intrinsic Tian: Tian and human nature are intrinsically related in the sense that the nature of Tian can be the nature of humanity, and the law of Tian can be the law of humanity. If they inwardly seek it, human beings may find the truth concerning the Mandate of Heaven to achieve the ideal of perpetual unity of the Self and Tian. Among the Confucian Five Classics and Four Books, the Doctrine of Means details what is necessary. It begins by saying: ‘what Tian has conferred is called The Nature; accordance with this nature is called The Path of Duty; regulation of this path is called Instruction’ (天命之谓性, 率性之谓道, 修道之谓教).45 Tian here has no connotation of God in a religious sense, but neither does it deny God’s existence. The Mandate of Heaven is simply an ontological principle that human beings can follow through teaching and self-cultivation. Mengzi is very influential in developing this concept from Confucius. He believes that human beings have a natural capability without learning and a natural consciousness without thinking. He puts forth his basic conviction that all people share some honourable innate capacity endowed by Tian.46 He suggests that humanity has four dimensions, or ‘four principles’

‘Book of Changes, Heng’. Zisi, ‘Liji, Zhongyong, 礼记, 中庸’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 11 December 2020, http://ctext​.org​/liji​/zhong​ -yong​/zh. 46 Mengzi, ‘Gong Sun Chou I, 公孙丑上’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 8 October 2021, https://ctext​.org​/mengzi​/gong​ -sun​-chou​-i​/ens: ‘Benevolence is the most honourable dignity conferred by Tian’ (天之尊爵也). 44

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(siduan, 四端), of kindness in their hearts – compassion (ceyin, 恻隐), shame (xiuwu,羞恶), respect (cirang, 辞让), and consciousness (shifei, 是非).47 As long as people do not lose the innate pure heart of a newborn babe – utter innocence – they will know Tian. He states: He who has exhausted all his mental constitution knows his nature. Knowing his nature, he knows Tian. To preserve one’s mental constitution, and nourish one’s nature, is the way to serve Tian. (尽其心者, 知其性也. 知其性, 则知天矣. 存其心, 养其性, 所以事天也).48 Hence, the nature of humanity rooted in the way of Tian can achieve unity with Tian through cultivation. ‘Sincerity is the way of Tian. To think how to be sincere is the way of humanity’ (诚者, 天之道也; 思诚者, 人之道也).49 If individual persons do this, they can extend the full development of their own nature to other human and non-human creatures. The Doctrine of Means states: It is only he who is . . . able to give its full development to the nature of other men, he can give their full development to the natures of animals and things. Able to give their full development to the natures of creatures and things, he can assist the transforming and nourishing powers of Heaven and Earth. Able to assist the transforming and nourishing powers of Heaven and Earth, he may with Heaven and Earth form a ternion. (能尽人之性, 则能尽物之性; 能尽物之性, 则可以赞天地之化育; 可以赞天地之化育, 则可以与天地参矣).50 Within layers of relationships, individual cultivation for sincerity is given priority over relationships with other creatures, both human and other. In doing so, humanity can experience heaven and earth’s transforming and nourishing power, and become one with both. The humanistic focus based on the nature of humanity in unity with Tian makes an irreconcilable contrast to what the Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509–64) proposes – that the interdependence of knowledge of self and knowledge of God is critical to being fully human.51 Moreover, while these early Confucian texts affirm the relationships between human beings, and between human beings and other created things, creation is understood as something humanity lives in rather than lives with. Renfu Tianshu states: ‘Nothing is more precious than human beings amongst creatures out of the essence of heaven and earth’ (天地之精所以生物者, 莫贵于人).52 This Confucian thought has promoted an anthropocentrism that neglects the broader creation order.

Mengzi, ‘Gong Sun Chou I’. Mengzi, ‘Jinxin I, 尽心上’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 8 October 2021, https://ctext​.org​/mengzi​/jin​-xin​-i​/ens. 49 Mengzi, ‘Jinxin I’. 50 Zisi, ‘Liji, Zhongyong’. 51 See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford L. Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1977), I.i.1; I.i.2. 52 Chunqiu Fanlu, ‘Renfu Tianshu, 春秋繁露, 人副天数’, Chinese Text Project, accessed 27 November 2021, https:// ctext​.org​/chun​-qiu​-fan​-lu​/ren​-fu​-tian​-shu​/ens. 47 48

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Following Mengzi’s thoughts, the National Confucianist Xiong Shili (熊十力, 1885–1968) speaks explicitly: ‘Tian does not exist outside of humanity. . . . What humanity desires is what Tian ordains’.53 (Xiong remembered what he once learned from his Buddhist friends: There is a little Buddha in every person’s heart.) This corresponds with classical Chinese hermeneutics insofar as it maintains that the epistemological concern of the heart (yixin weizhi, 以心为知) finds unity with the ontological source of the world to achieve harmony with ‘Dao’, or unity with Tian. The philosophers in the school of Li (理), active during the Song and Ming Dynasties, also emphasize the intrinsic Tian. The Cheng brothers (Cheng Hao, 程顥, 1032–85; and Cheng Yi, 程頤, 1033–1107) were the most famous Li scholars. According to the Cheng brothers, Li is an immaterial cosmic principle which is the principle of every being, including yin–yang (阴阳) and the Five Elements (wuxing, 五行). They even equate human nature (xing, 性) with Li, averring that ‘the mind of one person is one with the mind of Heaven and Earth. The principle of one thing is one with the principle of all things’.54 Li, similar to the Greek logos, reveals the source, its mystery, and its relationship to all creation through human reason.55 Later, Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130–1200) developed the school of Li (lixue, 理学) in Neo-Confucianism. Lu Xiangshan (陆象山, 1139–92) took a further step claiming that the fundamental source of the universe is none other than Li, which is identical to the human mind. A representative of the school of Xin (xinxue, 心学), Wang Yang-ming (王阳明, 1472–1529), further argued that intuitive knowledge is one’s inward distinguishable instinct which the spirit Tian reveals. He insisted that one should concentrate on inward-looking reflection and contemplation rather than on external and intellectual investigation. Lu and Wang preferred to emphasize the potential for greatness in every human being and the power of the human mind and heart to choose good and to reach perfection through practising virtues. These interpretations of the intrinsic Tian insist that one can acquire knowledge of Tian through one’s inward heart. Such convictions, profoundly influenced by Chan (or Zen) Buddhism, came to China during the Han dynasty (202 bce–220 ce). Although they influenced the social morality of the time, some scholars believe Confucianism made a further step towards atheism by remaining distant from theism. If one’s heart is Tian, showing the order of the universe, then there is no need for the existence of a God or supreme master outside oneself. This led the Dutch Reformed missiologist Hendrik Kraemer to conclude that the entire spirit of Chinese civilization is essentially humanistic.56 This dichotomy of human wisdom and divine, however, reflects an apologetic attempt for intellectual consent to classical theism. Some Protestant scholars argue that the immanence of intrinsic Tian is comparable to the kenotic movement of the Christian God in the act of incarnation. For example, the indigenizing daological approach by Liang Yancheng attempts to offer a replacement of the Greek static being with an immanent intrinsic Tian that is communicable. Huang, in his

Shili Xiong, Yuanru, 源儒 (Taipei: Minglun, 1972), 2:175. Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 551. 55 See Huang, Confronting Confucian Understandings, 180. 56 Hendrik Kraemer, World Cultures and World Religions: The Coming Dialogue (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 178. 53 54

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critique of Liang, fails to understand the paradoxical nature of the inclusive approach towards Confucianism and of the exclusive soteriological path of revelation in Jesus Christ.57 In a spirit of an open dialogical approach that seeks to press beyond irreconcilable differences regarding the substance of things, it can be said that Chinese intrinsic Tian invites Protestant theology to move towards oneness with God, whereas Protestant theology invites intrinsic Tian to be distinguished from human participation in the divine nature. Intrinsic Tian resonates with Christian panentheism, wherein God’s presence and activity, while distinct from those of the world, are one with those of the world. However, unlike intrinsic Tian, Christian theology of creation resists anthropocentrism. So Gregory of Nyssa (335–94): ‘For who, when [taking] a survey of the universe, is so simple as not to believe that there is Deity in everything, penetrating it, embracing it, and seated in it?’58 Franciscan spirituality, too, honours creation and recognizes mutuality and personhood among all creatures; nonhuman animals, plants, the moon, and stars are celebrated as humanity’s brothers and sisters.59 The Jesuit missionaries, with their contemplative tradition, attempted to be ‘mediators of an immediate experience of God that would lead to an inner change of heart or a deepening of religious sensibilities already present’.60 For them, the creator God dwells in all creatures: I will consider how God dwells in creatures; in the elements, giving them existence; in the plants, giving them life; in the animals, giving them sensation; in human beings, giving them intelligence; and finally, how in this way he dwells also in myself, giving me existence, life, sensation, and intelligence.61 This ‘togetherness’ with the broader creation order exposes a radical difference between intrinsic Tian and a Christian theology of creation. On the one hand, Christian theology insists that humanity is created to ‘be with’ – for relationships with the earth, other creatures, and God. The earth is the home of humanity. Humanity’s being, origin, and destiny are inextricably bound up with that of the earth.62 The non-human creatures of the earth, though differentiated, are mutually interdependent, echoing their relationships with one another. They ask for reverence and respect when revealing the goodness and beauty of God. They, in turn, teach human creatures the wisdom of seasons and cycles, birth and growth, patience and hope. The Christian understanding of the broader creation order can assist intrinsic Tian in expanding its human centrism to all creation and to attend more deliberately to the ethical implications of living in a shared ecology.

See Huang, Confronting Confucian Understandings, 214–19, 249. Gregory of Nyssa, ‘The Great Catechism’, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, Volume 5: Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, Etc. (Edinburgh/Grand Rapids: T&T Clark/ Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997), 495. 59 See Francis of Assisi, ‘The Canticle of Creatures’, Francis of Assisi Academy for Planetary Health, accessed 8 October 2021, https://www​.laudatosi​.org​/pope​-francis​/the​-canticle​-of​-creatures. 60 John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 19. 61 Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George E. Ganss (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 177. See also Paul A. Rule, ‘Does Heaven Speak? Revelation in the Confucian and Christian Traditions’, in China and Christianity: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future, ed. Stephen Uhalley Jr. and Xiaoxin Wu (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), 67. 62 See Mike Higton, SCM Study Guide: Christian Doctrine (London: SCM Press, 2006), 182. 57 58

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On the other hand, the anthropocentric Chinese understanding of the immanent presence of Tian in human hearts offers some wisdom for those western theologies of imago Dei heavily based on linear, cognitive, and segregated thinking. The moral experience within is revealed by Tian silently, as in negative theology. It would not be difficult for Chinese Christians to grasp St Paul’s exhortations – ‘Christ in you’ (Col. 1.27); ‘Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith’ (Eph. 3.17; cf. Col. 3.15). Intrinsic Tian enhances the biblical understanding of implanted knowing in each human being (see Jer. 31.33; Acts 17.28). Another path to enlarging the two traditions is that of orthopraxy and orthopathy rather than orthodoxy. As Fang Dongmei (方东美, 1899–1977) points out, Confucian texts, in a large portion, including the unity of Tian and humanity, are expressed in the form of poetry rather than as metaphysical statements. The beautiful mystical insights derive from an ambiguous world view.63 It is, therefore, the practices concerning Tian/God in everyday human life, rather than metaphysical agreements concerning the existence of the divine, that may assist in bridging the gap between Confucian and Christian traditions. Christian contemplative traditions cultivate inward beauty and goodness with the ideal of contemplatives in action. They bear resemblance with Wang Yangming’s ‘unity of knowledge and action’ (zhixingheyi, 知行合一). Indeed, Confucian spirituality cultivates inner sageliness and outer kingliness (neisheng waiwang, 内圣外王), ‘a life of contemplation and a life of activity’.64 Likewise, the daily examen, performed in silence, resonates with ‘quiet sitting’ (jingzuo, 静坐) in Confucian practice. These resonances do not take away the stark contrasts between the two traditions. However, through a mutually enriching dialogue, the Confucian practice offers a spiritual path for human flourishing: to be a better human being committed to ethical and social responsibilities in and with the world in ways that Christian traditions share. Christian virtue and character of sacrificial love in Christ, however, extends to all, including the marginalized, rather than being reduced to key relationships, as exhibited in Confucian ethics. Christian tradition offers a broader vision of human thriving by becoming fully alive in Christ for the world, trusting that the life-giving Spirit is working towards Shalom – the transformation and fulfilment of all creation.

Conclusion Tian, both transcendental and immanent, alludes to the trinitarian God that western creation theology has attempted to articulate from the biblical text: ‘Creation is of the order of love. God’s love is the fundamental moving force in all created things.’65 If true, love can be an emerging language that bridges Christian theologies of creation and Tian. Love is not a doctrine but rather a way of being, listening attentively, discerning patiently, and receiving openly. From ancient understandings of transcendental Tian to moral Tian and then to intrinsic Tian,

See Ching, Chinese Religions, 84; Bresciani, ‘Explorations and Responses’, 606–11. Julia Ching, ‘What is Confucian Spirituality?’, in Confucian Spirituality, ed. Weiming Tu and Mary E. Tucker (New York: Crossroad, 2003), 1:94. 65 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015), 38 (§77). 63 64

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Chinese tradition has focused on the ontological creativity in creation’s origins and on the human creature and its cultivation to achieve unity with Tian. These understandings enlarge the western understanding of a transcendental God–creator, provide a cosmic perspective of creation and recreation of the sages and challenge western theologies heavily based on human intellect. However, Chinese Tian is stubbornly anthropocentric in its focus and concerns. Christian theologies of creation, by contrast, invite broader visions of interdependency and dialogue among all creatures, both human and other. They also insist that such a vision is grounded christologically – that is, in Christ, the supreme uncreated sage who has already opened a soteriological path for all to be in unity with the divine. Nevertheless, bringing these two traditions into mutually enriching dialogue with texts in contexts highlights the complex and ambiguous problem of intercultural exchange and invites contemplation in a spirit of hospitality, humility, honesty, and discernment rather than decisive formulas or glossing over real differences. Such dialogue is also pursued in the hope of building – or recognizing – bridges between the ancient creation texts of Tian and Christianity so that both traditions can be mutually enriched and transformed in the ways of creation’s life.

Further reading Chan, Wing-Tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Ching, Julia. Chinese Religions. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Huang, Paulos Z. Confronting Confucian Understandings of the Christian Doctrine of Salvation: A Systematic Theological Analysis of the Basic Problems in the Confucian-Christian Dialogue. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Küng, Hans and Julia Ching. Christianity and Chinese Religions. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Tu, Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds. Confucian Spirituality: Volume 1. New York: Crossroad, 2003. Uhalley, Stephen, Jr. and Xiaoxin Wu, eds. China and Christianity: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2001.

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CHAPTER 55 DECOLONIZATION A POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE TO A THEOLOGY OF CREATION Nicolás Panotto

Postcolonial theology is not simply another ‘theology of the genitive’.1 Rather, it represents an epistemic approach that offers some axes of critical rereading and articulation of diverse discourses, theories, and narratives within the theological world. This approach aims to provide a new hermeneutical locus for diverse currents and build bridges and intersectional processes based on disciplinary knots, historical genealogies, and political conjunctures to establish new epistemic conjunctions around specific problems, themes, and demands. That is why concepts such as coloniality, subalternity, identity, and difference, among others, become frameworks for relocating and intertwining knowledges rather than endogenous and closed concepts. This is how a postcolonial rereading of a theology of creation operates: although one does not find a systematic corpus on the subject within the field of postcolonial theology, there are references and interweavings based on themes linked to anthropological and colonial conceptions of nature that can be linked with this theological exercise. In this sense, the search for a postcolonial approach to a theology of creation will concentrate on: (i) identifying the colonial elements present in the historical construction of this theological framework, (ii) recognizing the intrinsically political and colonial dimension of the elements within theologies of creation, and (iii) accounting for the epistemic tensions that arise from this postcolonial rereading.

Postcolonial and theopoetic antecedents To speak, then, of a postcolonial approach to a theology of creation means, first of all, to account for two central elements: (i) the specificity of a postcolonial approach to issues related to the field of this theology, and (ii) the contribution of process theology (more specifically, the notion of theopoiesis), which, as shall be seen, intervenes as a relevant starting point in approaches to this field. A postcolonial method proposes a critical analysis that locates coloniality as a historical matrix that shapes the hegemonic ways of understanding the human and the social, its political relations, and how one understands and lives in reality. It does not refer to a geopolitical fact located in the past but rather to a matrix that was shaped over centuries, and that still operates today from the establishment of epistemes, cosmovisions, and institutional modes,

Jules A. Martinez-Olivieri, A Visible Witness: Christology, Liberation, and Participation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), 35. 1

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under the aegis of modernity. As the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano argues, the colonial– eurocentric–modern matrix that was constructed from the colonial encounters of history still permeates our habitus through the presence of a coloniality of being (which translates into hierarchies of racialization, class and, as María Lugones adds, of gender2), a coloniality of power (which is inscribed in the types of political institutionality and social configurations that have been inherited from modernity to administer the commons), and a coloniality of knowledge (which has a direct impact on how the concept of ‘truth’ has been attached to rationalist and homogeneous legitimizations of knowledge).3 One central element of postcolonial theory is that these colonialities – of being, of power, and of knowledge – configure a way of seeing the world, especially from the perspective of a development–nature–modernity relationship. Modern anthropocentrism makes nature a space of domination and the concept of development a type of teleology that configures the types of relationship and hierarchization – between human and non-human, and between societies and cultural matrices. This is what Sylvia Wynter calls the construction of The Man,4 where colonization is understood as a process of de/super-naturalized establishment of being and where secularization plays a central role in transforming from divine otherness to human otherness. Colonial logic intervenes in the constitution of a universal and abstract way of approaching humanity’s relationship with nature as something subordinated to reason and human control. This has consequences not only for the modes of economic intervention on the environment but also for the processes of differentiation between groups, subjectivities, territories, and cultures. Therefore, a decolonial approach to these processes implies, above all, an epistemic deconstruction of the meanings that mediate these relationships. To this responds the distinction made by Gayatri Spivak between the global and the planetary: while the former implies the idea of massification that is constructed in the postcolonial era, the planetary invokes ‘the effort required to figure the (im)possibility of this underived intuition’.5 Along the same lines, the Venezuelan anthropologist Arturo Escobar describes the politics of place as a way of granting a political dimension to the cultural difference inscribed in the diversity of identities, which is not only a singular way of approaching the cosmological or natural but also the recognition of other worlds that inhabit our planet. Understandings of local culture and place oppose the homogeneous space circumscribed by modernity, the west and capital itself, especially within the sense of globalization. ‘The focus, therefore, shifts to the multiple links of identity, place and power – between place-making and people-making – without naturalizing or constructing places as sources of authentic, essentialized identities.’6 There is a critique here towards the

See María Lugones, Peregrinajes: Teorizar una Coalición Contra Múltiples Opresiones (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Del Signo, 2021). All translations throughout this chapter are the author’s own. 3 Aníbal Quijano, ‘Colonialidad del Poder y Clasificación Social’, Journal of World–Systems Research 6, no. 2 (2000): 342–86. 4 See Sylvia Winter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. 5 Gayatri C. Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 72. 6 Arturo Escobar, ‘El Lugar de la Naturaleza y la Naturaleza del Lugar: ¿Globalización o Postdesarrollo?’, in La Colonialidad del Saber: Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas, ed. Edgardo Lander (Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales: Centro de Integración Comunicación, Cultura y Sociedad, 2011), 115. 2

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same social and human sciences: silencing efforts behind the abstraction of concepts such as Capital, Globalization, or the State makes one lose sight of the presence of alterities and subaltern movements present in countless contexts. This emphasis on the multiplicity of localities entails deconstructing the dichotomous differential mechanisms endorsed by the west, as seen in the development/underdevelopment polarity. This stems from questioning the division between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, which is the source of other dichotomies, such as theory and practice, reason and emotions, body and mind, and place and space. In this sense, some cultures conceive of biophysical, human, and supranatural elements through intertwining and relationships, as proposed by the social philosophy of ‘Buen Vivir’.7 One should not, however, only speak of the ‘deconstruction’ of ontological and identity principles but also of the construction of alterities that confront the hegemonic frameworks of meaning. Here arises the importance of social movements as a body of multiple political identities that confront the homogeneity of traditional models. In Escobar’s words: ‘Politics . . . is also located in place, not only in the supra levels of capital and space. Place, one may add, is the location of a multiplicity of forms of cultural politics, that is, of the cultural becoming political, as has been evidenced in social movements.’8 This is why Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that the postcolonial approach focuses more on the politics of difference than on the politics of identity.9 The starting point concerns not only how the particularities are constituted but also the critical possibilities that the spaces in between can offer within colonial differences.10 Chakrabarty argues that this process of differentiation that criticizes modern anthropocentrism takes on another dimension from the place of the so-called Anthropocene: ‘This non-human existence and energy mode of the human tells us that we are no longer simply a form of life endowed with ontological meaning. Humans possess a sense of ontic belonging.’11 Hence, postcolonial theory needs to go beyond traditional postcolonial anthropology to account for the problematics that the Anthropocene establishes:

So Catherine Walsh, ‘Development as Buen Vivir: Institutional Arrangements and (De)colonial Entanglements’, Development 53, no. 1 (2010): 18: ‘In its most general sense, buen vivir denotes, organizes, and constructs a system of knowledge and living based on the communion of humans and nature and on the spatial–temporal–harmonious totality of existence. That is, on the necessary interrelation of beings, knowledges, logics, and rationalities of thought, action, existence, and living. This notion is part and parcel of the cosmovision, cosmology, or philosophy of the indigenous peoples of Abya Yala but also, and in a somewhat different way, of the descendants of the African Diaspora’. See also Eduardo Gudynas, ‘Buen Vivir: Germinando Alternativas al Desarrollo’, América Latina en Movimiento 462 (2011): 1–20; Eduardo Gudynas, ‘Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow’, Development 54, no. 4 (2011): 441–7; Alberto Acosta and Mateo M. Abarca, ‘Buen Vivir: An Alternative Perspective from the Peoples of the Global South to the Crisis of Capitalist Modernity’, in The Climate Crisis: South African and Global Democratic Eco-Socialist Alternatives, ed. Vishwas Satgar (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2018), 131–47; Eija Ranta, Vivir Bien as an Alternative to Neoliberal Globalization: Can Indigenous Terminologies Decolonize the State? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018); Natasha Chassagne, Buen Vivir as an Alternative to Sustainable Development: Lessons from Ecuador (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021); Henry Veltmeyer and Edgar Z. Lau, eds, Buen Vivir and the Challenges to Capitalism in Latin America (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021). 8 Escobar, ‘El Lugar de la Naturaleza y la Naturaleza del Lugar’, 128. 9 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Clima y Capital: La Vida Bajo el Antropoceno (Santiago: Mímesis, 2021). 10 See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2012); Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/ Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 11 Chakrabarty, Clima y Capital, 60. 7

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‘What is needed, then, is to think the human on multiple scales and registers, considering ontological and non-ontological modes of existence.’12 In summary, a postcolonial approach implies an assessment of the meanings of the planetary, focusing not only on practices on reality and nature but also on the epistemic, cultural, and hermeneutic frameworks that determine their definition and apprehension. Therefore, a postcolonial approach is an invitation to identify how a theology of creation, on the one hand, promotes concepts about reality and the divine as an ontological platform, confirming colonial and modern world views. On the other hand, it also proposes how a theology of creation can contribute to generating a plurality of hermeneutic places to unsettle underlying hegemonic meanings. In this sense, multiplicity or plurality does not equate to abstract, descriptive, or passive diversity. Diversity originates from the struggles and resistances in the historical and present colonial differences and, therefore, implies an intrinsically political dimension in its confrontational constitution. This pluralization of meanings arises from the contraposition of two concepts: development and process. The first, development, is based on a modern teleological ontology, whose linearity legitimizes the ‘end’ from the purity of an ‘origin’, which acts as a founding myth loaded with colonial meanings, and also in the hands of a set of histories, institutions, and groups that ‘administer’ or ‘represent’ it. The idea of process, on the other hand, has to do with the presence of a multiplicity of meanings and practices that do not necessarily respond to a teleology but rather to an immanent continuity that constantly re-signifies practices and meanings. The concept of process has played a central role in postcolonial critiques of many creation theologies. These critiques have sometimes drawn on Alfred North Whitehead’s distinction between creation and creativity: the former is understood as the field in which the latter acts as a process of constant re-creation.13 This act of creativity implies the inscription of a relational pluralism, an element that describes not only cosmic processes but also the constitution of all religious traditions. From a theological point of view, this relational pluralism takes the name of polydoxy, ‘an inherently multiple teaching of the multiple’.14 Nothing is closed; nothing is forever. Everything is vibrating; everything is in movement. For this reason, as Catherine Keller observes: ‘No theology in history has been more tuned to the evolving symbioses of all creatures than process theology: Whatever science knows is brought into play, at the very edge of what is not yet known.’15 From this, multiplicity, creativity, and (critical) becoming are three fundamental contributions of process theology to a postcolonial look at a theology of creation. In another essay, Roland Faber and Catherine Keller sum it up thus:

Chakrabarty, Clima y Capital, 62–3. See William E. Connolly, ‘Process Philosophy and Planetary Politics’, in Common Goods: Economy, Ecology, and Political Theology, ed. Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, Catherine Keller, and Elias Ortega-Aponte (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 25–53. 14 Roland Faber and Catherine Keller, ‘Polyphilic Pluralism: Becoming Religious Multiplicities’, in Divine Multiplicity: Trinities, Diversities, and the Nature of Relation, ed. Chris Boesel and S. Wesley Ariarajah (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 63. 15 Catherine Keller, ‘Theopoiesis and the Pluriverse: Notes on a Process’, in Theopoetic Folds: Philosophizing Multifariousness, ed. Roland Faber and Jeremy Fackenthal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 192. 12 13

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Because it is the very sacred or divine activity of enfolding, this multiplicity will allow us to discern it not only in multiplicity, but also as sacred or divine multiplicity. . . . Desiring this divine in multiplicity inherently directs our pluralistic gaze toward a trust no longer driven by fear of becoming, difference, and flux, but filled with anticipation of the mutual embodiment, of the inter-carnation, of encounters, conjunctions, and interferences of Wisdoms. Whether we evoke the plurisingularity of Elohim or the manyness-in-oneness of the Christian Trinity or the sacred intertwining of samsara and nirvana in the Buddhist ‘co-origination’ (pratitya-samutpada) or the complexity of the trickster of native religions, we prehend the sacred folds of multiplicity. ‘S/He/It’, we might say, not only insists on multiplicity but becomes as its very interactivity – not as the one, not as the many, but as the sacred or divine (in) multiplicity.16 In other words, such plurality does not describe the action of the divine in history from a simple mathematical hermeneutic where theology contextually expresses superficial singularities. Rather, it draws attention to the divine action in history as mutually ontologically constituting. Here the reappropriation of the notion of theopoiesis is an attempt to resist sameness; it is an inscription betokening an excess of meaning. Hence, as a ‘resistance to the colonizing Oneness, . . . pluralism exceed[s] relativism’.17 This accords with Chakrabarty’s insistence on the contrast between identities and differences. It is an excess that always finds an embodiment in the in-between connectiveness. Theopoiesis recalls religious, mystical traditions, especially their notions of the unnamable and infinite divine person. It also relates to the ‘making divine’ of Hellenistic Christianity. However, Keller makes a critical observation about this idea. Reflecting David Miller’s claim that ‘In theopoetry, as opposed to theopoetics, theology does not end with the death of God, because there is no death of God. . . . [T]heopoetics begins when theology ends’18 – Keller wonders whether such a division is possible. Can theopoetry be detached from the theos and logos to which it alludes? So, she answers: ‘[W]e might reframe Miller’s postulate thus: theopoetics begins not where theology ends but where it negates itself. This is actually where it comes to be: where it negates itself becomingly.’19 Postcolonial approaches draw from process theology and the idea of theopoetics to employ concepts of becoming and multiplicity as critical axes. As Faber and Keller state: Postcolonial theologies do not imagine either a founding or a final purity of a separated, socially just religious community. Difference does not separate. It does not protect authenticity from piracy by restoring oversimplification and mutual exclusion. Once I begin to feel – to ‘prehend’ – the other (how am I separate from him/her/it?) – have I not taken some of that difference into self, effecting an ‘other in self ’?20

Faber and Keller, ‘Polyphilic Pluralism’, 69. Faber and Keller, ‘Polyphilic Pluralism’, 67. 18 David L. Miller, ‘Theopoetry or Theopoetics?’, Cross Currents 60, no. 1 (2010): 8. Cited in Keller, ‘Theopoiesis and the Pluriverse’, 185. 19 Keller, ‘Theopoiesis and the Pluriverse’, 187. 20 Faber and Keller, ‘Polyphilic Pluralism’, 64. 16 17

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More specifically, a postcolonial critique of a theology of creation will involve: (i) a questioning of the colonial–onto–theological metaphysics that grounds it, especially the image of the divine that it promotes; (ii) accounting for the tension between order and process in ‘origins’ as two theological ways of accounting for historical processes; and (iii) countering hegemonic colonial–western anthropology, as opposed to a relational anthropology.

Towards a postcolonial critique of creation theology Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming is a major contribution to this field. In this book, published in 2003, Keller argues that Genesis presents a theomatic theology: a vision that begins from the presence of the deep, from chaos. She argues that the theology that invaded early Christianity did not tolerate this idea. That is why it developed an imaginary of an almighty God who made history a scenario of control. The concept of depth became linearity. Chaos became order. This eliminates, for example, any feminine image in the framework of creation, nature, and mythology, a figure that has been ancestrally linked to the origins of the world. Therefore, a theology of creation that legitimizes the idea of an omnipotent God will always fall into the scheme of the God that imposes from a patriarchal logic. This is what Keller calls tehomophobia, ‘the systemic repression’ of ‘biblically certifiable’ theologies of the deep.21 Tehomophobia buttresses not only gender hierarchies but also refutes any logic that questions the order that gives content to this linearity in social, political, cultural, and racial terms. The traditional theology of creatio ex nihilo also relates to this logic. The notion of a zero point from which the Great God of History operates means the annulment of anything prior to the existence of this divinity, which has total control over it. As Keller puts it: ‘Genesis 1 + omnipotence + ontology = creatio ex nihilo’.22 Any possibility of thinking about autonomous creatural processes is also lost. From a postcolonial perspective, this means that existence and nature are under the mantle of a teleology imposed by the hegemonic epistemes, ‘rules of formation’,23 that account for and canonize that ontology. The concept of creatio ex nihilo acts as a device where the divine is transformed into a metaphysical force that controls creation’s processes and where the plane of the historical is inscribed in a pre-established – and, therefore, controlled – beginning and end: ‘The ex nihilo doctrine constructed as orthodoxy itself the pure dualism of originating Logos and prevenient Nothing.’24 However, the metaphysical teleology of creatio ex nihilo affects not only conservative world views – those ontologies that justify and extend established mores and locations of power – but also permeates critical perspectives. This is what a decolonial approach suggests: the coloniality of western thought also crosses emancipatory visions. In this sense, Keller’s questioning of the Brazilian Lutheran theologian Vítor Westhelle is interesting. Westhelle argues that western doctrines of creation maintain the idea of an ‘order of creation’ – ‘an “abstract order”, i.e., an

Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), xix, 7. Keller, Face of the Deep, 64. 23 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), xii. 24 Keller, Face of the Deep, 10. 21 22

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ideology that justifies bourgeois domination’25 – as a kick-start to legitimize oppressive visions of history. From a Latin American perspective, the idea of ‘order’ has always been linked to domination. Westhelle affirms that the idea of creatio ex nihilo can be reread from the idea that God will not fall into negation, as the theologies of domination do. Keller, however, wonders to what extent the theology of creatio ex nihilo can contribute to a liberating theology when it is sustained by a lineal conception of history and under the figure of a metaphysical divinity.26 In other words, a decolonial critique of the theology of creation leads one to see that it all too often acts as an epistemic device that frames fundamental elements of western theologies, whether conservative, progressive, or ‘liberating’. A theology of creation that continues to show historical linearity – whether in an evolutionary or liberating key – from the action of a divinity that maintains control – whether to impose order or revolution – will continue to legitimize a colonial and western vision. As Whitney Bauman summarizes: This theology [of creatio ex nihilo, which ‘functions epistemologically like terra nullius’] reduces the anxiety of living in a finite, relational world through postulating an allpowerful God who saves us from the anxieties of finitude and relation. This God, whose will and act are united, then becomes a foundation for a colonizing ethical and political approach to the world. This colonizing approach translates into an ethics and politics of civilizing other peoples and an anthropocentric view of the rest of the natural world. The world is only recognized in terms of what it means to the center, or the colonizing mind. That which cannot be assimilated, in the ‘best-case’ scenario, is not acknowledged as real or important.27 A postcolonial critique of the theology of creation implies posing the idea of becoming in the face of a homogeneous history and celebrating plurality and multiplicity, not as contingencies within a telos but rather as the inscription of that becoming that overlaps and conjugates all times, as an excess to what is intended to be imposed and enclosed as a beginning and an end. Therefore, a postcolonial theology of creation can be understood as a theomatic theology that does not counterpose order with chaos but rather champions a theology where ‘originary indeterminacy generates order not in opposition to but upon the face of the chaos’.28 A theology of becoming, according to Keller, borrows from Edward Said’s distinction between ‘beginning’ as relative and ‘origin’ as absolute. This implies a decolonization of the idea of ‘creation’ itself. The theology of creation traditionally ‘emphasizes an event in relation’,29 which implies the presence of a ‘creator’. In contrast, a postcolonial theology of becoming implies detaching history from the control of a creator, which, in turn, means detaching history

Vítor Westhelle, ‘Creation Motifs in the Search for a Vital Space: A Latin American Perspective’, in Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside, ed. Susan B. Thistlethwaite and Mary P. Engel (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 150. 26 This same criticism is made by other liberation theologians, such as Marcella Althaus-Reid, Ivone Gebara, and Hugo Assmann. 27 Whitney A. Bauman, ‘Creatio ex Nihilo, Terra Nullius, and the Erasure of Presence’, in Ecospirit: Religion, Philosophy, and the Earth, ed. Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 356. 28 Keller, Face of the Deep, 38. 29 Keller, Face of the Deep, 5. 25

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from the power structures that sustain that hierarchization.30 Divinity in history does not come from identifying a God-All-Mighty that controls it but rather as a presence that manifests itself, in-carnate in the multiplicity manifested in the uncontrollable becoming of existence. Keller states: ‘The logos of a becoming-in-relation will . . . fold continuously in and out of the chaos, producing the complications of a light shining in the dark: neither of a new nonbeing, a mere absence, a worship of disorder, nor of a delusional solidity of Presence.’31 Such multiplicity represents the inscription of difference in history. In the case of a postcolonial perspective, such an idea assumes an even more radical dimension in political terms, comparing this to its usual use in literary theory or Derridean deconstruction. Difference is always colonial difference. Keller proposes a ‘third space’ that is not only the representation of the excess of identity that questions Manichean duplicity but is also an instance of oscillation, of critical mimesis in the face of the epistemic frontiers imposed by coloniality. In this sense, for Keller, the presence of such a space allows one to distinguish between an originative and originated beginning. Origination is neither a starting point nor a process without course or content but is rather the incarnation of a (critical) process of constant self-(re)generation of history and the cosmos. Keller states: If we discern a third space of beginning – neither pure origin nor nihilist flux – its difference translates into another interstitial space: that between the self-presence of a changeless Being who somehow suddenly (back then) created; and the pure Nonbeing out of which that creation was summoned, and toward which its fluency falls. That alternative milieu, neither being nor nonbeing, will signify the site of becoming as genesis: the topos of the Deep.32 Thus, a theology of creation from the multiplicity of becoming implies the dichotomy of ‘making’ and ‘letting be’: ‘And God said, “Let there be . . .”’ (Gen. 1.3, 6, 14). It is a creatio ex profundis, a creation from (uncreated) tehom that lies ever ‘depersonified but preexistent, as a layering or enveloping matrix’.33 From a postcolonial point of view, one could say that what comes from this becoming is neither an abstract excess nor a passive multiplicity. It is, rather, a critical becoming that confronts the conditionalities imposed on reality, history, and nature by the colonial machinery. It is an anti-idolatrous becoming that overthrows the hegemonic theological metaphors that cloister the processes of the cosmos.34 It is a becoming that bursts in front of the episteme of the Almighty God to enable an ecology of knowledge that accounts for the worlds that otherwise inhabit it.35 This theology of becoming relates to what Bauman calls ‘creatio continua’, continuous creation. He describes it as follows: ‘Rather than modeling power here after an omnipotent

See, for example, George E. Tinker, ‘Why I Do Not Believe in a Creator’, in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice, and Life Together, ed. Steve Heinrichs (Waterloo: Herald Press, 2013), 167–79. 31 Keller, Face of the Deep, 40. 32 Keller, Face of the Deep, 12. 33 Keller, Face of the Deep, 28. See Catherine Keller, ‘Creatio ex profundis: Chaostheorie und Schöpfungslehre’, Evangelische Theologie 69, no. 5 (2009): 356–66. 34 See Franz Hinkelammert, Totalitarismo del Mercado: El Mercado Capitalista Como ser Supremo (Madrid: Akal, 2021). 35 See Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Una Epistemología del Sur: La Reinvención del Conocimiento y la Emancipación Social, ed. José G. G. Salgado (México City: Siglo XXI, 2009). 30

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God who creates ex nihilo, this continuing co-creation model depends upon the power of (our understandings of) God creating ecosocial communities with human and non-human “others” in different times and places.’36 Hence, the political implication of creatio continua is not only to construct a counter-narrative to the colonial metaphysics present in the traditional theology of creation but also to enable – taking up Escobar’s call37 – a political theology of places, where these emerging multiplicities are understood not only as reappropriations of concrete space but, rather, as other places, other worlds, that are born from the depths of creation.

Decolonizing the Nihil: Anthropology of the Ch’ixi Finally, another central element of a postcolonial rethinking of the theology of creation has to do with the anthropology it proposes. In the case of traditional approaches, western anthropocentrism responds precisely to a theological metaphysics translated into an anthropocentric mode. Therefore, a postcolonial critique has to do with both the conditionality and the actions of the human being in this process of becoming. The first element relates to questioning the Byzantinian–modern Manichaeism38 differentiation between immanence and transcendence. Bauman raises the relationship between a ‘radical immanence’ and a ‘radical materialism’.39 A role of theology is to rethink this relationship with such material immanence as a way, precisely, of rethinking the materiality of transcendence itself. One could say that transcendence itself comes from this relationship, or, put otherwise, that transcendence is what enables this relationship. This is what Kwok Pui-Lan refers to as correlative immanence: ‘Correlative immanence problematizes the autonomous notion of Self and Other that the Western imaginary has espoused and the straight dividing line that has kept the two separated.’40 How can this correlative immanence be deepened by a postcolonial vision of a theology of creation? More specifically, what elements would come into play in this correlative immanence? What kind of dynamics are enabled within the framework of a decolonizing critique? A postcolonial critique of a theology of creation towards a correlative immanence has to do with disarming and complexifying the subject–object distinction within the traditional creational logic, which operates in the background of the transcendence–immanence distinction that frames modern–colonial theology. Here, the determination of God is referred to specifically as an Absolute Subject who controls history as an Object of dominion and channels its temporality in progressive and linear terms. This implies, then, an anthropology that assumes a metaphysical, originating, and controlling ontological conditionality of time and space, as

Bauman, ‘Creatio ex Nihilo’, 371. See also Whitney Bauman, ‘The Problem of a Transcendent God for the Well-Being of Continuous Creation’, Dialog: A Journal of Theology 46, no. 2 (2007): 120–7. 37 See Arturo Escobar, ‘Mundos y Conocimientos de Otro Modo: El Programa de Investigación de Modernidad/ Colonialidad Latinoamericano’, Tabula Rasa 1 (2003): 51–86. 38 See Charles Taylor and Benjamin Lee, ‘Multiple Modernities Project: Modernity and Difference’, The Center for Transcultural Studies, accessed 2 March 2022, https://www​.sas​.upenn​.edu​/transcult​/promad​.html. 39 See Bauman, ‘The Problem of a Transcendent God’, 120–7. 40 Kwok Pui-Lan, ‘What Has Love To Do with It? Planetarity, Feminism, and Theology’, in Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology, ed. Stephen D. Moore and Mayra Rivera (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 38–9. 36

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one sees in traditional theological anthropologies. Divine metaphysics and anthropological metaphysics are two sides of the same coin, which are also based on a utilitarian and objectifying vision of nature. However, the postcolonial questioning of the modern–colonial subject–object logic does not necessarily imply the annulment of a constitutive difference as an ontological foundation. Postcolonial critiques have proposed two lines of complexification concerning this difference. On the one hand, by inscribing it in the framework of plurality, where there is not a single subject–object logic but rather a heterogeneity of subjects, objects, and types of links that unfold as the context of correlations allows, emphasis is placed not so much on the metaphysics of each element but, rather, on the deconstruction of its status of uniqueness based on the processes that give rise to its movements. This is what Lugones calls an ‘ontological pluralism’, which deconstructs the uniqueness of the subject, or what Escobar develops from the idea of pluriverses as ways of promoting a sociocultural flow that questions modern ontological dualisms.41 The other way has been to evoke the strategic dimension of ‘difference’, inscribed in the framework of colonial differences, from a decolonial and subaltern perspective. In this sense, the ontological status of power subscribed in the subject–object dualism imposed by coloniality is subverted, imploded from within, based on the fissures that subjects and subaltern logics find in order to move disruptively within colonialist logics. This is the well-known proposal by the Indian critical theorist Homi Bhabha in his work on the processes of mimesis that are gestated from the in-between spaces in colonial narratives, or what Walter Mignolo refers to as the operation of delinking subjects based on colonial differences.42 In short, a critical rereading of the modern subject–object binarism has to do with identifying the critical, deconstructive, but also ontologically constitutive dimension of the difference that this binary establishes, as a way of de-absolving the ontological condition of each part, enabling new places of interaction, of opening space for the emergence of other ontologies. The subject–object distinction, then, does not respond to a linear logic, to an operation of domination, and even less, does it conform to an ontological hierarchy. Rather, it gives rise to an understanding of the constitutive diversity of reality from countless operations of differentiation between subjects and objects, between human and non-human relations, and in heterogeneous flows of cosmic interaction. This post/decolonial gaze assists in deconstructing the onto-theology present in the theology of creation, especially the concept of creatio ex nihilo. Beyond the critique pointed out earlier regarding the use of this concept by modern-euro-centric theologies, could one propose a revision of the difference that arises from the tension between immanence and transcendence? Does correlative immanence not also have to do with de-absolving the metaphysics present in the immanence–transcendence logic, radicalizing the transcendent dimension that springs from the differentiality it inscribes, as an alterity that does not present itself as a totality but rather as a constitutive undecidable question at the borders of the diversity of the human and the non-human as well as of their relations?

See Lugones, Peregrinajes; Arturo Escobar, Autonomía y Diseño: La Realización de lo Comunal (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2017). 42 See Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Walter Mignolo, La Désobéissance épistémique: Rhétorique de la Modernité, Logique de la Colonialité et Grammaire de la Décolonialité (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2015). 41

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This leads one, then, to seek the operations of differentiation that decolonized accounts of creation enable in order to deconstruct and radicalize the othering that presupposes subject– object binaries by removing them from the assumptions of western metaphysics. From a decolonial gaze, a first element for this quest is to approach the creationist account as ‘text’, as literature, and thus identify the politics of subaltern translation involved in its constitution and use. For postcolonial philosophy, the field of literature itself is transformed into a stage of resistance and struggle through re-writing and translation. The configuration of the creation ‘story’ implies a process of political rereading of Mesopotamian myths.43 In this sense, the hermeneutical exercise of mythological rereading is inscribed as a fracture within the narratives hegemonized both then and in the face of the hermeneutic linearities intended by modern colonial readings of history. In other words, recovering the mythical dimension of the creational narrative entails the recognition of a politics of translation driven by a subaltern community that reinterprets its history and redefines its temporality from a mimetic exercise based on hegemonic cosmovision. In this way, creative myth as literature speaks more of the subaltern capacity to reinterpret foundational narratives than it does of the establishment of a hegemonic narrative about origins and sole depositaries. Recovering this mythological dimension means affirming an anthropology that unfolds not so much the content of the properly human that appears in the story but rather the critical implications of its narrated constitution itself. As Spivak states, myth is also a babbling of the silence of the subaltern.44 As a disruptive myth, the creational story is transformed into a position of enunciation, a poetics of identity, a device of hybridization that, far from pretending to legitimize the image of an Absolute God who demarcates a unique History, imprints instead an in-between in front of monopolistic conceptions. Here, translation becomes a flight, a renunciation.45 The second element to highlight is that a postcolonial critical rereading of the theology of creatio ex nihilo implies the inscription of a process of subjectivation that, in turn, entails a new cosmic–political ontology. Jean-Daniel Causse and Élian Cuvillier prompt that there is not simply one theology of creation in the biblical text and that the creation myth does not really speak of the ‘absolute beginning of things’ but rather of the human being and its relationship with the earth and with the divine.46 Starting from a psychoanalytic perspective, they propose to radicalize the presuppositions of process theology. Although they agree with the processual critique of the instrumentalization of ‘nothingness’ as the starting point of a colonial essentialist metaphysics, they understand this original chaos as an unnamable spatiality that enables the creative word. For this reason, they argue that creatio ex nihilo speaks rather of ‘the distance between God and the world’.47 Although the original chaos implies a non-metaphysical constitutive

See J. Severino Croatto, Exilio y Sobrevivencia: Tradiciones Contraculturales en el Pentateuco (Comentario de Génesis 4:1–12:9) (Buenos Aires: Lumen, 1997). 44 See Gayatri C. Spivak, En Otras Palabras, En Otros Mundos: Ensayos sobre Política Cultural (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2013). 45 See Édouard Glissant, Introducción a una Poética de lo Diverso (Madrid: Cinca, 2016). 46 See Jean-Daniel Causse and Élian Cuvillier, Viaje a Través del Cristianismo: Exégesis, Antropología, Psicoanálisis (Maliaño: Sal Terrae, 2015). 47 Causse and Cuvillier, Viaje a Través del Cristianismo, 41. 43

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materiality that enables a creational process that questions any attempt to establish an Omega point as an original model and as a dominating and absolute principle, the nihil, the chaos, can also be understood as both movement-from-process and as absence–emptying that inaugurates an ontological rupture that allows for a (re)creation. For this reason, Causse and Cuviller aver, ‘in a certain way, creation is in itself a first kenosis’.48 It is an absence, a distance, which does not seek to saturate the world with presence. Taking up the mysticism of Isaac Luria and his notion of tzimtzum (‘contraction’, ‘withdrawal’) as one of the moments of Creation, Causse and Cuviller propose that the constitution of the world is sustained by a renunciation of the divine to its absolutization: ‘Creation does not speak to us of an all-powerful God who occupies everything, who does everything, but [rather] of a de-divinized world. The world thought of as creation is a world that exists thanks to this withdrawal of the divine.’49 In other words, the creational dimension of reality implies the constitution of a difference, an otherness. Beyond the critique of the ‘relational’ dimension mentioned earlier, which also serves as a platform for a colonial perspective with an Absolute God directing History, in this case such a relationship does not so much expose the ontological constitution of the divine so much as expose the differential ontological inscription from a distance. Creation is established not so much in its uniqueness, homogeneity, linearity, or uniformity, but rather from its constitutive otherness, from a distance taken by the divine. So Causse and Cuvillier state: ‘Creation as new creation is not the prolongation of something, but the deviation, the difference, the rupture with respect to what was. Life, true life, comes from what was not yet, but is arriving.’50 Therefore, understanding creation from this differential constitution is to understand creation from grace. Grace here means the end of speech about there being any ‘originating cause’, be it the necessity of God or the intentionality of the human being. Creation as grace means that reality and its origin are beyond all calculation. In other words, a creational vision from grace implies a decolonization of the temporal and ontological constitution of reality. Appealing to the decolonial thought of Bolivian philosopher Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, this implies the constitution of a ch’ixi world, a world marked by ‘the parallel coexistence of multiple cultural differences that do not extinguish but instead antagonize and complement each other’.51 The Aymara word ‘ch’ixi’ refers to a type of tonality that, at a distance, is recognized as grey, but upon approaching, one notices a surface composed of an infinite combination and interweaving of black and white dots. Thus, ch’ixi epistemology entails a break with historicism and colonial binaries since it appeals to a prismatic temporality of a future–past that resists the continuous present of what the author understands as the four hegemonic horizons imposed by modern thought – pre-Hispanic, colonial, liberal, and populist – as ‘stages’ of a lineal causality. Each of these stages – or even their juxtaposition – entails the establishment of a linearity that becomes habitus and everyday life, which does not consider the processes of constellation and multi-temporality. Ch’ixi implies, above all, a mimetic anthropological understanding in the field of postcolonial processes. Cusicanqui speaks of the identity of indigenous and mestizo populations as a

Causse and Cuvillier, Viaje a Través del Cristianismo, 45. Causse and Cuvillier, Viaje a Través del Cristianismo, 45. 50 Causse and Cuvillier, Viaje a Través del Cristianismo, 47. 51 Silvia R. Cusicanqui, ‘Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization’, South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 1 (2012): 105. 48 49

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ch’ixi identity; that is, identity as a ‘zone of uncertainty’, as a spatiality of frictions and even contradictions. The idea here concerns a being that is ‘ni chicha ni limoná’ (‘neither this nor that’): ‘The notion of ch’ixi, like many others (allqa, ayni), reflects the Aymara idea of something that is and is not at the same time. It is the logic of the included third. A ch’ixi color gray is white but is not white at the same time; it is both white and its opposite, black.’52 From here, Cusicanqui wonders why contradictions should be understood as paralyzing disjunctions or irreducible oppositions. Ch’ixi epistemology means inhabiting colonial differences within the framework of a ‘“political economy” of knowledge’53 that is also an economy of aesthetics and ethics. In Cusicanqui’s terms: The idea is then not to seek the tranquility of the One, because it is precisely a Manichean anguish; it is necessary to work within the contradiction, making of its polarization the space for the creation of an intermediate fabric (taypi), a weft that is neither one nor the other, but quite the contrary, it is both at the same time.54 The nihil as original chaos is not the nothingness that enables the absolutization of the given presence of what is hegemonized by colonial cosmovisions. It is, rather, the distance that God imprints, a chaotic grace, an enabling emptiness, projecting a ch’ixi anthropology, which makes the human a fissure of a cosmic coexistence, full of colours, of opposites, of interactions between subjects and objects. The correlative immanence of a postcolonial theological anthropology has not to do so much, therefore, with the constitutive uniqueness of the human as it does with the appeal to naive multicultural visions that propose a multiple plagued with independent uniquenesses, without linkage or self-criticism. It is to evoke chaos, nihil, ch’ixi, as a constitutive difference born of the distance–alterity that imprints the relation–tension between the divine and the world. To decolonize the nihil is, therefore, to remove the origin from being a nothingness in the hands of an Absolute, to empower the differential dimension that recognizes the ch’ixi existence in the projection of pluralities, alterities, interculturalities, contradictions, and subaltern–decolonial operations against all discourse and practice that pretends to colonize, to order and close the chaos-as-process, as multiplicity.

Conclusion: Decolonizing the theological critique of the creational If we seek to go beyond dichotomies, we need to create new languages. And this is a beautiful challenge for Christian theology, with the help of poetry, life testimonies and spiritual rites. Let us begin with a time of listening, of silence, of not knowing, so that new forms of naming may emerge.55

Cusicanqui, ‘Ch’ixinakax utxiwa’, 105. Cusicanqui, ‘Ch’ixinakax utxiwa’, 102. 54 Silvia R. Cusicanqui, Un Mundo Ch’ixi es Posible: Ensayos fesde un Presente en Crisis (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2018), 94. 55 Arianne van Andel, Teología en Movimiento: Ensayos Eco-Teológicos y Feministas para Tiempos de Cambio (Buenos Aires: JuanUno1, 2021), 245. 52 53

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A postcolonial approach to the theology of creation highlights not only the problems regarding the coloniality that prevails in the content of several central concepts – such as nature, creation, creatio ex nihilo, and God the creator – but also the impact of instrumentalization by the colonial imaginaries that characterize so many contexts. As this chapter has shown, the very concept of ‘creation’ entails serious theological problems, starting from the metaphysical image of a ‘god’ who controls history, a notion that prevails in Christianity. The sociopolitical and cultural determinations of modernity also have this teleology behind them. Rather than speaking of a ‘theology of creation’ as a closed system, we need to place the creational needs in a new pluriverse dimension of the theological, not as an inaugural act but rather as a constituent continuum of reality. The traditional Christian eschatology that operates behind the theologies of creation entails the determination of a board with a set of rules established with a Player who, in turn, chooses their allies. A creational theopoiesis gives rise to a post-metaphysical critique of the divine, claiming the critical and transformative dimension of locations that account for a relational multiplicity that confronts those places of privilege. This theology intends to go beyond the Byzantinian dichotomy between ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, positing an immanence inscribed in a material transcendence, where nature, more than a fixed space, is a field of excess multiplicities. This diversity is not a passive reflection of an ‘origin’ but is rather a creative act where the divine manifests itself as its original force. This multiplicity of determinisms possesses in itself a critical–political dimension: it entails questioning the divine metaphysics that sponsors colonial violence and the anthropological and cosmological imaginaries that are instrumentalized by colonial logics. In this way, what constitutes the human is inscribed in a new place. Or, rather, it is inscribed in the frontiers born of the multiplicity of places that make up the bricolage, the ch’ixi, of reality. Such a theology seeks a theological anthropology that really wants to leave aside the modern vices that yearn to find the ‘essence’ of the human, whether in its ‘natural’ form or from the progressive perspective of the ‘new man’. The critical dimension of anthropology does not come from constructing a new model, however counter-hegemonic it may be, but rather from opening the lines that demarcate and drive the anthropological imagination in the light of a creative dynamic that constitutes the world itself. And it is precisely this openness, this flow, this dynamic, and this process, which characterizes its divine dimension.

Further reading Bauman, Whitney A. Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Connolly, William E. A World of Becoming. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, 2003. Keller, Catherine. Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Moore, Stephen D. and Mayra Rivera, eds. Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.

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CHAPTER 56 RELIGIONS AND RESPONSIBILITY

Jan-Olav Henriksen

Creation: Its relational character implies responsibility When religious traditions assign the notion of ‘creation’ to reality, this designation immediately establishes an optic in which the world appears under a specific point of view: creation is a relational term. The relationships that this notion opens up are twofold. First and primarily, the creation is related to the creator, who is the source and origin of all, and whose power sustains and renews creation and manifests itself in its ability to be and to develop further. Second, ‘creation’ relates all elements of creation to each other. Humans are not the only creation of God but are part of creation and, thereby, related to all other parts of the created world. Moreover, as evolutionary theory and genetics teach, humans would not be if there had not been external conditions that have provided them with the potential and opportunities to be. Hence, the created reality in which humans find themselves is given as a valuable fact – it is impossible to separate fact and value at the fundamental level of reality.1 Therefore, the fundamentally relational character of creation is also vital for understanding the relationship between religions and responsibility. Responsibility presupposes relations. Because humans cannot untie themselves from their relationships with the rest of creation, responsibility is not an optional attitude. Humans are responsible whether they want to be or not. Furthermore, this responsibility implies that the present and future state and condition of creation cannot be seen as independent of human action. More than ever, humans have learned that the future of the creation they are part of depends on how they carry out their responsibilities for creation as a whole. This point needs underscoring: although they can say they are more dependent on the rest of creation than the rest of creation is on them, that is not the full picture anymore. The notion of the Anthropocene2 suggests otherwise; humans have a

Accordingly, one can understand the given character of the natural environment as the wider, and to some extent, independent, background of human practices. ‘The independence and the resistance that this background poses to our interests and desires respond to a sense of fundamental importance and depth. . . . The independence and the distance established by animals and environments is a kind of fact which articulates our overall conceptual dimension: it is in fact the background which makes sense of the importance and of the depth of our inhabiting the world, of our encounters with others and of the many activities discussed in the text. It is a fact which concerns us: we can account for it only by deploying the overall scheme of human values. . . . The reality of the environment, of animals, and nature is not detached from the overall pattern of values, from the sense of importance and depth it expresses.’ Piergiorgio Donatelli, ‘The Environment and the Background of Human Life: Nature, Facts, and Values’, in Facts and Values: The Ethics and Metaphysics of Normativity, ed. Giancarlo Marchetti and Sarin Marchetti (New York: Routledge, 2017), 261. Of course, the situation of the Anthropocene complicates this independence insofar as it implies that humans are now shaping the total character of the earth and its natural condition to an extent that hitherto was not the case. 2 See Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt, eds, Religion in the Anthropocene (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2017). 1

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tremendous impact on the shape and future of the natural environment, and the consequences of human activity on the rest of creation cannot be ignored. When religions understand the world as creation, the fundamental relationality of creation is the fundamental feature that constitutes human responsibility towards others as well as towards God as the creator. As it will be argued later, this fact presents specific challenges to contemporary believers and the religious traditions to which they belong. It is not obvious what practices of responsibility are present in contemporary religious traditions that recognize some human responsibility for creation. In this context, however, the main aim is to grasp better the notion of responsibility and the conditions it relies on in theological anthropology. To be responsible is to be response-able. It means to be able to orient oneself about what is happening, to understand it, and to respond adequately. Hence, responsibility requires both knowledge and the capacity to act according to knowledge and values. Thus, responsibility also implies that one has more than one option about what to do: when one has no choice and is simply forced to act in a specific way, it is hard to speak about responsibility. Hence, taking responsibility presupposes one is also responsible for keeping the space open for different possible actions. Unless this space is open, there cannot be any responsible action. Given these considerations, it is important to understand that responsibility cannot be ascribed exclusively to one’s past actions, for which there was a choice between different options. Individuals are also responsible for the future and for keeping the space open for different types of actions that can be chosen responsibly as a reaction to the challenges at hand.3 Moreover, the relational element that constitutes responsibility suggests that one can detect or perceive how what one does affects others. A relational approach to the world implies that one cannot see oneself as detached or separated from the rest of creation but as part of it. Hence, actions are never only about a person and what they do, but a person’s actions also have an impact on others with whom they have a relationship. These others need not only be their immediate acquaintances, they may also be members of future generations. To be able to respond to what an individual’s actions do to others, and to be susceptible to their reactions, is not only part of the capacity to act responsibly but is also something for which individuals have a responsibility to develop. The fact that human beings are interwoven with the fullness of creation implies that there was no individual and responsible subject prior to this situation. Humans become individuals because they are part of creation and are responsible for the same reason.

The nuances in the notion of responsibility need not occupy us here. It is sufficient to note that responsibility entails that human agency is subjected to a normative assessment that constitutes the possibility for ascribing blame or praise to a person and their actions. It means that one can hold the person accountable for how one has acted or intends to act in view of a normative context for assessing behaviour and its motivation, its background desires, or the reasons behind it. For more on the different nuances of responsibility, see Nicole A. Vincent, ‘A Structured Taxonomy of Responsibility Concepts’, in Moral Responsibility: Beyond Free Will and Determinism, ed. Nicole A. Vincent, Ibo van de Poel, and Jeroen van den Hoven (New York: Springer, 2011), 15–35; Ibo van de Poe, ‘The Relation Between ForwardLooking and Backward-Looking Responsibility’, in Moral Responsibility: Beyond Free Will and Determinism, ed. Nicole A. Vincent, Ibo van de Poel, and Jeroen van den Hoven (New York: Springer, 2011), 37–52. 3

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Hence, a religious approach to human responsibility means that one cannot understand the human as placed over against nature and the rest of creation. It also means that individuals cannot choose to take on responsibility after they have become acting subjects. Instead, responsibility is based on the relational character of being and is part of what constitutes humans as acting subjects. Hence, religious understandings of creation seem to underscore a point that the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas has developed consistently: a person’s subjectivity (selfrelation) is a morally charged phenomenon from the outset. Humans are, as constituted by their relationship with the rest of creation, constituted as responsible. They are fundamentally and originally in a position as being-for-others. Whatever else can be said about human agency, its conditions, presuppositions, and consequences, is secondary to this fact. Humans do not become who they are as separated from others; therefore, their being-for-others and their responsibility are inseparable from the outset.4 The other is the one who makes one, and by making that one, the other also makes that one responsible. Who the other is may differ – but from a theological point of view, God makes an individual by using the persons and the material conditions present in creation. To be responsible, therefore, entails being related to the good and to the values inherent in creation. The good is experientially accessible in the flourishing of creation. Whenever there is freedom, justice, good conditions for environmental development and sustainability, richness and variation in species, and safeguarding of natural landscapes – in such instances, goodness manifests itself in ways that allow for more freedom for all of creation. However, the internal relationship between responsibility and goodness does not imply that responsibility makes a person good. A person is responsible for the good, but that person may also act contrary to goodness. A human being who is at a loss about their responsibility is thereby expressing how they have lost the fundamental orientation that makes humans responsible and enables them to see themselves as stewards of the goodness for which God has provided the possibilities by creating. Responsibility and goodness do not originate in human agency but in God’s creative act that allows humans to become responsible agents. A contemporary understanding of humans as stewards of creation is, therefore, not a carte blanche for doing whatever one wants with nature and the environment but is shaped fundamentally by the responsibility for the web of relationships that creation is and for its flourishing. It is also not a warrant for an anthropocentric approach to creation but one that may contribute to underscoring the intimate and profoundly relational character between all creatures. Human uniqueness consists of the ability to act responsibly – a capacity called for in the present more than ever. Greta Thunberg speaks of the cathedral builder attitude5 – the attitude in which individuals see their agency as contributing to a task that will be momentous for future generations and in which everyone is called to look beyond their short-term goals for the benefit of the long-term goal of a sustainable future for all of creation, including humanity.

Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Substitution’, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 105. Greta Thunberg, ‘“You did not Act in Time”: Greta Thunberg’s Full Speech to MPs’, The Guardian, 23 April 2019, https:// www​.theguardian​.com​/environment​/2019​/apr​/23​/greta​-thunberg​-full​-speech​-to​-mps​-you​-did​-not​-act​-in​-time. 4 5

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Contemporary challenges to religions and their understanding of responsibility Members of religious traditions and communities share with other human beings some responsibility for creation. They are also responsible for developing adequate practices and understandings for dealing with the challenges at hand. The calling to be stewards of creation (Genesis 1) implies that God does not determine all that happens. If the case were otherwise, it would be hard to uphold any notion of creation as it now appears in a critical condition and judge it as the result of God’s good work. Human beings are responsible for the precarious situation in which the earth finds itself. To ascribe the responsibility for the present circumstances to God is blasphemy. So too is the attempt to deny the climate crisis with backing in religious symbols and persuasions that suggest either that the environment is there for humans to use and consume for their own purposes only or that the conditions for climate and environment are nothing to worry about and can be left to God to take care of. In the contemporary situation, religious traditions share the responsibility not only to identify the fundamental values and symbols that should guide their practices of orientation and transformation but also to access or develop the relevant knowledge required to guide them concerning the challenges that the climate crisis and environmental destruction represent. Hence, humans are responsible for how they act, for understanding on what basis they do so, and for accessing the necessary knowledge for acting wisely. Accordingly, religious traditions must acknowledge that they do not possess all the knowledge about what would be wise to do in a given situation. Holy scriptures do not present the knowledge needed to do the right thing. At best, they can provide symbols and norms required to orient humans in the world, they can question and model how individuals might relate to the rest of creation, and they can provide means to identify and perceive what is necessary to change to allow God’s creation to flourish. At this point, especially the acknowledgement of the interrelatedness of all of creation is essential, as is the call to display the love and care of God to all of creation, as implied in the calling to be the image of God. The limitations of religious traditions when it comes to acting responsibly in light of the climate crisis suggest that religious traditions need to take up the responsibility to be informed and guided in the best possible ways about the present stance of science on the relevant topics. To be informed in this way means that contemporary and responsible religious practices of reflection must employ their religious symbols in ways also informed and shaped by science. Science does not compete with religion but provides the necessary background knowledge against which religious discernment and practices of orientation and transformation must be developed to allow creation to appear as God’s good gifts. How to deal responsibly with creation is not sufficiently clear from the first pages of Genesis, nor by deferring all that happens to ‘God’s will’. Acting responsibly with creation in the manner suggested in the introduction implies a strategy other than that advocated by promoters of creationism or by climate change deniers. It means that the symbol of creation is developed to allow humans to see creation as a gift that must be shared. This can only be done responsibly through practices shaped by the interaction between contemporary knowledge and the fundamental symbols of the religious tradition.6

A significant example of this strategy is Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015). 6

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As indicated, responsibility manifests itself in practices. A practice is a pattern of activity with a specific aim, and this aim is not external to the agent. Moreover, the practice manifests the agent’s quality and responsibility towards the agent as well as towards the goal of the practice. A practice can be developed and done in a variety of ways and is therefore flexible concerning how it is done. Practices have their origin in different human motivations and desires. Alasdair MacIntyre understands a practice as follows: By a ‘practice’ I . . . mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.7 And Andreas Reckwitz expands MacIntyre’s definition with the following specification: ‘A “practice” (Praktik) is a routinized type of behavior which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, “things” and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge.’8 Responsibility, as practised, is therefore linked to a wide variety of other human activities that humans share by learning through participation. Practices of care, love, stewardship, manufacturing, manipulation, study, and so on, build on, presuppose, and relate the practitioner to other practitioners and to the rest of creation. Practices are thus also a mode in which elements in creation interact with and affect one another. Ideally, religions would offer various patterns for practices that manifest ways to take on and acknowledge human responsibilities for creation. Some practices might be symbolic in character, whereas others have concrete and actual effects on how to take care of, sustain, and improve the qualities given with creation. To offer a word of thanks to God for food on the table is a symbolic act of gratitude to God as the origin of that which sustains life. Engaging in agroecological farming may express the acknowledgement that some ways of developing produce are better than others for the well-being of creation. Hence, some practices might then also take on a prophetic dimension as a critique of existing farming and food production methods.9 However, although all practices are related to human responsibility, either by recognizing it or by failing in it, the religious character of a practice is dependent on how it is rooted in, motivated by, or expressed as a manifestation of the stories that religions build on and in which they have their origin.10 The relationship to this origin is not (only) a matter of historical

Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), 187. 8 Andreas Reckwitz, ‘Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing’, European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 2 (2002): 249. 9 A concrete example, which also suggests an inherent inter-religious dimension in such practices, can be found in Timothy W. Bartel, ‘Farming as if Creation Mattered’, Critical Muslim 26 (2018): 25–38. 10 On the principles for understanding practices in this way, see Jan-Olav Henriksen, Christianity as Distinct Practices: A Complicated Relationship (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 7

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legitimation (although that can also be the case), but also, and more importantly, a way to recognize the link between the practices in question and the divine realities and powers that supersede the abilities present in human agency. When practices take on a religious character, it is because they allow practitioners ‘to gain access to and communicate or align themselves with . . . superhuman powers. The hope involved in the cultural prescribing of these practices is to realize human goods and to avoid bads, especially (but not only) to avert misfortunes and receive blessings and deliverance from crises’.11 Accordingly, it is misleading to see religions’ responsible practices as merely linked to an otherworldly realm. When people practise religion, it ‘often involves not just the desire to seek help from superhuman powers but also a variety of other subjective motivations, some of which actually may not be particularly religious’.12 Moderation in flying, supporting organic farming, caring for refugees, and demonstrating for social justice are all practices that have various motivations; some may be seen as a religious practice or experienced as religious, even though it may not be so for others.

The point of departure for responsibility: Creation as God’s gift A theological understanding of responsibility cannot take human agency as its most fundamental point of departure. Instead, such understanding is better grounded in how creation represents a given, a gift that is prior to agency, and towards which humans are, therefore, responsible. All responsibility is constituted by and relates to God’s gifts. This also means that there is always an element of gifting in all human responsibility – because it relies on God’s gifts, and implies passing these gifts on or enabling them for their further flourishing. The fundamental gift charter of creation implies that neither gift exchange nor charitable giving are good models for an economy of grace that presupposes God as offering humans the gifts of creation to steward.13 These forms of giving fail to establish what might be considered the most important horizon for providing a gift; namely, a deeply embedded and permanent relationship. The gift of creation (and the goodness implied therein) is, therefore, not something external to creation, nor an instrument that can be arbitrarily exchanged. The responsibility of giving transcends duty: it is a manifestation of the realization of human interconnectedness as it expresses itself in relation to other humans as well as towards the rest of creation. Thus, the gifts individuals offer to others might be understood as good in themselves and not only good with regard to what they offer to others in terms of meeting their needs or providing them with benefits. The theological warrant for such understanding is underscored by how God’s unconditional gifting is the precondition for how to exercise responsible stewardship in creation. God’s unconditional giving is:

Christian Smith, Religion: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 3. 12 Smith, Religion, 3. 13 Cf. Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 56. 11

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not obligated by the prior performance of the recipients and . . . not conditional upon a return being made by them. This principle marks all these relations off from do ut des giving, or ‘I give so that you will give’, the alternative principle of conditional giving that covers barter, commodity exchange, and debtor–creditor relations of all sorts.14 This is most obvious in how God creates the world. Creation cannot be a response to anything creatures have done. Kathryn Tanner calls this fact God’s ‘total gift’. Nothing obligates God in any way in creation or in God’s setting up covenant relations. It is done out of ‘sheer free beneficence’.15 The gracing fellowship with the rest of creation based on God’s gifts provides a chance for a community other than one based on economic exchange or merit. This gracing fellowship is inclusive in the sense that everyone who sees themselves as a possible participant is allowed to enter and be recognized as a participant on equal terms. It also means that humans can see themselves as related to and participating in a fellowship that includes non-human living beings and even landscapes, oceans, and forests. God continues to give, no matter what the human response is. The non-conditional character of God’s giving also expresses itself in how God continues to give despite the misuse of his gifts. Had God then stopped giving, it would have placed God’s giving within the economy of exchange again, where failures prompted a response of forfeiting these gifts. But this is not what happens. When humans experience the loss of these gifts, it is not because of God stopping to give, but it may be because of their sin: It may seem to us as if God takes away gifts in response to our sin. But it is our sin itself that interrupts the reception and distribution of God’s gifts, bringing suffering and death in its train. The loss of what we might have enjoyed is not God’s punishment of us, but the natural consequence of our turning away from and refusing what God is offering us for our good. God’s gifts continue to stream forth to us in the way they always have; we are simply failing to avail ourselves of them, to our own destruction and harm.16 Because God’s giving is not dependent upon human reception, humans cannot fail to receive some of God’s gifts as part of the created world.17 Moreover: the unconditionality of God’s giving is saved despite all our failures of reception and response because anything that might look like a condition for the reception and good use of God’s gifts is really itself the gift of God. There is nothing good about us that is not also the gift of God, and this includes the acts by which we receive those gifts and put them to good use.18

Tanner, Economy of Grace, 63. Cf. Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), 2–3. 15 Tanner, Economy of Grace, 63. 16 Tanner, Economy of Grace, 64–5. 17 Cf. Tanner, Economy of Grace, 66. 18 Tanner, Economy of Grace, 67. 14

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And individuals cannot make an adequate return to God’s giving.19 Accordingly, the responsibility for stewarding creation as a gift is not constituted by human agency alone but by God’s continuous work in creation.

Issues in theological anthropology related to responsibility Responsibility implies more than potential blame for failures of the past. It also implies the capacity for foresight and assessment of potential action. Two important features that shape human life motivate future-directed human action: desire and vulnerability. Representing God in the world means taking up a responsibility related to these two features. They do not exist in opposition to each other, but they do present individuals with the constant challenge of figuring out how to deal with them – be it in terms of balance, complementarity, rejection, or negotiation. None of them is better than the other: both present challenges by and for themselves, and both also present challenges to the other. Unchecked desire may lead to hurting others in their vulnerability. However, the attempt to shield oneself from vulnerability may also lead to an unhealthy negation of desires and a rigid rejection of life qualities that contribute to flourishing and community. Furthermore, denying both desire and vulnerability may cause problems for human fulfilment. Religious symbols and practices can help deal with the tasks and challenges that desire and vulnerability represent. Religions offer practices of orientation (What is the best thing to do or to be?), transformation (Should I transform the object of my desires or my way of dealing with vulnerability?), and reflection (How do I live and relate in the best way possible to others and to God?). Hence, the relevance of religious practices can be identified in how they mediate resources that shape human lives in ways that allow desire and vulnerability to be an integral part of a good life in community with others and with the rest of creation. Religious communities are arenas in which one learns to offer reasons for one’s choices and preferences concerning the desires one seeks to realize. At their best, the practices and relationships that exist and bear communities are those ‘in and through which we learn how to become practically rational agents and how to exercise those virtues without which rational deliberation is not possible. But to exclude oneself from those practices and relationships is, by impoverishing one’s moral experience, to deny oneself the possibility of understanding what it is to be such a rational agent’.20 In other words: desires need a context of community and practice to develop into maturity and rationality. Thereby, the community provides responsibility with fertile ground. Not only human lives but also many other parts of creation are fragile and vulnerable. Vulnerability always exposes the integrity of living beings and puts it at risk.21 This fact implies that life has a tragic dimension. Practices shaped by misguided, corrupted, and distorted desire

Tanner, Economy of Grace, 68. Cf. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 58. 21 Cf. David H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 282–4. 19 20

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may, therefore, cause great evil; so may tragic events that befall us, but which nevertheless do not have their origin in human agency (and are therefore not caused by sin, as many theologians would say). Illness, disease, pandemics, accidents, earthquakes, fire, and different types of loss, including the death of close ones, are part of this tragic dimension. Some of the latter can be remedied by human action, whereas other tragedies seem inevitable in the way they cause suffering.22 Theological anthropology serves to interpret human experience, including tragedy. It needs to provide orientation in relation to the question: What does it mean to live a good life? How can human flourishing be possible when they are so vulnerable to misfortune? Vulnerability seems to be at the centre of what makes the tragic elements in life. All the aforementioned negativities are what they are because of the vulnerable character of human existence. However, this also entails that humans must recognize that all conditions for life, in all creation, are vulnerable. Without vulnerability, no tragedy. Because vulnerability is a deeply ambiguous element in this existence, it constantly sparks the need for practices of orientation, transformation, and reflection with regard to the conditions in which human beings live. Moreover, dependency and vulnerability go hand in hand. It affects the embodied human, and also the psychological and social dimensions of being human.23 Dependency affects all creation, not only humans. Dependency exposes humans to vulnerability because they are not self-enclosed and unaffected by their environment and by those with whom they interact. Humans are receptive, responsive, and susceptible to what others do to them. To be susceptible has both positive and negative sides. On the positive side, it is a condition for being responsive and response-able. It means that one can empathize with others, participate in their experiences of joy and suffering, and, hence, share a common world shaped by emotions, mutual recognition, common tasks, and values. Vulnerability is also related to elements such as love and trust because such phenomena expose the care and safeguarding of others. Love that is not recognized and trust that is not met with trust can cause brokenness, hurt, or frustration. Life’s finite, fragile, and vulnerable character is the backdrop against which it is possible to understand sin as a theological notion. Sin is what negatively affects the vulnerable state in relationships between creatures. Religious traditions that articulate the finite and vulnerable character of creation allow for more flourishing and provide better conditions for community. It means avoiding idealizing life conditions in ways that generate unnecessary frustration and disappointment and instead provide a more realistic attitude towards living conditions. Acceptance of vulnerability is crucial for wise engagement in practices with others. A theological approach to vulnerability can take up the notion of created being as its immediate fundamental context of significance. Vulnerability is part of the created world; hence, it can be considered a part of what constitutes the goodness of creation. Vulnerability, finitude, dependence, and fragility are dimensions of God’s good creation.24 Against this

Criticism of the Augustinian interpretation of all evils as caused by human sin has recently been launched in a comprehensive study by David Tracy. See David W. Tracy, ‘Augustine Our Contemporary: The Overdetermined, Incomprehensible Self ’, in Augustine Our Contemporary: Examining the Self in Past and Present, ed. Willemien Otten and Susan E. Schreiner (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 51–2. 23 For psychological dimensions of vulnerability and its relationship to a theological interpretation, see W. Paul Jones, ‘Suffering into Wholeness: Vulnerability and the Imprisoned Child Within’, Quarterly Review 15, no. 3 (1995): 275–85. 24 Heike Springhart, ‘Exploring Life’s Vulnerability: Vulnerability in Vitality’, in Exploring Vulnerability, ed. Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 24. 22

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backdrop, responsibility becomes an important element in human life and an integral part of many religious traditions. Similar to vulnerability, desire is an open and dynamic phenomenon. Among the main tasks in human life is to find out if, and to what extent, desires can realize goodness and provide for flourishing. It is nevertheless beyond question that desire is always a desire for what is assumed to be good – at least personally.25 However, desires can be misguided and misdirected, and this is why it is so important to recognize the need for orienting and guiding them. Desire is thus an integral element in the embodied direction towards the world and towards oneself; it is a moment in the individual being-in-the-world. Humans do not only desire actively; desire also happens to humans in passivity. Desire is a relational phenomenon. Thus, it is possible to see desire as something prior to, but that also informs, faith practices in different ways. Desire guides and interacts with faith. It is an interplay between the desire for goodness and flourishing on the one hand and faith in what one puts one’s trust in on the other hand. This relationship, rooted first in the pre-subjective manifestations of desire and later in the more-or-less articulated contents of faith, makes it possible to see religious practices as rooted in, informed by, and shedding light on the contents of concrete human experience. Because desire is always personal and related to the object and the embodied self, it exists in a dialectical movement or oscillation between the relationship with the other and one’s relationship with oneself. Desire connects humans with the rest of creation. Hence, desire is of crucial importance for a relationship with the other. Yet, it is also vital for how one can perceive oneself, namely through the opportunities which desire opens up by relating to imaginaries, contexts of understanding, and beliefs. Although desire emerges out of a relationship with the other, its motivating force always provides individuals with a direction in which they are placed in a specific and definitive situation by desire. Desire demands that one takes on this situation in a specific manner – thereby realizing a specific mode of being-in-the-world, namely responsibility. Desire and vulnerability are both parts of what constitutes human identity as dependent upon elements exterior to the subject that operate within and beyond (as well as behind) them but which can never be overtaken by or fully integrated into rationality. Understanding desire as an integral part of the self ’s being-in-the-world sheds important light on the role that responsibility has in human life. Responsibility provides the context that safeguards relationships with the rest of creation while ensuring that human practices are developed in ways that recognize both desire’s relationship with the good and vulnerability’s qualities and risks.

For an analysis of the diverse meanings of ‘good’ and their relationship to desires, see MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 13–16, 24–31. An important element in MacIntyre’s contribution is how he links his constructive understanding of the neo-Aristotelian connection of desire and the good to human flourishing, and thereby to all human capacities, not only to the immediate desire, but also to rational contemplation. Hence, he also underscores the partly contextual element in the conditions for (the realization of) the good/goodness. 25

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Further reading Deane-Drummond, Celia, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt, eds. Religion in the Anthropocene. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2017. Gerten, Dieter and Sigurd Bergmann. Religion in Environmental and Climate Change: Suffering, Values, Lifestyles. London: Continuum, 2012. McFague, Sallie. Blessed are the Consumers: Climate Change and the Practice of Restraint. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013. McFague, Sallie. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1993. Springhart, Heike and Günter Thomas, eds. Exploring Vulnerability. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017. Vetlesen, Arne Johan. The Denial of Nature: Environmental Philosophy in the Era of Global Capitalism. London: Routledge, 2015. Vincent, Nicole A., Ibo van de Poel, and Jeroen van den Hoven, eds. Moral Responsibility: Beyond Free Will and Determinism. New York: Springer, 2011.

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CHAPTER 57 CITIES

Genevieve James

Why cities matter Cities are prophetic interpreters of the human condition and of human destiny. To keep one’s gaze on the world’s cities is to keep one’s gaze on the fate of humanity, with whom cities are inexorably connected. To keep one’s gaze on the cities of this blue planet is to observe momentous shifts as human settlements increasingly move in an urban direction. The city is a complex site for realizing human aspirations amid the persistent threat of chaos, discord, deterioration, and death. Cities evoke wonder, hope, and new dreams, but also fear, anxiety, and frustration. They reveal pathologies of social and political power, and pathologies in patterns of access to resources. It is in the city where decisions are made that have enduring significance across nations, generations, and times. Cities are the strategic places where grand ideas meld together in social, spiritual, and physical infrastructures that shape humanity’s and the earth’s future. While we celebrate the marvel that is the city – its indomitable presence, its inherent strategic consequence, its dominating skylines or the strength and height of its buildings – we have seen over history that cities are not indestructible. Cities are fragile and exposed to destructive and disastrous forces. From 2020 to 2022, many cities of the world have had to adapt to a constant state of disaster and crisis. As a case in point, the city of Durban, on the east coast of South Africa, experienced back-to-back disasters, including the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2021 citywide looting and unrest, and the 2022 floods that twice descended on the city. The city, the land, and the rivers that run into the Indian Ocean were devastated. People searched in vain for loved ones; infrastructure and property were destroyed; houses and cars were swept into the sea. Urbanism: Influence beyond the city limits One ought not to err in exploring cities only from a purely statistical perspective. A singular focus on urban population growth statistics denies the richness and complexity of why cities matter. Cities matter because of their ability to influence and shape life – human and other – on planet earth. Cities matter because they have, since time immemorial, signalled the rise and fall of empires and the human behaviours that caused their destruction. It is, therefore, unsurprising that, given the renewed significance of the cities of our world, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) heralded 2022 as the ‘Year to Transform our Cities’.1

United Nations Human Settlements Programme, ‘2022: Year to Transform Our Cities’, accessed 24 January 2022, https://unhabitat​.org​/2022​-year​-to​-transform​-our​-cities. 1

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Urbanism is a concept that relates to the high potency of cities in shaping the character and influence of urban life. Written almost a century ago, Louis Wirth’s 1930s seminal work on urbanism suggests that the differences between urban and rural areas would be greater had it not been for the influential nature of cities, deepened in good measure by urban communication and transport networks.2 Significant economic, cultural, social, political, and religious decisions take place in cities, with ripple effects across all settlement types. Wirth developed the concept of ‘urbanism’ to denote a dominant urban way of life that surpasses the physical location of the city: The influences which cities exert on the social life of man [sic] are greater than the ratio of the urban population would indicate, for the city is not only increasingly the dwelling place and the workshop of modern man [sic], but is the initiating and controlling Centre of economic, political and cultural life that has drawn the most remote communities of the world into its orbit and woven diverse areas, peoples and activities into a cosmos.3 Sound the alarm: Increasing urban agglomerations leading to the ecumenopolis Those researching cities note increasing interest in urban agglomerations over the past thirty years.4 Urban agglomerations – city clusters that perform as economic cores – are a major trend in urban spatial organization. These agglomerations represent clusters of high-density cities connected for concentrated economic and environmental activity, shared purpose and interests. Masanobu Kii notes: ‘[U]rban growth in this century will produce increasingly concentrated cities, some growing to enormous sizes. . . . [P]opulations will continue to concentrate in larger agglomerations, with the largest urban agglomerations in [the year] 2100 swelling to populations of at least 40 million and possibly significantly greater.’5 The expansion of urbanization, indicating that in some contexts urbanization has expanded on a regional scale, has resulted in ‘giant urban galaxies with population sizes and degrees of polycentricity far beyond anything imagined only a few decades ago’.6 Urban concentrations may coalesce into what Constantinos Doxiadis, in 1969, termed the ‘ecumenopolis’, which refers to the progression of urbanization, transport, and human networks leading to the fusing of urban areas and megalopolises to become a single continuous worldwide city.7 Doxiadis asserted that the inevitability of urban growth would see the realization of the ecumenopolis.

See Louis Wirth, ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1–24. Wirth, ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, 7. 4 See Chuanglin Fang and Danlin Yu, ‘Urban Agglomeration: An Evolving Concept of an Emerging Phenomenon’, Landscape and Urban Planning 162 (2017): 126–36. 5 Masanobu Kii, ‘Projecting Future Populations of Urban Agglomerations around the World and through the 21st Century’, npj Urban Sustainability 1, no. 10 (2021): 1–12, doi: 10.1038/s42949-020-00007-5. 6 Edward Soja and Miguel Kanai, ‘The Urbanization of the World’, in The Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society, ed. Richard Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (London: Phaidon, 2007), 59. See also Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, ‘The “Urban Age” in Question’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 3 (2014): 731–55. 7 Constantinos A. Doxiadis, ‘The City (II): Ecumenopolis, World-city of Tomorrow’, Impact of Science on Society 19, no. 2 (1969): 179–93. See also John G. Papaioannou, ‘The Road to Ecumenopolis’, Ekistics 62, no. 373–5 (1995): 177–208. 2 3

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Today, Doxiadis’ words are far from science fiction; the ecumenopolis is becoming highly plausible and probable in our time. Cities in the battle for global ascendency Cities have always been the battleground for regional and global ascendency, ideological supremacy and religious and economic dominance. To explore the world’s cities is to witness how geopolitics inspires the ethos, mission, presence, and priorities of cities. In the battle for influence and for natural, human, and financial capitals, cities around the world are crafting new economic, political, scientific, technological, and military alliances. These alliances precipitate new geopolitical shifts of power. When cities battle for supremacy, entire regions become disrupted. The reshaping of the global order and its attendant shifts in power carry consequences that impinge on the education, health, economy, and environment of cities. Geopolitical shifts of power and influence are reinforced by surges in research and innovation spend. A Royal Society report indicates that cities and regions, rather than countries, are the key sites of research significance.8 Leading cities remain major hubs of scientific production, flagship universities, and institutes.9 A critical indicator of the changing world order is the rise in the influence of the cities of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (known as the BRICS alliance). Consequently, more urban research is being produced and accessed from the cities of the global south and east, including those of the BRICS alliance. Cities of Africa: Watch this space I write from an African context. The history of Africa boasts ancient cities such as Memphis, Thebes, Carthage, Alexandria, and Timbuktu. These cities influenced education, trade, medicine, science, religion, and philosophy. While urbanization has occurred later in Africa than on other continents, it has been massive, swift, and unprecedented. Between 2021 and 2100, African cities will become among the largest megalopolises in the world. Thirteen of the world’s twenty biggest urban areas will be in Africa, and more than a third of the world’s population will be in Africa.10 Till Förster and Carole Ammann stress that African cities cannot be compared to western cities because they ‘fail to meet expectations based on the historical experience of Western urbanisation’.11 Even within the continent, there is great diversity across cities and ‘enormous international and intra-national differences in urbanisation dynamics and governance

See The Royal Society, Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century (London: The Royal Society, 2011). Available online: https://royalsociety​.org/-​/media​/Royal​_Society​_Content​/policy​ /publications​/2011​/4294976134​.pdf. 9 See The Royal Society, Knowledge, Networks and Nations, 41. 10 See Max Bearak, Dylan Moriarty, and Júlia Ledur, ‘Africa’s Rising Cities: How Africa Will Become the Center of the World’s Urban Future’, Washington Post, 19 November 2021, https://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/world​/interactive​ /2021​/africa​-cities/. 11 Till Förster and Carole Ammann, ‘African Cities and the Development Conundrum: Actors and Agency in the Urban Grey Zone’, in African Cities and the Development Conundrum, ed. Carole Ammann and Till Förster (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 5. 8

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conditions’.12 A shared sense of crisis is affecting African cities that is being felt structurally and subjectively.13 African cities share a painful history of colonialism and still suffer the residual effects of coloniality on all spheres of urban life and consciousness. An anomaly in African urban growth is that African cities are ‘urbanizing under different conditions – not in response to demand for urban labour – but despite a general lack of formal urban opportunities’.14 African urban populations continue to grow despite the lack of concomitant increase in formal employment, education, and training opportunities. The deficit in labour opportunities deepens urban impoverishment and amplifies urban vulnerability. Described as a ticking time bomb, there is a legitimate caution that Africa’s youth unemployment crisis is a crisis of global proportions: Africa’s youth employment problem is a global problem. The world can’t achieve and sustain global development with a large segment of youth alienated and unprepared to lead their continent and the world. Hordes of struggling African youth will continue to migrate en masse to developed countries. And foreign investors can’t be assured of peaceful business climates in Africa, as poverty and inequality fuel looting, insurgencies, and terrorist activity on the continent.15 In South Africa, the urban context is characterized by gross corruption, the greed of political, economic, and cognitive elites, massive urban development lags, and apartheid-legacy inequalities in access to the city. Cries for justice reverberate across the nation’s post-apartheid cities through regular public protests focusing on housing, service delivery, unemployment, and corruption. South Africa is home to the Kairos Document, the famed biblical and theological commentary on the political crisis of apartheid and the compelling challenge to the church to draw from theological wells in committing to social justice action.16 There are now renewed calls for a new Kairos, with a recommitment to justice and renewed theological and doctrinal explorations that might inspire urgent action for justice.17 In May 2022, for example,

Warren Smit, ‘Urban Governance in Africa: An Overview’, in African Cities and the Development Conundrum, ed. Carole Ammann and Till Förster (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 56. 13 See Richard E. Stren and Rodney R. White, eds, African Cities in Crisis: Managing Rapid Urban Growth (London: Routledge, 2020); Jonathan Crush, Bruce Frayne, and Wade Pendleton, ‘The Crisis of Food Insecurity in African Cities’, Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition 7, nos. 2–3 (2012): 271–92; Arne Tostensen, Inge Tvedten, and Mariken Vaa, eds, Associational Life in African Cities: Popular Responses to the Urban Crisis (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2001). 14 Henrik Ernstson, Mary Lawhon, and James Duminy, ‘Conceptual Vectors of African Urbanism: “Engaged TheoryMaking” and “Platforms of Engagement”’, Regional Studies 48, no. 9 (2014): 1568. See also Smit, ‘Urban Governance in Africa’, 55–77. 15 Audrey Donkor, ‘Africa’s Youth Unemployment Crisis Is a Global Problem’, Foreign Policy, 19 October 2021, https:// foreignpolicy​.com​/2021​/10​/19​/africa​-youth​-unemployment​-crisis​-global​-problem. See also Kingsley Ighobor, ‘Africa’s Jobless Youth Cast a Shadow over Economic Growth’, United Nations Africa Renewal, accessed 7 April 2022, https:// www​.un​.org​/africarenewal​/magazine​/special​-edition​-youth​-2017​/africas​-jobless​-youth​-cast​-shadow​-over​-economic​ -growth. 16 See ‘The Kairos Document: A Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa’, CrossCurrents 35, no. 4 (1985): 367–86. 17 See, for example, Bonganjalo Goba, ‘The Kairos Document and Its Implications for Liberation in South Africa’, Journal of Law and Religion 5, no. 2 (1987): 313–25; World Council of Churches, ‘Kairos for Creation – Confessing Hope for the Earth: The Wuppertal Call’, accessed 7 September 2021, https://www​.oikoumene​.org​/resources​/documents​/kairos​ -for​-creation​-confessing​-hope​-for​-the​-earth​-the​-wuppertal​-call. 12

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the Ecumenical Leadership Council of South Africa, in collaboration with the University of South Africa, hosted a conference titled, ‘Revisiting the Kairos Document and Reimagining The Prophetic Voice of the Church of South Africa’. Do people of faith and their visions of a just city have any place in city-making? Now, against the background of a decisively urban world with new urban agglomerations, increasing urban development complexities and deepening development gaps, where do the urban designers, architects, developers, leaders, thinkers, and urban municipalities draw their impulse and influence from to establish cities that are just, sustainable, delightful, and liveable? This chapter contends that such help can come from the heritage of faith communities in the form of the doctrine of creation – that the doctrine of creation can be considered as a city-maker’s tool of reflection and action, inspiring the thinking for and the making of, just, liveable, and sustainable cities. And yet, as Stephan de Beer, a South African urban theologian and city planning scholar, laments: ‘Ironically, most theologians have failed themselves to translate the doctrine of creation to the challenges faced by urban settlements across the world, but, particularly in Africa. There is rich potential for inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary conversation and innovation, as theologians and urbanists from various disciplines contemplate and construct urban futures together’.18

Inspiration from the doctrine of creation for citymaking in the twenty-first century The doctrine of creation far exceeds the creation account expressed in the first chapter of Genesis. It also considers God’s continuing creation, culminating in the new creation, which is the New Jerusalem. If the trajectory for the fulfilment of creation is urban, then humanity’s eschatological future is moving in a decisively urban direction. The doctrine of creation, therefore, carries rich significance for urban planning, urban development, and the creation of just, liveable, and transfigured cities – in our time and beyond. For this reason, what follows here will extract salient aspects of the doctrine of creation that can inspire fresh urban discourse, consciousness, and praxis. However, it is necessary to begin by noting that doctrines should not be studied in compartments or sterile remoteness from each other. The rigid, silo-based study of doctrine fails to illuminate the big picture of the creator and creation. No theological doctrine exists in isolation from other doctrinal loci.19 Doctrines ‘interpenetrate and inform each other’.20 The richness of the doctrine of creation is linked, for example, to the doctrine of salvation, eschatology and the missio Dei: ‘The doctrine of creation is not one disconnected doctrine among many, but a great mystery bound up with the other great mysteries of Christian faith: the

Stephan de Beer, private correspondence with author, 18 September 2022. See, for example, William B. Whitney, ‘Beginnings: Why the Doctrine of Creation Matters for the Integration of Psychology and Christianity’, Journal of Psychology and Theology 48, no. 1 (2020): 44–65. 20 Robert C. Bishop, ‘Recovering the Doctrine of Creation: A Theological View of Science’, BioLogos, accessed 7 April 2022, https://biologos​.org​/articles​/recovering​-the​-doctrine​-of​-creation​-a​-theological​-view​-of​-science. 18 19

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Trinity, the incarnation, the mysteries of redemption, and new creation. All of our believing, all of our Christian reflection, all of our praying and serving is tied into the doctrine of creation.’21 This noted, this chapter now turns to consider key inspirations from the doctrine of creation for human work in and about cities. In the beginning, God in community Based on the caution not to separate the doctrine of creation from other doctrines, the doctrine of creation is now explored through the lens of the doctrine of the Trinity. The Christian doctrine of creation is rooted in the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of creation highlights the key characteristics of the creator, the triune God. It has been said that the Bible offers not so much a doctrine of creation as a doctrine of the creator. One is inspired by the creator from whom one receives the impulse to create. Moreover, as Ramathate Dolamo has noted: ‘[T]he purpose of Trinitarian theology is not to define God or God’s “substance”, but to describe the whole, interrelated gracious movement of God who seeks communion – intimate relationship – with what God has created.’22 I contend that understanding the nature of God as triune enhances reflection on city-making. For William Whitney, ‘the doctrine of creation describes the triune God’s continuous and loving action of creating in the beginning, sustaining the world that has been created, redeeming fallen humanity, and ultimately bringing about the restoration and perfection of the entire created order’.23 The creation narratives offer a primary introduction to the triune God, the creator. The book of Genesis begins with a testimony to the one who initiates creation (Gen. 1.1-3). Whitney states: ‘Creation is always set in the larger narrative of God’s triune action through the Son and Spirit, and the working of the triune God for the redemption of the entire created realm.’24 Creation is about the nature of God, humans’ identity as creatures of the earth, and the future of the world as it is recreated.25 The three persons of the Trinity work in unity and synergy according to the will and purpose of God to initiate creation.26 Jacob Sherman cautions, therefore, against assigning the act of creation solely to the Father: We are sometimes tempted to think of God the Father as Creator, God the Son as Redeemer, and the Spirit as the Sanctifier, but this is an unfortunate way of speaking. Rather, scripture and tradition alike teach that all of the great acts of creation, redemption, and sanctification are acts of the Father through the Son in the Spirit. It is the one God in three persons who creates.27

Jacob Sherman, ‘Creation: An Act of Love’, Church Times, 19 February 2016, https://www​.churchtimes​.co​.uk​/articles​ /2016​/19​-february​/features​/features​/creation​-an​-act​-of​-love. 22 Ramathate T. H. Dolamo, ‘A Trinitarian Theology of Creation: An Ethical Perspective’, HTS Teologiese Studies/ Theological Studies 75, no. 1 (2019): a5421, doi: 10.4102/hts.v75i1.5421. 23 Whitney, ‘Beginnings’, 47. 24 Whitney, ‘Beginnings’, 46. 25 See David Fergusson, Creation (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014), 2. 26 See Eph. 1.11b; 1 Cor. 8.6; Rev. 4.11. 27 Sherman, ‘Creation’. See also Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998); Thomas F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 76–109. 21

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Creation is the work of the triune God – of the Father, and of the Son (the Word who became flesh, and by and through whom all things were made [Jn 1.1-3; Col. 1.16]), and of the Holy Spirit, who moves over the deep (Gen. 1.2) and fills the cosmos (Ps. 139.7-10).28 Perichoresis refers to the notion that the three persons of the Trinity mutually share in the life of the others so that none is isolated or detached from the actions of the others. This idea has implications for life in urban environments. Because the creator is community and because there is no isolation in God, human existence in urban contexts can draw from and be inspired by the relational character of God. One can observe that the creator is connected to the whole created order and continues to co-create together with the inhabited earth. City-making, therefore, ought not to become an endeavour solely for urban planners. City-making in community An implication of the claim that the triune God works in and as community to bring about the created order is that city-making in community ought to be an inclusive, collaborative work enriched through multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinarity (MIT) and informed by situated community knowledge, insight, and participation. Building cities in community involves widening the circles of urban imagination, reflection, and dialogue beyond the realm of city planners to include the voices, knowledge, and experiences of diverse communities. The resulting urban design becomes enriched by the encoded, explicit, tacit, situated, and subjugated knowledge that resides outside of the city planner’s disciplines. The social, economic, environmental, and spiritual spheres of the city must possess shared spaces for mutual and reciprocal learning and the convergence of ideation, experience, skill, and insight for inclusive city-making. When professional city-makers co-design and co-create cities, they create cities in community. This means ‘creating new [urban] solutions, with people, not for them’.29 Within professional and scholarly institutions that create knowledge on city-making, there needs to be a commitment to breaking disciplinary silos while creating intentional spaces for disciplinary convergence for wholeness in urban praxis. There are great benefits of MIT for the vision-casting, study, and making of cities. Multidisciplinarity involves distinct academic disciplines and approaches to specific urban problems.30 Interdisciplinarity analyses, synthesizes, and harmonizes links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole.31 Transdisciplinarity involves different disciplines working together to create ‘new conceptual, theoretical, [and] methodological innovations that integrate and move beyond discipline-specific approaches to address a common problem’.32 Transdisciplinarity also

See Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1997). 29 Christian Bason, Leading Public Sector Innovation: Co-creating for a Better Society (Bristol: Policy Press, 2010), 6. 30 See Research Development Office, ‘The Difference between Multidisciplinary, Interdisciplinary, and Convergence Research’, NC State University, accessed 7 April 2022, https://research​.ncsu​.edu​/rdo​/the​-difference​-between​ -multidisciplinary​-interdisciplinary​-and​-convergence​-research. 31 See Bernard C. K. Choi and Anita W. P. Pak, ‘Multidisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in Health Research, Services, Education, and Policy: 1. Definitions, Objectives, and Evidence of Effectiveness’, Clinical and Investigative Medicine 29, no. 6 (2006): 351–64. 32 Maria H. Guimarães et al., ‘Who Is Doing Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research, and Why? An Empirical Study of Motivations, Attitudes, Skills, and Behaviours’, Futures 112 (2019): 102441, doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2019.102441. 28

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involves crossing over scholarly boundaries and drawing knowledge from a range of spaces outside of the academy. MIT should not be perceived as a scholarly fad but rather as an orientation to study that understands that a singular discipline cannot solve the challenges of urban contexts. MIT can produce depth and richness of perspective and provide a view to the bigger, clearer urban picture. It is a preferred method of urban study that facilitates the formation of diverse teams comprising a wide range of memory, knowledge, expertise, and experience. City planners should engage with urban theologians, sociologists, economists, educators, social policymakers, migrancy experts, early childhood practitioners, and a range of other stakeholders to put together a rich tapestry of what makes an inclusive, loving city that nurtures friendship, enhances well-being, and is resilient in times of crisis. MIT can support higher education, religious bodies, governments, city-makers, businesses, and civil society in the efforts required for urban development in this century. MIT can also lead to new theological, social, and intellectual insights, new sites for urban research, and new collaborative networks for high-impact urban research collaborations. De Beer believes that ‘institutional mechanisms such as innovation hubs, urban incubators, city laboratories, or urban studios should be created for such MIT approaches to be explored and implemented in relation to particular urban contexts or challenges’.33 City-making for community Because the creator God exists as community, the created thrive in community. In this way, humans bear the characteristics of the creator. Humans are created to live in relationships; they cannot thrive alone. In the African context, one sees this divine instinct manifest in the singular marker of the African community, which is the philosophy of Ubuntu/botho. Ubuntu is at the heart of the social function, purpose, and value system of African communities. Ubuntu reminds one that humans are human only in and with the humanity of others – ‘I am human because we are’. Ubuntu also encourages humans to act in a manner that grants priority to what benefits the community and not the individual. The ethos, culture, spirit, and service orientation of African cities are inspired by this enduring philosophy that emphasizes the reverential interdependence of humanity. Ubuntu serves as an impulse for engaged, collaborative, and connected urban design. When considering how to make cities for better health and well-being, one must remember that cities can bring humans together or isolate them. The anomaly in the context of cities is that, on the one hand, cities ‘hold networks together and bridge connections’;34 yet, cities simultaneously conspire to destroy human connections. Georg Simmel describes the social tendency that ‘one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd’.35 Similarly, Jason Byrne identifies a body of research supporting the claim that cities promote adverse

Stephan de Beer, private correspondence with author, 18 September 2022. Lauren Rickards et al., ‘Urban Studies after the Age of the City’, Urban Studies 53, no. 8 (2016): 1534. 35 Georg Simmel, cited in Francesca Perry, ‘Does City Life Make Us More or Less Lonely? Share Your Stories’, The Guardian, 29 February 2016, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/cities​/2016​/feb​/29​/city​-life​-more​-less​-lonely​-loneliness​ -cities​-share​-stories. 33 34

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health outcomes, noting that urban life’s ‘cognitive load’ can be ‘depressogenic’.36 Cities contain concentrated risk for major mental challenges such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress, mood, or addictive disorders. Since the city’s physical infrastructure can become exposed to corrosive agents, so too can the well-being of urban dwellers become eroded through urban forms that are life-opposing instead of life-affirming and socially supportive. Kimberley Brownlee cautions that social deprivation, ‘as with pain, thirst, hunger, or fear, triggers the fight or flight response that induces a whole host of health risks’.37 City-makers, regulators, and community builders can improve the quality of urban life. Urban design can become a tool for improved mental health through physical and social infrastructure that mitigates social isolation, which better corresponds to the modes of life in and for which creation exists. Cities that thrive need a caring and socially responsive skilled citizenry who seek the well-being of their cities. Layla McCay, Ingrid Bremer, Tarik Endale, Marjia Jannati, and Jihyun Yi note: ‘Policymakers, urban planners, architects, engineers, transport specialists, developers, and others impact on mental health through their contributions to the design and delivery of the urban built environment.’38 Urban design guidelines, for example, can help by ensuring built environments that facilitate the possibility of more meaningful social encounters. City design that alleviates loneliness and encourages social encounters is critical; it is becoming clear that human sociality should be a primary consideration when writing urban development regulations. Against this backdrop, researchers are increasingly demonstrating that access to social networks is important for helping city dwellers to cope with stressful life events. Also, the human brain produces oxytocin when people socialize, which rewards those who socialize with positive feelings. When humans interact with others, they, in effect, selfmedicate. Social deprivation and the absence of social capital fortify poverty, ill health, and environmental degradation. Addressing social isolation – the lack of social connection that impinges on mental health and social capital – requires actualizing aspirations, including building cities for better community. Building better community in cities is ‘not merely a social or economic matter but is also a profound spiritual challenge’.39 So Philip Sheldrake: ‘[C]ities reflect and affect the quality of human relationships. The fact is that in the context of urban environments we cannot separate functional, ethical, and spiritual questions. If places are to be sacred, they must affirm the sacredness of people, community, and a human capacity for transcendence.’40 The earliest churches were rooted in the cities that rose and fell throughout history, yet the Christian movement has been sustained. Communities of faith have been inspired to live and work in communities of care. They play a role in cities in reflecting theologically on and

Jason Byrne, ‘Planners Know Depressingly Little about a City’s Impacts on Our Mental Health’, The Conversation, accessed 25 September 2022, https://theconversation​.com​/planners​-know​-depressingly​-little​-about​-a​-citys​-impacts​ -on​-our​-mental​-health​-81098. 37 Kimberley Brownlee, cited in Steve Price, ‘Loneliness, Urban Design, and Form-Based Codes’, Public Square: A CNU Journal, 20 October 2016, https://www​.cnu​.org​/publicsquare​/loneliness​-urban​-design​-and​-form​-based​-codes. 38 Layla McCay et al., ‘Urban Design and Mental Health’, in Mental Health and Illness in the City, ed. Niels Okkels, Christina B. Kristiansen, and Povl Munk-Jørgensen (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2017), 421. 39 Philip Sheldrake, The Spiritual City: Theology, Spirituality, and the Urban (Malden: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 3. 40 Sheldrake, The Spiritual City, 7. 36

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addressing urban challenges. Findings from the Church of England’s ‘Commission on Urban Life and Faith Report’, for example, reveal that people of faith are powerful assets: they add ‘faithful capital’ to cities – hope, faith, love, worship, a sense of the divine, commitment to and celebration of life, an experience of community, commitment to individual and collective transformation, and values and transferable skills.41 These communities of care become the social capital identified by Jürgen Moltmann: The opposite of poverty isn’t property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties. For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow or are stunted and suppressed. So, let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own hands, and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us.42 Making cities that share (divine love) versus cities for individual surplus accumulation (self-love) Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord.43 In the twenty-first century, cities have all the hard times of the Dickensian variety, plus new fault lines, disequilibrium, and dysfunction, plus new development challenges that have led to contested urban futures. The fragility of cities has deepened because cities cannot be sustained with the current resource scarcity, wealth, income, and digital divides. Since the 1990s, the world’s cities have revealed again what humans have long known – that any economic system can become prone to abuse, failure, and corruption. Any economic system in the hands of the powerful and acquisitive will fail. In cities the world over, acquisitive behaviour is endorsed as socially acceptable. The needs of the individual are limitless, and surplus accumulation takes place at the expense of the poor. To seek the shalom of the city, it is necessary to: develop the ethos of sharing and to exorcise the ethos of surplus accumulation, promote development that does not discriminate against the poor and that works to address systems and structures that cause poverty, promote confluence with rather than competing for natural resources and growth, and move from ‘domination to stewardship to co-existence and partnership between the human species and the rest of creation’.44

‘Commission on Urban Life and Faith Report’, Anglican Communion News Service, accessed 7 April 2022, https:// www​.anglicannews​.org​/news​/2006​/05​/commission​-on​-urban​-life​-and​-faith​-report​.aspx. 42 Moltmann, The Source of Life, 109–10. 43 Augustine, The City of God, 14.28. 44 Dolamo, ‘A Trinitarian Theology of Creation’, 5. 41

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Conclusion: City-making for wholeness of the earth Like civilizations, cities are fragile; they can be exposed to slow, chronic decay or sudden and catastrophic destruction. Societal collapse and its associated terms – ‘fragility’, ‘resilience’, ‘risk’, ‘sustainability’, and so on – have become matters of extensive inquiry and of decisionmaking around infrastructure.45 In addition, increased focus on sustainability is congruent with increased consciousness of the urban fragility, scarcity, and degradation that has already occurred. Sadly, many cities have been too late to consider the intricate web of life that sustains the economy. The preferential option for the economy over the environment has led to perilous sustainability outcomes. The singular motivation to increase profits has taken precedence over accountability for earth-keeping. Cities worldwide compete for natural resources to the detriment of people and places. Centuries of thoughtless, avaricious pillaging of Africa’s (and others’) natural resources have left the earth in ruin. In Johannesburg, mining companies have left large unsightly mine dumps and sludge dams that impose a harsh sentence on townships that were cunningly positioned as buffer communities by the apartheid government. Pictures of urban economic progress throughout history have been characterized by the shrouded sun and the distinctive smoggy skies where pollutants form toxic pillars of smoke that rise above the towers of economic progress while effluents merge into once life-giving streams and soil. We are already witnessing the complex impact, on cities, of climate change with its attendant precipitation and temperature shifts as well as more frequent and severe extreme weather events. Climate change is already contributing to urban water and food insecurity. Insufficient energy supply will become a major constraint for expanding or developing new urban projects. The effects of environmental degradation and climate change impinge heaviest on the poorest cities and communities. Africa’s foreign investment partners have not complied with environmental standards, leaving the beautiful, resource-rich continent exposed to further degradation. To think, live, move, and have our being in the triune God and in the community of the whole inhabited earth is a journey laden with vast and unceasing complexity. Failure to act will be catastrophic – for all life. In safeguarding the earth, humans will continue to enjoy the manifold benefits in this generation and the generations to come. The Greek word oikos, meaning household, is the root of the English prefix ‘eco’, from where the words ‘economy’ (laws, norms, and management of the household) and ‘ecology’ (the logic of the household: the study of living things in relation to their environment) are derived. In essence, the management of the earth – the inhabited household – must be connected with an acute understanding of humanity’s interrelationship with the environment.46

Joseph Tainter, cited in Ben Ehrenreich, ‘How Do You Know When Society Is about to Fall Apart?’, The New York Times, 4 November 2020, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2020​/11​/04​/magazine​/societal​-collapse​.html. 46 See, for example, Ruth Page, God and the Web of Creation (London: SCM, 1996); Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015); Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary Radford Ruether, eds, Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-being of Earth and Humans (Cambridge: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, 2000). 45

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Many readers of the Bible have observed that the Bible begins in the garden (Eden) and ends in the city (New Jerusalem), yet the garden and its creatures can never be detached from the city. People of faith have answered the call to consider the glaring ecological and socioeconomic trials of our time and of our urban contexts. Finding their impulse in the triune God who hears and answers the groaning of all creation (Rom. 8.22), communities of faith continue to work with the whole inhabited earth towards a redeemed creation, a New City where they will ‘neither harm nor destroy’ (Isa. 65.25). The theological, moral, and economic case for action is compelling. This chapter has explored how people of faith need not view doctrine as dead, detached, and lifeless, having no concern for the betterment of our world. It contends that understanding the doctrine of creation provides the impetus for city-making in and for improved community and shalom. The triune God – God as community47 – sets a creative chain in motion that humans are invited to share and actively participate in. Our cities can experience alternate, just futures when people of faith explore the connectedness of doctrine for the liberation of the created order. Faith communities can draw from the wellspring of doctrinal insight to work with God to transfigure the cities of our time. People of faith can, thereby, be development assets in urban contexts. In conclusion, it is vital to emphasize that creation relates to what Piero Coda calls ‘a dynamic event, of history: the history of God’s relationship with humanity and through the latter with the cosmos’.48 Creation is a dynamic event, a history. And precisely as such, it is rooted in the life force of the Trinity and animated by the love of God. Creation stretches over time and develops. It is not simply a specific act that is realized once and for all in the beginning. People play a part in the history of creation. Through God’s creative activity, humanity possesses the ‘continuing capacity and suitability to be a vessel of God’s presence and an instrument of God’s work’49 in the earth and in the cities of the world, our home.

Further reading Conradie, Ernst M. ‘Is it Not God’s Mercy that Nourishes and Sustains Us . . . Forever? Some Theological Perspectives on Entangled Sustainabilities’. Scriptura: Journal for Biblical, Theological and Contextual Hermeneutics 116, no. 2 (2017): 38–54. De Beer, Stephan. ‘Theological Education and African Cities: An Imperative for Action’. Missionalia 48, no. 3 (2020): 231–56. Gyekye, Kwame. ‘Person and Community in African Thought’. In Person and Community, edited by Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye, 101–22. Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992. Le Bruyns, Clint. ‘The Rebirth of Kairos Theology and its Implications for Public Theology and Citizenship in South Africa’. Missionalia 43, no. 3 (2015): 460–77.

See Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society, trans. Paul Burns (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2005). Piero Coda, ‘God and Creation: Trinity and Creation out of Nothing’, Claritas: Journal of Dialogue & Culture 4, no. 1 (2015): 6. 49 Philip J. Hefner, ‘Beyond Exploitation and Sentimentality: Challenges to a Theology of Nature’, in Concern for Creation: Voices on the Theology of Creation, ed. Viggo Mortensen (Uppsala: Svenska kyrkans forskningsråd, 1995), 128. 47 48

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CHAPTER 58 POLITICS

Tim Gorringe

Introduction Contemporary Hebrew Bible scholarship seems to agree that the creation theme, both in Genesis and in Second Isaiah, is a product of the exile or later. Cyrus the Great, who defeated the Babylonians who were responsible for the exile, credited his success to the Babylonian god Marduk, but the group responsible for Second Isaiah ascribed it to YHWH (Isa. 45.1-3). On one reading, the purpose of this group was to say that there are no iron laws which mean that this is how things have to be. There is always an alternative. ‘Without this insight nobody – right up to the present – can achieve anything politically. . . . Creation theology is political education par excellence.’1 The same applies to the opening chapters of Genesis, which draw on motifs found throughout the Ancient Near East but may well have been composed in Babylon. Again, on one reading, they speak of establishing an order in which there are no hierarchical relationships. Rather than being the introduction to the history of Israel, as Albrecht Alt taught,2 Genesis is Zukunftsmusik, a utopian dream for people in exile.3 If this is right, then creation theology began life as a political theology. Another prophet of the exile, Ezekiel, in his vision of the valley of the dry bones, suggests that any political theology is also a theology of new creation (Ezekiel 37). The person who understood this most profoundly was Paul of Tarsus. In the course of Christian tradition, however, this reading of creation as a vision of a potentially liberating future has only been picked up once or twice. Creation theology was profoundly influenced by Stoicism and Neoplatonism, although not necessarily in liberative ways. This chapter will explore the political significance of the theology of creation through the ideas of natural law, the idea of the fall, of degree and order, of estates and orders, and finally, in relation to climate change. I begin, however, with some remarks on the relationship between creation and ‘nature’.

Creation and nature Raymond Williams describes ‘nature’ as ‘perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language’.4 In one of its meanings, it stands for the entire material world, whether including

Ton Veerkamp, Die Welt anders: Politische Geschichte der Großen Erzählung (Berlin: Argument, 2012), 92. Albrecht Alt, Essays on Old Testament History and Religion, trans. R. A. Wilson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966). 3 Veerkamp, Die Welt anders, 104. 4 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 219. 1 2

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or not including human beings. The abstract sense of nature derives from assuming a single prime cause, God. ‘Nature’ and creation often function virtually as synonyms. Thus Ephrem the Syrian writes: ‘In his book (i.e. Genesis) Moses described the creation of the natural world so that both Nature and Scripture might bear witness to the Creator. Nature, through man’s use of it, Scripture, through his reading of it.’5 In the homilies John Chrysostom preached in Antioch after the riots over the imperial statues, he repeatedly speaks of the knowledge of God through creation while emphasizing that God’s providence is above nature, taking care that nature is never deified.6 In the modern period, Karl Barth says, more cautiously: In the realm of nature . . . for all its distinctiveness . . . there is nothing which does not point to grace and therefore come from grace; nothing which can enjoy independent life or exercise independent dominion. And conversely, for all the newness and particularity of the realm of grace, there is no place in it for anything unnatural, but from the creation everything is also nature.7

Natural law For all these theologians, ‘nature’ refers to the natural world, identified with the works of the first six days of creation according to Genesis (including the creation of human beings, who are part of nature). This has its own political importance, but historically the political importance of creation at first derived from Stoicism rather than scripture. For Stoicism, ‘God’, who is ‘thinking fire’ or ‘fiery Spirit’, is not transcendent but rather immanent in all reality, ‘the rational germinating power of all future development’.8 The divine Fire is also Logos, a rational principle that instructs all things and for which ‘Nature’ is the supreme teacher. These ideas gave rise to the idea of ‘natural law’. Drawing on Stoic teaching, Cicero writes in his essay on The Republic: Law in the proper sense is right reason in harmony with nature. It is spread through the whole human community, unchanging and eternal, calling people to their duty by its commands and deterring them from wrong-doing by its prohibitions. . . . This law cannot be countermanded, nor can it be in any way amended, nor can it be totally rescinded. . . . There will not be one such law in Rome and another in Athens, one now and another in the future, but all peoples at all times will be embraced by a single and eternal and unchangeable law; and there will be . . . one lord and master of us all – the god who is the author, proposer, and interpreter of that law.9

Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, trans. Sebastian Brock (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 102. 6 See Saint Chrysostom, ‘Concerning the Statues: Homily IX’, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Volume 9: Saint Chrysostom: On the Priesthood; Ascetic Treatises; Select Homilies and Letters; Homilies on the Statutes, ed. Philip Schaff (New York: The Christian Literature Company, 1889), 402–4. 7 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 62. 8 Max Pohlenz, Die Stoa: Geschichte einer geistigen Bewegung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1959), 95. 9 Cicero, The Republic and The Laws, trans. Niall Rudd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 68–9. 5

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Cicero, who was a philosophical eclectic, was perfectly aware that law was convention, but he nevertheless believed that the world as individuals apprehend it – ‘nature’ – yields clear moral imperatives and that these are derived from ‘God’, understood more personally than any of the great Stoic teachers would have allowed. Christians, who read Cicero with enthusiasm, could later understand this passage in terms of the Christian God. The Latin jurists, in views which found their way into Justinian’s codification of law during the sixth century, taught that the lex gentium – what is now called international law – derived from natural law. Law is the bridge between Aristotle’s ethics and his politics: it is what maintains the polis given that individuals and societies cannot rely entirely on virtue. Cicero, and the western tradition up to the present, have understood law as vital both to the ordering of any civilized society and to peace between nations. Saint Paul had learned from the Stoics. He uses the term phusis (‘nature’) to speak of human behaviour that conforms, or fails to conform, with what is taken to be natural. Some Gentiles who live just lives do so physei (by nature) (Rom. 2.14). In sinning, others contradict nature (Rom. 1.26-27). Paul’s arguments in the first two chapters of his Epistle to the Romans convinced Christian thinkers up to the seventh century that the idea of natural law was thoroughly Christian. Tertullian, for example, says, in good Stoic fashion, that nature is the first school: God is first known by nature. Nature is the teacher, the soul the disciple. Whatever nature teaches is taught by God.10 Stoicism imbues the political teaching of the early Fathers: ‘The political theory of the Fathers is that of the ancient world. . . . [T]he modifications introduced by Christianity are to be regarded rather as modifications of detail than completely or fundamentally changing the conceptions which were already current.’11

Creation as the ground of human equality and common ownership Robert Carlyle’s judgement needs emending in two ways. Stoicism taught that because Universal Reason, the Κοινός Λόγος, imbues all things, and all humans share in the same Logos, so all should act in κοινωνία (community), an important idea for Paul (e.g. 1 Cor. 12.12-31; Phil. 4.15). Roman law paid lip service to the idea of natural law but insisted on the absolute right (dominium) to property. The early Christian Fathers drew other conclusions. Clement, Basil, Ambrose, and Chrysostom all teach that it follows from the fact of κοινωνία (it is a metaphysical rather than an ethical idea) that all things are in common. Exegeting the story of Naboth, Ambrose argues: The earth was made in common for all. . . . Why do you arrogate to yourselves, ye rich, exclusive right to the soil? Nature, which begets all poor, does not know the rich. For we are neither born with raiment nor are we begotten with gold and silver. Naked it brings people into the light, wanting food, clothing, and drink; naked the earth receives whom it has brought forth; it knows not how to include the boundaries of an estate in the

See Tertullian, The Crown. Robert W. Carlyle and Alexander J. Carlyle, A History of Mediæval Political Theory in the West (Edinburgh/London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons/William Blackwood and Sons, 1903), 1:195. 10 11

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tomb. . . . Nature, therefore, knows not how to discriminate when we are born, it knows not how when we die.12 Ambrose’s argument is framed in purely Stoic categories. Chrysostom is more careful. In his exposition of 1 Timothy, he argues: Is not ‘the earth God’s and the fullness thereof ’? If then our possessions belong to one common Lord, they also belong to our fellow-servants. The possessions of one Lord are all common. . . . God . . . has made certain things common, as the sun, air, earth, and water, the sky, the sea, the light, the stars, whose benefits are dispensed equally to all as brethren. . . . And mark, that concerning things that remain common there is no contention but all is peaceable. But when one attempts to possess himself of anything, to make it his own, then contention is introduced, as if nature [phusis] herself were indignant.13 These ideas of primitive equality and shared property never died out. They reappear in the medieval peasant movements throughout Europe: ‘Whan Adam dalf and Eve span, wo was thanne a gentilman?’, asked John Ball in 1381.14 Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the seventeenth-century Diggers, wrote: In the beginning of Time the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man, the lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another.15 There can be no freedom, he wrote, ‘unless the Land of England be freely set at liberty from proprietors, and become a common Treasury to all her children, as every portion of the Land of Canaan was the common livelihood of such and such a Tribe, and of every member in that Tribe, without exception, neither hedging in any, nor hedging out’.16 The second amendment to Carlyle’s judgement follows from the fact that Stoicism was fatalistic. The paradigm of the Stoic political actor, Marcus Aurelius, writing in his tent as he patrols the Empire’s eastern border, says: ‘To Nature, who bestows all things and takes them away, the man who has learned his lesson and respects himself says: “Give what is thy good pleasure, take back what is thy good pleasure”; and this he says not boasting himself but only

De Nabuthe, col. 732, in PL 14.732. Cited in Charles Avila, Ownership: Early Christian Teaching (Maryknoll/London: Orbis Books/Sheed and Ward, 1983), 62. 13 In Epistolam I ad Timotheum, 12, 4, in PG 62.562–64. Cited in Avila, Ownership, 95. 14 Cited in Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 211. 15 Gerrard Winstanley, The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2:4. 16 Winstanley, Complete Works, 2:38. 12

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listening to her voice and being of one mind with her.’17 The Stoic motto is nec spe nec metu – neither hope nor fear. This is not true for Christianity, for which, as Ton Veerkamp suggests earlier, hope is the key political virtue and which believes, on his account, on the grounds that it is the liberating God who creates, that ‘another world is possible’.18 For Paul and later Christians, this hope springs from the new creation of the resurrection. Either way, Christians have a politics of hope.

The fall, inequality, and private ownership Aristotle had taught that human beings were not created equal; but Stoicism, followed by the Fathers, believed that they were. Late Stoicism, as represented by Seneca, believed that there had been a golden age in which all were equal and property had been held in common. Humans followed nature without fail, and the best and wisest were their rulers. This happy state was lost through the growth of vice and avarice.19 The institutions of society are made necessary by this decline. There are obvious analogies between this view and Christian ideas of the fall, read as a matter of will and more darkly than Seneca’s ‘decline’. Both stories surely derive from a memory of the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. In the biblical story, violence follows the development of agriculture, which produces the first surpluses. The idea of the fall quickly appears as a justification for inequality. It is sin which requires positive law and the State, and justifies slavery and private property. Augustine cites Cicero’s definition of natural law word for word but, unlike his teacher Ambrose, insists on the right to private property.20 Although he allows the priority of common use, he grounds the right to property partly in natural law and partly in positive law. In the City of God, Augustine teaches that slavery can be regarded partly as a punishment for sin but also as a remedy for sin, part of the order necessary in a fallen world.21 Cicero had described the State as ‘a numerous gathering brought together by legal consent and community of interest’.22 Commenting on this, Augustine denies that there can be any justice among those who do not serve God.23 He, therefore, rephrases Cicero’s definition, omitting the ideas of law and justice: to be a state is to be a multitude of rational beings associated together in the harmonious enjoyment of that which people love.24 Although noting that Augustine later expresses that ‘states without law are nothing but robber bands’, Carlyle comments: ‘No more fundamental difference could very well be imagined.’25 Cicero is fully aware of bad and corrupt law, but at the same time regards the possibility of law as the exercise of the human potential for politics. Here he is

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. A. S. L. Farquharson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 74 (10.14). This is the slogan of La Via Campesina, which I apply to Paul. 19 See Seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, trans. Richard M. Gummere (London: William Heinemann, 1920), 2:394–431 (Epistle 90). 20 See Augustine, Free Will, 1.15.33; Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 6.26. 21 Augustine, The City of God, 19.15. 22 Cicero, The Republic and The Laws, 19. 23 Augustine, The City of God, 2.21. 24 Augustine, The City of God, 19.24. 25 Carlyle, A History of Mediæval Political Theory, 166. 17 18

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Aristotelian: humans are community animals who shape their society through discussion and debate. Augustine represents a quite different strand, which reappears in Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt26 and which regards politics as a necessarily dirty business whose job it is to keep human greed and violence in check. The idea of natural law was rethought in the thirteenth century by Thomas Aquinas, under the impact of his rediscovery of Aristotle’s work. What began as a metaphysical doctrine was now fully theological. God is eternal law in Godself and governs the universe through the divine reason. Everything is regulated and measured by eternal law, but intelligent creatures make this their own law through their natural aptitudes for due activity and purpose. This is natural law, which is the sharing of eternal law by intelligent creatures.27 Natural law is the impression of the divine light in individuals. The lex gentium is derived from the natural law as conclusions are derived from premises and forms that body of laws without which humans could not live together.28 Unlike Stoic and Patristic thinking, Aquinas, following Aristotle, believes that political orders are not a remedy for vice but are rather how human beings, by nature sociable, realize their true nature.29 At the same time, even in the state of innocence, human beings would need authority, and it would be all wrong (inconveniens) if those superior in knowledge and justice did not exercise that authority.30 After the Reformation, natural law was rethought again by Johannes Althusius and Hugo Grotius. For the latter, natural law was ‘a dictate of right reason’ and includes the sanctity of private property and the obligation to fulfil promises and the infliction of penalties according to desert.31 Althusius had identified natural law with the second table of the Decalogue. Grotius refers to the Hebrew Bible, but what really counts for him are clear and distinct ideas and self-evidence. Natural law is now distanced from creation, where it began. Its basis is neither metaphysical nor theological but is, in effect, based on the sensus communis (common sense). The same is true of contemporary accounts, such as that offered by John Finnis,32 which are based on sociological and ethnological accounts of human society.

Class, degree, and order Stoicism, followed by the Church Fathers, assumed that the original state of human beings was one of equality. Universal experience, however, was of inequality. Justifications for this were remarkably feeble – largely ad hominem. In the discussion of justice in Plato’s Republic, for example, the fact that the different classes have to stay as they are is urged because the

See Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2006). 27 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), I, Q. 91, Art. 2. 28 See Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 95, Art. 4. 29 See Thomas Aquinas, ‘On Princely Government’, in Selected Political Writings, trans. J. G. Dawson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959), 2–9. 30 See Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 96, Art 4. 31 Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace, trans. Richard Tuck (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), 82. 32 John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 26

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alternative just would not do.33 Aristotle argues that slaves are inferior to free men, women to men, and barbarians to Greeks, ‘by nature’34 – an uncharacteristically lazy refusal to think, and one which he may not really have believed given that he freed his slaves in his will. Nothing could make clearer how the sensus communis is mistaken for what is ‘natural’ (cf. Paul’s assumption that long hair for men is ‘unnatural’, in 1 Cor. 11.14). Aquinas at least corrected Aristotle in this regard, arguing that slavery and private property were not instituted by nature but were rather created by human reason for the convenience of human life. They are not a contradiction of the natural law but an addition to it.35 There was, however, one metaphysical justification for degree, classically expressed by Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Ulysses argues that the reason the Greek war effort is floundering is that degree has been overlooked: The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre, Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order . . . It is a disorder in the planets, it is suggested, which brings natural disasters, and in the same way, human society cannot survive without degree: O, when degree is shaked, Which is the ladder of all high designs, The enterprise is sick! . . . Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows!36 The world view Shakespeare is summarizing here is not, as some have suggested, Platonic, but rather Neoplatonic. Edward Zeller described Neoplatonism as ‘the intellectual reproduction of Byzantine Imperialism’.37 The systems of Plotinus and Proclus were almost entirely contemplative, but they did teach what Arthur Lovejoy called ‘the great chain of being’38 – an ordered descent from the One, or the Good, to the lowliest microbe. Human beings (anthropos) were one link in this chain, but, in fact, human beings were not a unity. The chain of being was accepted, but human beings were class divided. Neoplatonism entered the Christian bloodstream above all through Augustine, for all his clearly articulated differences from it. In his ruminations on peace, Augustine states that the peace of the whole universe is the tranquillity of order and that ‘order is the distribution which

See Plato, Republic, 434b. Aristotle, Politics, 1254a–b. 35 See Aquinas, ST, II–II, Q. 66, Art. 2. 36 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 20, 21 (act 1, scene 3). 37 Eduard Zeller, The Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, trans. Oswald J. Reichel (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1870), 34. 38 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 33 34

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allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place’.39 Although slavery has to be understood as the punishment for sin, it is also true that social peace is the ordered harmony of each respecting their proper station.40 Another assumption lurking in the background here is that the beauty of all things is enhanced by difference. Aquinas shares this assumption and argues that there would have been disparity even in Paradise ‘in order to have the beauty of order more splendidly reflected among men’.41 The beauty of order, in other words, includes class distinction, notoriously described in the doggerel of C. F. Alexander’s ‘All things bright and beautiful’: The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high and lowly, And ordered their estate.42 Another main source for Neoplatonism was Pseudo-Dionysius, whom Aquinas cites some 1700 times. He coins the word ‘hierarchy’ in describing both the celestial and the ecclesiastical hierarchies and, following Zeller, it can be supposed that the vision of celestial hierarchy is but the projection of the imperial hierarchy which he knew. Like Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius has no interest in the realities of class, but his world view taught generations that class distinction was part of the very order of creation (understood as emanation). Alexander’s hymn was written in 1848. These views lasted a long time.

Estates, orders, and mandates Since the eleventh century, at least, European society had been understood in terms of three ‘estates’ – clergy, nobility, and peasantry – though artisans, merchants, and tradesmen were also included in the third estate. Luther took over and reinterpreted this tradition of thought. In his account of the command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he argues (somewhat improbably) that this is about establishing the church and household government. Civil government was not needed as the fall had not yet happened.43 Commenting on Psalm 127, he speaks of government in the home, the city, and the church. The first two ‘embrace everything – children, property, money, animals, etc. The home must produce, whereas the city must guard, protect, and defend. Then follows the third, God’s own home and city, that is, the church, which must obtain people from the home and protection and defense from the

Augustine, The City of God, 19.13. See Augustine, The City of God, 19.16. 41 Aquinas, ST, 1, Q. 96, Art. 3. 42 Cecil F. Alexander, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, in Hymns for Little Children, 25th edn (London: Joseph Masters, 1850), hymn 9, verse 3. 43 Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Volume 1: Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 1–5, trans. George V. Schick (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1958), 103–4. 39 40

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city’.44 He calls these ‘the three hierarchies ordained by God’.45 He maintains that they have been established by God ‘that in the world there may be a stable, orderly, and peaceful life, and that justice may be preserved’: Therefore the psalmist here calls it ‘God’s righteousness’, which is permanent and abides forever. Lawyers call it ‘natural law’. For if God had not Himself instituted these stations and did not daily preserve them as His work, no particle of right would last even a moment. Every servant would want to be a lord, every maid a mistress, every peasant a prince, and every son above father and mother. In short, conditions would be worse among men than they are among the wild animals, where each devours the other; for God did not give them such institutions.46 Luther’s reference to natural law is revealing. Just as the medieval estates lie behind his understanding of society, so behind sola scriptura, in this instance at least, lies the natural law, which goes back to Stoicism. These ideas were taken up by later Lutheranism and taken to mean that it is part of God’s creation that all humans live within structures of family or government which sustain human existence. The task of the church is to evangelize these structures. Although he was theologically opposed to Luther, there are nevertheless analogous arguments in Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (published in 1680 but written forty years earlier), in which he derives from Genesis the absolute authority (dominium) granted by God to fathers and, by extension, to the fathers of the State. Adam’s children are subject to him, and the subjection of children is ‘the only fountain of all regal authority’.47 The Reformed theologian Emil Brunner also took up the theology of orders in his volume of ethics Das Gebot und die Ordnungen (translated as The Divine Imperative), first published in 1932. The orders he had in mind were marriage and the family, work and the economic order, the State, culture (science, art, and education) and the church. The first four were, in his view, all derived from ‘Nature’. This means that ‘they exist because of the psycho-physical nature of [human beings]. Their nature and their existence are recognized by means of reason, not by faith, by means of the purely natural power of cognition which is given to every [human being] just because, and in so far as, [they are] a human being’.48 Although they are recognized by reason rather than faith, the orders are divinely given to make life in community possible and are not just parables or analogies of true community. God trains human beings for community through them. Barth objected that he did not understand from what source and in what way Brunner claimed to know these orders. In Brunner’s later book on justice and the social order, it became clear that it was based on a natural law interpreted mainly in an Aristotelian fashion.49

Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Volume 41: Church and Ministry III, trans. Charles M. Jacobs (Fortress Press: Philadelphia, 1966), 177. 45 Luther, LW 41:177. 46 Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Volume 13: Selected Psalms II, trans. Martin H. Bertram (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1956), 369. 47 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7. 48 Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative: A Study in Christian Ethics, trans. Olive Wyon (London: Lutterworth Press, 1936), 335. 49 Emil Brunner, Justice and the Social Order, trans. Mary Hottinger (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 1945). See 44

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The German Christians and Nazi sympathizers such as Paul Althaus who lauded ‘the people’ (das Volk) as one of the orders of creation also used these ideas. Barth claimed that the theology of orders lay behind the temporizing of the German Christians because it instituted double-entry bookkeeping and allowed another source of revelation apart from scripture.50 The same charge lay behind his apoplectic attack on Brunner (in Nein!) the following year. Learning from Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his fragmentary Ethics, preferred to talk of ‘mandates’ rather than ‘orders’. In his view, the latter word suggests divine sanction for all existing orders and institutions in general and a romantic conservatism which is entirely at variance with the Christian doctrine of divine mandates.51 The word ‘mandate’, by contrast, refers to a divinely imposed task rather than a determination of being. Although the mandates are imposed on all people, they are not divine in themselves but only to the extent that they serve Christ. He identifies these mandates as labour, marriage, government, and the church (and later, he added ‘culture’).52 He took labour from the command to ‘till and keep the earth’ in Gen. 2.15. Like Aquinas, Bonhoeffer thinks of labour as human participation in the action of creation, which brings into being a world of things and values designed to glorify the service of Jesus Christ. Marriage is likewise taken from the first chapters of Genesis and is a matter of producing and educating children. Parents become the representatives of God to their children. No biblical passage was cited to justify including the State, but this followed, for Bonhoeffer, from the first two mandates. He does not spell this out, but presumably, he is following Luther in believing that the State provides the structure within which labour and the family can flourish. Bonhoeffer also thought relations of superiority and inferiority were implied in the mandates, which Barth described as ‘a suggestion of North German patriarchalism’.53 Barth asked why there were only four or five mandates and not others: ‘Is it enough to say that these particular relationships of rank and degree appear with a certain regularity in the Bible and that they can be more or less clearly related to Christ as the Lord of the world?’.54 Barth himself adopted a command ethic which was to have sections following the doctrines of creation, reconciliation, and redemption. In the doctrine of creation, the grace of God in Jesus Christ is described as both the noetic and ontic basis of creation. Barth intended to deal with the State under the ethics of reconciliation though he does note that Louis XIV’s notorious ‘L’État c’est moi’ (‘I am the State’) applied to every person so that the State cannot relieve the individual of any responsibility but is rather wholly the responsibility of every individual.55 Under the ethics of creation, Barth dealt, under the heading of ‘near and distant neighbours’, with the claim that ‘das Volk’ is an order of creation, which he describes as ‘one of the most

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. A. T. Mackay et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 20. 50 See Karl Barth, Lutherfeier 1933 (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1933), 1–21. 51 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Scott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 388–94. 52 See Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 388–9n2. 53 Barth, CD III.4, 22. 54 Barth, CD III.4, 22. 55 Barth, CD III.4, 464.

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curious and tragic events of the whole history of Protestant theology’.56 From Genesis 10, he took the claim that all nations ‘are one blood’ (as opposed to the ‘Blut und Boden’ [‘Blood and Soil’] claim of German Fascism). Christian ethics cannot espouse either an abstract internationalism and cosmopolitanism or an abstract nationalism and particularism. From the following chapter of Genesis, he understood that the scattering of the nations was ‘a work of the divine wrath even if with an undertone of grace’. ‘For all the judgements which may fall on individual peoples, the existence of others will ensure that the ordinances of the divine wisdom and patience are the more evident elsewhere’.57 It can also be noted that the claim that Johannes Boemus formulated in his 1520 publication Omnium Gentium Mores, Leges et Ritus, that all barbarous peoples were descendants of Ham and cursed to be ‘perpetual hewers of wood and drawers of water’, and therefore, are properly treated by open coercion, draws on the idea of orders of creation.58 Though not the most important, this was one of the justifications for apartheid in South Africa and could obviously be used to justify slavery. The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa finally conceded that this view was heretical (i.e. an option incompatible with the church’s life), and we can simply take from it Shakespeare’s warning that the Devil can cite scripture for his purpose. Barth also dealt with the question of war under the ethics of creation. He did not endorse an abstract pacifism but considered that ‘Peace is the real emergency to which all our time, powers and ability must be devoted from the very outset in order that [people] may live and live properly, so that no refuge need be sought in war nor need there be expected from what peace has denied’.59 The church cannot claim that war is absolutely avoidable, but it must oppose ‘the Satanic doctrine’ that war is inevitable and therefore justified, that it is unavoidable and therefore right when it occurs, so that Christians have to participate in it.60 Barth considered the only justification for war was the complete loss of national independence.

The global emergency As has been seen, the political dimension of the theology of creation has, by and large, been concerned with questions of human freedom, the State, the social structures that support human life, and private ownership. Over the past fifty years, a new dimension has taken prominence, arising from the threat to the planet’s life-support system, which is connected with climate change. Actually, the threat has a fourfold aspect, including, besides climate change, the explosion of the human population, resource depletion, and the loss of biodiversity.61 Because of how feedback loops operate, there is no certainty about the imminence of the threat, but it is certain that humankind, and mammalian life in general, is under notice. This

Barth, CD III.4, 305. Barth, CD III.4, 315–16, 320. 58 Johannes Boemus, Omnium Gentium Mores, Leges et Ritus ex Multis Clarissimis Rerum Scriptoribus Collecti (Lyon: Sébastien Gryphe, 1542), 4 (bk. 1, chap. 1). 59 Barth, CD III.4, 459. 60 Barth, CD III.4, 460. 61 See Timothy J. Gorringe, The World Made Otherwise: Sustaining Humanity in a Threatened World (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2018). 56 57

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is not a geological threat, or a matter of fate, but a political issue. ‘Nature’, the scene of human operation, divine gift, witness to God and to God’s purposes, and to which human beings belong, has, by the scale and nature of human interventions, turned on human beings and may terminate their tenancy. An often-cited article by Lynn White Jr. argued that Christianity’s misuse of the ‘domination text’ (Gen. 1.28) lay behind the ecological crisis.62 Partially agreeing with this, Jürgen Moltmann added as aggravating factors the individualization and spiritualization of the notion of salvation so that the earthly and material ceased to matter, as did the anthropocentricity of most accounts of the doctrine of creation, including that of Barth.63 Two broad issues lie behind this kind of charge. The first is the extent to which intellectual arguments lie behind cultural and material change. It is true, of course, that beliefs make a difference, but they are scarcely ever the sole determinants of events. In this case, cultural historians point to the snowball effect of medical progress, improved agriculture, bigger populations, and increasingly effective use of various forms of carbon-intensive technologies, combined with ignorance, until sixty or so years ago, of the cumulative effects of all these changes.64 At the very least, the relationship between ideas and technologies has to be understood dialectically. It also needs to be asked whether the text in Genesis (Gen. 1.28) was, in fact, repeatedly cited as a justification for human interventions. Francis Bacon and Descartes, frequently mentioned as the two principal villains in the story, do not cite it. I doubt it ever occurred to the developers of either steam or oil technology. A much more plausible interpretive key to what was going on is the Greek idea of hubris. The second is the question of how to interpret texts. Texts have not only a social but also an intertextual context. In this case, anyone who reads Genesis 1 is almost certainly likely to have read Genesis 2. There, human beings are told that their vocation is to serve (abad) and to keep (shamar) the earth (2.15). However the verb radah (1.28) (translated as ‘have dominion’ but which, on some accounts, describes the care of a shepherd for their flock) is understood, this verse would have been qualified by the latter one (2.15). If appealing to Genesis, then care and nurture, ‘husbanding’, are the proper way to understand the human task, and this reading could be defended by the way in which Luther, for example, explains what rule consists of in his account of the fourth commandment.65 It is true that the creation texts have been understood anthropocentrically. To some extent, this is necessary, as Wendell Berry insists. Humans have to acknowledge their power and responsibility. If they will not nurture, they can destroy. The need for husbanding and nurturing, loving kindness and humility, is paramount.66 At the same time, Moltmann is right, following Abraham Heschel, that the sabbath, rather than human beings, is the crown of creation, a claim that raises questions about the provisional and teleological nature of politics. ‘Even without human beings, the heavens declare the glory of God. This theocentric biblical world picture gives

See Lynn White Jr., ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–7. See Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1985). 64 See, for example, Lewis Mumford, ‘Progress as “Science Fiction”’, in The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 2:197–229. 65 Martin Luther, Luther’s Large Catechism, trans. John N. Lenker (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1967), 31–45. 66 Wendell Berry, Standing by Words: Essays (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 1983), 149. 62 63

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the human being . . . the chance to understand [themselves] as a member of the community of creation.’67 Human beings are part of ‘nature’ – the whole world system. The psalmist says that although the heavens declare the glory of God, ‘they have no speech or language’ (Ps. 19.3). But in human beings, ‘nature’ – the created order – finds its voice. Humans praise God as the articulate voice of nature. However, they also threaten to destroy it, like Samson, bringing the house down on themselves and everything else. This has several implications. First, here is a theology where the Stoic category of ‘nature’ is no longer central. Both natural theology and the Lutheran idea of orders began from ‘nature’ and proceeded to God. However, beginning with God means understanding ‘nature’ in the divine light. For the Stoics, as for Spinoza and his nineteenth- and twentieth-century admirers, it is Deus sive natura (God or nature). For a theocentric understanding, on the other hand, ‘nature’ – the sum of reality that is neither human nor divine – is part of God’s creation. Nature is de-divinized, but not therefore understood as the material for every kind of exploitation and abuse because it is fundamentally understood as gift – grace. The proper response to a gift is gratitude. Another way of putting this was suggested by the priestly writers in their blueprint for a new society: ‘The land (eretz) is mine – with me you are but guest workers and tenants’ (Lev. 25.23). ‘Eretz’ can be extended to embrace the cosmos. Second, creation is understood in an eschatological or, as Moltmann prefers, messianic context. The Apostle Paul already suggests this in Romans 8, speaking of the creation groaning in bondage (Rom. 8.19-23), an idea taken up by the Greek Fathers, and by the Orthodox Church, who insist that humans need delivering not just from ἁμαρτία (sin) but also from φθορά (transcience or corruptibility). As Moltmann puts it, in the messianic light, creation is both in bondage and open for the future. He takes this as an invitation to think in terms of open systems so that knowledge through domination is replaced by communicative knowledge: ‘It is theologically necessary to view created things as real promises of the kingdom; and it is equally necessary, conversely, to understand the kingdom of God as the fulfilment, not merely of the historical promises of the world, but of its natural promises as well.’68 The question is, which political practices spring from this theology of creation? I suggest they are threefold. First, putting together the early Patristic arguments for human equality (for which the theological arguments, beginning with creation in the image of God, are stronger than the Stoic argument) with Aquinas’ adoption of the idea of humankind as political animals, then all human beings need to be understood as political actors (as Barth argued). Professional politicians of all persuasions cannot be left to do the job. Concretely, this means both political and economic democracy.69 Second, since this will be resisted, and the task is urgent, appeal to law is vital. Since all nations and all cultures are implicated, the instruments of international law, based on ideas of a lex natura, must be strengthened and used. In this case, ‘natura’ means: what natural sciences of many kinds are showing without a shadow of a doubt will happen if consumption patterns and energy use continue as at present. In the face of the evidence, these patterns and uses constitute crimes against humanity.

Moltmann, God in Creation, 31. Moltmann, God in Creation, 63. 69 See David Van Reybrouck, Against Elections: The Case for Democracy (London: Bodley Head, 2016). 67 68

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Third, there is an argument that monasticism began in Egypt in the fourth century not simply as a quest for holiness but as a response to famine. Men70 put themselves under a self-denying ordinance and lived in celibate communities because bringing children into the world would lead to their death by famine. This initiative developed into an ordered system of agricultural work, study, and prayer, familiar to those in the west from the Benedictine tradition but also known in other cultures. This is not about life denial but rather about life affirmation, forgoing consumption to make life for the future and for others possible. Without changing practices of consumption, agricultural practices, practices of trade, and addressing present obscene levels of inequality, there is only what the author of Deuteronomy calls a politics of death (Deut. 30.15). But a politics of creation is a politics of hope. ‘Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. . . . No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe’ (Deut. 30.11, 14).

Further reading Avila, Charles. Ownership: Early Christian Teaching. Maryknoll/London: Orbis Books/Sheed and Ward, 1983. Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics III.4. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance. Translated by A. T. Mackay, T. H. L. Parker, Harold Knight, H. A. Kennedy, and J. Marks et al. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961. Cargill Thompson, W. D. J. The Political Thought of Martin Luther. Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1984. Carlyle, Robert W. and Alexander J. Carlyle. A History of Mediæval Political Theory in the West, Volume 1. Edinburgh/London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons/William Blackwood and Sons, 1903. Moltmann, Jürgen. God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation. Translated by Margaret Kohl. London: SCM Press, 1985. Veerkamp, Ton. Die Welt anders: Politische Geschichte der Großen Erzählung. Berlin: Argument, 2012.

It was specifically men. The women stayed at home and a small number of children were allowed. The men who went to the monasteries did so that ‘others might live’. 70

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Addressing creation and economics today must begin with the hard truth of creation effaced. The global economy is crashing against the earth in what James Speth calls ‘the Great Collision’.1 Signs of this collision abound, from climate disruption and the spread of toxic pollutants to the loss of forests, land, fresh water, marine fisheries, and biodiversity. Surveying the damage, Bill McKibben prophesizes the end of nature and decries the loss of the hospitable planet humans once inhabited. ‘We’re running Genesis backwards’, he observes, ‘decreating’.2 Addressing creation effaced entails more than practices like reducing emissions and consuming less. As Wendell Berry says: ‘We will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as “environmental problems” without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them.’3 Taking Berry to heart, this chapter considers how economics conceives creation and then, by contrast, considers how the doctrine of creation illuminates economics. Beyond origins, the doctrine of creation is about the kind of place creation is – its nature or character – as well as how creatures are to inhabit their God-given home. When one considers that the aetiology of economics is the rule or management of the household, a significant overlap between theology and economics becomes evident.

Creation in economics Modern economics begins with scarcity. There is not enough. Creation is fundamentally lacking. In the face of this scarcity, humans are forced to make choices, to assess the opportunity costs of using scarce resources one way rather than another. Thus, economic or economizing behaviour is born. This is succinctly reflected in the classic definition of economics: ‘Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.’4 Versions of this statement can be found in almost every economics textbook. The centrality of scarcity reflects at least in part the period and place in which the discipline was born. In France and England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the sudden increase in pauperism in the wake of the profound social disruptions effected by

James G. Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1. 2 Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2010), 25. 3 Wendell Berry, ‘The Total Economy’, in Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny, ed. Doug Bandow and David L. Schindler (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003), 415. 4 Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London: Macmillan and Co., 1932), 15. Italics mine. 1

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the Industrial Revolution was a central concern of public intellectuals. Few connected the phenomenon with changes in commerce, however. Instead, they focused on the principle of population, so famously articulated by Thomas Malthus. Malthus held that the growth of the human population would exceed the earth’s carrying capacity. As Malthus put it, whereas population increases at a geometrical ratio, subsistence increases at a rate that is arithmetical.5 This truth condemns humanity to a bleak future afflicted by hunger and famine, misery and chaos, unless population growth is curbed. David Ricardo held similarly apocalyptic views of humanity’s future. His ‘scarcity principle’ linked a growing population to a scarcity of land that would eventually destabilize society. The focus on scarcity and fears of societal demise earned the nascent discipline of economics the epithet – the ‘dismal science’. But it should not have stuck, for it was not long before economists were proclaiming that economics held the key to extracting growth and prosperity for all from limited resources. This optimism is perhaps nowhere more evident than in John Maynard Keynes’ famous prophecy of a day soon coming when capitalism would resolve all of humanity’s economic needs and liberate humanity to revel in religion and virtue. The point is that economics may begin with the claim that creation does not offer enough, but this is not a bad thing. On the contrary, scarcity is the stimulus for growth by means of innovation, creativity, and productivity. With the discipline of economics leading the way, humans can grow their way to a better future. In other words, scarcity initiates a kind of social theodicy. At first, with God still in the picture, economics offers a straightforward theodicy. Malthus is exemplary in this regard. In the first edition of his famous treatise on population, he included an account of how to square creation afflicted with scarcity with an all-powerful and benevolent God. Malthus argued that scarcity is part of God’s plan ‘for the creation and formation of mind; a process necessary, to awaken inert, chaotic matter, into spirit; to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul; to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay’.6 This is to say, scarcity is a stimulus to the mind and a prod to human achievement. As it was thoroughly secularized by the early twentieth century, economics became a social theodicy – no longer explaining the ways of God but now of humanity, which leads to the nature of the human creature in economics. Given that creation is marked by scarcity, it is unsurprising that the human creature would be characterized by possessive individualism. Economics conceives of the human creature first and foremost as an autonomous individual who is the proprietor of one’s own person and capacities, owing nothing to society and free of dependence upon or subjection to the will of others. This is easily misunderstood. It does not mean the human creature is solitary, isolated, or solipsistic. Economic individualism is a vision of society. Granted, it is an atomistic vision, where individuals neither owe nor properly expect anything from others more than noninterference unless one voluntarily commits. At its heart, then, economic individualism is not about freedom from others (exchange, after all, is central to economics) but freedom from control by others. Not all modern economists share the libertarianism of a Milton Friedman

See Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 14. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 353.

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or Friedrich Hayek that makes the preservation of individual freedom the goal of the market; some share Adam Smith’s more utilitarian conviction that the free market will produce the best material outcomes for the most people. What most share is the anthropological vision of the possessive individual constituted by a power – the will – that functions best when not coerced. In other words, economic sociality is a matter of voluntary relations. This understanding of the human creature was derived in part from theological reflection on humanity as created in the imago Dei. Trends in late medieval nominalist theology broke with earlier currents and construed God’s relation to the world not in terms of participation and charity but in terms of sheer will – sovereignty, ownership, and, finally, power. This paved the way for those such as Thomas Hobbes (whose thought was resisted in some ways, but not this way, by early political economists like Smith) to present humanity as basically miniature copies of divinity who exercised the same sort of relations – voluntary and possessive relations of sheer will or power – with others. This possessive individualism is but a small step to the well-known characterization of humanity as homo economicus, which places self-interest at the centre of human (economic) character. This is captured in a well-known quote from Smith: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love.’7 This particular feature of the human creature in economics has provoked much debate. Part of the difficulty in unpacking this is that within the discipline, the meaning of homo economicus is not monolithic. For example, Alfred Marshall argued that ‘progress chiefly depends on the extent to which the strongest and not merely the highest forces of human nature can be utilized for the increase of social good’.8 Adam Smith was of a similar mind; he did not think self-interest was the sole or best motive for human action. He was convinced, however, that in the economic sphere, it was the strongest motive and that it could be constrained within that sphere. More contemporary thinkers, such as Milton Friedman and especially Gary Becker, are forthright in arguing that interest-maximizing behaviour is comprehensive, applicable to all human behaviour – whether that is purchasing an automobile, deciding on a spouse, or procreating – and it is so whether individuals are aware of it and can verbalize it or not. The centrality of self-interest to human nature in economics prompts two additional observations. First, as Dennis Robertson famously observed, economics ‘economizes on love’.9 This is to say, economics accounts love among the scarce resources of creation. And if the likes of Marshall and Smith economize on love, Becker and company economize virtually ad nihil when they reduce benevolence and altruism simply to forms of self-interest. Second, the rise of self-interest reflects the fruition of a theological trajectory that gained momentum during the Renaissance. The nature of the change is succinctly captured in Bernard Mandeville’s famous quip, ‘private vices, public benefits’.10 Self-interest or self-love underwent a remarkable rehabilitation in social and ecclesiastical circles in the eighteenth

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 1:18. 8 Cited in Dennis H. Robertson, Economic Commentaries (London: Staples Press, 1956), 148. 9 Robertson, Economic Commentaries, 154. 10 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, ed. E. J. Hundert (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 27, 148. 7

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century. Previously, it was understood that through the various means of grace available in the Christian life, desires contrary to charity could be healed. However, concurrent with the advent of the money-profit economy, there began to circulate the belief that religion could not be counted on to restrain destructive passions and disordered desires. Instead, it was suggested, disordered desires ought to be harnessed in the name of an all-consuming interest. Eventually, ‘interest’ was identified with economic interest, and, before long, even theologians agreed that perhaps instead of resisting those disordered desires, they should be used in the hope that, by means of some invisible hand, they might produce the greatest good for the greatest number.11 Given the possessive nature of humanity, it follows that creation is treated as appropriable property. Moreover, property is construed in terms of absolute dominium. Reflecting the return of an ancient Roman vision of dominion as a matter of total and exclusive control, private property is one of the foundations of modern economics. Not only is private property a bulwark against coercion, and so is an essential condition of freedom, but it also nurtures entrepreneurial energy and economic productivity. As one who rightly exercises dominion, humanity is cast as the conqueror of creation. Economics was born in an age when humanity was perched at the pinnacle of creation, with the rest of creation subordinated to its utility and convenience. Trends that began with Renaissance humanist convictions regarding humanity’s ability to perfect creation converged with aforementioned nominalist trends in theology that effectively removed God from creation, with the result that humanity was firmly set over against nature, which now possessed no purpose of its own but rather awaited endowment with meaning by human ingenuity. The human creature no longer participates in and is subject to a given created order but rather now strives to transcend nature, which it must master by imposing order and meaning. Thus, economics treats creation as raw material for the designs of human will. Creation is reduced to a stock of ‘natural resources’ to be efficiently ‘exploited’. As Hannah Arendt put it, every tree is viewed as potential wood.12 Ecology becomes ‘resource conservation’ and is framed entirely in terms of commodity production, maximizing and sustaining high returns. At best, ecological harm is treated as an externality or neighbourhood effect; that is, as a cost not born by the market but instead shifted to the public. At worst, judgements are offered regarding the ‘right amount of pollution’, including designating certain areas ‘under polluted’. Resource depletion is left to the management of the market, which incentivizes technological and economic developments that will maintain growth even as one resource is depleted and society transitions to the next. The labour involved in making the transition, however, will not necessarily be enjoyable. Ironically, even as labour has replaced contemplation as the highest form of life in the modern world, the meaning of labour has been diminished, stripped of any intrinsic connection to goodness or beauty, and left as a mere means amenable to almost any end at the whim of the acquisitive human will. Specifically, modern economics renders work utilitarian – merely instrumental to production for the market, to interest or profit maximization.

See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Milton L. Myers, The Soul of Modern Economic Man: Ideas of SelfInterest: Thomas Hobbes to Adam Smith (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983). 12 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 158. 11

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Worse still, the world of total work is subject to a rational discipline by means of the division of labour – whether it is Taylorism, Fordism, or, now, post-Fordism – that renders work little more than drudgery for most. Arendt has shown that the utilitarian logic of modern work ends in nihilism.13 This increasingly holds as well for the traditional professions, which find themselves subsumed by the alienating logic of utility. The dehumanizing character of modern work prompted Karl Marx’s critiques of the market economy for reducing human beings to appendages of machines and human labour to a commodity. But this was a reality already recognized by Smith when he observed that the division of labour often resulted in work that deadened the mind and crushed human sentiment.14 The drudgery of work under the triumph of utility is made worse by economics’ resistance to governmental enforcement of such things as minimum wage, and health and safety standards. The final aspect of creation in economics considered in this chapter is the circulation of goods via the free market. The ends of market circulation are twofold, embracing freedom and general benefit. The market serves freedom, understood as negative freedom from coercion, enabling individuals to exchange voluntarily based on self-interested and self-determined ends. Recall the passage from Smith regarding self-interest driving market exchange. The market becomes the principle of social organization perfectly suited for a world of atomistic individuals freely pursuing their own private ends. The market’s unique suitability for this task is attributable to its anonymous, impersonal, and instrumental logic of efficiency. Because the market renders individuals as only impersonal means to one another, one is freed from the threat of coercion that taints personal relations. For example, because the market separates efficiency from other characteristics of persons (like race), discrimination is reduced.15 By being treated not personally, as persons, but as mere efficient means, individuals are said to be independent of the wills of others. The market also provides a general benefit to humanity. On the one hand, this refers to the general good, which is the aforementioned facilitation of the pursuit of individual purposes. No other human organization could bring about greater satisfaction of human desire than the free market. On the other hand, the general benefit involves human welfare. As Smith wrote, speaking of the person engaged in the free market: ‘He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. . . . [H]e intends only his own gain, and he is in this . . . led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.’16 Indeed, it is often asserted that the market promotes human welfare better than if humans directly intended to seek the welfare of others. Thus, the market is credited with sustaining and uplifting countless poor who would otherwise have perished, leading Charles Schultze to declare: ‘Harnessing the “base” motive of material self-interest to promote the common good is perhaps the most important social invention mankind has yet achieved.’17

See Arendt, The Human Condition, 154–9. See Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2:302–3. 15 See Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 109. 16 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1:477–8. 17 Charles L. Schultze, The Public Use of Private Interest, rev. edn (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1977), 18. 13 14

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The market’s effectiveness is due to its nature as an information system. Utilizing pricing, the market provides information in the form of incentives for what and where something is desired. Thus, central planning is rejected not only because it infringes upon freedom, and not simply because humanity can hardly resist misusing such power, but also because the information necessary to plan well on a grand scale exceeds human abilities. Even as economics touts the superior welfare benefit of the free market economy, the nature of the general benefit is often misunderstood. The general benefit refers to the increases in the welfare of the whole, not of any particular lives. Indeed, Smith’s interest in the free market was partly stimulated by how it increased absolute wealth while not necessarily increasing relative equality, a phenomenon noted most recently by Thomas Piketty.18 The free market does not claim to be egalitarian. Progress and the distribution of benefits are uneven, even if most benefits eventually disperse widely after the wealthy have funded experimentation and development. This is to say, the market is devoid of anything resembling ‘distributive justice’. It is morally neutral or blind. Indeed, efforts to determine market outcomes inevitably violate freedom and fail because of unintended and unforeseen effects. Under the free market, justice is strictly commutative – a matter of not violating the rules of non-coerced exchange. Nor does the market have anything to do with merit or desert. Prices, wages, and market earnings are not earned in the sense of acknowledging merit. Rather, such are simply signals or incentives to produce and provide what the market wants. Thus, the free market entails the risk of unmerited failure, which may be tragic but is not unjust. In summary, creation in economics is agonistic. In the beginning, by the design of a taskmaster god perhaps, there was not enough. So begins the great human struggle to exercise dominion, to possess and control, to labour (no matter how alienating and dehumanizing the effort might be) and produce, and to exchange on the free market in the hope of securing one’s interest. In this economic agony, relations in the created order are instrumentalized and impersonal, ruled by a logic of utility rather than by that feeble and scarce resource called ‘love’.

Economy of creation Consideration of the economic dimensions of the doctrine of creation begins with the idea of creatio ex nihilo. Implicit in the claim that creation is out of nothing is the conviction that the Trinity creates not out of any necessity but freely as an expression of love. As Kenneth Schmitz puts it, creation was born of the creator’s riches and not out of human need.19 Several economic implications follow. For example, this means that ‘the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it’ (Ps. 24.1). This immediately raises the question of property. If the earth is the Lord’s, then on what grounds do humans appropriate creation as their own? The tradition holds that pre-fall, God’s gift of creation was a gift to be shared by all. There was no private property. Only post-fall did institutions like property become necessary as a kind of remedy for sin, as a means of correcting

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). See Kenneth L. Schmitz, The Gift: Creation (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press 1982), 127.

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disordered human desire. Thomas Aquinas, for example, argued that private property enhances responsibility while reducing chaos and conflict.20 The tradition’s embrace of private property, however, did not simply jettison the original common use in favour of absolute dominion, not only because the Franciscans, followers of John Wycliff, and others challenged the embrace of private property but also because the tradition embraced dominium utile – the notion that private property has, as John Paul II put it, a social mortgage attached, associated with what he referred to as ‘the universal destination of material goods’.21 That is, private property entails responsibility for serving justice – the common good. Thus, for example, Aquinas argued that a person in extremis might take what belonged to another, and such a person should not be regarded as a thief.22 Indeed, Augustine suggests that those who withhold from persons in need might be considered thieves because they did not order their property for the good of all.23 That creation was born of the creator’s riches means that creation and created life are characterized not by scarcity but by plenitude and abundance. From start to finish, the Bible proclaims and celebrates the Trinity’s abundant generosity. One of humanity’s most serious cultural losses under the regime of economics, Berry notes, is the recognition that creation, though limited, is inexhaustible; an intact ecosystem has a depth that funds work, learning, beauty, solace and pleasure that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or even generations.24 Abundance properly conceived encompasses quality and quantity, pointing out that ‘more’ can never be enough if what is produced does not promote life. Consider the phenomena of ‘food deserts’ or the ‘edible foodlike substances’ that a consumer economy substitutes for food.25 The claim of created abundance is prone to misunderstanding. There is enough to satisfy the desires of every living thing, but this does not mean enough is provided to sate disordered desires, such as greed and gluttony. Nor does confessing created abundance deny the experience of scarcity, the fact that many lack the necessities of life. Rather, created abundance repositions scarcity, anchoring it neither in nature (human or otherwise) nor in God but instead in human rebellion against the created order. Making sense of this requires distinguishing between scarcity and limits. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer prompts, human life as creaturely is constituted by limits at the centre of existence. This can be as straightforward as the fact that creaturely life is embodied, and bodies have limits. And these limits are a good thing; they are the form of individuals’ freedom as creatures. (What would a human body without form or limit be? It could not be, which is the point.) Thus, persons live from creaturely limits, understood as manifestations of the gift of God’s grace.26

See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), II–II, Q. 66, Art. 2. 21 John Paul II, ‘Centesimus Annus’, The Holy See, accessed 2 September 2020, http://www​.vatican​.va​/content​/john​ -paul​-ii​/en​/encyclicals​/documents​/hf​_jp​-ii​_enc​_01051991​_centesimus​-annus​.html. 22 See Aquinas, ST, II–II, Q. 66, Art. 7. 23 See Augustine, Sermons III/6, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1993), 107. 24 See Wendell Berry, ‘Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits’, Harper’s Magazine (May, 2008): 41. 25 See Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006); Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (New York: Penguin, 2008). 26 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1–3/Temptation (New York: Collier Books, 1959), 52–3. 20

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In other words, the limits that give form to creation and creaturely life are neither restrictions nor indices of lack. Creation is not infected with opportunity costs, where the inability to have everything is accounted a loss, lack, or deficiency. Indeed, to count the form, the limits of creation and creatureliness, as a negative, as a lack or as emblematic of scarcity, and to lament the inability to have everything, is a rejection of creatureliness. It is to aspire to be more than creatures; it is to warp history into a Promethean/Sisyphean struggle against limits – whether that be a struggle against God (Malthus’ theodicy), against other humans (homo economicus in the market agonistes), or against a nature whose God-given integrity resists human exploitation. Scarcity is thus a mark of the fall; it is not creation’s character, a bad gift given by a taskmaster god, but rather a scar on an original plenitude. The good gift of creation is more than sufficient, with much to spare. Albino Barrera calls this ‘conditional material abundance’.27 It is conditional not in the sense that it must be merited but rather in the sense that God provides through other creatures. Specifically, economic life is a means for receiving, sharing, and extending the goodness of God’s material provision. Only when humanity fails to participate in communicating this abundance does scarcity surface. Indeed, while every age has been afflicted by hunger and famine, only under modernity has scarcity replaced subsistence to the point that it now dominates.28 Contrary to the selfaggrandizing myths of modernity, the medieval world, on the whole, improved living conditions and had communal resources for mitigating famine that the free market society lacks. Modernity’s particular vulnerability to scarcity is related to, among other things, the way social recognition and rivalry have been channelled into the economic register and the way all desires are assumed equally valid and limitless, thereby stressing creation’s carrying capacity. If the doctrine of creation reconfigures possession and undercuts generalized scarcity, it also presents humanity as something other than John Ruskin’s covetous machine; that is, as interest maximizing homo economicus. The human creature is fundamentally dependent, receptive, ecstatic, and self-giving. Whereas economics resists dependency and the limits it reflects, confessing humans as creatures entails embracing the reality that human persons receive themselves – their being as well as their continuity – as a gift from God through others. This fundamental openness or receptivity to others means that the human person is not possessive but ex-static. As Aquinas says, divine love makes one ex-static, placing a person outside oneself, not suffering one to belong to oneself but to the beloved.29 As David Schindler puts it, one’s creaturely identity is found inside one’s constitutive belonging to others in both gift and gratitude.30 All of this is to say that the human creature lives in the mode of donation, of self-giving and receiving love. As recipients of the gift of life in Christ, human beings are

Albino Barrera, God and the Evil of Scarcity: Moral Foundations of Economic Agency (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 73. 28 See Stephen A. Marglin, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 214–15. 29 See Christopher A. Franks, He Became Poor: The Poverty of Christ and Aquinas’s Economic Teachings (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009), 181. 30 See David L. Schindler, ‘Homelessness and Market Liberalism: Toward an Economic Culture of Gift and Gratitude’, in Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny, ed. Doug Bandow and David L. Schindler (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003), 357. 27

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freed to live life as a surplus, to be given for and with others. Humanity only exists in and as ordered towards the common good/communion/community. Accordingly, humanity is not rightly separated from or set over against ‘nature’ as a conqueror. Rather, as Aldo Leopold famously argued, humanity is part of creation, holding membership in nature as co-creatures. Accordingly, while acknowledging the contingent and temporal effects of the fall, humanity’s relation to the rest of creation is essentially characterized not by conflict but by cooperation and cultivation. In this regard, humanity’s role in creation has too often been distorted by the understanding of dominion in terms of a sovereign control that mirrors a false image of God. As Rowan Williams argues, following Aquinas, creation is not a monarchical exercise of divine power, for in creation there is nothing upon which such power can be exercised.31 Rather, creation is an expression or instantiation of love. Therefore, what humanity reflects in its dominion, stewardship, or priesthood (all legitimate ways of describing the human role in creation) is rightly understood in terms of service, not sovereignty. God creates utterly for humanity’s sake; therefore, the human role in creation is to love creation, to care for it in accord with and reflective of divine love. Just as humanity’s role in creation is recast, so too is the character of human work. Whereas economics views labour as drudgery from which one ultimately hopes to be liberated, Christianity’s vision of labour is more positive. Indeed, the original, prelapsarian vision of labour is one of delight; drudgery is not intrinsic to labour but subsequent to the fall. Redemption, likewise, does not escape labour but recovers the delight that accompanies the gift of vocation. Central to this vision of work is the taming of utility. Taming is not merely a matter of reducing working hours to expand leisure time, although dismantling the world of total work certainly should be part of bringing work in line with the order of creation. Taming utility fundamentally means reimagining the nature of work beyond efficiency and profit maximization in pursuit of self-interest. Work must be reimagined, as Dorothy Sayers says, as more than merely economic; it must be reclaimed as an expression of humanity’s creative energy, analogous to art.32 As such, the commonplace antinomies – work/contemplation, work/rest, work/play, work/pleasure – are dismantled.33 For example, Augustine observes that prior to the fall, work was marked by sheer pleasure: ‘there was no stress of wearisome toil but pure exhilaration of spirit, when things which God had created flourished in more luxuriant abundance with the help of human work’.34 Work in the order of (new) creation is transvalued; good work, even hard work, can be pleasurable. Wendell Berry argues that such good and pleasurable work is deeply rooted in community; that is, it is work not in service to the insatiable wants of a sovereign self but is rather embedded in and nurtures life-giving bonds with others, including the rest of creation.35

See Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 68–9. See Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (New York: Harper Collins, 1987), 218. 33 See John Hughes, The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 228, passim. 34 Augustine, On Genesis, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2002), 356. 35 See Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (New York: North Point Press, 1990), 140–4. 31 32

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This means that the redemption of work in light of the doctrine of creation reconnects human work with its proper end – realizing work as part of vocation. Human labour is not a commodity to be bought and sold but is rather an expression of the human being as ecstatic, as other-oriented in loving service in community. It is a calling by which individuals nurture families, act charitably towards neighbours, contribute to the common good, and, recalling a Benedictine aphorism, ‘to work is to pray’, ultimately worship, in that labour is rightly ordered to and by sabbath. Thus, the logic of human labour is not that of utility but (asset-based) community development. The goods and services humans labour to provide one another are provided not on the basis of self-interest, nor even on the basis of providing for the welfare of others, but rather in the hope of nurturing and enhancing the abilities of others to participate fully in the life of community.36 The difference between work motivated by self-interest and that motivated by ecstatic love may appear insignificant. After all, as Smith recognized, profit-seeking self-interest does not necessarily exclude mutuality and shared benefit (even if transaction costs render market exchanges anything but equitable). The insignificant difference is actually a superficial similarity, for, as David Schindler points out, mutual self-interest is not the same as generosity. The difference love makes is as visible as that between a ‘home-cooked’ meal and that of a restaurant, between the care provided by Mother Teresa and a nurse moved primarily by monetary gain, and between a mass-produced bookshelf and a craftsperson’s cabinet. There is a real difference between the work of a baker driven by profit-seeking and one moved by love. The difference, notes Schindler, is not one of mutuality but of asymmetry – the way the labour of love is ordered towards the other, actively desiring their benefit.37 This account of human labour does not exclude profit. The hostility of the tradition to business and merchants was not rooted in an objection to profit but rather in the ways that merchants and trade developed outside the community norms of charity and reciprocity. Aquinas argues that profit or gain is not intrinsically problematic; it simply cannot be the sole or principal aim of trade. He names four legitimate ends of trade – sustaining the household, aiding the impoverished, serving public utility, and payment for labour.38 Likewise, this account of labour does not refuse a benign use of utility as the exercise of judgement regarding appropriate or fitting – which means more than merely efficient – means in service to transcendent goods. Nor is labour’s service to community limited to human flourishing. Insofar as humanity holds membership in creation, ‘keeping and tilling’ for the sake of creation and not simply for itself, the community that it seeks to nurture ultimately encompasses all of creation. Finally, the economics of creation reconfigures markets. Commonplace critiques of the free market often advocate its reform, usually by attempting to delimit its influence within the economic realm and/or by supplementing the market through various welfare measures. Such

Although constrained by the presuppositions of economics, Amartya Sen’s work on capabilities is suggestive in this regard. See, for example, Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1999). 37 See Schindler, ‘Homelessness and Market Liberalism’, 359–60, 365. 38 See Aquinas, ST, II–II, Q. 77, Art. 4. 36

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efforts remain compatible with economics and so fail to reflect fully the difference creation makes in shaping economic vision. Because the life of the creature is fundamentally donative, a matter of giving and receiving, exchange has a certain ontological priority. This, of course, does not mean that everything should be exchanged by means of markets, but it does mean that what is needed is not a modified free market but rather a different kind of market – a virtuous or moral market – one that aids in the circulation of human labour and its products in accord with the universal destination of material goods, in accord with the nurture and extension of communion/community. This is not a matter of simply inserting a different end – welfare, altruism, capability, and so on – into the free market’s utility function. Rather it is about repositioning both the goods exchanged and the market within a wider social logic and practice. Thus ends the commodity fiction that strips traded goods of their personal–communal histories and universal telos as well as the fiction of the ‘free’ or self-regulated market. Of late, ceremonial gift exchange has received much attention and has fuelled assertions that a gift economy is the proper alternative to the free market, with much ink spilt on how gifts entail reciprocity and how such reciprocity does or does not differ from commercial transactions. This possibility faces several difficulties. Among the most pressing is the fact that historically gift-exchange societies tended to be characterized by a kind of honour-agonistics. They were not free of oppression. Thus, one might argue that Christianity disrupts gift exchange in much the same way it interrupts Roman dominion or heroic virtue. Moreover, classic gift exchange was narrowly circumscribed by kinship, which, again, Christianity can be interpreted as disrupting – either by extending gifts to strangers, thereby upending the traditional logic of reciprocity, or by rendering all strangers kin in Adam/Christ. Either way, the gift of creation is neither a straight line nor a closed circle but both simultaneously, something sui generis or perhaps ex nihilo. Much of the debate around gifting revolves around reciprocity or the expectation of a return; the free market entails a kind of reciprocity or mutuality. However, the distinguishing mark of a market that aligns with the character of creation is not reciprocity. Rather, the distinguishing mark of a moral market is generosity, an excess beyond self-interest and the impersonal contractually obligated that is expressive of the desire to give and to share good things with others, which is but another name for charity – the ecstatic, ‘asymmetric’ love that inaugurates, animates, and consummates creation. In other words, charity is both the logic that underwrites and the wider social practice that upholds a market that finds its place in a civil economy, an economy that serves the common good, community, and communion.39 * * * Economics envisions life as a struggle against limits, a competition for scarce resources mediated by an impersonal market that treats neighbours, near and distant, as well as creation itself, as instrumental means to self-interested ends. Thus, the Great Collision is no surprise.

See Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni, Civil Economy: Efficiency, Equity, Public Happiness (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). 39

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The doctrine of creation reminds us that we live at the mercy of charity and that the household of God is inhabited by love, where the gifts of creation circulate so that every hunger might be sated and every thirst slaked, so that all might join in the communion of love that is the blessed Trinity.

Further reading Bell, Daniel M., Jr. The Economy of Desire: Christianity and Capitalism in a Postmodern World. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012. Bruni, Luigino and Stefano Zamagni. Civil Economy: Efficiency, Equity, Public Happiness. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Hughes, John. The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism. Malden: Blackwell, 2007. Marglin, Stephen A. The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Wirzba, Norman. From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015.

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David Grumett

In this volume, food is classed as an ‘upbuilding discourse’ related to the doctrine of creation. In the Genesis creation narratives, it is fundamental. This chapter will show that, from a biblical standpoint, dogmatic lenses such as suffering, death, and eschatology, as well as the doctrine of creation itself, are corollaries of food provision, manufacture, distribution, and consumption, rather than theories developed independently of these. In the first Genesis creation narrative (1–2.4a), vegetation grows on the third day, and water creatures and birds are created on the fifth. On the sixth day, God makes land animals and humans, which for food are given the vegetation from the third day. In the second Genesis creation narrative (2.4b–3.24), God makes trees, and their fruit grows in the Garden of Eden for the man (ha’adam) to eat. The man and the woman (ha’ishshah) take and eat the fruit of the single tree from which God has forbidden them to eat. As punishment, they are expelled from the garden and must produce their food by means of agriculture, which is physically demanding. Food is intrinsic to both of these narratives, and the ancient Israelite agricultural cycle and the New Testament creation narratives both refer to them. For these reasons, this chapter opens with the Genesis narratives. Its first section discusses vegetation because God makes this and nothing else available as food. In the first Genesis narrative, God gives this first to humans, then to animals, and the section order reflects this. The second Genesis narrative is also important for understanding human food, so it is discussed in the first part of this first section. Reference is also made to the creation narratives of Mark and John. Although in the Genesis creation narratives only vegetation is available as food, animals and their products are later eaten by humans, and some animals hunt and kill other animals or scavenge carrion. The second section, on animals as food, considers how far this is compatible with God’s will for the created order. In this section, humans are again discussed before animals because Genesis suggests that they consume animals as food first. As will be seen, humans and animals participate in the new creation differently. Because of this, predation may be permissible for some animals even if, from the perspective of the doctrine of creation, the human diet is vegetal.

Vegetation as food In the first Genesis creative narrative, God commands on the first day that there be light in the darkness, and there is. On the second day, the sky is formed from the separation of the waters. On the third day, dry land appears as a result of the gathering together of the waters on earth. These divisions – light from darkness, waters, and land from the sea – that occupy the first part of the narrative (1.1-13) all provide necessary conditions for seed germination and

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plant growth, including light, the possibility of rain, and soil. After the appearance of dry land, still on the third day, God commands that the earth grows (dasha) vegetation (deshe), which includes plants (eseb) yielding seed (zera) and trees producing fruit (peri) (1.11). All these are brought forth (yatsa) and seen by God to be good (tov) (1.12). If, as the text suggests, each new day begins in the evening, this vegetal growth may be associated with the return of the light in the morning, later on the third day. Marking the end of the divisions of the first three days, it suggests that plants are foundational to life. In the second part of the narrative, which describes the fourth to the sixth days (1.14-31), each of the divisions from the first three days is populated in a recapitulation that corresponds to the first three days. This populating begins on the fourth day when the sun is made (1.14-18). The sun provides warmth, which is another essential condition for plant growth. By the end of the fourth day, sustained vegetal growth is therefore possible.1 For humans On the sixth day, the plants (eseb) yielding seed (zera) and trees producing fruit (peri) are given by God to humans as food (Gen. 1.29). This is God’s first act of food provision. In ancient Mesopotamian creation narratives, humans were formed to supply the gods with food in response to shortages due to the greater number of gods produced by divine marriages and the unwillingness of the inferior gods to continue this increasingly demanding work.2 Mesopotamian gods were hungry, requiring twice daily feeding on a diet that included plenty of meat.3 In Genesis, this arrangement is reversed: God gives food to humans. This provision is exclusively derived from the third day. Humans are not given animals or animal products to consume. This is consistent with the chapter structure just described, in which the purpose of the first, second, and third days is to divide and resource the earth before its population on the fourth, fifth, and sixth days. In the narrative, the value of the water creatures, birds, and land animals derives from God’s pleasure in them rather than from their usefulness to humans.4 God sees that they are all good (1.21, 24). From the perspective of the cosmic order unfolded in Genesis 1, it would make little sense for humans to be given water creatures or birds to eat because these are created on the fifth day. It would make even less sense for humans to be given cattle, creeping things or other land animals as food because God makes these on the same day as humans. The third and final part of the first creation narrative (2.1-4a) governed Israelite arable farming. On the seventh (shebiith) day, following the productive activity of the preceding six days, God rests (shabath). In ancient Israelite agriculture, every seventh year was similarly a

Air is not explicitly mentioned. It includes the carbon dioxide that, alongside light and water, is necessary for photosynthesis, which produces the glucose that enables natural plant growth. However, the presence of air may be inferred as part of the breath or wind (ruach) of God over the waters on the first day. 2 See Wilfred G. Lambert, Ancient Mesopotamian Religion and Mythology, ed. A. R. George and T. M. Oshima (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 171–9. 3 See JoAnn Scurlock, ‘Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Mesopotamian Religion’, in A History of the Animal World of the Ancient Near East, ed. Billie J. Collins (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001), 390–403. 4 See Huw Spanner, ‘Tyrants, Stewards – or Just Kings?’, in Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto (London: SCM Press, 1998), 217. 1

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year of rest for the land. In this year, crops could be neither sown nor harvested, and vines could not be pruned (Lev. 25.3-4). Not even the previous year’s aftergrowth nor grapes from untended vines could be gathered (25.5). For food during the sabbath year and the following year, an abundant crop was provided by God’s blessing in the sixth year. This sustained the Israelites during the sabbath year and the eighth year until the crops planted after the end of the sabbath year were ready to harvest in the ninth year (25.21-23). The practice of leaving cultivated fields periodically fallow – although not all in the same year – to regain fertility while being grazed by animals was widely practised in arable farming until the development of commercial fertilizer. It remains a component of some zero-input organic systems. The second creation narrative (Gen. 2.4b–3.24) includes, in chapter 2, the formation of the man, the planting of the garden in Eden, the naming of the animals, and the making of the woman; and, in chapter 3, the temptation, eating of the fruit, and expulsion from the garden. A notable difference with the first creation narrative is that vegetation does not grow until there is rain and human agriculture (2.5). Close to the start of this narrative, God forms (yatsar) the man from the dust of the ground, plants (nata) a garden in Eden, and makes trees grow (tsamach) to provide food (2.7-9). God tells the man that he may freely eat from any tree in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If the man eats from this tree, God tells him, he will die. God then creates the woman, whom the serpent successfully tempts to eat the fruit from this tree and who tempts the man to partake in it with similar success (3.6). Therefore, the first temptation and transgression described in scripture is dietary indiscipline. After both the man and the woman have taken and eaten the forbidden fruit, they gain awareness of their nudity (3.7). This ordering of events became important in later Christian tradition. Christian moralists have frequently been accused of an excessive focus on sexual sin. However, early lists of the seven cardinal sins, including those of Evagrius Ponticus, John Cassian, and Gregory the Great, took note of scripture, placing gluttony first and lust second.5 Dietary discipline was prominent in the practice of early Christian hermits, who ate very little food, largely due to the belief that a lack of dietary control led to other sins. Much later in Christian history, the ‘Edenic’ vegetal diet was frequently invoked by radical nineteenth-century Christian groups, in conjunction with Christian tradition and the teachings of prophetic leaders, to advocate abstinence from meat and animal products.6 Such abstention has rarely been simply a matter of personal or communal faithfulness. Rather, by embracing such a diet, these groups have typically viewed themselves as inaugurating a new Golden Age characterized by peace and harmony. The ‘Edenic diet’ language continues to be used today. As in the nineteenth century, it is likely to describe a vegan diet that includes plants yielding seed (1.29), which are given to humans as food in the first Genesis creation narrative, in which the garden in Eden is not mentioned, as well as the fruit given to the man in the second narrative (2.16).

See David Grumett and Rachel Muers, Theology on the Menu: Asceticism, Meat and Christian Diet (London: Routledge, 2010), 8–11. 6 See Samantha J. Calvert, ‘“Ours is the Food that Eden Knew”: Themes in the Theology and Practice of Modern Christian Vegetarians’, in Eating and Believing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vegetarianism and Theology, ed. Rachel Muers and David Grumett (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 123–34. 5

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Returning to this second narrative, because of their transgression, the man and the woman cease to be gardeners and become farmers. The man is first placed in the garden to tend (abad) and keep (shamar) it (2.15). After he and the woman eat the forbidden fruit, however, they no longer obtain food so easily. The man, first named Adam (adam) in 3.17, must labour to produce food for himself and the woman, whom he names Eve (ishshah) in 2.23.7 The ground (adamah) is cursed, and food production will henceforth entail toil. Humans will continue, as in Genesis 1, to eat plants (eseb), but these will be grown in fields (sedei). This indicates settled purposive arable farming, which will be physically demanding, with Adam eating ‘by the sweat of his face’ (3.19). The depiction of agriculture as difficult, with crops produced by hard manual labour vulnerable to threats including drought, floods, disease, pests, and fire, is widely reflected in human experience. The dietary provisions of the Genesis creation narratives are largely endorsed by Mark’s christological recasting of them in his prologue and the following account of Jesus’ baptism. In John Muddiman’s words regarding this text, the ‘basic assumption and the key to its interpretation is the Jewish doctrine of creation fulfilled in the coming of Jesus’.8 In the beginning (arche) (Mk 1.1), Jesus comes to John the Baptist and descends into the river Jordan. While re-emerging, he sees the heavens separated, the Spirit descends like a dove, and God speaks, confirming his approval of Jesus. These features correspond, respectively, to the divine word being the agent for the creative act (Gen. 1.3, etc.), the four rivers flowing out of Eden (2.10-14), the creation of the heavens (1.1), the breath or wind (ruach) of God on the waters (1.2), and God seeing the goodness of creation (1.4, etc.). John’s wilderness home and his camel hair clothing identify him as a desert ascetic. His diet is consistent with his asceticism: he eats locusts (akrides) and wild honey (meli agrion) (Mk 1.6). This provision evokes that of Genesis 1–2, from which the water creatures, birds, and land animals of the fifth and sixth days are excluded. The association is further strengthened if akrides are identified as part of a plant, as some argue on etymological grounds, rather than as locusts.9 There is further New Testament evidence supporting the Genesis 1–3 case that human food provision is vegetal. John’s prologue, which has frequently been read as a creation narrative, provides a synopsis of the first Genesis creation narrative parsed in the terms of Christian theology.10 In John’s prologue, in the beginning (arche), the Word is with God and makes everything (Jn 1.1-3). Light is associated with life and shines in the darkness (1.4-5). The Word becomes flesh (sarx) rather than specifically human (1.14). Sarx is the standard Septuagint translation of basar, which is the term used in the flood epic to describe human and animal life collectively (Gen. 6.12, 17; 7.21; 9.11, 15, 17) and animal life alone (Gen. 6.19; 7.15-16; 8.17; 9.4, 15-16). It is this human and animal flesh into which Christ enters. The Johannine elements correspond with creation solely by means of God’s word (Gen. 1.3, etc.), the goodness of light and its separation from darkness (1.4-5), and the creation of humans on the sixth day as part of the wider group of sentient beings (1.24-31). John’s prologue, while lacking the graphic

See Robert Murray, The Cosmic Covenant: Biblical Themes of Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation (London: Sheed & Ward, 1992), 99. 8 John Muddiman, ‘A New Testament Doctrine of Creation?’, in Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto (London: SCM Press, 1998), 30–1. 9 See Sebastian Brock, ‘The Baptist’s Diet in Syriac Sources’, Oriens Christianus 54 (1970): 113–24. 10 See Muddiman, ‘A New Testament Doctrine of Creation?’, 31–2. 7

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depiction of John the Baptist and the concrete imagery around Jesus’ baptism, nonetheless presents Christ the Word in bodily solidarity with the created order. Its own creation imagery is recapitulated in John’s account of the day of resurrection. This begins on the first day of the week in darkness (Jn 20.1) and includes the narrator’s report that Mary Magdalene supposed Jesus to be a gardener (20.15), before continuing in the evening of the first day, when Jesus breathes the Spirit (pneuma) on the disciples (20.22). Although on a literal reading Mary is mistaken, perhaps due to the dim light, she identifies Jesus as the cultivator of a garden and thus as the new Adam. John presents the resurrection as a new creation in which Jesus is in solidarity with all human and animal life, and gardens the earth. This serves as a reminder that, in Genesis, God is a gardener, planting (nata) Eden (Gen. 2.8) as a home for the man and the woman, in which they may also garden.11 For animals The question of what foods animals are to eat is addressed in the first creation narrative. At the beginning of the fifth day of creation, vegetation is growing, but there are no living creatures to consume it. However, on this day the population of the divisions continues, with the filling of the waters that were contained under the sky on the second day. God commands that these waters swarm (saras) with living creatures (sherets) and with birds of the air (oph) (1.20). All these are then created (bara) and are seen by God to be good (tov) (1.21). The plants yielding seed and the trees producing fruit are, in principle, available for the water creatures and birds to consume. However, two issues may be raised. The first concerns the mismatch between this food provision and what aquatic creatures really eat. Those living wholly in or upon open water do not consume the vegetation growing on dry land. The narrative makes it unclear what foods these are given to eat. It might be supposed that just as on the third day the dry land both appears and grows vegetation, so on the second day the earthly waters include the microorganisms on which aquatic life may feed. There is a second issue. If weight is given to the correspondence between the divisions of the first three days and the populations of the second three days, then food provision for aquatic life and birds should be made on the second day rather than the third day, but apparently there is none. Because the extension of the provision of the third day to birds is indeed announced on the sixth day, it will be discussed in what follows. However, any attempt to resolve the issue of what foods aquatic creatures are to eat would be speculative. On the sixth day, the dry land that appeared and was fertile on the third day is populated. God commands that the earth bring forth living creatures (nephesh chayyah), including cattle (behemah), things that creep (ramas), and land animals (chayat ha’aretz) (1.24). These are made (asah) by God, who sees them to be good (1.25), and are provided for by the vegetation grown on the third day. Immediately after God gives food to humans, he gives the green plants (yereq eseb) as food to every land animal, bird of the air (oph), and thing that creeps (1.30). A single exception is made. As punishment for successfully tempting the man and the woman to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the serpent (nachash) is condemned to crawl on its stomach (gachon) and eat dust (aphar) for the rest of its life

See Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, 2nd edn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 91–2. 11

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(3.14). The serpent’s means of locomotion and its future diet both serve to emphasize that the transgression it precipitated was dietary. In the Genesis creation narratives, this is all that is said about food for animals. Notably, no animal species is granted permission to eat any other species. Moreover, the creation paean with which the book of Job culminates refers to God taming powerful and potentially predatory primordial beasts as part of divine creative activity. This shows Mesopotamian influences in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, with creation more about bringing order out of disorder than creating something out of nothing.12 Behemoth is made to eat grass (Job 40.15-24), and the sea monster Leviathan is captured, destroyed, or otherwise subjected (Job 41; cf. Pss. 74.14; 104.26; Isa. 27.1). From the standpoint of the doctrine of creation, all this evidence suggests that no animal may therefore eat another animal, and so no species is either predator or prey. The notion that ruminants, which chew the cud and do not hunt or scavenge carrion, are ‘good’ animals is supported by the Johannine identification of Christ as a lamb. This close association is a reminder that both humans and land animals are made on the sixth day. In John’s account of Jesus’ baptism, the designation of Christ as a lamb indeed forms part of the creation narrative. In John’s prologue, the light appears in the darkness, and all things come into being (Jn 1.3-5). John the Baptist subsequently announces Christ to be the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (1.29). In imagery suggestive of God’s breath or wind (ruach) over the waters on the first day and of the separation of the waters on the second day, John testifies to his baptism of Jesus by water and the descent of the Spirit from heaven onto him like a dove (1.32-34). The next day, he again affirms that Jesus is the lamb of God (1.35). Representing both humanity and animality, Jesus, as God’s ruminant lamb, inclusively recapitulates the divine productive activity of the sixth day. Predation may also be critiqued from a systematic theological perspective. It is more likely that a good God would have created a harmonious world than one in which some species need to attack and destroy others to survive. Moreover, as Michael Lloyd persuasively argues, the problem of predation is intensified when considered christologically. Jesus Christ assumes creatureliness to save it. He shows forth God’s love, freely gives of himself and ultimately sacrifices his own life so that others may have life. Predation, in contrast, is founded on annihilation, attack, the destruction of another’s life, and the preservation of one’s own life. ‘For reasons which are intrinsic to a Christian understanding of God and of the world, focussed as they both are in Christ’, Lloyd concludes, ‘we should see animals, their interaction, and the natural world in general as no longer the way God created them to be’.13 From the perspective of the doctrine of creation, animals are, like humans, to eat a vegetal diet. Animals as food The engagement with Genesis has so far been limited to the two Genesis creation narratives. However, Adam and Eve’s second son Abel is recorded as raising one or more herd species (tson),

Debra S. Ballentine, The Conflict Myth and the Biblical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 86–9. Michael Lloyd, ‘Are Animals Fallen?’, in Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto (London: SCM Press, 1998), 160. 12 13

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probably sheep or goats, and killing some of them to offer to God (Gen. 4.4). Furthermore, a case may be put based on biological and evolutionary evidence that the consumption of prey animals by predatory animals was part of the natural created order. For humans In both Genesis creation narratives, evidence may be adduced that humans are to exercise power over animals, which might include consuming their products and even killing them for meat. In the first narrative, on the sixth day, God makes the other living creatures and then wills that man (adam) be made (ashah) in his image and likeness (Gen. 1.26) to rule over all the living beings previously created. Man is then created (bara) in God’s image (1.27), blessed (barak), and commanded to subdue (kabash) the earth and to rule over (radah, 1.26, 28) the other living beings. The notion that humans were made or created in the image (tzelem) or likeness (demuth) of God occurs in four verses of Genesis. Modern systematic theology has generally accepted the tendency in medieval Latin theology to place great weight on the notion that humans bear what in the Vulgate is rendered the imago Dei (1.26, 27; 9.6) or the similitudo Dei (1.26; 5.1).14 A similar justification for human use of animals, including consumption of their meat and products, may be inferred in the second narrative. After God has formed (yatsa) the birds of the air (oph ha’shamayim) and field animals (chayat ha’sadeh) out of the ground, he brings them to the man to be named. The man’s naming of the cattle (behemah), birds, and field animals (2.19-20) may be regarded as the first act of husbandry, which is the domestication and raising of animals for human use and consumption. Looking beyond Genesis, an important creation synopsis in the Psalms echoes Mesopotamian creation myths by presenting violent conflict as part of God’s originating creative activity.15 In Psalm 89.5-13, God is praised as the maker of heaven and earth who subdues the sea, is feared by other gods, scatters enemies, and crushes the sea monster Rahab. Psalm 74.12-17 contains even richer creation imagery: God divides the sea, opens watercourses, and establishes the day and night, the moon and sun, the seasons and earthly boundaries. In so doing, God crushes the heads of the sea monster Leviathan and gives him as food for the people (am) in the wilderness (74.14). This second synopsis apparently endorses meat eating by humans, at least on a specific occasion and with explicit divine sanction. In general, both passages indicate that less peaceable creation traditions than those presented in Genesis 1–3 have some part in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Conflict is also a key dynamic in the gospels, such as in Jesus’ emphatic denunciations of the Pharisees in Matthew, which are set against a backdrop of separation and judgement, and Mark’s portrayal of Jesus opposing an evil world. Does the case that humans should not eat meat, therefore, rest on excessive reliance on the Genesis creation narratives and an unjustifiably literal reading of them? Genesis 1–3 presents a paradisal prelapsarian era free of meat-eating and predation. Invoking this as a model for human diet today entails protological justification, in which a stance about how the world should be now or in the future is grounded in a claim about how it was originally. However, as

See David S. Cunningham, ‘The Way of All Flesh: Rethinking the Imago Dei’, in Creaturely Theology: On God, Humans and Other Animals, ed. Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough (London: SCM Press, 2009), 100–17. 15 See Ballentine, The Conflict Myth and the Biblical Tradition, 84–5. 14

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has already been acknowledged, evolutionary science shows that there has never been a time when animal life was free of pain and suffering and that some animal species are naturally predatory.16 Because this volume is about the doctrine of creation, the three points supporting animal use and consumption that have just been outlined will be addressed from this standpoint. The first point concerns the creation of humans in God’s image to rule over animals and the suggestion that humans may use animals however they choose. However, the notion that being created in the divine image endorses human use of animals and their products is controverted by the internal textual evidence, in which divine power is productive and sustaining. Indeed, as has been shown, the structure and statements in the text of the first Genesis creation narrative show that God provides humans with vegetal food, not meat or animal products. To be credible, any argument based on humans bearing God’s image or likeness needs to have as its starting point how God acts in the preceding narrative. The same is true of rule or dominion (radah). In Gen. 1.26, this is a function of being made in God’s image and likeness and therefore needs to be similarly understood with reference to God’s exercise of producing and sustaining power. The most important purpose of God’s instruction to humans to rule over the animals is to indicate that animals are not to be worshipped as gods, nor feared for their purported spiritual powers, nor used to represent gods in hybrid form, as in certain other ancient Near Eastern religions.17 Arguments justifying human consumption of animals and their products based on the imago Dei and on rule or dominion are in wide circulation but are intrinsically weak. The second point potentially justifying human use and consumption of animals is the man’s naming of the animals in the second Genesis creation narrative. Naming is closely associated with classification, which may expedite human use of the named being or product. However, naming also suggests the affection of the namer for the named and establishes a relationship between the two.18 Today, companion animals are more likely than farmed animals to be named by their owners and are kept for companionship and enjoyment rather than for use and consumption. The third point, grounded in conflict, is more persuasive than the first two. It is certainly the case that, even though conflict and violence are part of human and animal life, portions of scripture featuring these are sometimes omitted from discussion because they discomfort some readers. Even so, the violence and destruction that may have been a necessary part of God’s originating creative activity cannot justify the ongoing human use of these in the created order once established. Human rule over animals, human naming of animals, and creation by conflict myths do not justify the consumption of animals or their products. As already noted, God regards all the sentient beings of the fifth and sixth day as good, and nowhere in the Genesis creation narratives are humans granted permission to eat animals or their products. Martin Luther justly portrays the prelapsarian dominion exercised by humans over animals as benevolent

See Christopher Southgate, ‘Protological and Eschatological Vegetarianism’, in Eating and Believing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vegetarianism and Theology, ed. Rachel Muers and David Grumett (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 247–51. 17 See Collins, ed., A History of the Animal World of the Ancient Near East, 307–424. 18 See Stephen H. Webb, Good Eating (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), 64–6. 16

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and grounded in harmony between the different parts of the created order. Only after the fall is the relationship between humans and animals characterized by human industry, ingenuity, and skill. Their employment nevertheless ‘has positive significance in that it gives the appearance of dominion and, in a fallen world, persists as a trace of the way dominion was once properly exercised’.19 Notions that may form part of a doctrine of the fall should not be read into the doctrine of creation. As David Clough writes, it is a ‘theological mistake to ground an account of human uniqueness among other creatures in the doctrine of creation’.20 This position is strengthened by christological reflections on new creation and the imago Dei. In 1 Cor. 15.42-49, Christ is described as the second and last (eschatos) Adam. The resurrection of the dead is presented as surpassing even the creation of Adam. Like Adam, the perishable are from dust, whereas the heavenly are, like Christ, from heaven (15.48). Nonetheless, those who have borne the image of the man of dust may also bear the image of the man of heaven (15.49). The term used for image in this passage, eikón, is also used in the Septuagint to translate demuth, which becomes the Vulgate imago. This further strengthens the Christian theological connection with the Genesis creation narratives, providing the context for their interpretation. Moreover, at a dietary level, the correspondence of Christ with Adam is broadly confirmed by the New Testament evidence about the diet of Jesus, who is not recorded as eating meat, although after his resurrection offers fish to his disciples (Jn 21.13) and himself consumes fish (Lk. 24.43). The idea of a new creation (kaine ktisis) is explicitly unfolded in 2 Cor. 5.17-19. This is a reality for those in Christ: the old has passed away, and the new has come. This is the work of God, who has given those in Christ a reconciling role. For humans, this ministry may rightly be viewed as extending to animals and to the whole created order. For animals Animals are not part of the new creation in the same way as humans. Lacking knowledge of Christ, they are not entrusted with a ministry or message of reconciliation. It cannot, therefore, be supposed that human avoidance of meat and animal products necessarily entails similar abstention by all animals. Predatory animals and birds consume smaller or weaker creatures, which they hunt and kill. Moreover, scavengers such as pigs may consume creatures of any size they take as carrion. Predation forms part of the great creation psalm, Psalm 104, in which, as part of a harmonious world, lions roar for their prey (tereph) and, like all animals, seek their food from God (104.21). Predation also features in the creation paean of the book of Job, in which the lion and its young hunt their prey, the raven and its young cry to God for prey, and the eagle nests in its rocky crag watching for prey and carrion for itself and its chicks (Job 38.39-41; 39.29-30). This biblical evidence is confirmed by biology and microbiology. As Norman Wirzba writes: ‘Deep in the bowels of the earth countless bacteria, microorganisms, fungi, and insects are engaged in a feeding frenzy that absorbs life into death and death back into the conditions for

Scott Ickert, ‘Luther and Animals: Subject to Adam’s Fall?’, in Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto (London: SCM Press, 1998), 91–3. 20 David L. Clough, On Animals: Volume 1: Systematic Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 67. 19

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life.’21 From this perspective, death is part of life, and any invocation of an initial paradisiacal state from which death was absent is unsupportable. At the level of larger species, organisms also feed on each other. For example, a pair of pelican chicks are likely to contain a favoured stronger chick and a weaker chick, which may be denied food or sacrificed to a predator to maximize the chance of the other chick surviving.22 In the long term, the ‘struggle to survive brings about rich, complex changes in structure and behaviour’.23 In Holmes Rolston III’s memorable phrase, ‘the cougar’s fang has carved the limbs of the fleet-footed deer’.24 Theologians who have engaged evolutionary theory frequently have a strong conviction that God, humans, and other sentient beings share, in some sense, a common life. This view has already been encountered as a feature of process theology, where a corollary seems to be that humans should avoid eating meat and other animal products that cause animal suffering. Typically, process theology is metaphysically grounded. In classic Christian doctrine, however, christology may give a context and significance to suffering that transcends the purely earthly frame of reference. This is important, given that in Rom. 8.19-23, creation (ktisis) waits, subjected to futility, and groaning (sustenazó) in travail until freed from bondage. This passage is often cited to support the view that creation is incomplete or ongoing. In any case, animals participate in the waiting and groaning. This implies that attempting to eliminate suffering here and now may be premature. Endorsing such a position, Southgate suggests that God in Christ suffers with creatures in an attentive and loving solidarity that ‘at some deep level takes away the aloneness of the suffering creature’s experience’.25 God does not thereby become a victim alongside sentient beings but rather is revealed as their redeemer. The theological implications of this require development. In John’s prologue, Christ the Word is implicated in all of God’s creative activity. Process theologian John B. Cobb contends that the Word, therefore, enlivens all living things and is immanent within creation. Cobb adopts the incarnation as a model for how Christ is present in the whole created order by virtue of having created it. The Word is uniquely enfleshed in Christ but ‘present in every creature’ such that an animal may be said to ‘incarnate Christ’.26 It follows that when humans mistreat animals, they mistreat Christ, who shares in both the joy of animals and in their suffering. Both animal lives and human lives ‘participate in forming the everlasting life of Christ’, in whom all are reconciled, including the slaughtered and the slaughterer.27 Cobb does not set out the implications of his theology for human consumption of meat and animal products, although he does cite several other instances of human mistreatment of animals to be addressed. His stance may provide a theological context for predation by giving the life of every creature hunted and killed by another animal some divine recognition, feeling, and meaning.

Wirzba, Food and Faith, 94. See Jay B. McDaniel, Of God and Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1989), 19–21. 23 Elizabeth A. Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 185. 24 Holmes Rolston III, Science and Religion: A Critical Survey (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 1987), 134. 25 Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 52. 26 John B. Cobb Jr., ‘All Things in Christ?’, in Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto (London: SCM Press, 1998), 177. 27 Cobb, ‘All Things in Christ?’, 179.

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The evidence in the world shows that predation is part of the created order in the sense that there has never been a time when species that are now predatory were non-predatory. For example, Neil Messer accepts that, in the animal world, some animals either prey on, kill, and devour other animals or they starve. This has been the case, he argues, ‘throughout the history of life on earth’, such that there ‘was never a golden age of peace and plenty’.28 Considering leopards, Messer writes that these are ‘exquisitely well-adapted hunters and killers’ of antelopes and some other species. Insofar as the notion of an original creation is compatible with an evolutionary perspective, predation is part of that creation. However, Messer contends that the predator–prey relationship is not part of God’s will for animals in heaven: ‘In God’s good future . . . it must be possible for leopards to be ultimately fulfilled without hunting, and killing kids, and for kids not to be the victims of lethal violence.’29 The scriptural and theological sources presented in this section may enable predation to be accepted within a doctrine of creation, especially if such acceptance is accompanied by a corrective eschatology. Conclusion This chapter has shown that biblical and systematic theologians need to give food greater attention. The doctrine of creation reflects the Judeo-Christian understanding of God as a giver of food. In combination, the Genesis creation narratives and their recapitulations in the Gospels of Mark and John indicate that humans are given plants and fruits to eat and that animals are given plants. Arable farming is governed by the sabbath principles laid out in Leviticus 25, which are grounded in God’s rest on the seventh day of creation. The physically demanding nature of farming is accounted for by the second Genesis creation narrative, which describes the first biblical transgression, which concerns food. The relation between humans and animals is one of rule in God’s image and likeness by means of a relationality established in naming. This suggests that animal welfare and behaviour are to be respected but that animals are not to be worshipped, feared, or used to represent hybrid deities. Even sea and land monsters are tamed by God, and John portrays Christ as a lamb rather than as a predatory animal. Animals do not share in the new creation in the same way as humans because they lack cognizance of it. It may therefore be possible to reconcile predation, vividly described in some biblical texts, with the doctrine of creation. Indeed, evolutionary approaches to theology demand this. In the Bible, the Genesis creation narratives are accompanied by descriptions of creation through conflict. These suggest that creation involves suffering and is ongoing until its eschatological correction or completion.

Further reading Calvert, Samantha J. ‘“Ours is the Food that Eden Knew”: Themes in the Theology and Practice of Modern Christian Vegetarians’. In Eating and Believing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on

Neil Messer, ‘Natural Evil after Darwin’, in Theology After Darwin, ed. Michael S. Northcott and R. J. Berry (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2009), 141. 29 Messer, ‘Natural Evil after Darwin’, 152–3. 28

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CHAPTER 61 PANDEMICS CONCEPTUALIZING THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION DURING THE ERA OF HIV/AIDS AND COVID-19 Sophia Chirongoma

Introduction The HIV and Covid-19 pandemics are the two major public health crises that have necessitated a multi-stakeholder response in our times. The specific thrust of this chapter is hinged upon how these two global pandemics have shaped thinking and theological reflections on God and God’s purpose for the created universe. The discussion is mainly about how African Christians and theologians grapple with and theologize about the two pandemics. Reflecting on the divine attributes of omnibenevolence and omnipotence amid the debilitating sickness and death caused by the HIV and Covid-19 pandemics in Africa, the study wrestles with the age-old philosophical question: If God created the universe not only as ‘good’ but ‘very good’, what then is the rationale for pain and suffering endured by human and non-human entities in the created universe? The point of reference in interrogating the question of pain and suffering in this discussion is the two most recent global pandemics – HIV and Covid-19. Hence, the pivotal question in this context is: If an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God created a ‘very good’ universe, why do God’s creatures continue to live in the shadow of sickness and death, unable to find either a cure or a vaccine for exterminating two giant and menacing pandemics?1 Francois Tolmie and Rian Venter unpack these questions thus: ‘As usually happens in times of crisis, millions of people all over the world turned to religion for guidance and spiritual comfort during the [Covid-19] pandemic. . . . It is clear that one’s view of God plays a very important and perhaps even a determinative role in the way in which one makes sense of the current situation.’2 In line with this claim, the present chapter introduces how African Christians are making sense of God the creator in the context of these two pandemics that continue to claim countless lives.

Several religious studies and theology scholars have wrestled with the question of a universe created as not only ‘good’, but also ‘very good’. See Mark Brett and Jason Goroncy, ‘Creation, God, and the Coronavirus’, Theology 123, no. 5 (2020): 346–52; Matthias Zeindler, ‘Was hat Gott mit dem Corona-Virus zu tun?’, Die Bibel, accessed 26 March 2020, https://www​.die​-bibel​.ch​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2020​/03​/Theologisches​-zum​-Corona​-Virus​.pdf; Musa W. Dube, ‘“And God Saw that it was Very Good”: An Earth-Friendly Theatrical Reading of Genesis 1’, Black Theology 13, no. 3 (2015): 230–46. 2 Francois Tolmie and Rian Venter, ‘Making Sense of the COVID-19 Pandemic from the Bible – Some Perspectives’, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 77, no. 4 (2021): a6493, https://doi. org/10.4102/hts. v77i4.6493. 1

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Methodological and theoretical framework In reflecting upon the debilitating impact of the HIV and the Covid-19 pandemics, I do so within the purview of my social location as an African feminist theologian domiciled within my Shona culture in Zimbabwe. This echoes the stance adopted by Musa Wenkosi Dube, an African feminist theologian, biblical scholar, and continental coordinator of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians (the Circle), whose work employs a methodological framework informed by her social location in Botswana, which exposes her ‘to a sharpened awareness of international relations of the past and present; the identity of being a woman and all the joys and burdens that come with it; and the reality of living in the HIV/AIDS active zones’.3 Treading in Dube’s footsteps, this chapter’s reflections are framed by my positionality of living in the ‘HIV/AIDS active zones’, where an intense humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe compounds the situation. Such reflections emerge from the lived realities of the Shona people in Zimbabwe, whose experiences are not far removed from those of others in southern Africa. They offer a contextual analysis of how Shona people make sense of the two pandemics and their impact on human and non-human entities. One of the central goals for African feminist theologians4 is to transform lives positively by eliminating all that threatens and effaces life. The bulk of African feminist theologians are members of the Circle, which was founded in 1989 under the visionary leadership of Mercy Amba Oduyoye from Ghana. Under the flagship of the Circle, African feminist theologians have become a vibrant force in the theological arena. Through their tireless advocacy and prolific academic work, they have remained consistent as agents of positive change and social transformation. As it does with other contextual and life-transforming theologians, it comes naturally for them to take centre stage in responding to both the HIV and Covid-19 pandemics, not only through writing but also through praxis. They have also been resolute about producing literature that offers words of life and hope amid the shadows of death and hopelessness wrought by these two pandemics. Standing firmly on the shoulders of fellow African feminist theologians, this chapter adds another bead in weaving the tapestry on an ongoing journey begun by the matriarchs of the Circle.5 With reference to the Shona people in Zimbabwe, it engages in a contextual analysis of the African people’s journeying with the HIV and Covid-19 pandemics. Adopting a narrative method, a trademark for African feminist theologians, the chapter presents the life stories of ten study

Cited in Musa W. Dube, ‘Grant Me Justice: Towards Gender-Sensitive Multi-Sectoral HIV/AIDS Readings of the Bible’, in Grant Me Justice! HIV/AIDS & Gender Readings of the Bible, ed. Musa W. Dube and Musimbi Kanyoro (Pietermaritzburg/Maryknoll: Cluster/Orbis Books, 2004), 117. 4 The author is aware that some members of the Circle prefer to use the designation ‘African women theologians’ rather than ‘African feminist theologians’, particularly because they feel that the blanket term ‘feminism’ tends to ignore the influence of race and social class when discussing gender justice issues. See Isabel Apawo Phiri and Sarojini Nadar, ‘“Treading Softly but Firmly”: African Women, Religion, and Health’, in African Women, Religion, and Health: Essays in Honor of Mercy Amba Ewudziwa Oduyoye, ed. Isabel Apawo Phiri and Sarojini Nadar (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2006), 5. Cognisant of the fact that there is a very thin line between these two groups, as well as the fact that the two designations have been used interchangeably in some academic literature, this chapter makes use of the term African feminist theology/theologians to embrace both categories. The terms ‘African women theologians’ or ‘African women’s theology’ will therefore feature only if it is a direct citation. 5 See Musimbi R. A. Kanyoro, ‘Beads and Strands: Threading More Beads in the Story of the Circle’, in African Women, Religion, and Health: Essays in Honor of Mercy Amba Ewudziwa Oduyoye, ed. Isabel Apawo Phiri and Sarojini Nadar (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2006), 19. 3

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participants who willingly shared their experiences with the author. The main goal of sharing the study participants’ stories is to provide a platform for them to narrate their experiences and enrich readers through the readers’ learning from the wisdom and the tenacity of those who have trudged the path of surviving the two pandemics in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean context is riddled with escalating poverty levels, unemployment, food insecurity, and an almost defunct public healthcare system. Such a context provides fecund ground for both the HIV and Covid-19 pandemics. Before presenting the study participants’ narratives, the chapter introduces some theological literature from a plethora of such that has been produced to reflect theologically on the two pandemics. Selected theological literature on the HIV and Covid-19 pandemics in Africa In the early days of the HIV pandemic, theologians and religious leaders tended to skate through the subject under the pretext that their faith communities were safe from the virus. Three factors mainly influenced this attitude of avoidance. First, it was presumed that the virus predominantly affected those who abused intravenous drugs and alcohol. Second, it was believed that the spreading of the virus was confined to a group of sexual minorities, especially men who have sex with other men. Third, those who engaged in multiple sexual relationships were regarded as another pathway for the virus’ transmission. Due to these misconceptions, which divided human communities between ‘us’ and ‘them’, theologians and religious leaders felt they did not have to worry about the virus. However, this bubble was short-lived. Soon, the virus had entered their doorsteps, and either they or those close to them started being infected by HIV. This sudden and unexpected turn of events jolted both theologians and religious leaders to change their trajectory. Facts are strong-headed, and they speak for themselves. The HIV pandemic, which soon became an epidemic, hit Africa harder than any other continent. No family or community has been able to escape this epidemic. As the 2001 UNAIDS report noted: ‘Africa is home to 70% of the adults and 80% of the children living with HIV in the world, and has buried three-quarters of the more than 20 million people worldwide who have died of AIDS since the epidemic began.’6 More than a decade later, the same facts are restated by Dube, who bemoans: Although HIV and AIDS was, and still is, a global epidemic, the African continent has had a lion’s share of those infected and affected. Sub-Saharan Africa alone accounted for an estimated 69 percent of all people living with HIV and 70 percent of all AIDS deaths in 2011. . . . The apocalyptic texts of HIV and AIDS are inscribed upon our bodies, etched upon our memories and spirits. The African continent, including its church, bear[s] the wounds of HIV and AIDS upon its social, economic and political body.7 The statistics presented earlier present a grim picture of the intensity of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa. As HIV-related symptoms started to claim the lives of those close to African

Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO), ‘AIDS Epidemic Update: December 2001’, accessed 1 April 2023, https://data​.unaids​.org​/publications​/irc​-pub06​/epiupdate01​ _en​.pdf. 7 Musa W. Dube, ‘Let There Be Light! Birthing Ecumenical Theology in the HIV and AIDS Apocalypse’, The Ecumenical Review 67, no. 4 (2015): 532. 6

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theologians and religious leaders, and they found themselves nursing, burying, and comforting loved ones who were bereaved due to HIV-related symptoms, they realized the pertinent need for addressing the pandemic with renewed energy. Offering spiritual care through the ministry of accompaniment – that is, accompanying those who are either infected or affected – became an integral role for faith communities.8 Other practical interventions entailed the provision of much-needed health care services, including facilities for Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT) services, training carers for home-based care (HBC), rolling out Antiretroviral therapy (ART), setting up caregiving facilities to cater for those needing such services, and the provision of nutritious meals for the sick, especially those enrolled on ART.9 African theologians embarked on producing literature that ministered to the holistic needs of their faith communities in HIV contexts. The need for theological resources that were lifeenhancing, hope-igniting, and life-affirming was necessitated by the various retrogressive, retributive, judgemental, discriminatory, stereotyping, and hope-diminishing theologies that proliferated in the early days of the HIV pandemic. African feminist theologians were among the key players in producing theological literature responding to the kairos moment. Ezra Chitando affirms that African women theologians are clearly leading in the area of theological reflections on HIV and AIDS.10 As explicated by Isabel Apawo Phiri, the Circle’s active response to the HIV pandemic was informed by the daily realities of ordinary women and girls in their context, particularly that most of the infected population were women and girls.11 Musimbi Kanyoro also foregrounds the fact that the HIV epidemic in Africa bears a feminine face: The latest figures released by UNAIDS say that 58% of all Africans living with HIV are women. We are in trouble. Things keep getting worse for African women. The book of Proverbs admonishes, ‘Don’t give up and be helpless in times of trouble’ (Proverbs 24:10). . . . Women everywhere are beginning to heed the advice given in the wisdom of the Proverbs. Today there are networks and organizations of women who are organizing to raise the visibility of issues related to women, girls and AIDS, to catalyze action to address these issues, to facilitate collaboration at all levels, and, in so doing, to scale up action that will lead to concrete, measurable improvements in the lives of women and girls. The Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians is part of this movement. Our contribution serves to educate our societies, to advocate for justice through theology and Scriptures and to empower women to confront the pandemic through a better understanding of the foundations of their faith as . . . presented in the Bible.12

See Masiiwa Ragies Gunda et al., eds, Treatment Adherence and Faith Healing in the Context of HIV and AIDS in Africa: Training Manual for Religious Leaders (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2019); Sue Parry, Beacons of Hope: HIV Competent Churches: A Framework for Action (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2008); Ezra Chitando, Living With Hope: African Churches and HIV/AIDS 1 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2007); Ezra Chitando, Acting in Hope: African Churches and HIV/AIDS 2 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2007). 9 See Ezra Chitando and Charles Klagba, eds, In the Name of Jesus! Healing in the Age of HIV (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2013). 10 See Ezra Chitando, ed., Mainstreaming HIV and AIDS in Theological Education: Experiences and Explorations (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2008). 11 See Isabel Apawo Phiri, ‘HIV/AIDS: An African Theological Response in Mission’, The Ecumenical Review 56, no. 4 (2004): 422–31. 12 Musimbi R. A. Kanyoro, ‘Preface’, in Grant Me Justice! HIV/AIDS & Gender Readings of the Bible, ed. Musa W. Dube and Musimbi Kanyoro (Pietermaritzburg/Maryknoll: Cluster/Orbis Books, 2004), viii. 8

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The facts Kanyoro raises here are pivotal to the matters discussed in this chapter. As noted, African women are being invited to read and interpret the biblical texts in such a way that they can holistically address the multifaceted factors exposing their African communities to HIV infection, focusing especially on the susceptibility of women and girls. The intertwinement of the HIV epidemic with social justice issues is also brought to the fore by Dube: ‘HIV/AIDS thrives through all forms of social injustice that often leaves people powerless to implement decisions that empower them against the epidemic. HIV/AIDS is therefore very much a social justice issue, one that pushes us as a world to seek justice for ourselves, for and with all members of the earth community and in all our relationships, institutions and structures.’13 Concurring with the aforementioned, Esther Mombo and Sophia Chirongoma noted: During the peak of the global HIV epidemic, the Circle’s engagement with HIV was core because HIV was like a magnifying glass that brought to light in a more significant way the issues the Circle members were writing about, these issues ranged from religion, culture and poverty. As people continued to grapple with existential questions, the HIV epidemic brought to light the hidden adherence to the various harmful and oppressive cultural practices for instance, widowhood rites. As a magnifying glass, HIV also brought to the fore the economic challenges in the communities, particularly how they impact on women’s lives. It has also unveiled the issues of discrimination and the marginalization of women. Most pertinently, the HIV and AIDS epidemic has presented a perfect excuse for entrenching stigma and negative stereotyping on the basis of gender or sexuality.14 Hence, African feminist theologians have continued to vociferously advocate for the empowerment of women and girls and all members of society who have been continually pushed to the periphery as a panacea for the HIV pandemic, not only in Africa but also the world over. They have also not tired from speaking out on the urgent need to revisit harmful and contentious religio-cultural practices that increase people’s susceptibility to HIV/AIDS. Chitando notes: ‘Whilst male African theologians have promoted inculturation, women theologians have adopted a more critical attitude towards African cultures. African women theologians call for the transformation of African cultures in the time of the pandemic.’15 Mombo and Chirongoma affirm the outstanding progress that the Circle members have made in theologically responding to the HIV pandemic in the last two decades: The theme of health and healing is another important pastoral concern which has gripped the attention of Circle writers for almost two decades. The onslaught of the HIV epidemic steered the Circle to devote time and resources into researching and publishing

Musa W. Dube, ‘Introduction’, in Grant Me Justice! HIV/AIDS & Gender Readings of the Bible, ed. Musa W. Dube and Musimbi Kanyoro (Pietermaritzburg/Maryknoll: Cluster/Orbis Books, 2004), 5. 14 Esther Mombo and Sophia Chirongoma, ‘Thirty Years of African Women’s Liberation Theology’, in Mother Earth, Postcolonial and Liberation Theologies, ed. Sophia Chirongoma and Esther Mombo (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2021), 22. 15 Ezra Chitando, Troubled but Not Destroyed: African Theology in Dialogue with HIV and AIDS (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2009), 67. 13

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on health and healing with a special focus on HIV and AIDS for about nineteen years. The Circle was among the first organized groups to focus not only on researching and publishing on HIV and AIDS, but it also took upon the task to equip communities on how to deal with the epidemic through conducting seminars and workshops. At the third Pan-African Circle conference held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 2002, the executive committee was mandated to encourage Circle members to continue researching and writing about HIV and AIDS, including stories of those living with the virus.16 This excerpt illustrates how the focus on HIV and AIDS has been at the heart of the work of the Circle from the time the virus found its way onto African soil. The ferocity of the HIV epidemic in Africa, particularly how it disproportionately impacted young African women of childbearing age, spurred the Circle to establish partnerships with other entities pursuing the same goals. Such an initiative led to the Circle’s collaboration with the Yale University Divinity School, the Yale School of Public Health, and Yale’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. Through such collaboration, members of the Circle were awarded research fellowships, making it possible for the research fellows to undertake research aimed at formulating and implementing interventions in response to the challenges posed by the HIV/AIDS pandemic within their specific African contexts. This five-year partnership (2002–7) equipped African feminist theologians with skills and resources for executing their academic knowledge in practice. Furthermore, in 2006, the Circle partnered with the Ecumenical HIV and AIDS Initiative in Africa (EHAIA) under the auspices of the World Council of Churches. The main thrust of this collaboration was to jointly equip and transform the churches in Africa to become HIV and AIDS competent. The Circle members’ publication of more than twelve volumes dedicated towards the theme of HIV and AIDS between 2003 and 2013 is testimony to the fact that the pandemic has been at the centre of the Circle’s research and publications.17 However, as members of the Circle have expended their energies to research and write about the HIV and AIDS pandemic, they have not, to this author’s knowledge, interfaced the HIV and AIDS pandemic with the doctrine of creation. It is this gap that what follows here seeks to, in part, fill. Furthermore, it seeks to reflect on how the debilitating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has inspired lay people, as well as some scholars in religious studies and theology, to rethink the doctrine of creation. In what follows, we first listen to the narratives of some Shona sojourners trudging along the path of life riddled with sickness, death and bereavement wrought by the HIV and Covid-19 pandemics.

Narratives of journeying through the HIV and Covid-19 pandemics To uphold confidentiality, no participant shall be identified by name in what follows. Instead, their identifying markers are P1 for participant number 1, P2 for participant number 2, and so on. The data was collected through the distribution of a questionnaire that was mailed

Mombo and Chirongoma, ‘Thirty Years of African Women’s Liberation Theology’, 21–2. For a comprehensive list of these publications, see Mombo and Chirongoma, ‘Thirty Years of African Women’s Liberation Theology’, 13–32. 16 17

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electronically in August 2022. This section summarizes the key themes emerging from the ten study participants’ responses. The key questions posed to the study participants were:

i. How can we make sense of God’s ‘good’ creation during times of calamity, such as the outbreak of the Covid-19 and the HIV/AIDS pandemics?



ii. Is the debilitating sickness and death related to the HIV/AIDS or the Covid-19 pandemics a sign of a defectively created universe?



iii. Are such pandemics a sign of God’s wrath on a sinful world?



iv. How do these pandemics impact the lived realities of non-human creatures?

The narratives of the study participants must be understood in the context of the tumbling public health care system in Zimbabwe, the exponential rates of inflation, misgovernance, and food insecurity. In response to the first two questions, P1 stated: The universe was created by God as a good and perfect gift bequeathed to us to tend and care for it. However, due to our selfish and irresponsible conduct, we have turned the earth into a hostile and oft uninhabitable space. The outbreak of pandemics cannot be blamed on God the creator. We are the architects of our own downfall, and we need to repent before it is too late. Similarly, in response to the same two questions, P2 answered: The Bible is clear that God spoke the universe into existence. Everything that is here on earth was created by God in a perfect and untainted world. As human species, we were created to serve as God’s vicegerents, to serve and protect the universe. The outbreak of several natural disasters, including the two pandemics [the Covid-19 and the HIV/AIDS pandemics], is a result of our disobedience, nature is retaliating. Even our indigenous culture teaches about the consequences of irresponsible ecological tendencies. In response to the previous questions i. and ii., P3 stated: The Bible teaches us that when Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden, it was endowed with natural resources which nurtured, healed, and restored human vitality. I am convinced that if we were all to return to the Edenic lifestyle, eating healthy and living a healthy lifestyle, breathing fresh air, growing our own food, exercising, and enjoying the sunshine, then we would be able to reduce or eliminate some of the menacing diseases such as Covid-19 and the HIV pandemic. Our departure from the Edenic lifestyle has opened avenues for ill health and a shorter lifespan. And P4 responded to the same two questions as follows: God created a perfect universe and bestowed it unto us in its perfection. However, sin and disobedience have turned the world into an uninhabitable place. How I long for a new heaven and a new earth, which is promised in the Bible. I look forward to the new creation, where there is no sickness, death, and no sin. A world where we no longer fear 805

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waking up with a debilitating illness whilst not affording access to basic healthcare is a place where I long to live. Responding to the third and fourth questions, P5 shared the following insights: The outbreaks of pandemics cannot always be attributed to God’s wrath on humanity’s sinfulness. In my view, it is not only rational beings who are being affected by the outbreak of these pandemics but non-human entities as well. For instance, scientists have often pointed to the fact that the HIV virus originated either from monkeys or chimpanzees. Moreso, the massive use of disposable masks during the Covid-19 pandemic has been cited as a major cause of unsustainable and reckless disposal of masks, causing the birds, wild animals, plants, and several life forms underwater to be affected by the masks being blown by the air in the environment. P6 responded to these same two questions as follows: The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. God did not create a defective earth. It is his abode, and he deeply cares for it. The outbreak of pandemics heavily impacts both human and non-human entities. I was enthused to learn how the lockdown period allowed wildlife to roam freely around the main road since there was little to no road traffic as human communities retreated into their domestic sphere. The Covid-19 lockdown measures allowed the earth to renew, restore and rejuvenate. The key issues emerging from the ten study participants elicit the view that the outbreak of natural disasters, such as those associated with the two most recent global pandemics, does not annul the fact that God created a good earth. All study participants echoed that both the Christian and African indigenous teachings concur that the universe was created as good by the creator. The flocking of wildlife onto the roads, which had been deserted in line with observing lockdown measures during the Covid-19 pandemic, elicited a return to a state where the movement of wildlife was uninterrupted by human activity. The threat posed by ecologically insensitive ways of disposing of masks is a reminder of the intricate connection between human activities and the welfare of non-human entities. This suggests that when humans suffer a calamity such as the outbreak of the Covid-19 or the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the whole earth community suffers.

Theological reflections As noted earlier, the HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 pandemics have elicited theological responses within faith and academic communities. As communities grapple with the harsh realities of staring at the sickness and death in their midst, the four pivotal questions raised earlier in this chapter continue to resurface. Reflecting on the Christian community’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Mark Brett and Jason Goroncy summarize these overarching questions as follows: ‘Alongside the plethora of responses to the coronavirus pandemic, there have emerged some deeply rooted questions for faith: what might it mean to speak in this 806

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context of a loving God who has created the world and who continues in relationship with all creatures, human and non-human, through the depths of suffering, uncertainty, exploitation and death?’18 Here, Brett and Goroncy foreground the paradox of envisaging a universe that was created ‘good’, and indeed ‘very good’, and which inhabits sickness, death, and suffering for both human and non-human entities. The difficulty reconciling these two stark realities of life has been deliberated upon by scholars attending to various crises. For instance, reflecting on the global ecological crisis, Dube highlights paradoxes also presented by the outbreak of epidemics and pandemics: Throughout the process of creation, the [Gen. 1] narrative repeatedly tells us that the creator God would stop and evaluate what was created. And seven times the narrative tells us that God found every aspect of creation good (vv. 1–4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). Indeed the last pronunciation underlines that God found creation not just good, but very good (v. 31). . . . Whereas Gen. 1:1–31 presents us with the beauty of creation, something is now wrong with creation. . . . Given the severe environmental crisis confronting us, the contemporary reader/listener stands between two conflicting stories: the biblical story describing the splendour of God’s creation in its perfection and today’s lamentable state of the Earth. Entering the theatre of creation as presented by Genesis 1 is no longer a luxury, but a call to re-think our relationship with the Earth. The reader/listener of Genesis 1, who is a privileged witness to the drama of creation, has an important role in keeping the God standard for the Earth and all its members.19 Here, Dube makes it apparent that the current state of the earth is not congruent to the perfect state that God originally envisioned at creation. It is indisputable that the ongoing ecological crisis is a major contributing factor to the outbreak of viruses causing pandemics, such as those associated with Covid-19 and HIV/AIDS. Humanity’s failure to exercise responsible stewardship has made humans vulnerable to all manner of diseases. So, Alexander Hampton and Annalea Rose Theissen argue: ‘For many, there is a collective sense that this [Covid-19 pandemic] is more than an issue to manage our way out of. Rather, it is indicative of our broken relationship with the natural world of which we should be a part, and perhaps our alienation from a deeper sense of meaning, one not centred exclusively upon human needs and wants.’20 The theme of the interconnectedness of ecological devastation and the outbreak of ailments and diseases within human communities is a recurring one among scholars. So, for example, Ernst Simmons avers: While tacitly affirming our connection to nature, humanity in general has seen itself as above nature, viewing it primarily as a natural resource. This has resulted in ecological destruction on a global scale and has set the stage for the emergence of a pandemic

Brett and Goroncy, ‘Creation, God, and the Coronavirus’, 346. Dube, ‘“And God Saw that it was Very Good”’, 231, 232. 20 Alexander J. B. Hampton and Annalea Rose Thiessen, ‘Introduction: Theology and Ecology in a Time of Pandemic’, in Pandemic, Ecology and Theology: Perspectives on COVID-19, ed. Alexander J. B. Hampton (London: Routledge 2021), 1. 18 19

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arising from our own abuse of nature and its creatures. The COVID-19 pandemic is an ecological as well as medical problem. We ignore the ecological roots of this crisis at our peril and further ill prepare ourselves for the next pandemic.21 The core of the message conveyed here is that human beings are the main culprit in the devastation of the created universe.22 It is, therefore, pertinent that humanity repents from the folly of dominating and exploiting the universe that was bequeathed to humans by the creator. This will entail redressing and reclothing Mother Earth.23 The healing and restoration of the earth will also elicit the healing of the human community from all the viruses threatening to swallow human communities. Peter Lampe elucidates this point thus: ‘To Christ followers, . . . recovering from a severe illness and healing mean[s] experiencing the creative power of God, a new creation or re-creation. It gives a foretaste of what human beings may hope for in the ultimate, the eschaton: to rest, become whole and healed, refreshed and recreated by God’.24 As became apparent in the responses by P3 and P4 to the first two questions, the existence of sickness and death due to pandemics such as the Covid-19 and HIV pandemics is a result of humanity’s departure from the Edenic perfect state of the universe. P3 reminisces a return to the Edenic state, where the universe abounded with the fullness of health and vitality. Evoking a return to the Edenic state of the universe P3 expresses a longing for the restoration of a perfection that has since been lost. On the other hand, P4 expresses a deep longing for the establishment of a new heaven and earth where there will be no more sickness and death. The longing for a new earth, where one will no longer worry about falling sick, as well as not worrying about failing to access basic healthcare, must be understood against the background that for over two decades, the Zimbabwean public healthcare system has been bereft of basic medicines and equipment, coupled with understaffed, overworked, and underpaid health personnel. This is a cocktail for a healthcare crisis, especially in the face of the HIV and Covid-19 pandemics. This longing should also be understood against the backdrop that for most African people, including the Shona in Zimbabwe, health and well-being are at the top of their priority needs. Hence, a threat to their health and well-being poses a major threat to their existence. In envisaging either a return to an Edenic state or the ushering in of a new heaven and a new earth, the study participants affirm the view that the universe in its current state has lost its former glory. They foreground that the universe was created in a perfect and glorious state.

Ernest Simmons, ‘The Entangled Pandemic: Deep Incarnation in Creation’, Dialog 60, no. 4 (2021): 351. See Sophia Chirongoma, ‘Lament for the Chimanimani Community in Zimbabwe in the Aftermath of Cyclone Idai’, in Words for a Dying World: Stories of Grief and Courage from the Global Church, ed. Hannah Malcolm (London: SCM Press, 2020), 92–7; Sophia Chirongoma and Ezra Chitando, ‘What Did We Do to Our Mountain? African Eco-Feminist and Indigenous Responses to Cyclone Idai in Chimanimani and Chipinge Districts, Zimbabwe’, African Journal of Religion and Gender 27, no. 1 (2021): 65–90; Sophia Chirongoma, ‘Where Earth and Water Meet: Development, Displacement, and African Spirituality in Zimbabwe’, in Decolonizing Ecotheology: Indigenous and Subaltern Challenges, ed. S. Lily Mendoza and George Zachariah (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2022), 146–61. 23 See Sophie Chirongoma, ‘Karanga-Shona Rural Women’s Agency in Dressing Mother Earth: A Contribution towards an Indigenous Eco-feminist Theology’, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa: Essays in Honour of Steve de Gruchy 142 (2012): 120–44. 24 Peter Lampe, ‘Health and Politics in the COVID-19 Crisis from a New Testament Hermeneutical Perspective’, Acta Theologica 40, no. 2 (2020): 123. 21 22

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Hence, either returning to its pure form or recreating a new earth would help humanity escape from the current deformed universe. No response from the ten study participants mentioned Christ or the Holy Spirit when referring to God’s creative work. This should not be construed, however, as suggesting that the study participants dismiss the concept of the Trinity. Instead, such silence could indicate that the Shona Christians’ view of creation, while informed by the biblical text, is heavily influenced by the indigenous Shona myths of creation, such as the Mwedzi, Dzivaguru, and Guruuswa creation myths.25 These indigenous Shona creation myths only mention Mwari/Musikavanhu as the creator of the universe. As such, in their perception of the biblical creation story, they also focus mainly on God as the creator of the universe and not necessarily on God’s triune character.

Conclusion This chapter has brought to the fore the importance of rethinking the doctrine of creation amid the most recent global pandemics – the Covid-19 and the HIV/AIDS pandemics. Acknowledging that for most African people, turning to religion in times of crisis is their default response, the study has drawn insights from how the Shona people in Zimbabwe are drawing from the wells of their Christian tradition to make sense of the debilitating effects of these two pandemics. Wearing the lenses of an African feminist theologian, the overarching question that the study sought to answer is: How can we make sense of God’s ‘good’ creation during times of calamity, such as the outbreak of the Covid-19 and the HIV/AIDS pandemics? Drawing insights from study participants and the theological reflections presented in this chapter, the conclusion reached herein is that the universe was created as intrinsically good, but human actions/inactions are the main cause of some of these natural disasters. It is important to affirm that the created universe remains complex and awe-inspiring. Humanity’s quest to conquer the world by discovering vaccines and cures for all the viruses and ailments threatening our existence is an ongoing journey. Co-existing peacefully and in partnership with other created beings is reminiscent of the vision of shalom, whereby the universe returns to its original state.

Further reading Bate, Stuart C. and Alison Munro. Catholic Responses to AIDS in Southern Africa. Pretoria: South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, 2014.

See David Lan, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Chirevo V. Kwenda, ‘Religious Myth and the Construction of Shona Identity’, in Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity: An Introduction, ed. Craig R. Prentiss (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 197–210; Nisbert Taringa, ‘How Environmental Is African Traditional Religion?’, Exchange 35, no. 2 (2006): 191–214; James L. Cox, ‘Making Mwari Christian: The Case of the Shona of Zimbabwe’, in The Invention of God in Indigenous Societies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 67–88; Kai Horsthemke, ‘African Creation Myths and the Hierarchy of Beings’, in Animals and African Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 37–43; Nisbert Taringa, ‘The Environmental Healing Promises of a Zimbabwean Traditional Religio-mythical Paradise’, in National Healing, Integration and Reconciliation in Zimbabwe, ed. Ezra Chitando, Kelvin Chikonzo, and Nehemiah Chivandikwa (London: Routledge, 2019), 245–56. 25

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T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation Byamugisha, Gideon B., John Joshva Raja, and Ezra Chitando, eds. Is the Body of Christ HIV Positive? New Ecclesiological Christologies in the Context of HIV Positive Communities. Delhi: ISPCK/SOCMS, 2012. Chitando, Ezra and Nontando M. Hadebe, eds. Compassionate Circles: African Women Theologians Facing HIV. Geneva: WCC Publications, 2009. Dube, Musa W. The HIV & AIDS Bible: Selected Essays. Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2008. Dube, Musa W., ed. HIV/AIDS and the Curriculum: Methods of Integrating HIV/AIDS in Theological Programmes. Geneva: WCC Publications, 2003. Van Klinken, Adriaan S. ‘When the Body of Christ has AIDS: A Theological Metaphor for Global Solidarity in Light of HIV and AIDS’. International Journal of Public Theology 4, no. 4 (2010): 446–65. Van Wyngaard, Arnau. ‘Manifesting the Grace of God to Those with HIV or AIDS’. Verbum et Ecclesia 35, no. 1 (2014): a780780. https://doi​.org​/10​.4102​/ve​.v35i1​.780.

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CHAPTER 62 THIS PRESENT DARKNESS WAR AND THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION Scott Paeth

And war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world – he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. (Rev. 12.7-9)

Introduction Central to the doctrine of creation in Christian thought is the principle that the world was created good by a good creator. Creation exists for the sake of the good for which God brought it into being, and is intended to serve that good. According to the narrative in Genesis, violence comes into the world only as a consequence of the distortion of God’s original intention for the world (Genesis 3–4). War is, in many ways, the most radical expression of the violence brought about via the Fall, and yet how one thinks about the morality of war is seldom linked to the cosmic questions grounding the understanding of the doctrine of creation. This chapter aims to examine the question of war from precisely this angle – exploring what can be learned about the morality and meaning of war as a question of creation. This question touches both on primordial cosmic as well as eschatological questions. War, in this respect, is not merely a matter of human action and intention, but it also communicates something about the character of the cosmos in which humans dwell. Furthermore, understanding war from within this cosmic framework can offer a different way of conceiving the moral questions that surround it. At the heart of this analysis are Walter Wink’s (Augustinian) insights about the powers and principalities that pervade the world. As he notes, the cosmic narrative contained within the Christian Bible tells of a world created by God to be good but which has fallen away from its original goodness and, yet, can be redeemed. The understanding of war that runs throughout this chapter interprets war as a symptom of the fallenness of creation, as reflected in the mythic narrative of heavenly warfare, particularly as portrayed through the lens of apocalyptic literature. And yet, the final word in the narrative is one not of condemnation but of redemption – a redemption that encompasses and transforms the violence of war into the victory of the Lamb.

Creation and consummation The doctrines of creation and eschatology are inherently linked around the issue of war precisely because of the cosmic and mythical aspects of the subject. Christian eschatology

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gives an account of the ‘last things’ that begins, narratively, prior to the creation account in the first chapter of Genesis. As the doctrine of creation tells of the natural goodness of the world as God intended, the origin of evil requires an account of the conflict between that original good and the corruption that leads to warfare and violence. Genesis itself does not offer such an account, even as it tells the story of how the seeds of evil bore fruit amid the garden planted by God. It is through apocalyptic theologies that the Jewish and, later, Christian traditions begin to understand corruption as having its origin in a cosmic conflict, even as such theologies offer a narrative of assurance that the conflict will eventually be resolved in the reassertion of creation’s original goodness. (Though whether that constitutes a restitutio ad integrum [restoration to original condition] or an entirely new creation is a subject of intense theological debate.) In this regard, it is impossible to understand the doctrine of creation without referencing the eschatological accounts that succeed it. The mythic account of conflict within the Christian tradition is drawn explicitly in terms of a war between ‘the legions of light and the armies of night’.1 Thus the war is framed in an unambiguously binary way – God’s forces of goodness are arrayed against the forces of evil, and only their total destruction is acceptable to restore creation to its intended goodness. War understood dualistically as a battle between good and evil in this way provides a moral justification for accounts of war in which the enemy is perceived to be beyond the moral pale and may thus be justifiably annihilated, just as the forces of evil are annihilated in the eschatological account, as can be seen in the twelfth chapter of Revelation. So Josephine Massyngbaerde Ford: In this second part of Revelation the struggle between good and evil develops into a clear dualism, not wholly unlike that found in Zoroastrianism, but even closer to the struggle between good and evil reflected in the Qumran writings. .  .  . In Rev. 12 the woman, surrounded by cosmic symbols, sun, moon, stars, seems to be the earthly complement of the angel in Rev. 10. A personification of light, she faces the hostile forces of darkness symbolized by the dragon. The battle will not end until all evil is conquered and the new creation comes to pass.2 The only possible and proper outcome, on this reading, is the utter annihilation of evil and its agents since only in this way can the intended order of creation be restored. Yet, that dualistic reading suggests that war is the proper and normative response to the distortion of God’s creation, rather than itself a distortion of God’s originally created peace. For this chapter’s purposes, the significance of beginning with this treatment of Revelation 12 is to insist on the linkage between creation and consummation, and to understand the entire cosmic narrative sweep of creation as part of a single action on the part of God rather than to understand creation and consummation as discontinuous and irrelevant to one another.

This phrase is borrowed from Gabriel Fackre, who used it frequently in his own writing. See, for example, Gabriel Fackre, The Christian Story: A Narrative Interpretation of Basic Christian Doctrine, Volume 1, 3rd edn (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996), 82. 2 J. Massyngberde Ford, Revelation (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), 195. 1

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Yet, as this chapter hopes to show, the challenge of considering the question of war in light of the doctrine of creation is precisely in understanding how the reality of violence can be understood under the category of the goodness of God’s creative action.

War in heaven A more detailed consideration of the cosmic war depicted in Revelation 12 is germane here. As Ford notes, the locus is the conflict between the woman and the dragon. Michael and the angels of God stand on the woman’s side against the dragon and his angels. The dragon, described as ‘a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns and seven diadems on his heads’ (v. 3), is juxtaposed with the woman, poised to give birth (vv. 2, 4). The dragon attempts to eat her son, ‘who is to rule all the nations with a sceptre of iron’, but the child is ‘snatched away and taken to God and to his throne’ (v. 5) while the woman flees ‘into the wilderness’ (v. 6). After the dragon and his angels are defeated and thrown down from heaven, the reader is told that ‘that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world . . . was thrown down to earth, and his angels were thrown down with him’ (v. 9). Richard Bauckham describes the narrative of chapters 12–14 as depicting ‘the messianic war from the incarnation (12:5) to the parousia (14:14-20)’.3 Notably, Bauckham sees the incarnation as the locus of the drama. The text can as easily be read to depict a cosmic conflict that extends back to the beginning of creation, but centres on the messianic redemption depicted by the woman’s labour and her child’s ‘snatching’ up to heaven.4 In either event, however, the crucial point is that the conflict is not merely terrestrial but rather cosmic in scope, and ends with the total defeat of evil at the hands of the forces of light.5 Given this militaristic narrative, one can understand how metaphors of a battle between good and evil have set the tone for much Christian cosmology. However, Bauckham makes another point, one to which this chapter will return. Referring to the culmination of the conflict in chapter 14, which depicts the triumph of the Lamb’s army, he writes: ‘[E]ven before the end of the description of these followers of the Lamb, the imagery has shifted from military terms to those of sacrifice and witness.’6 For Bauckham, this shift is crucial. However, it is overlooked in much of the recent rhetoric of Christian eschatology, in which the depiction of Jesus Christ as a non-violent ‘suffering servant’ is understood as only the first act in the drama of salvation. Christ’s return ‘on the clouds’ is understood as a violent and bloody return for the purposes of judgement and

Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 94. One can look to Jewish apocalyptic texts, such as Daniel, in which the Christ-event is absent (though Michael as heavenly general is present), for a view of this cosmic conflict as being an ongoing element of creation. The distinctly Christian contribution to the discourse is the insistence that it is centred and resolved through the incarnation. 5 Also worth highlighting is the interpretation of George Caird, who reads this conflict not in a military sense but rather in a forensic sense, portraying Satan not as a general of an anti-divine army but, rather, as an overzealous prosecuting attorney. See George B. Caird, The Revelation of Saint John (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996), 154–5. 6 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 94. 3 4

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punishment.7 On the contrary, Bauckham argues, the true victory of the Lamb comes through non-violent transformation rather than conquest.8 Yet, as presented in Revelation, the conflict does not end with the casting down of the dragon. Rather, as continued in chapters 13 and 14, the cosmic war continues through the satanic influence of the two beasts. As Charles Talbert argues, these beasts should be understood in context as manifestations of Roman imperial power.9 Having been defeated in the heavenly realm, the forces of evil continue their war temporally through the persecution of the church at the hands of Rome. This condition of persecution is at the heart of Revelation’s message: that the suffering of the faithful is not permanent but will be overcome by the victory of the Lamb. Through their suffering and witness, the faithful martyrs conquer the forces of warfare, violence, and death. For the early church for whom this text was written, warfare was something to be suffered rather than something in which to engage. The kind of struggle that Christians were called to was thus a non-violent proclamation of the Lamb’s victory, not taking up arms to meet the violence of the dragon with their own counter-violence. As Bauckham insists: ‘John’s message is not, “Do not resist!” It is, “Resist! – but by witness and martyrdom, not by violence”.’10 Even as the cosmic war echoes within the created world, war is not the intended state of creation. On the contrary, the final consummation is one in which the powers of war and violence are finally defeated and overcome through the witness of the Lamb, not through might or force. Yet, that final state of consummation is only attained on the other side of martyrdom and persecution. Underlying this narrative of a cosmic conflict is a set of theological presuppositions regarding the nature of the cosmos and how it is ruled. What Paul refers to as the ‘authorities’ and ‘powers of this present darkness’ (Eph. 6.12) are those who wage the cosmic war, the product of which is the suffering with which creation is cursed. This chapter will now turn to consider how these concepts shed light on the spiritual as well as the moral dimensions of war.

Powers and principalities Walter Wink begins his trilogy of books on the powers and principalities by analysing the mythic character of power in the New Testament context. Noting the distinction between the ancient conception of power and its modern understanding, he argues that ‘our use of the term

This interpretation has been prevalent in evangelical theology for much of the past century, yet its pedigree extends to the early church. For recent treatments, see, for example, David L. Allen and Steve W. Lemke, eds, The Return of Christ: A Premillennial Perspective (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2011); Alan S. Bandy and Benjamin L. Merkle, Understanding Prophecy: A Biblical-Theological Approach (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2015); Wayne A. Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994). 8 This point is also made forcefully in Jeffrey D. Meyers, The Nonviolent Apocalypse: Revelation’s Nonviolent Resistance against Rome (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021). 9 See Charles H. Talbert, The Apocalypse: A Reading of the Revelation of John (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 52. Talbert interprets the first beast as representing Roman military and political power, as embodied in the person of Nero, while the second beast represents Roman imperial religion and the cult of the emperor. See p. 55. 10 Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 92. 7

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“power” is laden with assumptions drawn from the contemporary materialistic worldview’.11 By contrast, the ancient viewpoint, as reflected in scripture, understood power as having both material and spiritual components – there was not an ontological separation between ‘spirits, ghosts, demons, or gods as the effective agents of powerful effects in the world’ and the material realm in which their influence was experienced.12 Rather the spiritual and material realms were, in a certain sense, porous to one another. The contemporary prejudice in favour of brute materialism results in the assumption that ‘spiritual’ is just another, possibly naïve, way of describing the ‘physical’ or ‘social’ – ‘laws of physical power, institutionalized forms of corporate power, psychological forms of power, perhaps even various forms of psychic power’. Otherwise, they are reduced to mere ‘superstition’.13 As a result, Wink argues, one’s ability to imagine the spiritual dimension of worldly conflict is truncated and impoverished: In short, our eyes and minds are themselves captive to a way of seeing and thinking that can only regard such entities as mere fantasies conjured up by the prevailing belief system. It is as impossible for most of us to believe in the real existence of demonic or angelic powers as it is to believe in dragons, or elves, or a flat world. For us the intermediate realm – what Henry Corbin has called the ‘imaginal’ realm – is virtually unknown. We simply do not have categories for thinking of such Powers as real yet unsubstantial, as actual spirits having no existence apart from their concretions in the world of things.14 This set of assumptions, Wink argues, allows one to remain ignorant of the genuinely spiritual dimension of the creation in which creatures exist: ‘The “principalities and powers” are the inner and outer aspects of any given manifestation of power. As inner aspects they are the spirituality of institutions. . . . As the outer aspect they are political systems, appointed officials, the “chair” of an organization, laws – in short, all the tangible manifestations which power takes.’15 All things in the universe – apart from God – are part of creation; therefore, creation is never ‘merely’ material but is simultaneously both spiritual and material. By separating the world into the ‘natural’, which can be described phenomenally and scientifically, and the ‘supernatural’, which is speculative and beyond empirical analysis, one ignores the simultaneity of the spiritual and the physical amid the everyday. The ‘powers and principalities’, Wink argues, aren’t ‘out there’ in any literal sense. Rather, they are with and among the rest of creation,

Walter Wink, Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 3. Wink’s analysis is far from unassailable from either an exegetical or a theological point of view. It does have the virtue, however, of bringing together the scriptural, theological, and ethical dimensions of power, particularly as power relates to the problem of violence, into direct conversation with one another, and in doing so, offers an incredibly useful heuristic for considering the problem of war from within the doctrine of creation. 12 Wink, Naming the Powers, 3. 13 Wink, Naming the Powers, 3. 14 Wink, Naming the Powers, 4. 15 Wink, Naming the Powers, 5. 11

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manifesting themselves through the behaviours and activities of the worldly institutions in which they appear.16 This is crucial for the larger argument Wink makes throughout the three volumes of his project and for this chapter’s purposes in understanding the nature of war in light of the doctrine of creation. As he states: In short, we must develop a fine-tuned sensitivity to what the ancients called ‘the war in heaven’. It is the unseen clash of values and ideologies, of the spirituality of institutions and the will of God, of demonic factionalism and heavenly possibilities. The unique calling of the church in social change lies in making clear the dual nature of our task. We wrestle on two planes, the earthly and the heavenly – what I have called the outer and inner aspects of reality. The ancients, in terms far more picturesque, spoke of this as the coincidence of what is above with what is below.17 War as a moral question can thus not be separated from war as a spiritual question. Insofar as violence in the human sphere of the ‘below’ corresponds to the spiritual dimension of the ‘above’, the two are co-imbricated. Yet, this does not imply that this is a dimension of reality beyond the capacity of human beings to address, either individually or collectively. On the contrary, the spiritual dimension of reality must be dealt with through human actions and institutions because that is precisely where they manifest themselves: ‘Any attempt to transform a social system without addressing both its spirituality and its outer forms is doomed to failure’.18 At core, Wink argues that to overcome the diabolical dimensions exercised by the powers and principalities within creation, one needs to confront ‘the Domination System’ of which they are a part and transform it. This transformation, Wink argues, is possible precisely because the powers are created forces within the one creation of God. There is not a realm of absolute evil that stands in contradiction to the divine will. On the contrary, Wink argues, the powers and principalities are created good by a good God, they are fallen, as creation as a whole is fallen, and they both can and must be redeemed, as the whole of creation is redeemed in Jesus Christ. ‘The Domination System’ is Wink’s name for ‘what happens when an entire network of Powers becomes integrated around idolatrous values’.19 Satan is the preeminent symbol of this system, which Wink argues emerges from a mythology of redemptive violence. He offers several examples of how this mythology is worked out symbolically within religious systems

As Wink argues in Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 173–4: ‘The new age dawning may not “believe in” angels and demons the way an earlier period believed in them. But these powers may be granted a happier fate: to be understood as symbolic of the “withinness” of institutions, structures and systems. People may never again regard them as quasi-material beings flapping around in the sky, but perhaps they will come to see them as the actual spirituality of actual entities in the real world. Even if we no longer endow them with human personalities and qualities, we can understand them to be as real as any thing: the invisible, intangible interiority of collective enterprises, the invariant, determining forces of nature and society, or the archetypal images of the unconscious, all of which shape, nurture, and all too often cripple human existence.’ 17 Wink, Naming the Powers, 130–1. 18 Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 10. 19 Wink, Engaging the Powers, 9. 16

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and concludes that ‘the myth of redemptive violence is thus the spirituality of militarism’.20 ‘Satan’ is the symbolic representation of this militaristic spirit within the Christian milieu. The values of the Domination System stand in opposition to the values of God’s reign, represented by Christ as the lamb of God.21 The heavenly war described in Revelation 12 is thus, Wink argues, a narrative of the ‘unmasking of the Domination System’.22 If violence is the tool of the system of domination, however, the implication is that the ‘war’ being fought in Revelation 12–14 is not a war in the military sense since the Lamb and his followers explicitly reject the idolatrous apparatus of the dragon and his followers. Wink, Talbert, and Bauckham all agree that the war on behalf of the Lamb is fought not with violence but through witness and martyrdom.23 However, the symbolic and mythic order has consequences in the phenomenal realm, and thus, as noted earlier, both the spiritual and social dimensions of the Domination System need to be addressed simultaneously. This requires an understanding of human morality and responsibility in the context of the reality of violence on the social and political level. How can violence be repudiated on the political plane if it has not been defeated within the system of domination? How can the values of the reign of God become manifest except within God’s reign? And if it cannot be done perfectly – if the ambiguous circumstances of historical experience require something other than witness and martyrdom – how can one begin to develop an ethics that addresses this? It is to this question that this chapter now turns.

War and the ethics of creation The body of literature covering the ethics of war is extensive and reaches back beyond the Christian tradition to figures such as Cicero, who formulated the traditional jus ad bellum (the law of recourse to force) and jus in bello (the law governing the conduct of hostilities) distinctions that were subsequently adopted by Ambrose, Augustine, and Aquinas as the foundation of Christian just war thinking.24 The ‘just war’ approach has tended to be the majority opinion throughout Christian history, but it has not had the field to itself. On the one hand, a Christian ethic of nonviolence is arguably older and has a firmer basis in the teachings of Jesus Christ.25 Through most of the first four centuries of the church, nonresistance was the predominant moral position among Christians with regard to war, and this position has continued as a minority position throughout Christian history.26 On the other hand, Christians have frequently supported wars on the grounds of their inherent righteousness and morality, justifying violence in the name of the command to holiness. This ‘crusade’ position represents the third major alternative in the history of

Wink, Engaging the Powers, 26. See Wink, Engaging the Powers, 46–7. Wink does not argue that this is a polar opposition. Rather, he writes: ‘The opposites are contained within God’s reign’ (p. 47). 22 See Wink, Engaging the Powers, 87–107. 23 Cf. Wink, Engaging the Powers, 92; Talbert, The Apocalypse, 51; Bauckham, The Book of Revelation, 94. 24 See Cicero, De officiis; Ambrose, De officiis ministrorum, 1.35.176. 25 See John Howard Yoder, Nonviolence: A Brief History: The Warsaw Lectures (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010). 26 See Mark Kurlansky, Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006). 20 21

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Christianity and has emerged periodically to provide a justification for Christian participation in warfare.27 However, there has been little attempt to ground Christian reflection on the ethics of war within the doctrine of creation specifically. Aquinas grounds his discussion within his treatise on the Virtues.28 Augustine does not treat the subject systematically but rather in the context of occasional writings responding to particular controversies.29 Similarly, on the Protestant side of the ledger, the magisterial Reformers did not make any particular attempt to provide a theological grounding for the adoption of the traditional theory of just wars, while the radical Reformers could be seen as embracing either an ethic of nonviolence or an ethic of crusade, depending on which figures are under consideration.30 But there was seldom a thoroughgoing attempt to understand the relationship of these moral arguments to the doctrine of creation beyond a very general appeal to the principle of a natural law or a right to self-defence.31 An exception to this general rule was Karl Barth’s analysis of war in the third volume of the Church Dogmatics, wherein he explicitly grounds his understanding of war within the doctrine of creation. The task of theological ethics, according to Barth, ‘is to understand the Word of God as the command of God’.32 In this first instance, this requires an ‘upward look’ to God’s action and is thus the proper subject of the doctrine of God. But it also requires a ‘downward look’ to the question of human action – to human beings as creatures and thus to the doctrine of creation. For Barth, this is the distinction between ‘general’ and ‘special’ ethics.33 However, in either case, the chief concern of ethics is the command of God, with a focus either on God as the one who commands or on humanity as the recipient of the command: Face to face with the ethical question, we have not only to consider a vertical dimension, the event or rather the many events of the encounter between God’s command and human action in a singularity and uniqueness which cannot be anticipated and which scorn regimentation. For these very events all take place – as can be seen both from the divine command and human action – in a definite connexion. Only as an event takes place in this connexion is it, in all its mystery, the ethical event. Only as the vertical intersects a horizontal can it be called vertical. We have thus to consider the horizontal

For a classic example, see Innocent III’s bull Post miserabile (1198), which initiated the Fourth Crusade. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), II.II, Q. 40. 29 See, for example, Augustine, Against Faustus the Manichaean. 30 So, for example, the Mennonites embraced an ethic of nonviolence grounded in the teaching of Christ, whereas Thomas Müntzer advocated violence. See Michael G. Baylor, The Radical Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Harold S. Bender, ‘The Pacifism of the Sixteenth Century Anabaptists’, Church History 24, no. 2 (1955): 119–31. 31 On the other hand, an appeal to natural law is not necessarily an argument grounded in the doctrine of creation. Natural law may be grounded in divine providence or the command of God no less than in the order of creation, and, in any case, may have insufficiently developed grounds in order to determine what its origin may be. Of course, as will be shown in the discussion on Barth herein, the command of God can be interwoven with the doctrine of creation in matters of ethics. 32 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. A. T. Mackay et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 4. 33 See Barth, CD III.4, 3–31. 27 28

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as well, and therefore the constancy and continuity both of the divine command and human action.34 Barth makes clear in his treatment of ethics in the context of the doctrine of creation that it cannot rely on any notion of natural law or orders of creation through which moral principles are generally known as objects of human inquiry because the command of God does not exist as a general object of inquiry. Rather, it is encountered always and only in the concrete circumstance. Thus, he criticizes Emil Brunner’s account of the orders of creation as being insufficiently grounded in christology.35 He prefers Bonhoeffer’s language of ‘mandates’, stating: We must try, unlike those who speak of orders or Brunner, but essentially like Bonhoeffer, to learn from the Word of God what is to be done. But we do not acquire this knowledge simply by considering the specifically ethical sayings of Scripture relevant to those spheres, and their previous ‘deposit’ in our own consciousness. A radical and comprehensive consideration of the Word of God to which these words of Scripture bear witness must be attempted.36 In what does this ‘radical and comprehensive consideration’ consist? Barth insists that it can only be grounded in God’s concrete action in Jesus Christ as the incarnate Word: ‘This is the general dogmatic assumption to which ethics may cling. It must cling to this alone if it is to proceed securely.’37 Through this divine Word, one comes to know the command of God and know God as the one who commands: He is the One who created heaven and earth, and on earth and under heaven [humanity]. He is the One who reconciles to Himself the [person] who as sinner has become His enemy, and in [humanity] the world. And He is the One who, from the danger and conflict in which [humanity] must still stand here and now, will liberate [humanity] for eternal life, redeeming [humanity] and making [humanity] perfect in the final act and revelation of His love.38 When one relates the ethical task of God to God’s word, one understands God not only as creator but also as reconciler and redeemer, and thus all of these dimensions are implicit within the ethical task. However, the form of the ethical task confronts the human creature in different ways through the ethical event: ‘This history is the reality in which the ethical event takes place, and to which we look from the event, and from which we must look back to the event to see it in its concreteness.’39 Thus, according to Barth, one encounters the reality of God

Barth, CD III.4, 17. See Barth, CD III.4, 19–21. Cf. Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative: A Study in Christian Ethics, trans. Olive Wyon (London: Lutterworth Press, 1937). 36 Barth, CD III.4, 23. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Scott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005). 37 Barth, CD III.4, 24. 38 Barth, CD III.4, 24. 39 Barth, CD III.4, 28. 34 35

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in the midst of this history in terms of various ‘spheres and relationships’.40 But these spheres and relationships should not be confused with ‘orders or ordinances’ of creation because then ‘there would always be the possibility of misunderstanding them as laws, prescriptions and imperatives’ rather than as ‘the spheres in which God commands and [one] is obedient or disobedient, but not laws according to which God commands and [one] does right or wrong’.41 Barth argues that these spheres and relationships ‘are not universal ethical truths, but only the general form of the one and supremely particular truth of the ethical event which is inaccessible as such to the casuistical grasp’.42 In contrast to an ethical system grounded in human reason or prudential judgement, as one could find in Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, and, more recently, Nigel Biggar,43 Barth argues that ‘to make decisions about the content of the divine command and good and evil in human action cannot be the task of ethics’.44 The ethical task, from the perspective of the doctrine of creation, is the articulation of the ethical event in which God commands, and human beings respond. From this starting point, Barth proceeds to consider how this articulation appears in different areas of human life. His consideration of the morality of war takes place in the context of his discussion of freedom for life. Human beings are, Barth argues, given their lives on loan from God, and thus their lives are oriented towards freedom before God.45 The meaning of human life is its relationship to God in the vertical dimension and to its fellow human beings in the horizontal, and thus human lives are intended for free fellowship with God and humanity. One’s obedience to God in one’s action is a command that a human being should ‘live in [their] acts, affirming and willing [their] existence, and doing what is necessary and possible for its preservation and continuation’. He continues: ‘In some sense it always contains, even if imperceptibly, incidentally or anonymously, the imperative: Thou shalt will to live.’46 To be free for life thus means, according to Barth, ‘the freedom to treat as a loan both the life of all [people] with [one’s] own and [one’s] own with that of all [others]’.47 As a loan from God, no human life has absolute value. All life is God’s to give and to take, and one’s ethical responsibility is to act in free obedience to God in the disposal of both one’s own life and that of others. Yet, to say that life does not have absolute value does not imply that it is not valuable. On the contrary, one’s own life and that of others exist under the command of God and thus are ‘placed in the light of a divine decree’:48 The fact that [one] lives, and that [one] does so in this individuality of a rational creature, at this time, in this particular orientation on God and solidarity with others, is something

Barth, CD III.4, 29. Barth, CD III.4, 29–30. 42 Barth, CD III.4, 30. 43 See Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1932); Paul Ramsey, The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility (New York: Scribner, 1968); Nigel Biggar, In Defense of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 44 Barth, CD III.4, 30. 45 See Barth, CD III.4, 331. 46 Barth, CD III.4, 333. 47 Barth, CD III.4, 335. 48 Barth, CD III.4, 335. 40 41

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which [one] cannot create of [oneself]. Nor can [one] maintain it effectively. Nor can [one] refashion it when [one] is no longer alive. [One] can only accept and live it in the way and within the limits in which it is allowed to [one] by God.49 Human life is an act of divine trust, and thus the ethical question is whether one will respect that which God has given, appreciate its value, use it freely, enjoy it and treasure it, and dispose of it as God wills, or not. Will one use the loan responsibly and show it its proper respect in recognition of God’s command? And how will one show life its proper respect? It is in answer to these questions that Barth considers several matters related to the taking or preservation of life, including suicide, abortion, and capital punishment. In this context, the ethics of war are a sphere in which the problem of life and its disposal are acutely raised, not only for soldiers and other military professionals, but also for humanity as a whole: ‘To-day everyone is a military person, either directly or indirectly. That is to say, everyone participates in the suffering and action which war demands’.50 The brutality of modern warfare lays bare ‘the appalling effectiveness and dreadful nature of the methods, instruments, and machines employed’. The extension of these methods and instruments beyond the battlefield into the bastions of civilian life ‘have made it quite clear that war does in fact mean no more and no less than killing, with neither glory, dignity nor chivalry, with neither restraint nor consideration in any respect’.51 In light of the hideous reality of war that Europe came to know in the first half of the twentieth century, Barth insists that war can only be justified under the strictest of moral scrutiny: ‘It is only in this extreme zone, and in conjunction with other human acts which come dangerously near to murder, that military action can in certain instances be regarded as approved and commanded rather than prohibited.’52 War, as a national mobilization for the sake of killing, implicates the entire population of a nation, while at the same time, those who fight and kill do so to those who themselves are acting in duty to and on behalf of their own nation, and thus war ‘calls in question, not merely for individuals but for millions of [people], the whole of morality, or better, obedience to the command of God in all its dimensions’.53 Barth continues: ‘Does not war demand that almost everything that God has forbidden be done on a broad front?’54 Any affirmative answer to whether a war should be fought, Barth argues, must carefully and precisely weigh the stakes, and acknowledge at the outset the ‘almost infinite arguments’ in favour of pacifism, arguments that are ‘almost overpoweringly strong’.55 All of which is to say that Barth begins from a position of presumptive pacifism, which can only be overcome in rare and particularly dire circumstances.56 War, in short, is not normal and should not be treated as

Barth, CD III.4, 335–6. Barth, CD III.4, 451. 51 Barth, CD III.4, 453. 52 Barth, CD III.4, 454. 53 Barth, CD III.4, 454. 54 Barth, CD III.4, 454. 55 Barth, CD III.4, 455. 56 It is worth noting Barth’s horror at the outset of the First World War, and the support for it by many Christian theologians whom he admired that led him to write the first edition of his Der Römerbrief. At the same time, he did 49 50

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a normal or generally acceptable state of affairs. It is an exception to the normal functioning of the state rather than a dimension of its proper sphere of action, which should be the fostering, rather than the annihilation, of life.57 Nevertheless, Barth argues that, despite the presumptive pacifism he suggests at the outset, ‘we cannot accept the absolutism of the pacifist thesis’ and thus ‘Christian support for war and in war is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility’.58 This is the slenderest of possible reeds that Barth is extending to the justification of war, however. He notes that one nation may throw another into the ‘wholly abnormal situation of emergency in which not merely its greater or lesser prosperity but its very existence and autonomy are menaced and attacked’.59 Under such circumstances – but only under such circumstances – can war be potentially justified.60 One’s responsibility for the lives and well-being of one’s fellow citizens may compel one to act in defence of the nation. And it may be that the independence of the state has a value that is necessary to preserve, even at the cost of fighting and killing: ‘It may well be that they are thus forbidden by God to renounce the independent status of their nation, and that they must therefore defend it without considering either their own lives or the lives of those who threaten it.’61 For Barth, it is precisely as creatures in obedience to the command of God that one must grapple with the question of the justice of war. As creatures for whom life is a loan, not to be valued absolutely, but to be lived and preserved and given and used in response to God’s command, the morality of war is thus almost always a perversion and abomination of the freedom for life for which human beings are created. And yet, those exceptional cases do exist, and, in such cases, the command of God may lead one to affirm the justice of a particular war. However, Barth insists, such cases are exceptionally rare.

The eschatological triumph of peace War represents a fundamental disruption of God’s created order, an ‘abnormal’ situation, in Barth’s words, supporting and supported by a system of domination governed by the fallen principalities and powers of creation. War is a form of systematized violence through which idolatrous ideological structures are kept in place. Yet the mythic narrative embodied in the book of Revelation affirms that the final triumph does not go to those distorted forms of power but rather to the army of the Lamb. As Wink insists, the powers and principalities embroiled in systems of domination were not created for those systems. They were created good for the purpose of fulfilling God’s aim in

his duty as a member of the Swiss militia during the Second World War, a circumstance that undoubtedly met his standard for dire circumstances. 57 See Barth, CD III.4, 458. 58 Barth, CD III.4, 460. 59 Barth, CD III.4, 461. 60 And even here, Barth argues, that may not be the last word: ‘Even the existence or non-existence of a state does not always constitute a valid reason for war. It can sometimes happen that the time of a state in its present form of existence has expired, that its independent life has no more meaning nor basis, and that it is thus better advised to yield and surrender, continuing its life within a greater nexus of states.’ Barth, CD III.4, 461. 61 Barth, CD III.4, 462.

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creation. Those created aims were distorted in creation’s fallenness, yet they are destined to be redeemed in God’s New Creation. The biblical narrative centres that drama of redemption in the person and work of Jesus Christ – the Lamb who was slain since the foundations of the world (Rev. 13.8). For Barth, Christ as the incarnate Word of God is the basis of the free fellowship of humanity that provides the ethical grounding for the command of God. For Wink, Christ’s sacrificial embrace of nonviolence breaks the spiral of violence through which the Domination System is sustained, and through his action provides the template for the embrace of an ethic of non-violent engagement that witnesses to the futility and immorality of war.62 Furthermore, the integrity of creation requires careful moral consideration not only of the human harm done through warfare but also of the harm done to non-human creation. The ecological destruction wrought by war compounds its immorality, revealing how war stands not only against the imperative to love one’s neighbours as oneself but also the biblical demand to act as good stewards of the creation. The earth itself is a loan no less than are individual human lives.63 Yet Wink also argues that the triumph of peace is not only an eschatological reality but also breaks into creation through human action. In Barth’s language, the vertical dimension becomes apparent within the horizontal. Revelation attests to this, he argues, as ‘resistance to evil and death, to the Dragon and its Beasts, is the only way to live humanly in an inhuman world’.64 Yet the triumph of the Lamb is already guaranteed through Christ’s sacrificial death – as the child of the woman, carried up to heaven in opposition to the dragon and its armies. So, the struggle remains a hopeful struggle: This capacity to enjoy victory in the midst of calamity is one of the most baffling aspects of Christian hope. The Book of Revelation may be gory, surrealistic, unnerving, even terrifying. But it contains not a single note of despair. Powerful as the Dragon of the abyss may appear, he has been stripped of real heavenly power. Those still in the clutches of the Enemy may not yet experience it, but the decisive battle has already been won. The struggle continues, but the issue is no longer in doubt. The far-off strains of a victory song already reach our ears, and we are invited to join the chorus. This is the rock on which we stand: The absolute certainty of the triumph of God in the world.65 Thus, the final word is a word of peace against war, embodied in the non-violent witness of Christ and those who follow him. And yet, on this side of the eschaton, the victory is always partial and provisional, and it may be that there are occasions when war is necessary, although, as Barth argues, such occasions need to be subjected to the most rigorous criticism, and should be understood to be exceptions rather than the rule.

See Wink, Engaging the Powers, 175–94. See Douglas J. Hall, The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come of Age (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2004); Anne Elvey and Keith Dyer, eds, Ecological Aspects of War: Engagements with Biblical Texts (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019). The ecological damage caused via military action can be tracked at ‘The Military Emissions Gap’, accessed 8 November 2022, https://militaryemissions​.org. 64 Wink, Engaging the Powers, 321. 65 Wink, Engaging the Powers, 321. 62 63

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What the mythic narrative of creation and consummation demonstrates is the means by which God’s will for peace is made manifest in the midst of a fallen world and how that peace is fulfilled in Christ as the incarnate Word of God, and the Lamb. War is the distortion of the good creation, yet the powers that propel creation towards war will finally be redeemed when the kingdom of God becomes manifest, and God is all and in all.

Further reading Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics III.4. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance. Translated by A. T. Mackay, T. H. L. Parker, Harold Knight, H. A. Kennedy, and J. Marks. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961. Biggar, Nigel. In Defense of War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. Edited by Clifford J. Green. Translated by Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Scott. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. Brunner, Emil. The Divine Imperative: A Study in Christian Ethics. Translated by Olive Wyon. London: Lutterworth Press, 1937. Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1932. Ramsey, Paul. The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility. Updated edn. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Talbert, Charles H. The Apocalypse: A Reading of the Revelation of John. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994. Wink, Walter. Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.

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CHAPTER 63 WORK TRIUNE AND HUMANE Gordon Preece

Introduction: Definitions and biblical bearings What common meaning can ‘work’ have for the creator God and for created humanity? Some assume it is completely univocal or common; others equivocal or completely different. Given bārā’ (‘he created’; Gen. 1.1) is only used in Genesis of God’s unique creative work, it might be best to opt for the second meaning. But God also ‘made’ (way-ya-‘aś; Gen. 1.7, 15, 26) manually, hands-on, and not effortlessly by word or by the Word (Jn 1.1). This provides an analogy for humans’ work, imaging God, governing creation (Gen. 1.26-28), offering their ‘whole’ lives of mental and manual labour transformed by the emerging new creation (Rom. 12.1-2). Within these poles of creation and new creation, God’s work in the economy of redemption provides a fruitful model for human work. The following exemplars all express this in trinitarian terms but locate their own starting points in different places – whether creation (Martin Luther and John Paul II), christology (Karl Barth), or pneumatology (Miroslav Volf). Defining ‘work’ is hard work. Some definitions are too modern, materialist, western, and masculine. They equate work (since c. 1800) materialistically with paid work, ignoring majority-world unpaid subsistence labour, domestic and volunteer work, and even slavery; all mainly female activities. Other definitions are too totalistic, like John Paul II’s ‘everything man accomplishes’.1 Volf ’s simpler definition suffices: Work is ‘an instrumental activity serving the satisfaction of [creaturely] needs’, ours and others.2 It includes most work and excludes leisure, although serious hobbies are somewhat like work. And some work, inwardly needed, selfpaced, and skilled, is as free as any activity. Biblically, humanity lives in a world of finite necessity. Eden was an abundant garden but not a pagan paradise with fruit falling unmediated from above. Adam and Eve were gardeners – they needed to be, or they went hungry. Beyond the garden, where God called them to go, the world was relatively uninhabitable, requiring robust subduing (Gen. 1.28).3 Despite romanticized views of creative work, even Michelangelo’s notebooks contain letters to tardy patrons demanding payment.4 The Marxist playwright Bertold Brecht is blunt:

John Paul II, Laborem Exercens: Encyclical Letter of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on Human Work (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1981), 1. 2 Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2001), 12–13. 3 See Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 197. 4 See Carolyn Vaughan, ed., Michelangelo’s Notebooks: The Poetry, Letters, and Art of the Great Master (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2016), 23–4. 1

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‘Grub first, then ethics’ (Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral).5 This fits the biblical bottom-line of work as, first, but not last, self-provision of food. Work, second, like food, has familial and social bonding purposes. Third, work can be a pleasurable and an aesthetic end in itself: God provided ‘every tree . . . pleasant to the sight, and good for food’ (Gen. 2.9) – suitable for sustenance, socially and morally good, and beautiful. Contrary to Mesopotamian myths, where humans were slaves for feeding ravenous gods, the Genesis God provided abundant seed for fruit-bearing plants to provide food. These require humans, who are created to work the garden. Formed from dusty and fertile earth, the earthling is ‘human from humus’, put in the garden to work (‛ăbôdâh) for someone or something, worshipping the creator, serving fellow creatures and creation. This is humanity’s origin and destiny (Gen. 2.5; 3.23; 4.2). Humans must also ‘keep’, observe, preserve, and guard the garden (Gen. 2.15). Urbanized westerners forget that working and keeping includes agriculture,6 but it also includes cult7 and culture. There is no sacred–secular divide.8

Creation-oriented theologies of work: (I) Martin Luther Linguistically and culturally, it is impossible to understand work today without also studying the related and often equated notion of calling or vocation. Simplifying centuries of development from Bishop Clement of Rome9 via Constantine’s church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, the commandeering of universal New Testament calling language for the salvation and lifestyle of all God’s people (laos) called (kleros) in Christ, now equated with exclusive priestly calling based on Old Testament models is dominant until the Reformations of the sixteenth century. Luther adopted, extended, and adapted Paul’s calling/vocation language to describe ordinary work in God’s good creation. The contemporary connection between work and creation cannot be understood without this massive step, or alleged misstep. For Luther, vocation has three main meanings: first, the gospel call to follow Christ (1 Cor. 1.2; 2.26); second, the work each person does as a social station/occupation (Stand) (for example, a farmer or prince whose occupation becomes spiritual work, or a calling [the Greek klesis translated in German as Beruf], when loving and serving others [1 Cor. 7.17, 20, 24]); and third, calling to the priesthood. The second is the focus here, as Luther’s usage is paradigm-changing from the exclusivity of the third

Bertolt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper / The Threepenny Opera, ed. Paul K. Ackermann (New York: Suhrkamp, 1982), 65. 6 See Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 29–32. 7 Cf. Num. 6.24; Exod. 25–40. 8 See Claus Westermann, Creation, trans. John J. Scullion (London: SPCK, 1974), chaps. 2–3. The threatened laceration of the linguistic and thematic linkage of agriculture, culture, and cult through sacred vs. secular, mental vs. manual, and agriculture/rural vs. culture/city divides, fails; the promise of blessing prevails, through Noah (Gen. 8.22; 9.20). 9 Clement’s First Epistle to the Corinthians (in chapters 1 and 65) uses ‘called’ in the universal New Testament sense. But in seeking to prevent schism and uphold the Corinthian leaders, he uses hierarchical Old Testament priestly and secular military models (in chapter 37) demanding lay (used first in this subordinate sense) obedience ‘to the laws that pertain to laymen’ (40.5), and to ‘the ministry [kleros, cf. clergy] presented’ to them (41). Cf. Yves M. J. Congar, Lay People in the Church: A Study for a Theology of Laity, rev. edn, trans. Donald Attwater (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1965), 3–5. 5

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(priesthood) towards the second (‘the priesthood of all believers’) in everyday vocational work, following from the first sense, as part of leading ‘a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called’ (Eph. 4.1). Earthly vocation is relational Luther’s vocational theology is framed by his Two Kingdoms doctrine, where Christ, Word, and gospel govern and mediate the heavenly kingdom, and God, as creator, and law, govern the earthly kingdom. ‘In the earthly realm [humanity] always stands in relatione, always bound to another.’10 Such social solidarity and radicalization of the Great Commandment apply to a wide range of created relational roles, not only to employment. Every Christian occupies several offices simultaneously; for example, parent, spouse, master/mistress, public officeholder, and even executioner. Luther famously wrote of fathers changing diapers as part of their vocation,11 and of blacksmiths’ tools being like preachers: ‘My dear sir, use me toward your neighbour as you would want him to act toward you.’12 While such medieval stations may seem static today, they are stages for the dynamic daily drama of God’s creative Word. Specific vocations are ‘optional’ for individuals, but creative faith and love are mandatory. Luther calls these vocational roles ‘God’s masks’, as in medieval mystery plays, masking the hidden, blindingly transcendent creator through the understated ubiquity of God’s work.13 This masking simultaneously transcends, relativizes, and sanctifies stations.14 Vocation expresses God’s continual, personalized creation Gustaf Wingren disputes the perception of Luther’s creational view of vocation as static. Vocational and social dynamism and solidarity are enabled by God’s constant creativity leapfrogging human depravity. Stations for Luther are ethical agents of God’s earthly law sustaining creation: ‘God himself will milk the cows through him whose vocation that is.’15 The creator’s presence pervades every office, prompting and prodding humans’ slothful nature towards freely loving service and opening their inwardly curved selves to others. Luther’s personalized Small Catechism response – ‘God created me’ – reflects the incessant immediacy of God’s creative work, no longer confined to the church or charitable works. According to Wingren, Luther’s inward freedom of faith and love before the creator’s face (coram Deo) lubricates vocational life against becoming ‘fixed or rigid . . . in an unchanging vocation where only a robot could function’. Externals are secondary because of ‘God’s

Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation, trans. Carl C. Rasmussen (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 4–5; citing Luther, WA 32:390–1. 11 See Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Volume 45: The Christian in Society II, ed. Walther I. Brandt and Helmut T. Lehmann, trans. Walther I. Brandt (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1962), 39–40. 12 Wingren, Luther on Vocation, 72; citing Luther, WA 32:495–6. 13 See Martin Luther, ‘Psalm 147’, in Luther’s Works, Volume 14: Selected Psalms III, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Daniel E. Poellot, trans. Edward Sittler (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 109–35. 14 Wingren, Luther on Vocation, 70; citing Luther, WA 23:189. 15 Luther, WA 44:6. 10

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ceaseless recreation of earthly relationships’.16 However, the two-kingdom contradiction between heavenly inner freedom of conscience and earthly and outer legal bondage to creation orders, expressed in Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian, becomes more dualistic, not just dialectical, despite Wingren’s reading.17 So, in 1525, Luther deplored the Peasants War for more just work and freedom from feudalism: ‘For baptism frees not life and goods, but the soul.’18 This dualism explains his indifference to structural or vocational change outside the working household. According to Luther, material, economic structures are outside the sphere of salvific transformation.19 His lingering Augustinian dualism adds a dulling coat of wax to his colourful creation theology. This leads to Volf ’s critique of Luther. Miroslav Volf’s critique of Luther’s protological vocation theology Volf ’s new creational perspective critiques Luther’s conservative, dualistic creational theology while preserving ‘Luther’s insight into God’s call to everyday work’ with its two key implications: first, an appreciation of work and ordinary obligations; and second, the overcoming of the medieval monastic exaltation of the contemplative over the active life. But Volf sees Luther’s application of this breakthrough as problematic in three ways: biblically (in its eisegesis of 1 Cor. 7.20ff. identifying social stations/roles with calling), theologically (due to its backwardslooking protology), and practically (for disallowing change from alienating work).20 Wingren defends Luther’s vocation framework against such criticisms by arguing that a dynamic creatio continua doctrine is core to Luther’s thought. Positive as this is, Luther’s divorce between a spiritual–heavenly kingdom and an earthly–bodily kingdom of vocation represents a false ‘auxiliary hypothesis’.21 Volf correctly sees the aforementioned Augustinian dualism as basic to Luther’s Two Kingdoms framework, neglecting bodily and sociovocational transformation of structures. The medieval three estates theory (clergy who prayed, nobility who protected, and peasantry who ploughed) ideologically identifies cultural and creation orders, reducing the transforming role of Christ and his Spirit to inward freedom and leading to later Lutheran misunderstanding of vocation in increasingly static terms. Volf sees this immutability of vocation as intrinsic to Luther’s singular soteriological analogy between spiritual and external calling – that is, between a singular and permanent/eternal calling and one that is unchanging, lifelong, and earthly. But this is more likely an overly rigid reading of 1 Cor. 7.20 (‘let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called’) as a direct divine command enforcing staying in one’s work or social station from conversion onwards. This ignores Paul’s pastoral concessions for peaceful marital relationships (1 Cor. 7.6, 9, 11, 15), circumcision as adiaphora or indifferent (1 Cor. 7.17-19), and even, arguably, disallows freedom from slavery (1 Cor. 7.21-24).

Wingren, Luther on Vocation, 94n28, 96–7. See Wingren, Luther on Vocation, 93–7. 18 Luther, WA 18:359. 19 Cf. Volf, Work in the Spirit, 103; Luther, WA 32:326. 20 Volf, Work in the Spirit, 106–7. 21 Imre Lakatos, ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs’, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge: Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 116. 16 17

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This was reinforced by Luther’s isolating protology (creation) from Paul’s eschatology (new creation) on living ‘as if ’ the world’s changing schema is indifferent, allowing for a free, not necessitated change of status or not (cf. 1 Cor. 7.29-31). Luther thus left an opening for 1920s German Christian Ordnungstheologie, stressing static orders of creation. He forgot that stations are only cultural approximations of created orders and instead made them akin to natural laws, as in Thomas Aquinas’ equally inflexible view of natural endowments that keep people in unchanging work roles within a hierarchy of being.22 Luther’s dualistic Two Kingdoms and primarily protological framework, his identification of vocation with social station, and his eschatologically pessimistic dualism explain his relative indifference to work and social alienation. But this is correctable by a less dualistic, Reformed and Barthian christocentrism, by an Irenaean view of a developing creation, and by embracing a trinitarian framework for thinking about vocation. By linking Luther’s core of creatio continua and vocation with a more positive, prospective, and dynamic new creational view of providence and vocation, this chapter will offer an answer to Volf ’s critique while adopting aspects of his pneumatological, new creational, and gift-based view of work in a triune framework.23 Will John Paul II’s more positive modern Catholic creation-based approach lead to some rapprochement with Protestant perspectives of vocation and gifts, or will it, too, need some trinitarian correction?

Creation-oriented theologies of work: (II) John Paul II The most significant recent creation-oriented theology of work is John Paul II’s 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens (On Human Labour). Before becoming a pope, Karol Wojtyla was a restaurant delivery boy, poet, stone-cutter, chemical plant worker, playwright, actor, philosopher (fluent in personalism,24 Marxism, and phenomenology), priest, and bishop. This was an intensive internship in the theology of work. He was also influenced by Belgian Catholic Action and French worker-priest movements. His association with Solidarity, a Polish union movement, was significant in sparking the former USSR’s collapse, a model still fruitful in current Belarusian protests. Laborem Exercens developed the rich Catholic Social Tradition formally founded ninety years earlier by Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891).25 It built upon the work of Vatican II (1962–5),

Volf, Work in the Spirit, 216n108. See Gordon R. Preece, The Viability of the Vocation Tradition in Trinitarian, Credal, and Reformed Perspective (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 305–7, 317. 24 Between the twentieth century’s two world wars, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, the Russian exile Nikolai Berdyaev, and French Catholics Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier developed the Personalist Movement as a third way between capitalist individualism and communist collectivism. It affirmed the dignity, creativity, and relational identity of God’s human image bearers based on God’s own personal nature. The 1950s Marshall Plan and the baby boom inspired optimistic growth, while 1960s anti-Puritanism turned from an otherworldly Catholic penitential theology of work towards a more positive creational and incarnational theology of work. See MarieDominique Chenu, The Theology of Work: An Exploration (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1966). 25 Leo belatedly updated medieval Catholicism’s fair wage teaching and guilds context to confront industrial capitalism’s ‘dark Satanic Mills’ reminiscent of poorer nations now doing the west’s dirty work while increasing their GDP. He affirmed the personal dignity of workers, a family breadwinner’s living wage, and rights of association for unions to balance employer power. This shaped the European Christian and Social Democratic tradition and centralized industrial relations, in Europe and elsewhere, for the twentieth century. Despite declining union participation, 22 23

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which had emphasized the creative and secular work of the lay apostolate in sanctifying the world ‘unfolding the Creator’s work . . . and contributing . . . personal industry to the realization in history of the divine plan’.26 John Paul II developed these hopeful personalist themes towards reorienting Greek philosophical and Catholic clerical exaltation of Mary of Bethany’s ‘perfect’ contemplative life over the ‘permitted’ active life of Martha (Lk. 10.35-42), as proposed by Constantine’s church historian Eusebius. This hierarchical distortion often quarantined more utopian, peaceful, spiritual, and communal memes from infecting lay material work, war, and plunder.27 Instead of this mutual insulation of clerical contemplation and lay action, Laborem Exercens sees work embracing both vertical and horizontal dimensions as a form of spirituality and sociality, ‘probably the essential key, to the whole social question’.28 Karl Marx defines humans’ essence materialistically as labouring animals, but humans are primarily, John Paul II avers, co-creators with God at work.29 Delight in the created goodness of work pulses through Laborem Exercens. Four things, in particular, might be noted. There is, first, attention to the question of ‘subduing’ creation (Gen. 1.28) through its external products of work and technology.30 This is expressed with ecological insensitivity until later somewhat balanced by Peace with God the Creator, Peace with all of Creation (1989), and, more fulsomely, in Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ (2015). Second, and blind to biblical context, ‘subduing’ is creatively subjectivized to include human self-ruling, working on developing the personal self. The internal ‘product’ is the ‘who’ of work, not the external good or ‘what’. Human beings are ‘both the goal . . . and the deciding agent in . . . production’.31 Work enables self-realization as humans, in a possibly neo-Marxist ‘making’ of themselves or a kind of work(s) righteousness. However, third, John Paul II adds critical nuance: work is ‘for [humanity]’, not humanity ‘for work’.32 This represents a non-instrumental alternative to a shared capitalist and communist rule by things over people. Following Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931), John Paul II

individualized bargaining in post-industrial and precarious gig economies, unions remain important. They help maintain just real wages and humane and secure working conditions, addressing creation-based survival, health, safety, and social aspects of work and human flourishing. 26 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: Gaudium et Spes; Promulgated by His Holiness, Pope Paul VI on December 7, 1965 (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1966), §34. See also Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium, Solemnly Promulgated by His Holiness, Pope Paul VI, on November 21, 1964 (London: Catholic Truth Society, 2012), §31. Volf cites from Gaudium et Spes (§38), as ‘containing probably the most notable . . . charismatic interpretation of Christians’ service to their fellows . . . through work and diverse gifts of the Spirit . . . to make ready the material of the celestial realm’. Volf, Work in the Spirit, 104–5. 27 See George Ovitt, The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 28 John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, 24.1. 29 See John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, 3.1. Stanley Hauerwas judges the notion of ‘work as co-creation’ to be ‘a remarkably bad idea’, following Barth; however, J. R. R Tolkien’s descriptor ‘sub-creation’ is best, given scripture’s allowing our imitating God’s ongoing making. See Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Work as Co-Creation: A Remarkably Bad Idea’, This World 1, no. 3 (1982): 89–102; J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf: Including the Poem Mythopoeia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 97–101. 30 John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, 4.1. 31 Miroslav Volf, ‘On Human Work: An Evaluation of the Key Ideas of the Encyclical Laborem Exercens’, Scottish Journal of Theology 37, no. 1 (1984): 68. 32 John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, 6.4, 6.5.

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advocates personalized worker participation at work. This affirms labour’s priority over capital as it works at and part-owns God’s great ‘work-bench’ and the ‘capital of creation’, plus labour’s technological heritage.33 Fourth, the relative right to private property ‘is subordinated to the right to common use’.34 After Communism’s collapse, this is developed (in Centessimus Annus, 1991) in a more freemarket direction, but within a legal framework potentially protecting the common good, labour, and the poor. Yet capitalist triumphalism post-1989 caused John Paul II’s hope for global solidarity to fade. Union membership declined, and multinational companies divided and conquered workers into undercutting each other.35 Women and work: Production and reproduction John Paul II does not fully apply scripture’s democratizing theology of work as human dominion to females, largely confining women to traditional domestic and reproductive work.36 His patriarchal Catholic gender ethic limited the liberating impact of Catholic personalist and social ethics on work. Still, some Catholic feminist theologians affirm potential in Laborem Exercens.37 Men’s and women’s imaging of God in creation, the priority of labour over capital, and the centrality of work to human self-determination have liberating potential for women when work is considered self-realization. Barbara Andolsen stressed the dignity and relative freedom that providing for oneself and for loved ones through paid labour often provides women.38 But women’s lopsided share of unpaid domestic labour should also be addressed.39 Pope Francis’ recent support for Universal Basic Income potentially addresses this but must overcome the patriarchal devaluation of women’s predominantly care-related work, both paid and unpaid. Further, the ‘care drain’ of millions of the Two-Thirds World women working overseas needs addressing, leading as it does to a ‘care deficit’ in their home countries and families.40 The creation mandate of Gen. 1.26-28 and 2.15 implies mostly shared production and reproduction responsibilities to the extent that biology allows. The mutuality of males and females in their representation of God to each other is essential to responsible rule and service of creation. However, as men treat women’s work, so men treat creation – as endless free resources for externalizing costs.

John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, 12.1–3. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, 14.1. 35 Gordon Preece, Changing Work Values: A Christian Response (Brunswick: Acorn Press, 1995), 217. 36 See John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, 19.3. 37 See Andrea Lee and Amata Miller, ‘Feminist Themes and Laborem Exercens’, in Official Catholic Social Teaching, Readings in Moral Theology No. 5, ed. Charles E. Curran and Richard A. McCormick (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), 411–41. 38 See Barbara H. Andolsen, Good Work at the Video Display Terminal: A Feminist Ethical Analysis of Changes in Clerical Work (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). 39 See Barbara Pocock, Natalie Skinner, and Philippa Williams, Time Bomb: Work, Rest and Play in Australia Today (Sydney: New South, 2012); Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family (New York: Penguin, 2015), chaps. 1, 4, 6. 40 See Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie R. Hochschild, eds, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004); Slaughter, Unfinished Business, chap. 11. 33 34

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Such liberationist themes were insufficiently developed by the papal conqueror of Communism, whether for feminists or for South American liberation theologians. However, for others, Laborem Exercens heralded a Catholic and Protestant consensus on a positive theology of work.41 This goes beyond John Paul II. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004) affirms work as fundamental to the Christian life.42 Benedict XVI’s 2005 Labour Day sermon echoed John Paul II’s ‘gospel of work’.43 Pope Francis, too, sees work affecting growth in human dignity through creativity, future planning, talent development, and taming technology from its dehumanizing tendencies.44

A Christ-centred theology of creation and work: Karl Barth The young Karl Barth was known as ‘comrade pastor’ in the Swiss industrial village of Safenwil. In the 1910s, he was active in worker education, organizing three labour unions, data collection on the Sulzer ammunition and Bally shoe factories, and negotiating with the local knitting mill manufacturer ‘like Moses with Pharaoh, asking him to let the people go’.45 Barth didn’t abandon activism altogether for academia. He remained a democratic socialist, opposed Nazism, questioned the Cold War, and preached regularly to prisoners. In 1919, one year after the armistice and two after the Russian Revolution, Barth wrote ‘The Christian’s Place in Society’, dialectically modifying his 1911 ‘Jesus Christ and the Social Movement’ article’s narrower ‘social revolution’ in light of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Romans bears witness to a more complete ‘revolution . . . before all revolutions . . . before the whole prevailing order of things . . . not . . . a denial but . . . an affirmation of the world as it is . . . in God . . . [and] not in a false transcendent world’, and argues that ‘genuine eschatology casts a light backwards as well as forwards’.46 Similarly, Barth’s Romerbrief II (1922) radically rejected German identification of the Protestant cultural and work ethic with God’s vertical and infinite kingdom. For Barth, creation is thoroughly eschatological, a veiled anticipation of God’s alternative order. Thus God’s ‘greater revolution’ transcends every revolution, civilization, and social and vocational ideology. Yet it frees humans for relatively righteous action in the world of work and politics.

See Lee Hardy, Fabric of This World: Inquiries Into Calling, Career Choice, and the Design of Human Work (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1990), 68. 42 See Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, ‘Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church: To his Holiness Pope John Paul II Master of Social Doctrine and Evangelical Witness to Justice and Peace’, The Holy See, accessed 15 August 2020, http://www​.vatican​.va​/roman​_curia​/pontifical​_councils​/justpeace​/documents​/rc​_pc​_justpeace​_doc​ _20060526​_compendio​-dott​-soc​_en​.html. 43 Benedict XVI, ‘Regina Cæli (St Peter’s Square, 6th Sunday of Easter, 1 May 2005)’, The Holy See, accessed 19 September 2020, http://w2​.vatican​.va​/content​/benedict​-xvi​/en​/angelus​/2005​/documents​/hf​_ben​-xvi​_reg​_20050501​ _workers​.pdf. 44 See Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015), 61–2 (§§127–8). 45 Preece, The Viability of the Vocation Tradition, 151; citing Barth’s letter to Eduard Thurneysen, dated 9 September 1917. 46 Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1928), 298– 300. 41

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In the 1920s and until 1936, Barth prophetically critiqued the natural theology of autonomous ‘creation orders’ merging into the German Christian ideology of ‘blood and soil’ within which Lutherans like Paul Althaus located the historical vocation of the German volk and Führer, perverting personal and political vocation. Christocentric creation and vocation The mature Barth’s Church Dogmatics is structured in trinitarian form partly to avoid isolation of the first and third credal articles through modern misuse of natural theology and Hegelian immanentizing of Geist (Spirit) within German culture. Hence Barth stresses the threefold Word of God in scriptural, preached, and, primarily, incarnate form (in CD I.2), and God’s election of Christ as divine elector/caller and human elected/called one (in CD II.2). This forms a christological pincer-movement with his doctrine of reconciliation (in CD IV), relativizing creation’s, and humanity’s, autonomy outside Christ. As the God-human, Christ mediates creation’s central, eternal, and internal covenant. Creation is its circumference or external form (CD II.1) making space for the drama of grace47 as ‘theatre’48 and ‘stage’ for Barth’s covenantalpersonalist (CD III.2) and providential (CD III.3) christo-anthropocentrism, converging in the section on work and vocation in CD III.4. Like many personalists, Barth says little about nature or ecology, ignoring the Swiss Alps, despite his love of Mozart as creation’s joyful voice. Yet, Barth’s No! to natural theology and to human, vocational, and cultural autonomy potentially makes a silence for a Yes! to humanity and creation through Christ’s all-embracing humanity. Barth’s Christ-centred anthropology and work Themes from Barth’s Christ-centred anthropology in CD III.2 pervade his treatment of work in CD III.4 under the subject of the creator’s liberating command. The personal trialogue of ‘I–thou’ encounter as Father and Son in the Spirit energizes Barth’s relational anthropology. God’s relational analogy ripples out to the created circumference providing personal and relational significance to cultural and working life.49 This is a more thoroughly trinitarian and christological personalism than is found in work by either John Paul II or Luther. Instead of the Lutheran static and horizontal created orders and the Catholic natural law structures of family, work, and state (which are open to secularization or idolatrous sacralization), Barth relativizes these allegedly autonomous orders vertically under the heading of ‘Freedom before God’. Thus election, freedom, and love of God, remembered each Sunday in confession and prayer as creation’s goal, precede the horizontal relations of co-humanity, life

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 44. 48 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.3, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and R. J. Ehrlich (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 48. 49 See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Harold Knight et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 249. 47

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on loan, and time-limitation (see table below). This places human work under the banner of God’s fundamental work of fostering freedom in created limitation. Barth’s christo-anthropology of election in Christ (CD II.2) links with the four freedoms of CD III.4 (§§ 53–56) where it shapes his criteria of free but finite humane work, as summarized in this table50 and explained as follows: CD III.2 Christo-Anthropology

CD III.4 Four Freedoms

CD III.4, §55 Work Criteria

§44 ‘Man as the Creature of God’, §53 ‘Freedom Before God’, the Objectivity: purposeful work with an elect being in covenantal Holy Day, confession, and prayer heart and soul history Worth: not trivial, dishonest, harmful, or dehumanizing §45 ‘Man as God’s Covenant Partner’ in I–thou encounter as God’s image

§54 ‘Freedom in Fellowship’ as male and female in community, family, and neighbourliness

Co-humanity: community, not competition or isolation

§46 ‘Man as Soul and Body’ under God’s Spirit

§55 ‘Freedom for Life’ as God’s Reflectivity: rational and soul loan and for the active life as our work task

§47 ‘Man in His Time’, with a God-given limited span

§56 ‘Freedom in Limitation’

Limitation: allowing for leisure and sabbath rest

‘Freedom before God’: Priority of rest over work (CD III.4, §53) Following Genesis 1, Barth prioritizes God’s command to rest on ‘The Holy Day’ before six working days of activity. Barth hears no positive command to work. One rests before working.51 By contrast, today, totalizing workplaces zoom into home offices under cover of work–life balance, externalizing costs onto employees and gaining 24/7 access to them.52 Barth’s re-ordering is a challenge to live by God’s creative work and not by one’s own. Humanity is more than Marx’s or managerialism’s homo faber. Thus, the week begins, not ends, with the Holy Day, for one is not justified by one’s job but rather by God’s sabbatical ‘Yes’ to creation in the risen Christ. Yet, dialectically again, the Holy Day relativizes one’s work before reaffirming work christologically53 – human persons are sent as workers ‘into the other days of the week’.54

Adapted from Gordon R. Preece, ‘Work, Theology of ’, in Global Dictionary of Theology: A Resource for the Worldwide Church, ed. William A. Dyrness and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008), 943. Used with permission. 51 See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. A. T. Mackay et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 52, 482. 52 See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile, 2019). 53 See Barth, CD III.4, 49–54. 54 Barth, CD III.4, 54. 50

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‘Freedom in fellowship’: Relationship before dominion, work ethic, and culture (CD III.4, §54) Here Barth further subordinates work to his Christ-centred personalism. His relational and sexual interpretation of the divine image contrasts with the Reformed (and John Paul II’s) dominion over creation aspect. This creation or cultural mandate is regularly credited with developing the Protestant capitalist work ethic, technology, and western civilization. But Barth sees no such mandate in the New Testament.55 ‘Freedom for life’: Work as part, not the whole of the active life (CD III.4, §55) This underscores, for Barth, that life is, first, God’s gift and loan, with work being understood as a providential part of ‘the active life’.56 Here, Barth makes any employment ethic secondary to the primary calling to witness to and prayerfully invoke God’s socially transforming kingdom as the distinctly human action. This is neither social (Marxism) nor individualistic labour (Capitalism).57 Economic necessity is the humbling human reason for work.58 Work is, therefore, part of, and not the heart of, ‘the active life’. So understood, Barth upholds the contemplative life but retains the Reformers’ critique of its Greek and monastic elitism and idleness. This counters Catholic clerical subordination of work. But it also attacks Protestant idolizing of work.59 Christo-anthropology and human work criteria (CD III.4, §55) The first criterion of objective/purposeful work involves human immersion in a task’s relative goal.60 The second asks about the worthwhileness of such purposes: Is work honest and useful, promoting ‘advancements, ameliorations, illumination, .  .  . even adornments of human existence?’61 Here, Jacques Ellul accuses Barth of economic idealism and ignorance, excommunicating entire economic sectors and ‘sending employers bankrupt and employees to the dole office’.62 Still, Barth has the early church tradition onside as he advocates work being minimally neither ‘injurious or ruinous’, like the arms and finance industries. Such damaging work should be damned.63 Third, humans coexist and cooperate in praying for and producing ‘our daily bread’. Work should be social work, not individualized, competitive, or inhumane.64 Barth critiques both

See Barth, CD III.4, 470–564. See Barth, CD III.4, 470–564. 57 See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.3.2, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 481–680. 58 See Gen. 3.17; Pss. 90.10; 104.23; Prov. 6.6-11; Barth, CD III.4, 472. 59 See Barth, CD III.4, 474. 60 See Barth, CD III.4, 527–9. 61 Barth, CD III.4, 530–2. 62 Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1976), 459–60. 63 See Barth, CD III.4, 530–1. 64 See Barth, CD III.4, 536–8. 55 56

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communist co-option and one-sided capitalist contractualism, objectifying workers as hands or means to economic ends.65 Fourth, reflectivity is based on humans being rational souls and subjects. Reflective work can occur despite unemployment, mind-numbing mechanical work, sickness, or domestic drudgery.66 Humans are heads and hearts as well as hands, imaginative architects and not busy bees, as in Marx’s metaphor.67 Fifth, for work to further human freedom it needs time limits against totalizing tendencies. Human work follows God’s completed work of creation and redemption. The sabbath celebrates this completion,68 offering a weekly strike and antidote to work compulsion. In sum, Barth’s combined criteria for humane work compares well with Marx’s and Volf ’s in opposing work and workers’ treatment as mere means.69 Barth affirms social and ecclesial countering of alienation through patient and partial steps toward humans’ real end in God’s kingdom, which is anticipated in the sabbath. Vocation as freedom in creaturely limitation Against the claim ‘we are creatures first then Christians’, in Barth’s anthropology, Christians are Christians first who only know true creatureliness as centred, elected, and covenanted in Christ for a ‘unique opportunity’ in time and place.70 This dynamic divine and human temporality provides more flexible forms of vocation than does Luther’s more fixed vocation for life. Thus Barth, citing Dietrich Bonhoeffer, distinguishes divine calling, as a ‘special’ and constant summoning of humanity towards its royal destiny in Christ, from human vocation, as one’s providential ‘place of responsibility’ in creaturely limitation.71 Barth further distinguishes this ‘comprehensive’ vocation embodied in a range of relational responsibilities particular to each individual from a ‘narrower’ occupation. This divine summons is ‘proper to all’, including the unemployed, homemakers, children, and the sickly and the elderly, who are useful test cases for the inclusiveness of vocation. A job is not the heart of their Christian or human vocation.72 God’s call is not equated with humanity’s spheres of responsibility, but it is closely related to such. God freely calls humans within social spheres without binding them to these spheres. Each person is uniquely called through creational criteria of age, history, personal ability, and life circumstances.73 Thus, creaturely limitations become forms of liberation in Christ. Barth blamed rigidities in Luther’s Two Kingdoms framework for centuries of compounding confusion between German culture, creation, and Christ. Though he affirmed Luther’s

See Barth, CD III.4, 542–3. Frederick Taylor’s compulsive Fordist mechanized management corrupted both systems. It still operates, but with sophisticated social measurement and mind-manipulation in Amazon’s inhuman, robotmanaged ‘Fulfilment Centres’. 66 See Barth, CD III.4, 546–9. 67 See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 1:283– 306. 68 See Barth, CD III.4, 550–3. 69 See Volf, Work in the Spirit, 170–2. 70 See Barth, CD III.4, 578. 71 Barth, CD III.4, 598. 72 See Barth, CD III.4, 599–600, 630. 73 See Barth, CD III.4, 600, 604–5. 65

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creational retrieval of vocation from its Medieval monastic monopoly via his ‘priesthood of all believers’, Barth believed that Luther’s law–gospel dichotomy tied vocation to law and the created order of the earthly kingdom, a move that cut vocation (Beruf) off from eschatological freedom and calling (Berufung) in Christ’s spiritual kingdom, and tied vocation to a vow-like role for life. The Creator Spirit and changing gifts and work Instead of a Lutheran fixed vocation, Barth moves towards a gift-based approach in similar ways that John Calvin included spiritual gifts within vocation. A range of vocational roles are opened to God’s call – as charismata change, through situational demands, and by the Spirit’s summons: ‘one ability now comes to the fore and another steps back’.74 Thus Barth prioritizes divine calling (Berufung) and gifting over human vocation (Beruf). This relativization of fixed roles enables provisional social transformation and vocational change.75 When moving into Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, it is found that human calling (Berufung) by God operates by relational analogy and action in witness to God’s triune work of reconciliation. Through prayer, proclamation, service, and kingdom ‘invocation’ (note the linguistic link to vocation), Christ brings social transformation and, belatedly, restoration of human dominion over the ‘lordless powers’.76 So Barth does discover a doctrine of dominion – not in creation, but in christological reconciliation.77 Further, there is another change of mind for Barth concerning the Creator Spirit’s underplayed role in the creation and new creation. Despite Barth’s stillborn pneumatology in the anticipated fifth volume of his Church Dogmatics, he earlier raises ‘the possibility of a theology of the third article, . . . of the Holy Spirit . . . [of] the entire work of God for his creatures . . . [including] calling’.78 In 1929, before the Church Dogmatics’ christological ‘domination’, Barth charted a pneumatological path between different Catholic and liberal Protestant natural theologies and subjugations of the Spirit. Here ‘The Holy Spirit as Creator’ establishes humanity in God’s image, the true knowledge of created orders, and their application to one’s calling.79 But Barth’s being caught between two world wars, due in no small part to German natural theology and its intoxication with its national vocation, led to his less fully pneumatological tendency and to a more constrained christological focus. Barth’s liberating theology of work and vocation Despite Barth’s downplaying their centrality in his Church Dogmatics, work and vocation still feature substantially to actively affirm and sustain one’s created existence by working to

See Barth, CD III.4, 603, 624–6. See Barth, CD III.4, 646–7. 76 See Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV.4: Lecture Fragment, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), 213–33. 77 This is contrary to the tenor of CD III.4, 470–564. 78 Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1982), 278. 79 See Karl Barth, The Holy Ghost and the Christian Life, trans. R. Birch Hoyle (London: Frederick Muller, 1938), 14–20. 74 75

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meet one’s own and others’ needs. Providence subordinates this to God’s central work and reconciling call in Christ. This enables the provisional transformation of work now, although Barth gives work less priority than does Luther, John Paul II, or Volf. Yet, by one litmus test for work ideology – its under- and over-employed victims – Barth excels. His mature christology maintains the convictions he developed while in Safenwil about Jesus, jobs, and justice, but within a more trinitarian, christo-eschatological hope for healing humanity’s working wounded. Barth offers critical criteria for liberation towards more humane work through God’s healing kingdom. His relativization of social labour to a smaller but significant part of God’s call, prioritizing the Lord’s Day, denying justification through one’s job, and humbling Marxist and some liberationist Promethean and capitalist ‘ideologies of work’ and co-creation still have global relevance for work’s victims.80

A Spirit-oriented theology of creation and work: Miroslav Volf With Miroslav Volf ’s Croatian Pentecostal roots, it is no surprise that he has taken up Barth’s belated pneumatological possibility by developing his doctoral mentor Jürgen Moltmann’s eschatological and pneumatological theology in his Work in the Spirit.81 While it is not yet fully integrated into his later social trinitarian framework,82 a fuller perspective on the Holy Spirit’s work in a cosmic and trinitarian context, and that in relation to human work, was long overdue. Gifts and work Volf sees Pauline spiritual gifts as an anticipatory experience of the Holy Spirit’s ultimate transformation of the material world. Two implications arise here: first, just as the Spirit’s activity is not closeted in the church, neither are gifts like evangelism (Eph. 4.11) and giving (Rom. 12.8). In this context, Volf also notes Spirit-anointed political judges, kings (Judg. 3.10; 1 Sam. 16.13; 23.2; Prov. 16.10), and temple builders and artisans (Exod. 35.2-3; 1 Chron. 28.11-12).83 Through the new covenant endowment of all God’s people, these ‘extraordinary tasks’ include ordinary work through the Creator Spirit expressing ‘the values of the new creation’. And second, gifts are not elitist, despite Pentecostal ‘supernatural addition’ given through anointed tongue-speakers and healers and Weberian sociological subtraction views of charisma as a talented, powerful personality. ‘Interaction’ models better connect personal and social history driven by human talent (creation) and cosmic, eschatological divine enabling (new creation).84

See Imliwabang Jamir, Vocation in Christ: Naga Christian Theology in Conversation with Karl Barth (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2016). 81 See Volf, Work in the Spirit, 79, 212–13n21. 82 As in Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998). Cf. Volf, Work in the Spirit, ix, 203n2; Miroslav Volf, ‘“The Trinity is Our Social Program”: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement’, Modern Theology 14, no. 3 (1998): 403–23. 83 See Volf, Work in the Spirit, 111–14. 84 See Volf, Work in the Spirit, 112. 80

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By distinguishing calling (as a singular salvational and ethical notion) from charismata (as plural and functional), Volf overcomes the problematic biblical basis, historical handicaps, and contemporary irrelevance of Luther’s protological view of vocation. He aims to: (i) be determined by the calling and equipping of the risen Lord and Spirit and not by social position; (ii) humanize alienating work instead of Luther’s vocational indifference. Gifts desire fitting work and trigger transformation and human and divine cooperation in anticipating new creation; (iii) allow plurality and flexibility of gifts through time and circumstance, better fitting what Zygmunt Bauman calls Liquid Modernity,85 rather than through the notion of an unchangeable calling; (iv) permit simultaneous or seasonal gifts (1 Cor. 14.12) for multiskilled Christians that better enables a more dynamic postmodern reframing of work; and (v) emphasize that the Creator Spirit, with Christ as Lord of all, also works through nonChristians in the world, albeit unconsciously.86 Eschatological versus creational paradigms Like Moltmann, Volf accents eschatological transformation and new creation.87 He gives four reasons for this eschatological priority: (i) the essentially eschatological nature of Christian existence; (ii) that new creation goes beyond restoring to transforming creation; (iii) its relevance to modern work by enabling human cooperation with God’s world; and (iv) it transforms and does not merely preserve work, through techno-economic structural change.88 Volf ’s valuable critiques and constructive proposals can be acknowledged as advances over purely creation-based vocational theologies without accepting in its entirety his new paradigm. First, eschatology is an but not necessarily the essential Christian characteristic. Christology surely has a stronger claim as Christ is ‘first and last’ (Rev. 1.17; 2.8; 22.13), ‘Alpha and Omega’ (Rev. 1.8; 21.6; 22.13).89 The Trinity is another clear contender. My own preferred economic trinitarian framework seeks more justice for the Father’s credal role as ‘creator of heaven and earth’, noting trinitarian appropriations or lead roles within the Trinity’s cooperative work. Volf ’s preferred social trinitarian framework, though not yet fully applied to work, could be as potentially fruitful as is his socially trinitarian ecclesiology in After our Likeness. Second, protological theologies of work stressing restoration or ‘back to the garden’ contrast with some discontinuous eschatological, ‘no work in heaven’ views. Yet there is room within a triune transformative view for rapprochement between Volf ’s continuity within the transformation view and similar Reformed views noting the Spirit’s role of completion – the garden in the city (Rev. 21), within an earthy, working (Isa. 65.17-25), humane, and urban eschatology. Further, because apocalyptic language is ambiguous, Volf uses creation and vocation concepts to develop specific gift-based ethics for eschatologically oriented work.90

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). See Volf, Work in the Spirit, 110, 115–18. 87 See Volf, Work in the Spirit, chaps. 5–6. 88 See Volf, Work in the Spirit, 101–2. 89 See Adrio König, The Eclipse of Christ in Eschatology: Toward a Christ-Centered Approach (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989). 90 See Volf, Work in the Spirit, chaps. 5–6. 85 86

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Third, a trinitarian Reformed framework accommodates divine–human cooperation through stressing the Spirit blowing over creation (Gen. 1.2), renewing humanity’s work (Ps. 104.30), and responsible dominion in Christ as suffering sub-creators (Rom. 8.18-30). Fourth, Volf critiques conservative providential vocation frameworks as ideological drains on needed technological and structural change. Conversely, Reformed theologians, such as Barth, see the change to vocational structures as rooted in God’s active providence as creatio continua moves beyond preservation.91 Providence preserves but also looks ahead (pro video) redemptively and eschatologically.92 Further, modern movements for human liberation and rights draw on creation as well as Exodus liberation themes (a subset of creation; for example, the plagues and sea opening, in Exodus 7–14), influencing the abolition of slavery’s dehumanizing work. Examples include: William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect’s 1787 portrayal of a slave pleading, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’, emblematic of the British Empire’s abolition of slavery; Martin Luther King Jr.’s biblical and philosophically personalist dignifying and economically empowering American dream and creed that ‘all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights’, his ‘beloved community’, and the Poor People’s Campaign, inspiring striking Memphis sanitation workers on the eve of his assassination; the way that Barth and Bonhoeffer’s prophetically critical views of vocational responsibility inspired South African Reformed and Anglican theologians such as John de Gruchy, Allan Boesak, and Desmond Tutu against Apartheid’s Nazi creation orders ideology; and Kathryn Tanner’s noting the critical socio-economic-political potential of God as the transcendent creator.93

Conclusion In sum, the aforementioned trialogue between various trinitarian theologians, each from their own starting point, shows that the language of God’s work as a model for human work is most empowering and balanced when God’s creative work from creation to new creation is stressed as thoroughly trinitarian. Behind the conservatism of some protologies of creation order and work lies a one-sided, insufficiently trinitarian, isolation of creation. This ideologically masks fallen powers as agents of preservation. But quietist escapologies also deal in the disempowering ‘opiate of the people’. Conservative and radical social stances are not causatively linked to creation and eschatology, respectively. Humbly and humanly imitating the servanthood of the crucified and risen Christ whose authority or dominion fulfils the creation commission (Mt. 28.18), and reflecting the triune creator’s distinctive and cooperative work in the world, is humankind’s way forward to liberative, transformative, and ideologically self-critical ways of working,94 for the healing of humanity and all creation.

See Gunton, The Triune Creator, 19. See Preece, The Viability of the Vocation Tradition, 256. 93 See Kathryn Tanner, The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1992), 78–9; cf. Preece, The Viability of the Vocation Tradition, 257–60. 94 See Volf, Work in the Spirit, 83–4, 108. 91 92

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Further reading Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics III.4. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance. Translated by A. T. Mackay, T. H. L. Parker, Harold Knight, H. A. Kennedy, and J. Marks. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961. Davis, Ellen F. Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Gunton, Colin E. The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. John Paul II. Laborem Exercens: Encyclical Letter of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on Human Work. London: Catholic Truth Society, 1981. Preece, Gordon R. The Viability of the Vocation Tradition in Trinitarian, Credal, and Reformed Perspective: The Threefold Call. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998. Preece, Gordon R. ‘Work, Theology of ’. In Global Dictionary of Theology: A Resource for the Worldwide Church, edited by William A. Dyrness and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, 938–46. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008. Volf, Miroslav. Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2001. Wingren, Gustaf. Luther on Vocation. Translated by Carl C. Rasmussen. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2004.

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CHAPTER 64 MEDICINE

Andrew Sloane

Introduction Medicine is a crucial, but contested, practice in the late modern world, and it faces multiple problems, old and new. Western societies allocate vast resources to medicine and to the healthcare systems in which its practice is embedded. And the ever-expanding array of diagnostic and therapeutic technologies associated with it seems to call for ever greater investment from those societies. They (or, I should say, ‘we’, as I live in Australia and benefit from its healthcare system) face difficult questions about what kind of care should be provided for people and at what cost. At the same time, communities in the majority world struggle to provide basic health care to those who need it. How are good decisions made about the resources that should be dedicated to this particular social enterprise, and how should such be distributed nationally and internationally? Familiar questions, perhaps, but important ones. The new questions that must now be addressed are equally important. Some relate to new and emerging medical technologies and their provision to people who might benefit from them; others relate to how such technical means might shape – and misshape – the nature of medicine as a caring profession and mute the voice of ‘vocation’. Still others relate to a changing global context – social and environmental – that has serious, even dire, implications for human communities and their health. It seems, indeed, as if after almost a century of being immune to it, there is a return to a world of epidemics. This chapter aims to bring medicine and a theology of creation into a critical conversation. As such, theological reflection will move in both directions. That is to say, the chapter will ask what contribution a theology of creation makes to a properly Christian – and so theological – account of medicine; but it will also ask what contribution a Christian account of medicine might make to a theology of creation. The chapter begins by identifying the kinds of questions that have traditionally been asked at the intersection of theology and medicine, noting their (at times myopic) focus on medical ethics, bioethics, and associated matters of theological anthropology. Deeper philosophical and theological issues are generally eclipsed or ignored in these discussions, and so this chapter argues that theological horizons need to be expanded to develop a properly theological account of medicine. The chapter will then outline key contributions that have been made to the theological interrogation of medicine, suggesting that they move towards our goal of an integrated theology of medicine, even if they don’t quite arrive there. The chapter will then sketch a creational theology of medicine, focusing on two principal (and related) questions – ‘What is medicine?’ and ‘What is it for?’ – before finally concluding with some thoughts on how theologies of creation and medicine might mutually interrogate each other so as to enable each discipline to enrich the other.

Medicine

Observations on (bioethics and) the theology of medicine Ours is not the first era to explore how Christian faith informs medical practice. While closer attention is now being paid to this aspect of history in light of the re-emergence of global pandemic disease, the church and its theologians have long sought to bring the gospel to bear on human (medical) needs. From the earliest communities in Roman cities, through the medieval hospitals and monasteries, to major Reformation-era figures such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, Christian communities have sought to respond with compassionate care to people suffering from epidemic and quotidian disease and have subjected it to careful theological scrutiny. Medical care is an important, even defining practice (or set of practices) deeply embedded in the Christian tradition. But the nature of those practices and their benefits has experienced almost revolutionary change in the last century and a half. The development of a wide range of antibiotics in the mid-twentieth century and readily available vaccinations made death from infectious diseases a rarity in more modernized countries. Rapid advances in anaesthesia and aseptic surgical technique meant that major surgery – even abdominal surgery – which in previous eras was an agonizing, traumatic, and risky endeavour, became widely available, relatively safe, and effective for an ever-increasing range of conditions. At the risk of banality and even cliché, the exponential growth in knowledge of human biology (including molecular biology), pathophysiology, pharmacology, and even physics, and the technological advances that have contributed to and arisen from such work have resulted in unprecedented knowledge of and capacity to treat diseases. Emerging technologies and controversial practices (including abusive research practices) led to the rise of bioethics as a discipline in the late twentieth century and increasing focus on the questions it seeks to address. Given the nature of the discipline and its history, this discussion has focused on controversial practices (e.g. abortion, euthanasia, assisted reproduction) and emerging technologies, and often at the intersection of both. Christian engagement with bioethics and medical ethics has generated significant theological work, especially in theological anthropology and its concerns with the limits of life, from Paul Ramsey’s pioneering work in medical ethics to major Vatican statements.1 But much theological reflection on medicine has been (unhelpfully) controlled by the lenses of bioethics and theological anthropology, to the neglect of larger questions about the nature of the discipline and its role in human community. Furthermore, while theological anthropology does necessarily impact the theology of medicine, the argument has tended to focus on human dignity, the imago Dei, human distinctiveness, and the like, and their implications for medicine at the extremes of human life.2 So too, while much work has been done on allocating scarce medical resources, such has largely been restricted to matters related to sophisticated technologies in ‘western’ contexts. Global issues, including questions about what good health care looks like in majority-world contexts, have largely been ignored.3 So, while there is much

Paul Ramsey, The Patient as Person: Explorations in Medical Ethics, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); John Paul II, The Gospel of Life: Evangelium Vitae (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1995). 2 See Andrew Sloane, Vulnerability and Care: Christian Reflections on the Philosophy of Medicine (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 29–51, 75–83. 3 There are, of course, welcome exceptions to this. See Lisa S. Cahill, Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice, Change (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005). 1

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to learn from theological anthropology and theologically oriented bioethics, the focus in this chapter will be on work that addresses broader matters of a theology of medicine.

Towards a theology of medicine Theological engagement with medicine often begins with an attempt to understand health and healing. Since fostering health and alleviating suffering are generally seen as being at the heart of medicine, this seems an appropriate place to start. However, Neil Messer notes that definitions of health tend to the extremes of either the totalizing, such as the (in)famous WHO statement,4 or the biological reductionism that has characterized the biomedical model.5 This, he argues, is the result of factors such as the inherently ‘fuzzy’ nature of concepts of health (and its [purported] opposites, illness and disease) and the way that ontological and teleological understandings of human beings (and communities) necessarily inform these notions. One great virtue of Messer’s work is the way he explicitly brings these questions to bear, and does so theologically. While he deals with the philosophy of health, he ensures that Christian theology reframes the questions and the grounds on which they might be answered. We are creatures, not just a species, and we have been created to flourish as creatures of this kind towards ends determined by God, which are made clear in scripture and in Jesus Christ. Drawing on Karl Barth’s notion of health as ‘the strength to be human’, Messer notes that suffering and limitation6 both witness to the brokenness of creation and provide an opportunity for particular forms of flourishing that cohere with the inherent weakness and vulnerability of human creaturely existence. This relates to another contribution of Messer’s work: he brings disability, and the insights of disability theology, to the centre of the discussion, rather than leaving them languishing on the margins. Clearly, there is much to learn from Messer’s work, including his commitment to broadening our attention beyond medical- and bio-ethics to the underlying theological categories that inform them. Central to these categories is the nature of human creatureliness and the ‘penultimate goods’ associated with our flourishing as creatures in history. His discussion of those goods and their value – albeit relative value in light of our ultimate telos –provides crucial elements of a justification of medicine as caring for vulnerable creatures and contributing to conditions that might enable their flourishing, but also chastens its totalizing tendencies and resists its idolatrous deployment as healthcare technique. Nonetheless, Messer’s work doesn’t quite ‘fit the bill’. Its most questionable feature is whether a theology of health is the best way to approach a theology of medicine. Perhaps ‘health’ does not do the requisite work, both because

The statement reads: ‘Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. ‘Constitution of the World Health Organization’, World Health Organization, accessed 7 October 2020, https://www​.who​.int​/governance​/eb​/who​_constitution​_en​.pdf. 5 Neil G. Messer, Flourishing: Health, Disease, and Bioethics in Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013). 6 While Barth explicitly identifies limitations not with creation’s brokenness but with creation’s goodness, Messer notes that limitation may reflect both the nature of creaturely existence and also its fallenness. Finitude and vulnerability are inherent in what it means to be creatures of the kind that we are, even as experiences of particular kinds of vulnerability and weakness are consequences of the fall. 4

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the notion itself lacks the clarity needed for it to do that job and also because it fails to capture what is at the heart of medicine and its practice.7 Discussion of the practice of medicine leads to theological critiques of the enterprise of medicine as it is currently, and so to the work of Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas directs his (often astringent) critique towards several features of medicine as a phenomenon in the late modern west: control, mastery, and the use of technology; ‘health’ as a consumer commodity; the willed ignorance of conditions of frailty and weakness in western culture (and the way that medicine reflects that and fosters it), and the marginalization of those who exemplify them. But perhaps his primary concern is how modern medicine articulates an identity-forming narrative antithetical to that which is meant to shape the church as an embodiment of the true possibilities of human community – a community of character. The narrative that drives medicine sees human life as an autonomous enterprise in which one seeks to overcome those things that would limit and constrain the free exercise of the will.8 It comes to echo and to foster this myth and the systems of mastery that are put in place in the vain attempt ‘to get out of life alive’.9 To put this in terms he does not, such a vision and narrative ignores – or actively rejects – the notion that the givenness of creaturely existence places limits on what is possible and desirable for humans to will and to do. The alternative is to turn, or perhaps return, to a different vision of medicine and to the storied community that might foster it. In this vision, human finitude and vulnerability are accepted as inherent to what it means to be the kind of creature humans are, as is the interdependence that allows for properly functioning communities. Medicine exists not to enable the exercise of one’s autonomy but rather to stand together with those whose vulnerability has been exposed, to ensure that it does not overwhelm them, and to express alternative forms of flourishing. This, too, finds its home in a Christian theology of creation and of humans as God’s creatures. A philosophically and theologically informed description of medicine as an existing phenomenon is needed before it can be understood, its malaise diagnosed, and a possible cure suggested. Here, the work of Catholic philosophers of medicine Edmund Pellegrino and David Thomasma provides a useful starting point. They argue that a philosophy of medicine needs to be derived internally from medicine as a social practice and its paradigmatic features.10 At the heart of medical practice is the clinical encounter between a person in need and a clinician with the power to meet that need. The experience of illness exposes the vulnerability inherent in the human condition, which then elicits the forms of care appropriate to respond to it. This, of course, makes medicine an intrinsically moral enterprise, inasmuch as power differentials and the eliciting of care are moral by their very nature. As such, it is neither the domain

See Sloane, Vulnerability and Care, 93–111. See Gerald P. McKenny, To Relieve the Human Condition: Bioethics, Technology, and the Body (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); David Bentley Hart, ‘God or Nothingness’, in I Am the Lord Your God: Christian Reflections on the Ten Commandments, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Christopher R. Seitz (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 55–76. 9 Stanley Hauerwas, The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 53. 10 See Edmund D. Pellegrino, The Philosophy of Medicine Reborn: A Pellegrino Reader, ed. H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. and Fabrice Jotterand (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008); Edmund D. Pellegrino and David C. Thomasma, Helping and Healing: Religious Commitment in Health Care (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1997). 7 8

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of mere technical competence (although competence is a virtue of medical practice) nor a commodity to be purveyed by practitioners and consumed by clients. Rather, it is care offered by a professional to a patient and an expression of a properly functioning human community.11 Furthermore, given that it is not controlled by technical possibilities and the tyranny of the possible, such a morally informed medical practice recognizes the limits of ‘cure’ – and that care extends beyond the boundaries of therapeutic interventions.

A proposal for a creational theology of medicine Outlining, briefly, a theology of medicine focusing on its nature and its goals will help identify how creational motifs contribute to a theology of medicine and the ways a theology of medicine might inform a theology of creation. While health and healing and the amelioration (if not elimination) of suffering are important to the work of a doctor, they define neither the fundamental nature of medicine nor its goal. Medicine is, at its heart, an expression of a community’s commitment to stand in solidarity with those whose inherent vulnerability has been exposed by illness, infirmity, or trauma, rather than abandoning them to it. And its goal is commensurate with that nature: to care for people in their vulnerability and frailty. Where possible, that care aims at doing what can rightly be done to enable people to flourish – and so healing disease and illness, alleviating suffering, removing those obstacles to engagement in the world, and participation in community that inhibit the attaining those ends proper to humans as relational creatures. In such circumstances, medicine deploys skill, knowledge, technology, and technique – in short, the power invested in doctors and the systems surrounding them – to meet human needs, aiming at curing disease, alleviating the suffering of illness, and overcoming the limits of infirmity. But such a ‘cure’ is not always possible: it is not always possible to ‘relieve the human condition’.12 Humans are finite in capacity, and mortal. Death will claim all in the end, and some conditions can, at best, be managed, never ‘cured’. That changes the form of care that medicine ought rightly to deploy; but it does not alter the fundamental nature of medicine or its goal. In conditions of irremediable brokenness, even distress that cannot be eased, medicine is still an expression of a properly formed community’s care for its most obviously vulnerable members and aims to care for them in ways that demonstrate the recognition of their inherent value as God’s creatures. This understanding of the nature and goals of medicine entails a theology of persons and of the human community. That theology of persons-in-community emerges, in turn, from a larger theological vision: Creatures of a good, order-making, sovereign God, humans were created in and for relationship with God, each other, and the created order, to enjoy and contribute to God’s shalom-making work in the world. Turning from that calling in sin, those relationships were fractured and distorted, and the human vocation perverted so that, while not losing the recognition of creatureliness or agential abilities, that agency contributes simultaneously to both disorder and order. God continues to engage with sinful humans for

Pellegrino and Thomasma see ‘healing’ as at the heart of the practice of medicine. While I think this is misguided, that ought not to detract from the contribution they make to a theology of medicine. 12 McKenny, To Relieve the Human Condition. 11

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the sake of both humanity and the world, calling Abram and Sarai, and then Israel as a nation, to walk in justice and rightness. Despite their failure and rebellion, God persists in that recreational task, coming in person in human flesh in the Incarnate Son to live and die and rise to exemplify and enable true human agency by the Spirit and to embody the final glorious and immortal destiny of humanity and the cosmos. Medicine, then, stands as a witness to the fundamental goodness of the world and embodied human existence in the face of current brokenness and seeks to restore, where possible, creation order in a world still subject to death and futility. It expresses God’s own ordering purposes, seeking to understand the world (in its ordered goodness and not-yet-reordered brokenness) so as to allow those biological and psychological systems God created to sustain frail flesh to do their work, and to disrupt factors that would interfere with their functioning or that directly afflict frail flesh. It contributes to God’s work of restoring a broken creation, imitating the healing work of the creation’s Lord. It does so as an anticipation of a future new creation, that final transformation and renewal of this creation which brings it to its God-intended end. But only as an anticipation – only as a foretaste, sign, and anticipatory promise of a restoration that is God’s sovereign gift alone and not a human attainment.

Medicine and a theology of creation in critical conversation Despite the earlier strictures against a myopic focus on theological anthropology and the image of God, such still contribute significantly to a theology of medicine. But it is particularly important to understand what it means for humanity to be created in (or perhaps as) the image of God and the very real limits of the theological work that that notion ought to do. As is evident in most systematic theologies, there is a pervasive tendency for discussions of theological anthropology to be oriented around two poles: the imago Dei and fallenness. One result is that the image of God is expanded to include all that might be said about humanity as created, with a particular focus on what differentiates humans from other creatures (be that understood ontologically, relationally, or functionally). This has often resulted in whatever is valued most about humans in a given social or theological context being projected onto the image (a kind of Feuerbachian anthropological move), with corresponding exclusionary consequences for those who might not exemplify those characteristics (especially people with a severe cognitive disability).13 Furthermore, the notion becomes bloated with a load of conceptual baggage from other domains, and the particular work it is meant to do in the creation account is lost.14 In such light, it is worth examining the Genesis account, albeit briefly. As has been frequently noted, the creation of humanity witnessed to in Genesis 1 is marked out from God’s other creative actions in several ways. It disrupts standard patterning in the text, it is the subject of divine deliberation, it receives more space than does any other act of creation (including a brief poetic expansion, and that in a particularly terse account), and it seems tied to the implementation of the divine creational program in interesting ways. And, of course, just what

See George C. Hammond, It Has Not Yet Appeared What We Shall Be: A Reconsideration of the Imago Dei in Light of Those with Severe Cognitive Disabilities (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2017). 14 See Richard Lints, Identity and Idolatry: The Image of God and Its Inversion (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015). 13

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is entailed in being made in/as the image and likeness of God has received a great deal of exegetical attention. Rather than focus on what the image is (if that is even the right question), we might instead consider what the image of God does, or is at least called to do. Whether this is understood as directly entailed in the notion or not, the text both marks out humans from the rest of creation and gives them a joint function in it – to rule, most likely as personal representatives of the divine ruler of all things, enacting God’s purposes, expressing God’s character, and being agents of the ordering purposes of the God of creative order. And that has important ramifications for a theology of medicine. Understanding ‘the image’ as vocation has substantial implications for understanding the world and engaging as agents in it, particularly when coupled with the naming vocation mentioned in Gen. 2.20. For all the limits of available data and the theoretical frameworks that shape apprehension of it, doctors have always sought to understand their patients and the conditions that afflict them, both because such understanding has inherent worth and also because it contributes to the forms their care for patients ought to take. Naming reminds us of the need to discern the nature of things to understand their place in creation’s order and how best to interact with them. If we connect that with scripture’s emphasis on the value and limitations of practical wisdom (an important, if too-often neglected, creational theme in the Hebrew Bible), we come to see the value of creational theology for understanding science and technology – including medicine. Our creaturely calling, including the limits associated with such, enable and constrain both research that helps us understand embodied human existence and interventions that might enable people to overcome barriers to their flourishing. Our remarkable capacity to understand the world, and the ability to turn that inquiry on ourselves as objects in the world (including such deep and complex systems as cellular function and neurophysiology), must be accepted as a gift. Such a gift prompts both wonder and awe, and the responsible use of that knowledge for the benefit of the whole community, and not only for those individuals and communities with the freedom and power to investigate the world. But we must recognize that our creatureliness establishes limits on what we can know and what we can change – something contemporary medicine, with its focus on technique and ‘biopower’, would do well to remember.15 The wisdom of finitude informs limits on medical knowledge and power, even as an awareness of vulnerability prompts their deployment. The orderliness of creation as a system also matters to a theology of medicine. Given that one of medicine’s key roles is to care for people in their brokenness, it is easy to think only of brokenness and not of order. But that ordering, both how systems interact with each other and the ends to which they are ordered, are crucial to all medical knowledge and care. This is true in the (relatively banal) way it is true for all science and technology: a more-or-less predictable world of cause and effect is both a necessary assumption of all scientific investigation and a condition of its success. Experimental design and technological application assume that the world will more-or-less behave now as it did in the past. That is true for medicine: anatomy, physiology, and bench science assume that for all the delightful diversity of us as a species, people and their bodies are put together and operate in fundamentally the same ways. But that

For an insightful philosophical critique of medical epistemology (and, intriguingly, a recognition that medicine needs theology), see Jeffrey P. Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). 15

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order also plays a constitutive role in clinical medicine and in the very possibility of therapeutic intervention. One vital role that medical and surgical interventions play is to shield the body’s healing processes from disruption, overcome barriers to them, or strengthen or enhance their creational functioning. A splint for a broken long-bone – or even surgical fixation – requires that the body’s normal processes – repairing torn vessels and connective tissue, dissolving dead bone and rebuilding skeletal architecture, restoration of muscles and their function – all operate as they should for the bone to heal. The splint (or surgery) aims to stop ongoing damage, while the creation of time and space allows for the body to heal itself – better, for God’s ordering work in creation to achieve its ends for creatures in conditions such as ours. So, too, antibiotics and antivirals aim to disrupt the function of a pathogen to allow the body’s immune system to do the work it is designed to do. Without a properly functioning immune system, no recovery from infectious disease is possible. I could go on, but the point is clear. However technically sophisticated the therapy might be, all medical and other interventions require the proper functioning of our creaturely systems if they are to work. They depend on creation being ordered and on the ongoing ordering work of the creator. The notion of creation order recalls that creation is ordered towards a goal. Humans are gifted with the privilege and responsibility of ‘subduing and ruling’ the terrestrial creation, a task that at least suggests that the ‘goodness’ of creation is not that of a static fully formed system but of one that has all the component parts in place ready to develop in ways governed by the character and purposes of God. It is ordered towards flourishing, but also to an end beyond itself, as God’s own rest in Gen. 2.1-3 suggests, and the Psalms celebrate (e.g. Psalm 96). What is implicit in the Hebrew Bible is made explicit in the New Testament, particularly its treatment of Jesus as the agent and goal of creation, the one who holds all things together in their current (penultimate) order, and sums them all up in himself and brings them to their ultimate end, their final eschatological order (e.g. Col. 1.15–23). Whether this is a redemptive end rather than one inherent in creation itself (a matter of some dispute),16 it is an end for creation as a whole and one with important implications for a theology of medicine. It is a reminder that the ends that medicine is oriented towards and the goods to which it contributes are penultimate, not ultimate, and that the only cure for mortality is found in the resurrection of Jesus and our bodily resurrection in a (re)new(ed) heavens and earth. This challenges the overweening ambition of biomedicine (especially most forms of transhumanism), reminding us that medicine cannot save us from frailty and finitude but only ameliorate the effects of brokenness. The theological awareness of the world’s brokenness also chastens medicine – at least in its current forms. If biomedicine has led to extraordinary advances in health care, with attendant benefits for millions (and it has), those benefits are, at best, unevenly distributed. People living as privileged beneficiaries of a liberal democracy and its post-industrial, late-capitalist economy have access to a level of medical care unimaginable for most people on the planet. True, people in the majority world benefit from vaccination programs and public health regimens that allow the control and even eradication of endemic infectious diseases. But medical research and the

For contrasting views, see Marc Cortez, ReSourcing Theological Anthropology: A Constructive Account of Humanity in the Light of Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017); David H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009). 16

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therapies (and preventions) it generates are heavily weighted towards conditions that afflict the rich rather than those that afflict people in lower-income contexts, despite the fact that the marginal utility of those treatments is inversely proportional to the resources dedicated to them. The awareness that humans are created in and for community, that the loving dominion entrusted to us and the benefits of our labour in the world are intended to be shared equally with all humans, not just a privileged few, should prompt soul-searching – and confession and repentance – in the medical fraternity. When medicine mirrors and compounds the fractured nature of human community rather than reflecting and contributing to the flourishing of all human creatures, theology has something to say. Finally, there is the extraordinary contribution that disability theologies have made to theologies of medicine. Many disability theologians would contest the association, even by juxtaposition, of disability with brokenness. Indeed, they would contend that such an association betrays the influence of a medical model of disability with all its ills. The disability theology movement argues that disability needs to be reconceptualized as an expression of creational diversity rather than as a consequence of the fall.17 Disability need not be seen as an impediment to human flourishing; indeed, it can provide opportunities to express both penultimate and ultimate creational goods. Moreover, false and marginalizing ableist assumptions lie behind the subjecting of people with disabilities to biomedicine’s totalizing gaze and deploying of medical power. While theologies of medicine need to pay attention to this critique, I resist some of its claims. For instance, I believe there is such a thing as a creational ‘design plan’, and that physical and intellectual disability reflect a disruption of it. That is to say, we are creatures of a particular kind with God-given capacities that enable us to navigate the world as God has made it. Disruptions to those capacities impinge on our ability to sense the world around us, process that information, engage in meaningful relationships with others, and enact plans that contribute to our common life. This is not the way it’s supposed to be – and neither are the distorted values and relationships that denigrate, exclude, or marginalize people with disabilities. Furthermore, the healings of Jesus and our eschatological transformation witness to God’s intentions for our embodied existence, but also allow us to recognize both the contribution of disability to personal identity and that people with disability can experience and contribute to the flourishing of their communities.18 Nonetheless, doctors and the systems they create (and which shape and misshape them) must listen carefully to people with disabilities to discern how best to serve them. Seeking to ‘normalize’ their function may be an imposition of biopower rather than an enabling of human flourishing. Truly, medicine has a lot to learn from a theology of creation. But equally, theologies of creation have much to learn from a theology of medicine. Theological reflection is sorely needed on matters as diverse as: disease and its role in creation; senescence and human experience; technology and the way it shapes and is shaped by culture and community; the therapeutic application of technology to the human mind and body, and possibilities of enhancement;

See Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994); Amos Yong, The Bible, Disability, and the Church: A New Vision of the People of God (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2011). 18 See Andrew Sloane, ‘Cognitive Disability and the Hebrew Bible’, Journal of Disability & Religion 25, no. 4 (2021): 412–26. 17

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mental illness; cognitive disability and agency and identity; neuroatypical cognition. These questions and others are not the sole purviews of medicine, but medicine is a practice that brings them into sharp relief and suggests the need for careful theological exploration. Two further issues call for attention here: embodiment and vulnerability. Medicine is a bodily practice. It deals with bodies and how they work, and does so (at least in its clinical forms) through a set of bodily practices. For medicine to forget the body would be for it to forget itself.19 Medicine, then, is in a good position to remind theology of the importance of the body. While Christian theology has a long, if at times ambivalent, tradition of affirming the goodness of the body and the material world, the body per se has not received the theological attention it deserves. As already noted, most theological anthropologies focus on the imago Dei and what distinguishes humans from other creatures. Animality is not distinctively human, and so the body has, until recently, generally received little sustained theological consideration.20 The recent resurgence of interest in the theology of the body, while welcome, has largely focused on sexuality and sexual identity.21 But the bodily nature of human existence has theological significance beyond matters of sex and sexuality. It informs issues as diverse as a theology of language and theological method, epistemology, and eschatology. Indeed, it is a central element of what it means to be creatures of the kind that humans are. While a theology of medicine is neither the only source of impetus for that larger theological project nor the only contributor to its ideational content, it does have something to say. It is a reminder that bodies are not incidental to human identity. Being a body is essential to being human and impacts every aspect of human existence. Ours are embodied minds. The concepts that structure our experience of the world and our understanding of it, the very metaphors that enable us to make sense of it to ourselves and to others, are determined by our bodily experience in time and space.22 Disruption to our bodies disrupts our cognitive capacities – and not just by way of direct cerebral insult. Few, if any, can do much constructive theological work when wracked by the pain of kidney stones. Ours is an embodied spirituality. Bodily practices, postures, and disciplines shape our experience of God and of others; and if true spirituality is to care for orphans and widows (Jas 1.27, echoing the prophets), then bodily practices are crucial to it.23 I could go on – ours are embodied communities; ours is an embodied destiny – but I think the point is clear. Theological anthropology needs to attend to the body. And given the attention medicine gives to it, theologies of medicine provide important resources to that systematic task. Finally, a theology of medicine should prompt theologies of creation to recognize that vulnerability and finitude are intrinsic features of human creatureliness.24 Again, systematics

Although, to be fair, it seems at times to be at risk of just that. See Joel Shuman and Brian Volck, Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006). 20 A notable exception is John A. T. Robinson, The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology (London: SCM Press, 1952). 21 See, for instance, Megan K. DeFranza, Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015); Ola Sigurdson, Heavenly Bodies: Incarnation, the Gaze, and Embodiment in Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2016). 22 See John Sanders, Theology in the Flesh: How Embodiment and Culture Shape the Way We Think about Truth, Morality, and God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016). 23 Warren S. Brown and Brad A. Strawn, The Physical Nature of Christian Life: Neuroscience, Psychology, and the Church (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 24 See Sloane, Vulnerability and Care, 40–1, 70–3, 83–5, 150–3. 19

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has addressed these phenomena. But all too often, such categories are collapsed into a discussion about sin, whether as a source or consequence. That is simply a mistake. Whether or not mortality is inherent in human creational existence, finitude clearly is. We are located in particular places in time and space; moreover, we have limited capacities and are prey to forces beyond our power. Much theological attention has been paid to the self-transcendent nature of what it is to be human; less has been given to what it means to be dependent and the vulnerability inherent in such a fact.25 Again, without claiming that a theology of medicine is the only voice that might contribute to this expanded conversation, it is an important one. For human vulnerability and the care that it summons is at the heart of medicine as a social practice. And it reminds us that this vulnerability is not an occasional lapse from the normal; nor is it somehow quarantined to those with obvious illness, disability, or incapacity. It is who we are. And acknowledging that and caring for each other in our shared finitude, frailty, and vulnerability is central to our calling as creatures and to the forms of communal life we are called to exemplify.

Conclusion Now, perhaps more than ever, medicine and medical care capture our hearts and minds. This highlights the intrinsic and instrumental value of careful theological analysis of the nature and goals of such a complex – and expensive – set of institutions and practices. The theology of creation has proven to be a fruitful locus of this reflection. Indeed, a robustly creational theology of medicine can critique, enrich, and reform both the practice of medicine in the late modern era and the practice of theology in the service of the church and its vocation in the world.

Further reading Bishop, Jeffrey P. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. McKenny, Gerald P. To Relieve the Human Condition: Bioethics, Technology, and the Body. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Messer, Neil G. Flourishing: Health, Disease, and Bioethics in Theological Perspective. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013. Pellegrino, Edmund D. The Philosophy of Medicine Reborn: A Pellegrino Reader. Edited by H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. and Fabrice Jotterand. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Pellegrino, Edmund D. and David C. Thomasma, Helping and Healing: Religious Commitment in Health Care. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1997. Shuman, Joel and Brian Volck. Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006. Sloane, Andrew. Vulnerability and Care: Christian Reflections on the Philosophy of Medicine. London: T&T Clark, 2016.

One notable exception is Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London: Duckworth, 1999). 25

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CHAPTER 65 TECHNOLOGY CYBERNETICS AND CREATION Scott Midson

Introduction: Technology and Genesis It can be difficult to conceptualize the link between Christian creation narratives and technology, especially given that the biblical creation narratives of Genesis 1 and 2 do not contain direct references to technology. Tools aren’t explicitly mentioned until Gen. 4.22, where Tubal-cain is said to make bronze and iron tools. Tubal-cain’s brothers are also affiliated with technologies in the sense of tools for making shelter (tents) and for making music (lyres and pipes) (Gen. 4.21-22). Beyond these explicit references, technologies can be inferred through references to tilling (see Gen. 2.15; 4.2).1 Such tilling is ambiguously presented by the Genesis narratives, particularly as Cain murders his brother Abel, which alienates him from the soil now stained with his brother’s blood (Gen. 4.10-14). The toil of tilling the cursed soil is something that humankind later seeks relief from, which is presented in the figure of Noah, another of Tubal-cain’s brothers, who is proclaimed by Lamech, his father, as being the ‘one [who] shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands’ (Gen. 5.29). God then commands Noah to build an ark, a product and example of technology (Gen. 6.14-16). Noah’s story suggests a divine vindication not only of technology but also of technology as a means of deliverance and a form of earthly salvation. Throughout Genesis, then, there are depictions of technology as toil alongside technology as liberation from labour, and of technology in its alienating and destructive capacity alongside technology in its positive and constructive capacity. Technology is also presented as a tool (means) and an object (ends). Like humans – who are both blessed and cursed, good and fallen, created and destroyed, creative and destructive – there is no single image or portrayal of technologies across the creation and subsequent narratives. Recognition of this is important if we are to successfully trace the contours and nuances of our humanness and actions, including those via technologies, in the world. How, then, can technologies be read and made sense of in the light of creation narratives? What is the relationship between technology and creation? And what, according to Genesis, can be deduced as appropriate relationships with and through technologies? In response to these questions, this chapter shows how narratives of creation can inform ethical guidelines for how humans consider technology by encouraging reflection on how humans express and understand themselves in situ with creation via technologies. Notions of creation and technology frame human existence, and the tensions and ambiguities between them can be

Regardless of whether actual tools are suggested by tilling, the principle, ‘technics of agriculture’, conveyed by the first chapters of Genesis is arguably a technological one. S. D. N. Cook, ‘Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on Genesis 1–3’, Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 45, no. 4 (1996): 418. 1

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critiqued and explored to reveal much about human desires and responsibilities and how ethics systems navigate between the two. To sketch out what is envisaged by the connectedness of creation and technology, as well as the ambiguities and tensions in the relationship, what follows begins with two case studies: Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem, ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’, which imagines a human–technology utopia, and Eduardo Kac’s 1999 art installation, Genesis, which emphasizes a human–technology hermeneutics. These examples – these stories, these tools – demonstrate the stakes of the relationship between creation and technology and indicate why an ethics of technology is important and how such might be developed. They also inform the framework for the subsequent analysis by drawing attention to two key themes – causality and responsibility – that inform many ethical concerns about technology. Specifically, who or what is causal in accounts of creation and technology in Genesis and beyond? And to what extent does – or should – causality determine responsibility in our ethical frameworks? A cybernetic ecology Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem, ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’, envisions an Arcadian state ‘where mammals and computers/live together in mutually/programming harmony’.2 Underwriting Brautigan’s utopian vision is a ‘cybernetic ecology’3 that draws on pioneering work by computer scientist Norbert Wiener and others in the then fairly new field of cybernetics (this work traces back to the 1940s). The term ‘cybernetics’, which is about a ‘science of control’, etymologically derives from the Ancient Greek word for ‘steersman’ and relates to the term ‘governor’.4 Cybernetic systems work by ‘impos[ing] order and structure on phenomena’, which they do ‘by making self-regulating feedback loops’.5 An everyday example of a feedback loop in a cybernetic system is an innocuous thermostat: a user sets a temperature, which kickstarts the heating system’s boiler. Once the sensor in the thermostat detects the user-specified temperature, the system regulates itself to maintain that temperature by switching off the boiler or regulating its flow. The ‘steersman’ of the cybernetic system could be considered twofold: (1) in the self-regulation and relative autonomy of the system, which may even constitute a rudimentary ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI);6 and (2) in how the human user sets the temperature for the system to maintain. The latter is often decisive in how one labels and regards everyday cybernetic systems: ‘typically, it is humans who are the users of such systems, and so they are figured as the eponymous steersmen that the technologies are ordered-to’.7

Richard Brautigan, ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’, in Live Poetry, ed. Kathleen S. Koppell (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 20. Reprinted by the permission of Salky Literary Management as agent for the author. Copyright © 1959, 1969 by Richard Brautigan. Copyright renewed © 2006 by Ianthe Brautigan. 3 Brautigan, ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’, 20. 4 Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2004), 108. See also Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1965), 18. 5 Scott A. Midson, Cyborg Theology: Humans, Technology and God (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 94. 6 There has been much debate about the term ‘AI’ given that the notions of both ‘artifice’ and ‘intelligence’ rely on contested assumptions about authenticity and independent thought, reasoning, and computation. The allusion to AI here is merely to acknowledge the connection between cybernetics and AI principles, particularly when it comes to pertinent concerns about humans being in or out of the loop in both technological systems. 7 Midson, Cyborg Theology, 94. 2

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The twofold identification of a ‘steersman’ resonates with the Genesis creation mythologies. Especially in Genesis 1, God is the creator, a kind of technologist perhaps, who brings everything into being; it is humans, though, who are commanded to be the tillers and the keepers that maintain the created order. Humans are responsible for regulating the system (the created order), akin to the self-regulating thermostat. The term ‘dominion’, introduced in Gen. 1.26 to refer to God’s command to humans to enact stewardship upon other creatures, can be seen as a parallel of the cybernetic ‘steersman’ in the sense of definition (1), which serves a regulatory and maintenance role from within the system. Taking this analogy further, God can be seen to fulfil the role of steersman in the sense of definition (2), given that God intervenes in creation but is external and other; there are clear links between the system and its external steersman, but for the most part, the system is self-regulating without requiring external intervention. Out of these initial parallels between cybernetics and creation, then, the concept of the steersman can be used to identify internal (1) and external (2) steering or governing figures in different contexts. By considering these together – that is, by locating cybernetics in wider creation and exploring the relationship between the two – one can note humans’ multiple roles in technology and creation. Analogously, humans fulfil a similar role to God’s vis-à-vis creation in relation to cybernetic systems. Humans are thus arguably steersmen according to definition (1) with regard to creation, but they fulfil definition (2) with regard to cybernetics systems. While cybernetic systems might then be said to model wider creation, it is also important to acknowledge that both are continuous with one another rather than discrete. In other words, cybernetics systems are not simply self-contained abstract microcosms of creation, but they also participate in wider creation. That humans simultaneously fulfil two different criteria for steersmen across these contexts indicates recursion, which attends to the ways that smaller systems model but are conditioned by and condition the bigger systems of which they are part. Here, the connections across porous systems and across the different figural steersmen raise questions about agency and accountability – or causality and responsibility – across different levels of creation that are to be highlighted and explored. Yet, whereas recursion acknowledges connections across systems via the participation of microcosms in wider wholes, Brautigan’s poem acknowledges connections across nature and technology – as cybernetic forests and meadows – in a way that subsumes or rewrites creation as technology. Here, it is not necessarily that God is a technologist of sorts, to return to an analogy earlier suggested, but that technology is presented as a god of sorts. So Brautigan’s final stanza imagines a world: where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.8

Brautigan, ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’, 20.

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Brautigan’s utopian vision is one in which technology, in the form of cybernetic machines and devices, is ubiquitous (as fused with, yet also somehow distinct from, nature) and liberatory (as watching over creatures benevolently, much like the Christian understanding of God). Technology is presented as allowing humans to rediscover connectedness with non-human creatures, seemingly achieved by absolving them of their power or responsibility associated with the role of steersmen. Unlike with recursion, which highlights accountability through connections and multiple roles (i.e. of humans), Brautigan presents inversion through a zerosum game where the system is totalized, and only one form of steersman – machines of loving grace – is recognized. In this apolitical and utopian scene, duty is subtextually presented as something that stands in the way of such blissful connections because it is only insofar as human labours are outsourced to the eponymous ‘machines of loving grace’, which seem to serve as stand-ins for humans and God alike, that humans can live harmoniously. While these depictions of humans resonate with what Gen. 5.29 describes as ‘relief from our work and from the toil of our hands’, such ideals are not without controversy: the historical instantiation of these visions has notably challenged such lofty ideals. The technological outsourcing of human work was most fervently realized when the machines of the Industrial Revolution began to replace (or at least re-place) human labour, optimizing outputs and efficiency but sparking backlash from many, including those associated with the Luddite movement. Now, the self-regulating potential of cybernetic systems heralds a new wave of ‘artificially intelligent’ technologies that many fear can push humans further out of the loop by automating more and more human tasks, including in production lines, vehicles, and in increasingly ‘smart’ cities and homes. In these contexts where selfregulating and semi-autonomous systems are having impacts across creation rather than being self-contained, one might ask: Is a liberation from duty the deliverance of utopia and harmony that Brautigan imagines, or can the figure of the steersman, placed recursively in its theological and technological contexts, offer another way to consider human roles and relationships? A useful place to begin to respond to this question is by further examining the steersman’s role in Brautigan’s poem. The cybernetic feedback loops of the machines fulfil the criteria of a steersman in the first – that is, internal and self-regulating – sense. Beyond this, Brautigan doesn’t indicate an external agent in the second sense of the term ‘steersman’. ‘Grace’ is referred to, which suggests divine assistance and sanctification, but whether the machines are a symbol for God or whether they supersede God’s role vis-à-vis creation is left ambiguous. This quandary also relates to that discussed by theologians of human dominion: Do human actions acknowledge or usurp God? Do we find evidence of recursion or inversion? The former position recognizes an external agent or steersman (2) that humans, as internal steersmen (1), are accountable to by their duties and recognizes those that humans are responsible for as mandated by those obligations. These accountabilities and responsibilities go beyond vague connections. Indeed, given the absence of accountability, one might ask whether the reconnection between humans and their mammalian siblings that closes the final stanza of Brautigan’s poem is a vapid notion of connection bereft of responsibility other than that which is outsourced to the eponymous machines of loving grace. In light of this, this chapter now turns to another case study as a counterpoint to Brautigan’s vision to better express one’s sense of responsibility as enacted through technology. This enriches one’s critiquing and contouring of analogical and recursive understandings of God–human–technology relations through cybernetics. 856

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Techno-Genesis Eduardo Kac is a bioartist who explores human relationships with technology and other species. Bioart, or ‘transgenic’ art, expresses and critiques human relationships with and through technologies, taking living bodies as a ‘canvas’ for different interventions and transformations. Kac’s bioart pieces – which include a glowing green rabbit formed by adding a fluorescent jellyfish gene to the rabbit’s DNA9 – exemplify this emphasis on embodied aesthetics, where the ‘artworks’ are not microcosms or representations that are ‘self-contained’ in conventional artistic media but rather highlight the real and lived possibilities and consequences of technological creativity. Of course, given that ‘the “GFP Bunny”10 project is a complex social event that starts with the creation of a chimerical animal that does not exist in nature’,11 this kind of work raises ethical concerns. The rabbit, which is a ‘chimera’ – that is, a hybrid and often monstrous creature – goes outside of nature by creating something new. How might one read this human and technological work of creation in light of the divine and ordered work of creation as told by Genesis? Kac’s broader portfolio of work encompasses responses to this important question. Before creating ‘Alba’ the bunny in 1999, Kac presented an installation called Genesis. In a similar vein to GFP Bunny, Genesis is a transgenic artwork that explores the intricate relationship between biology, belief systems, information technology, dialogical interaction, ethics, and the Internet’.12 The interactive artwork comprised several parts, with an ‘artist’s gene’ at its centre. Kac created this gene by translating (an already translated – that is, English – version of) Gen. 1.26 into Morse code and then developed a coda for translating that into DNA base pairs. The resultant gene comprised of those DNA base pairs was then incorporated into bacteria featured in the installation. The interactive part of the installation was realized in how online users could turn an ultraviolet light in the gallery on and off, which brought about biological mutations in the bacteria. As a result of those mutations, the DNA sequence was changed. Kac then concluded his work by translating the sequence back into Morse code and then into English. For Kac, ‘the ability to change the sentence is a symbolic gesture: it means that we do not accept its meaning in the form we inherited it, and that new meanings emerge as we seek to change it’.13 At different levels, Kac’s work highlights humanity’s transformative work: in the manifest form of technological activity in the world; and, latently, through the impacts of interpretation and hermeneutics, such as the meanings generated by reading Bible passages. Together, both readings suggest transformation – specifically through human activity – as an ongoing enterprise rather than as a one-time act. In other words, we cannot not be transformative or creative. That, for Kac, this is technological work performed by humans conveys a different conception of technologies from Brautigan’s vision of machines of loving grace. Both Brautigan and Kac touch on the complex work of technologies in drawing connections across humans and non-humans alike, depicting technologies as a fundamental part of the world, but Brautigan places more emphasis on the liberation of humans, depicting them as

See Eduardo Kac, ‘GFP Bunny’, accessed 2 May 2023, https://www​.ekac​.org​/gfpbunny​_essay​.html. ‘GFP’ stands for ‘green fluorescent protein’, which is the genetic material that the rabbit was created with. 11 Kac, ‘GFP Bunny’. See also Eduardo Kac, ‘GFP Bunny at 20’, Journal of Posthuman Studies 4, no. (2020): 119–28. 12 Eduardo Kac, ‘Genesis’, accessed 2 May 2023, https://www​.ekac​.org​/gensumm​.html. 13 Kac, ‘Genesis’. 9

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free from toil while also harmoniously re-joined to animals via technological means. Kac’s transgenic artworks could perhaps espouse such a conclusion in terms of the techno-mediated relationship between humans and bacteria, but note the artist’s own words about the role of humans in the technological relationships he depicts and enacts: As a transgenic artist, I am not interested in the creation of genetic objects, but on the invention of transgenic social subjects. In other words, what is important is the completely integrated process of creating the bunny, bringing her to society at large, and providing her with a loving, caring, and nurturing environment in which she can grow safe and healthy. This integrated process is important because it places genetic engineering in a social context in which the relationship between the private and the public spheres are negotiated.14 Kac’s ‘integrated process’ could be seen to accord with Brautigan’s vision of a harmonious cybernetic ecology, but whereas Brautigan sees technologies as liberating for humans, Kac wants to acknowledge the ongoing responsibilities of humans to care for subjects in ways that resist their objectification (which, presumably for Kac, is brought about through detachment and denial of integration). In this regard, Kac distinguishes between technological objects – such as Noah’s ark – and technological subjects – such as Alba the bunny. Alba’s liveliness suggests one way to make sense of this distinction, which raises the question of how technology is perceived in that hybrid and chimeric being. Another way to make sense of this technological subjectivity is to be more attentive to Kac’s emphasis on the human role in creating and nurturing such subjects (which, to be sure, the upkeep of the ark could be seen to constitute). Here, Kac focuses on the ‘others’ that humans bear responsibility for and are accountable to, contrary to Brautigan, who outsources such responsibilities to machines. As such, one might note that Brautigan talks about machines of loving grace; Kac tries to steer the focus onto humans of loving grace. What follows here is an exploration of these positions by reading both visions of cybernetics and creativity more closely alongside Genesis’ cosmogonies and understandings of relationship. Specifically, the chapter investigates the notion of responsibility as an expression of accountability among humans, technology, and God. It does so by asking what creation narratives suggest about humanity’s role – in particular, humanity’s sense of agency, duty, and purpose – and considers what might be seen to compromise or outsource human responsibilities that comprise human(e)ness.

Creating (with) technology: Framing an ethics of technology Defining technology Thus far, this chapter has referred to technology as tools, objects, systems, and subjects, all of which inform broader notions of change and transformation. As a category, ‘tools’ is perhaps the most readily discernible and intuitive subset of technology, and it suggests how changes are brought about. In this sense, distilling what one understands by ‘tools’ to

Kac, ‘GFP Bunny’. Italics mine.

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consider technology more broadly, technologies are the means of change. This definition can encompass technological objects, such as Noah’s ark, which was produced by tools but is also a means of bringing about protection – salvation, even – from a flood. Such a view of technology – as means – is consonant with the etymology of the term, which derives from the Ancient Greek root word τέχνη (technē), referring to practical processes of making and doing things. The Hellenistic philosophical tradition – specifically, Aristotelian thought – comes to this definition of technology in distinction from more abstract processes of theorizing and conceptualizing ideas. As Martin Heidegger notes, the emphasis for Aristotelian approaches to technology is on producing, which relates to Aristotle’s fourfold principles of causality.15 These principles – material, formal, final, and efficient – bring about effects, all of which are the work of technology.16 Technologies, then, are seen as the means and modes of transformation. What is useful about Aristotle’s quadripartite causal principles as collectively a way of conceptualizing technology is the sense of holism they provide, relating instrumental and anthropological dimensions through acknowledgement of what and who is involved in the transformative processes. In other words, technology encompasses more than the material tools, but also includes the design, skill/labour, and end goal/purpose that brings a practical change. As Heidegger writes of this approach, which ‘is in obvious conformity with what we are envisioning when we talk about technology’,17 it helps one to see technology both as ‘a means and a human activity’.18 Including the anthropological and the instrumental in the technological promotes a richer understanding of technology whereby, as Noreen Herzfeld notes, ‘technology is not just the machines, chemicals, or instruments we use but also the techniques, processes, and methods by which we use them’.19 This means that systems – such as cybernetic systems but also, for example, managerial or bureaucratic systems – can themselves be technological in that they are not necessarily or entirely material, but they represent an approach or operative framework that is ordered to human ends (i.e. we use them). Herzfeld’s definition of technology represents a form of technological voluntarism, in which ‘people freely create technological artifacts and see technological development as completely malleable’.20 Carl Mitcham and Katinka Waelbers, however, question the validity of such claims by asking:

(a) To what extent do humans shape technological products or processes?

(b) In what ways do technological products or processes shape human action and perception?21

See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 7–8. 16 Taking a simple example of a table to illustrate Aristotle’s theory of causality: material causes relate to the physical composition of the product, that is, wood; formal causes relate to the design of the product, that is, the table’s design; the final cause relates to the purpose of the product, i.e. dining; the efficient cause is the agent of change that is apart from the thing being created, that is, the carpenter. 17 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 5. 18 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 5. 19 Noreen Herzfeld, Technology and Religion: Remaining Human in a Co-Created World (West Conshohocken: Templeton Press, 2009), 8. 20 Carl Mitcham and Katinka Waelbers, ‘Technology and Ethics: Overview’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, ed. Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, and Vincent F. Hendricks (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 371. 21 Mitcham and Waelbers, ‘Technology and Ethics’, 371. 15

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While positive affirmations of (a) tend towards technological voluntarism, (b) suggests a countervailing trend wherein technological developments seem to follow their own ‘inner logic’, referred to as technological determinism.22 Here, the telos of technology is not strictly anthropological: Herzfeld elsewhere implies this view in writing that ‘technology has one purpose – to change the world, to reshape ourselves or our environment’.23 This definition, which could resonate with the changes brought about by the cybernetic meadows of Brautigan’s poem, is notably vague on the beneficiaries of such changes. Indeed, the openness of this definition indicates that technology may not be ordered to human ends or goals in that it is not always or unequivocally of benefit to humans materially or morally, which is a significant ethical issue. There is a concern that technologies can harm humans, such that, as Jacques Ellul writes, as a result of technological change, people ‘now live in conditions that are less than human’.24 The dehumanizing capacities of technology – expressed as ‘alienation, bureaucratization and intensified decision-making – not to mention environmental pollution and transformation’25 – are figured through Aristotle’s fourfold model of causality as having technological, rather than human, ends. Ellul and other prominent critics of technology understand dehumanization by emphasizing final causes – that is, the notion of technology pushing humans out of the loop and not prioritizing human (and humane) or anthropological ends. But there is another way one might understand dehumanization in light of Aristotle’s quadripartite causal principles: a deprioritizing of efficient causes in technological systems. One might look again to cybernetics here, with its self-regulating feedback loops that, as already noted, relocate and impel a reexamination of the role of the ‘steersman’. To this end, pioneering cyberneticist Norbert Wiener tellingly describes his work as developing ‘a mechanico-electrical system which was designed to usurp a specifically human function’.26 This, he considers, could, on the one hand, lead to a dominance of the machines; on the other hand, he notes the possibility of cybernetics ‘giv[ing] the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor’.27 Either of these scenarios could characterize Brautigan’s machines of loving grace, where the emphasis is on the usurping of human functions. Whereas a teleological or final causality distinguishes between the technologically deterministic and human-centred scenarios, in either case, the role and place of the usurped human – expressed through the causal efficacy of humans and machines – is unacknowledged. Aristotelian-informed approaches to technology acknowledge the presence of the anthropological and the instrumental in (technological) causality; they see the importance of both humans and machines in explaining causality. Yet they fail to address the contextual embeddedness of efficient causality, particularly in terms of the wider networks of responsibility and accountability that humans (as efficient causes) participate in. To suggest one example as a corrective of these shortcomings, theologian Philip Hefner sees humans as ‘created cocreators’ in that they are inherently creative and tool users but also accountable and oriented

Mitcham and Waelbers, ‘Technology and Ethics’, 371. Herzfeld, Technology and Religion, 8. 24 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 4. 25 Mitcham and Waelbers, ‘Technology and Ethics’, 368. 26 Wiener, Cybernetics, 6. Italics mine. 27 Wiener, Cybernetics, 27. 22 23

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to God.28 We might also expand this to consider one’s accountability to other humans and creatures (more on this later), an important part of the anthropological factor that Aristotelian approaches to causality fail to unpack. By and large, these approaches underwrite instrumental views of technology, which results in a problematic siphoning off of the kinds of ethical reflections on accountabilities and responsibilities that I am calling for here in our attitudes to technology. Recognizing the shortcomings of obscuring and outsourcing ethical reflections by not addressing how humans and technologies alike can be ordered-to others, Heidegger resists an Aristotelian approach to technology and turns instead to Plato, for whom technē and epistēmē (ἐπιστήμη, meaning ‘knowledge’) are linked rather than dichotomized (whereas Aristotle separated practical from abstract knowledge).29 This sets the scene for thinking seriously – where such thinking is a fundamental part of what technology is – about not what technology produces but rather what it reveals or brings forth, as well as what it conceals, or, as Heidegger says, ‘challenges’.30 What technology reveals and conceals of human nature – namely, the expression of human responsibility and accountability – is a question that demands more emphasis on the anthropological rather than the instrumental aspects of technology; in other words, it requires one to think more closely not only about to what ends technology functions (human vs technological) but also about the integration of human and technological causality, and the co-shaping of both. Attending to this point will yield more insights into the figure of the steersman and its multiplicity in recursive frameworks. Domin(at)ion The beginning of this chapter already noted that while technology does not explicitly appear in Genesis 1 or 2, this does not mean that it is absent. Indeed, for S. D. N. Cook, ‘the creation and Eden myths depict our relationship to nature as profoundly technological’.31 As he proceeds to say: The text even defines human beings explicitly in terms of a technological role, that of caretakers of nature. More broadly, the treatment of our relationship to nature here includes a technological characterization of both human nature and the human condition – particularly when ‘technology’ is understood to include both our instruments and our ability to deploy tools and techniques.32 Cook sees human nature as technological through human actions in the world, including using tools as a means to human ends and humanity’s mandated role as caretakers vis-à-vis wider creation, where humans are, arguably, themselves means to divine and created ends. The recursive framework that holds together these accounts of humans is expressed through an emphasis on dominion, an instruction given only to humans. While God commands humans

Philip Hefner, The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 27. See Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 13. 30 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 15. 31 Cook, ‘Technology and Responsibility’, 416. 32 Cook, ‘Technology and Responsibility’, 416. 28 29

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and animals (sea creatures and birds) alike to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen. 1.22, 28), only the former is given the additional instruction to ‘subdue’ the earth and to ‘have dominion’ over other creatures. The hierarchical connotations of this command are clear: for Cook, ‘this is often taken to mean that humans are in a superior or dominant position in the worldly scheme of things; that our role is to dominate the earth and its wildlife, to do with them as suits our purposes’.33 Many ecotheologians have understandably condemned such views: Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam, for example, aptly characterizes human dominance as ‘the ecological sin of irresponsible stewardship’.34 The issue is one of responsibility and power, especially when the latter is decoupled from the former, which Phyllis Trible discusses: As surrogate, steward, viceroy, or plenipotentiary, humankind represents God on earth. . . . With this vocabulary God gives humankind great power. Thereby, ‘dominion’ emerges as the first of two words that signal trouble for the ecological bliss of Genesis 1.35 The extent to which power is transferred from God to humans, as per a zero-sum game, is central to the issue of dominion and accusations of domination. Where the absoluteness of the power is perceived or maintained, as through human causal efficacy in the world, one finds a transference and even an inversion of power. It is significant here that Brautigan’s poem recaptures something of the ‘ecological bliss’ of Genesis 1, yet it does so by absolving humans of power and transferring that power to our machines. On the other hand, where dominion is about representation, and with that about an ethics of accountability and responsibility, a recursive model that is cognisant of the interconnected parts and whole is suggested. How, then, do we as humans understand, model, and represent God’s creative power? The cosmogenesis mythology of Genesis 1 presents God’s creative power as one of bringing forth a structured order out of the ‘formless void’ (Gen. 1.2). God achieves this by separating binaries – light/darkness, sky/land – across the days of creation (Gen. 1.3-19), which highlights a fundamental binary between formlessness and emptiness on the one hand, and structure and fullness on the other. God is thus presented as causally efficacious, which espouses an instrumental reading of creation that connotes what was noted earlier as an Aristotelian-inspired reading of technology. The aggrandizing of human stewardship, or surrogacy, over creation emphasizes the causal efficacy of humans, which ecocritical theologians have regarded as a way of remaking the world in humanity’s own image or as being deeply anthropocentric.36 Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ condemns how technologies are used to this end to ‘substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves’.37 The document proceeds to decry ‘the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological and economic growth’.38 Here, the problematic relationship between anthropology and technology is made clear insofar as means, which are

Cook, ‘Technology and Responsibility’, 416. Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam, Creation in Crisis: Science, Ethics, Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2014), 329–63. 35 Phyllis Trible, ‘Ecology and The Bible: The Dilemma of Dominion’, Canon & Culture 6, no. 2 (2012): 10. 36 See, especially, Lynn White Jr., ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–7. 37 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015), 17 (§34). 38 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, 54 (§109). 33 34

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part of the arbiters of change and transformation, become figured as absolute ends. To borrow a phrase from renowned media theorist Marshall McLuhan, ‘the medium [becomes] the message’.39 In theological terms, humans go from being a means of managing creation – having dominion – to seeing themselves as ends and the arbiters of value – having domination, which is then seen as passed on to our technologies. In light of Genesis 1 and 2, Pope Francis and other commentators, including Ellul, recognize this shift as a transfer of power (figured in terms of causality) from God to humans, and then to technology. Identifications of control tend to follow those of causal power in our perceptions, which is why it can often feel like one is ceding control along with power to machines and technologies that increasingly do bidding on our behalf, and that are programmed to self-regulate according to the principles of cybernetics. Even benevolent machines, such as Brautigan’s ones of loving grace, can be read according to this logic, where recursion shifts to inversion when figured in terms of power and causal efficacy. However, as many ecotheologians point out, dominion is not about surrogacy or a transfer of power that loses sight of the whole (i.e. the theocentric); it is, rather, about caretaking and responsibility. This is difficult to express through a quadripartite model of causality because, as per the critique of that model developed earlier, it requires wider contextualization of the efficient cause and the acknowledgement that that person or role is accountable to multiple agents – those that they are responsible for and those whose command they are following – who are also causally efficacious in many ways. Put differently, dominion is about obligations and ethics rather than capabilities and production. Indeed, God’s command to humans in Gen. 1.26 and 1.28 to have dominion marks a radical shift from the Babylonian creation story, the Enūma Eliš, which was a precursor to the book of Genesis. In the Enūma Eliš, following a long and bloody war between the gods, humans were created by the victorious gods out of the defeated ones to provide a kind of slave labour for the resting gods. An instrumental account highlighting power and production is better suited to this creation mythology; in Genesis, however, humans are charged with a caretaking role. This requires an alternative account of anthropology and technology that can recognize ethics and obligations. We have already seen how the ‘steersman’ of cybernetics functions analogously (as well as recursively and inversely) of these broader theological trends. Discerning internal (1) and external (2) steersman figures can help to identify accountabilities and responsibilities that are never absolute; this, in turn, can hold space for the ambivalence of humans vis-àvis technologies and creation, as per the demands and obligations of dominion. The next section returns to the examples with which this chapter began to consider these demands and obligations further in looking towards an ethics of technology rooted in creation.

Response-ability: Command, communication, control Playing God? Recalling Eduardo Kac’s bioart work, and in light of the previous discussions, one can ask: What kind of steersman is Kac? What is the relationship between technology and creation in

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 7–21.

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his Genesis installation? And what might one observe about power and responsibility in his work? For Kac, as cited earlier with regard to Alba, the subject of GFP Bunny, ‘what is important is the completely integrated process of creating the bunny, bringing her to society at large, and providing her with a loving, caring, and nurturing environment in which she can grow safe and healthy’.40 Kac’s emphasis shifts from the causally efficacious power of the one-time act of creating Alba to a different kind of power, one tied up in nurture and shared responsibility, as an ongoing act of creating subjects. Perhaps the most widely cited and culturally recognized example of this latter power is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where the novel’s tragedy is humanity’s rejection of the scientist’s creation. The creature declares: ‘I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend’,41 which accords with what Eileen Hunt Botting writes of the political dimensions of Shelley’s work; namely, as attending to ‘the prospect of the loss of love and community’.42 Botting notes that this underwrites Shelley’s critique of science throughout the text: ‘Frankenstein invites readers to speculate the consequences of using science to make a living creature without a family or other community to support it’.43 The myth of the solo steersman – someone who can create alone and is unaccountable to others in their actions – is fiercely critiqued throughout the novel. Kac’s Genesis picks up on this theme of community, although it is figured more conceptually and fluidly in that, through their interactions with the installation space, visitors have impacted the development of the mutated bacteria. Creativity is understood here as an entanglement between artist, subject, and visitor as much as between humans and technology; the emphasis is on the impacts of nurture rather than nature. To be sure, although the bacteria and DNA of Genesis aren’t readily afforded the same compassionate language of nurture and care as is Alba the bunny, or the same capacity for receipt of it as Frankenstein’s monster, the emphasis on ongoing creation through interactions between humans, technology, and the artistic subject is nonetheless consonant with Kac’s other works. This focus on co-creation juxtaposes concerns people have about the work of Kac-theartist-and-creator and the ethics of his making of technological hybrids and ‘monsters’. What are Kac’s recursive responsibilities? Does he supersede causal creative powers in a theological sense? Matthew Causey argues that Kac’s Genesis ‘engage[s] the risks inherent in the devastation possible through creation (both aesthetic and scientific) and the isolated manners in which contemporary constructions of the human are challenged’.44 Causey alludes to a limit or threshold crossed by hubristic scientific (and aesthetic) action, much like that of the eponymous doctor of Shelley’s infamous novel. Scientific and technological creativity that goes unchecked – which traverses a predetermined limit – is presented as culminating in destruction, which is realized in how Frankenstein loses himself (his health, his family, and his reputation) in pursuit of his creation and in seeking to bring about its destruction. While Kac’s story as an artist is far less sensationalized than is Shelley’s story, it is possible to heed

Kac, ‘GFP Bunny’. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 264. 42 Eileen Hunt Botting, Artificial Life after Frankenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 8. 43 Botting, Artificial Life after Frankenstein, 2. 44 Matthew Causey, ‘Stealing from God: The Crisis of Creation in Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Genesi and Eduardo Kac’s Genesis’, Theatre Research International 26, no. 2 (2001): 204. 40 41

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the concerns about overstepping the mark with technologies raised by her novel, and that are reflected in tabloid tales about ‘Frankenfoods’ and ‘playing God’, whereby, like for some critics of Kac’s work, the gulf between what one can do and what one should do with technologies is raised. Such ethical concerns, as noted earlier in the discussion on Aristotelian and instrumental approaches to technology, are not typically regarded as intrinsic to technology itself and are brought forth by subsequent realizations of the consequences (rather than the causes) of technologies. Here, the consequences might be read as technology taking on its own efficient causality and exceeding human control. In Shelley’s text and other concerns about hubris, we are guided, via the consequences of the mad scientist’s work, to critique the ethics of that causal figure, scrutinizing the humaneness of their actions. As a result, one finds one’s fears directed at monstrous creators and creations alike, where both might be characterized as what structural anthropologist Mary Douglas refers to as defiling and as ‘matter out of place’.45 Whether it is the creation that transgresses the boundaries of life and death, or the creator who gives unnatural life, one finds discomfort as a response. In effect, anxieties about ‘playing God’ concern the transfer of power without acknowledging the whole regarding human and technological creativity vis-à-vis divine creativity. To return to the language and understandings of steersmen introduced earlier in this chapter, there is a substitution of definition (1) of humans as being steersmen from within and having dominion, with definition (2) of humans repositioning themselves as external to that which they are in governance of; the latter could certainly describe Kac’s role concerning his Genesis artwork. According to these concerns about playing God, only God can be figured as a steersman of creation in the second sense. As Ted Peters notes, these concerns hinge on a radical separation of humans (1) and God (2): ‘Is it a sin to play God when we in fact are not God?’46 Humans and God, in other words, are radically different, but when one jeopardizes that difference by enhancing human capabilities, which is typically through technologies, then it is assumed that trouble is afoot. Is Kac, then, playing God? It would seem so in the context of his artwork and creation. To cast further light on this question, though, one can return to Peters, who is, in fact, critical of the notion of ‘playing God’. He returns to Christian teachings to examine human relatedness to God through human relatedness to creation, revealed in the call to dominion and to nurture and care for created beings.47 Dominion, for Peters, is not about reckless power but rather about responsibility; this makes humans accountable both to other parts of the system of creation of which they are also part, as per definition (1) of steersmen, but also accountable to the external steersman (2) of God. Peters’ theological approach thus identifies theocentric recursion and indicates something more nuanced and theologically complex than the more simplistic binaries of humans and God, and emphases on power and causality that underwrite the notion of ‘playing God’. Co-creation The kind of nuance Peters provides is also found in Kac’s artwork, which highlights creativity and relationship through layers of translation, audience participation, and interaction with the

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2001), 36. Ted Peters, Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2012), 1. 47 See Peters, Playing God?, 198. 45 46

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installation. Of course, Kac’s provocative work doesn’t fail to raise some eyebrows, too, which illuminates something of the tensions in creation and creativity – chiefly around human limits, powers, and capabilities – that are useful to reflect on in the wider and recursive framework of creation. This is a question one might ask of Kac as the creator of the artwork and, therefore, as a kind of external steersman (2), while visitors are inculcated into the system and become internal steersmen of it (1), having an impact on other parts of the system, such as the bacterial mutations. Kac’s artwork thus represents a rumination on co-creativity and shared causality, which understands humans as participative – unlike Brautigan’s vision, where humans are the objects (not providers) of care, much like the bacteria DNA is the focus of Kac’s study. To whom are different parts of the installation-as-system accountable, though? What are the shared responsibilities in this system? Is the subjectivity of the bacteria recognized? Should one acknowledge an obligation to care for it, or is such care appropriate only for more sentient subjects such as Alba, the transgenic bunny? Kac does not seem to answer these questions, suggesting an apolitical understanding of humans and technologies that resonates with an Aristotelian emphasis on causality in his approach to technology, albeit one that acknowledges more of the complexities of shared causality. Does this, however, go far enough to recognize responsibility? Whereas in GFP Bunny, the appeal to shared responsibility is conveyed through affective responses to the transgenic subject, in Genesis, it is presented by involving the audience in co-creation, and through the use of Genesis and the text’s reference to God and dominion. Putting aside, for now, the issue of whether this acknowledgement of responsibility is too implicit to inform an ethics of technology beyond a causal model or philosophy of technology, the emphasis on Genesis does at least return one to the notion of recursion and the wider context of creation. Put otherwise, Kac’s installation is not intended to be a self-contained art piece but rather a microcosm of the wider creation, and, as such, it offers a space of reflection on one’s ambivalence as a human, how this impacts humanity’s roles in the world, and how this also informs what individuals should and shouldn’t do with technologies in light of one’s responsibilities and accountabilities to others. Kac doesn’t provide answers to these questions – not least of all about his own accountability and responsibility as artistcum-creator and a steersman in an external sense with regard to his own creation (definition 2) – but that these questions are raised in his installation, in an explicitly theological way, is significant. Kac’s Genesis, then, doesn’t take one fully beyond the realm of Aristotelian approaches to technology that prioritize causality over ethics but, in attending to more of the complexities of co-creation, it does at least draw attention to the openness and ongoing nature of changes and transformations, including those that humans and technology participate in. Here, the importance of contextualizing humans and technologies alike is noted, as it is the narratives comprising human contexts that inform one’s place in the world and whether, ethically, something might be beneficial or detrimental and to whom. The transgenic bacteria of Genesis, for example, might not solicit one’s affective concerns nor, therefore, one’s sense of responsibility or obligation, but in the theological context of Genesis, one is accountable in one’s stewardship of the ‘system’ of creation of which humans and bacteria alike are part. The value of what is revealed and concealed by the technological transformations brought about and coproduced through the installation is for all to consider. This is not, however, a supplementary consideration; it is central to how humans develop and use technology responsibly. In this 866

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light, the installation might even be called a technology that interrupts some human practices and assumptions.

Modelling recursion: Towards an ethics of creativity This chapter has explored the relationship between cybernetics and creation through the themes of causality and responsibility. Of course, all metaphors have their limits, and that of cybernetics – specifically, the figure of the ‘steersman’ employed here to explore technology and the myriad of human relationships and entanglements with it – is no exception. An obvious limitation is an emphasis that it readily gives to the mechanical and the technical, which, when applied to wider nature, has historically had detrimental consequences for stripping one’s impressions of the vitality of the world and of creation. Yet this demonstrates shortcomings in assumptions about technology as much as about nature, some of which this chapter has attempted to address. It has sought to challenge models of technology that emphasize technology’s abstract and causal power, particularly when that is at the expense of discussions of its ethics. Explorations of technology’s causal power invite discussions of its consequences, but these discussions do not fully speak to the anthropological dimensions of technology, that is, our accountabilities and responsibilities to others and, in Christian theology, to God. Responding to these shortcomings, this chapter has proposed a re-assessment of causality that acknowledges such dimensions through the steersman figure, whose multiple identifications (internal and external to a given system, but also recursively across systems) mean that causality is layered and complex. Causality involves different steersmen figures working in tandem with one another; this checks absolute power and authority and recognizes human–technology entanglements. To be sure, rather than in the boundedness of the cybernetic system, it is through Genesis 1 and 2, with their emphasis on responsibility and accountability through dominion, that the multiplicity and complexity of the steersman figure can be fully noted. Read in conjunction and conversation with one another, as this chapter has shown, it is possible to see cybernetics systems as models of creation where causal power is distributed among agents. It is also possible to see cybernetics systems as microcosms of creation – that is, they participate in wider creation and are not self-contained – and here, the multiplicity (not replacement) of steersmen roles,48 as well as the accountabilities of those roles to others and to God, is noted. It is how such narratives frame developments and uses of technologies as well as understandings of humanity’s place and role in the world – and the recognition those narratives bring that, whether human or technological, the means are never

Wiener acknowledges this fundamental human factor in cybernetics: ‘[T]he future offers very little hope for those who expect that our mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves’. Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964), 69. Wiener’s reference here to ‘thinking’ furthermore advocates a Platonian rather than Aristotelian approach to technology, that is, one that sees it as a form of knowledge rather than production. 48

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neutral, nor are they an end in themselves – that can inform an alternative techno-ethics that is cognisant of context, of others and of one’s responsibilities within those frameworks.

Further reading Cook, S. D. N. ‘Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on Genesis 1–3’. Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 45, no. 4 (1996): 412–20. Herzfeld, Noreen. Technology and Religion: Remaining Human in a Co-Created World. West Conshohocken: Templeton Press, 2009. Midson, Scott A. Cyborg Theology: Humans, Technology and God. London: I. B. Tauris, 2018. Mitcham, Carl, Jim Grote, and Levi Checketts, eds. Theology and Technology, Volume 2: Essays in Christian Exegesis and Historical Theology. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2022. Olsen, Jan Kyrre Berg, Stig Andur Pedersen, and Vincent F. Hendricks. A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Wagner, Sven. The Scientist as God: A Typological Study of a Literary Motif, 1818 to the Present. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012. Wiener, Norbert. God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964.

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Lincoln Harvey

Introduction Sport is extremely popular. For example, millions of people regularly play football – or soccer, as it is sometimes known – and millions more watch televised events such as the FIFA World Cup. Sport’s worldwide popularity, therefore, raises an interesting question: why do people love it so much?1 The Christian theologian is well placed to answer this question, though it requires constructive work in the process. Of course, shortcuts are often possible, and any theologian interested in sport may want to consider what other Christians have said about it in the past. However, this approach only generates as many questions as it does answers, not least because historical research shows that previous theologians have judged sport to be problematic. For example, the fourth canon of the Council of Arles, convened in the fourth century, decreed that any Christians participating in the popular chariot races of the day should be excluded from the church’s fellowship,2 and, even though the episcopal reasoning is hidden from sight, the prohibition was likely informed by Novatian’s earlier refrain: ‘[I]dolatry is the mother of all games.’3 Novatian could have justified his conclusion quite easily. Sport and religion were often difficult to prise apart in the ancient world. A community’s sporting events were usually entwined with their religious festivals, with the games being punctuated by – or even constituting – sacrificial rites in which the gathered people expressed their gratitude to the gods. The Mesoamerican ballgame of tlachtli, for instance, involved two rival teams using their bodies to get a ball through a raised hoop, and in that sense, it resembled the modern-day sport of basketball. However, tlachtli differed markedly from its contemporary analogue in many ways, particularly by being underwritten by the mythical narrative of the creation of the sun and the moon, a story that led to the game culminating with the decapitation of the losing players. The defeated team’s heads were offered as a libation to the gods. Though tlachtli is a gruesome example, other sporting events bore a striking resemblance. For example, the ancient Olympics were dominated by animal sacrifices to Zeus (and his pantheon), and the Roman spectacles celebrated the coincidence of divine and imperial power

For a denser trail of references to substantiate the points made in this chapter, see Lincoln Harvey, A Brief Theology of Sport (London: SCM Press, 2014). In what follows, I will draw on ideas (and language) that have previously appeared in print, both in the book cited and in numerous articles which I have written on the theology of sport. In particular, see Lincoln Harvey, ‘Sjetimo se da smo igračke: sport u teološkoj perspektivi’, Crkva u Svijetu 53, no. 3 (2018): 416–30. 2 See Charles J. Hefele, A History of the Christian Councils, from the Original Documents, to the Close of the Council of Nicæa, a.d. 325, 2nd edn, trans. William R. Clark (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1883), 186. 3 Novatian, The Spectacles, trans. Russell J. Desimone (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1974), 126. 1

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in the dramatic verdict that marked the end of gladiatorial combat when the emperor’s raised or lowered thumb signalled his godly power over life and death. In each case, the sport and the gods clearly differ in form, but the early church had spotted how ancient sports consistently involved the worship of false gods. The church’s opposition to sport, therefore, was primarily doxological. The church’s early opposition to sport set the tone for what followed. For example, by the twelfth century, the fourteenth canon of the Synod of Clermont banned Christians from participating in the popular jousting events of the day,4 a restriction that was in some sense replicated – mutatis mutandis – by Puritan social decrees in seventeenth-century America.5 That being said, history is always a lot more complex than summaries suggest, and it is certainly true to say that official prohibitions would often waiver, with sport’s continued popularity forcing the church to rethink its negative stance.6 Such interludes were usually marked by an attempt to exploit sport for an ecclesial agenda. This is evident, for example, in the use that was made of jousting in the church’s recruitment for the Crusades,7 as well as in the rise of Muscular Christianity during the Victorian era, when Christians attempted to use popular physical exercise to sugar-coat the development of the virtues.8 In each case, sport was never thought to have value in itself but was only deemed beneficial when it was subordinated to the missional end of the church. In other words, sport has been embraced positively, but without it ever escaping the church’s long-held suspicion. In short, Novatian’s original diagnosis stuck: ‘Idolatry is the mother of all games.’ From a certain perspective, a link between sport and worship remains evident. It is easy, for example, for an analyst to correlate what happens in the sporting arena with what happens in church, with the ardent devotion of football fans being a good example.9 Like many churchgoers, they will habitually raise their arms in the air while singing their team’s praises as they marvel at their heroes in the temple-like structure of the modern stadium. Of course, much more could again be said about these similarities, as well as the many divergences, but even a cursory sketch indicates the way it would be risky for a Christian theologian to celebrate contemporary sports without first addressing the church’s longstanding concerns about its idolatrous tendencies. With that being noted, it still appears that most contemporary theologians specializing in the theology of sport embrace the doxological aspect of sport – and they do so positively. In general, they employ the abstract concept of ‘transcendence’ in the process, proceeding as if this technical concept is self-evidently theological, before equating ‘transcendence’ with the ‘flow’ that athletes experience in sport. By using the concept of transcendence in this way,

For a helpful summary of the church’s opposition, see Richard Barber and Juliet Barker, Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), 139–49. 5 For an overview, see Nancy Struna, ‘Puritans and Sport: The Irretrievable Tide of Change’, Journal of Sport History 4, no. 1 (1977): 1–21. 6 Struna shows how the Puritans, for example, also reluctantly accepted sport, while always sensing its dangers. Again, see, Struna, ‘Puritans and Sport’, 1–21. 7 For details, see Maurice H. Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 44–63. 8 See Dominic Erdozain, ‘In Praise of Folly: Sport as Play’, Anvil 28, no. 1 (2012): 20–34. 9 See, for example, Joseph L. Price, ‘An American Apotheosis: Sports as Popular Religion’, in Religion and Popular Culture in America, rev. edn, ed. Bruce D. Forbes and Jeffery H. Mahan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 195–212. 4

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the theologian can soon equate sport with worship, concluding that the competitive struggle on track and field enables the players to reach beyond themselves – transcend! – and thereby commune with the ‘Transcendence’ that permeates all things.10 Of course, this will always prove an attractive proposition, not least because it would free up Christians to play sports on a Sunday rather than attend church. But it is also clear that this kind of approach overlooks the fact that previous generations of Christians have worked hard to separate Christian worship from sport. As a result, it would be better to proceed on the assumption that something important is at stake in the church’s attempt to uncouple sport from its worship before seeing if there is a way to celebrate sport without confusing it with doxological practice. To do that, sport needs to be located within an ontological framework where it can be enjoyed as a choreographed ritual that punctuates – rather than replaces – the laborious human movement towards eucharistic worship. To explain what is meant by this statement is a dogmatic task of concern to and with the doctrine of creation.

Creation out of nothing Beginning with the assertion God created us out of nothing, two implications can be drawn, first noting the theological reasoning behind it.11 The doctrine of creation out of nothing has remained relatively free from controversy. The teaching is, of course, regularly tested and probed – and occasionally ridiculed! – by those outside the church, but it has largely been accepted by theologians within it. That is why there is no landmark ruling to which the theologian can point, some creedal statement negotiated at a nameable council that met to adjudicate between rival factions who fundamentally disagreed on the matter – no Nicaea or Chalcedon here. If anything, creation out of nothing functioned as the premise that drove the key doctrinal debates that marked church history. Christological disagreements, for example, usually blew up because of commonly held assumptions about the difference between God and his creatures. That is to say, attributing divinity and humanity to a single concrete reality – one hypostasis – would not be a big deal if Christians believed that both the divine and the human are infinite. The claim will only become contentious if the interlocutors share an assumption that the two adjectives are mutually exclusive; for example, humans have a beginning and are therefore finite, whereas God does not, and so is not. Once that premise is shared, any claim that ‘God became man’ becomes a conceptual conundrum that can be explored, with rival solutions likely to spring up in the process and conciliar action prove necessary. But creation out of nothing has never been that sort of puzzle. Instead, it has largely functioned as a theological ‘given’.12

10 For a careful analysis of transcendence in sport, see Robert Ellis, The Games People Play: Theology, Religion, and Sport (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2014). 11 Throughout what follows, I draw heavily from Colin Gunton’s work on the doctrine of creation. See, for example, Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998). 12 The church has on occasion spelt things out explicitly, but only when forced to articulate what it has always assumed. For example, the Confession of Faith at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and Session 11 of the Council of Florence in 1442.

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The reason the doctrine of creation out of nothing remained free from controversy is that Christians think there is only one God and that it is not humanity. This would appear to be the overriding witness of scripture, where the opening chapter of Genesis, for example, appears to draw a clear line between God and his creatures. The sun, moon, and stars, for instance, are often prime candidates for human worship, circling as they do up above the planet in the celestial sphere. But in Genesis, the sun and moon are demoted from the throne of divinity, instead being hung up in the sky like ornaments, which are designed after the creation of light to mark the movements of time.13 The countercultural message is clear: these entities are creatures, so they are not to be worshipped; God alone is. If the command to worship the one God alone is accepted, creation out of nothing is but a couple of argumentative steps away. Spelling them out explicitly:

(1) If there is only one God, and



(2) only the one God creates, and



(3) the creature is not this one God, then



(4) the creature must have been created out of nothing, because



(5) in the beginning, there is only the one God, and the creature is not it.

In other words, the singularity of God and the non-divinity of creation combine to generate the systematic point: creation is not made out of God’s god-stuff, so to speak, and because there is no other god around who could provide the eternal raw material, creation must have been created out of nothing because only the one God existed eternally. The logic here works, although it does not say much about what the creature actually is. Further analysis is, therefore, necessary if the doctrine of creation is going to inform a Christian evaluation of sport.

The non-necessity of the meaningful creature There follows two interconnected points about God’s creative act. First: creation out of nothing implies that the act of creation is an act of sovereign freedom. This would appear to follow because Christians, as monotheists, believe there are no other gods around when God acts to create, which, of course, means there is no other god who could have forced him to do it. Put otherwise, the creator was not contractually obliged to a rival, as if somehow indebted, enslaved, or waging an eternal war. Nor, for that matter, was there some kind of architectural blueprint or pre-existent material that was thrust into his hand, which would limit what was possible because these mythical influences would therein be rendered eternal and, in that sense, effectively divine. In short, nothing extrinsic to the one God could have forced him to act, meaning that the motivation to create was entirely his alone. Of course, an element of compulsion can still be smuggled in at this point. A theologian might imagine some interior drive forcing God to act. For example, the concept of ‘nothingness’ might be thought to signify some deficiency in God, perhaps signalling an emptiness which

Colin E. Gunton, Act and Being (London: SCM Press, 2002), 55–6.

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is equivalent to loneliness and thereby akin to a vacuous boredom that the creator just had to overcome. But the church has long rejected such thinking. The Christian God is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, infinitely alive in the unsurpassable fullness of his perichoretic mutuality through which the triune Persons endlessly bestow and receive identity in relationship. That is to say, the Christian God is believed to be three eternal Persons who simply are the subsisting relations mutually defined, which together constitute the pure being-in-act that is the one God. The doctrine of the Trinity thereby implies that there is no emptiness, so to speak, in God, no loneliness, and certainly no itch to scratch. Instead, God is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and thereby perfectly fulfilled and infinitely satisfied. Or, to put that otherwise, God keeps his own company, so to speak, and just so – and here is the dogmatic point to carry forward – God’s decision to create is free from both external and internal compulsion. Or, in more commonplace language: the act of creation is an act of grace. Second: What does the graciousness of God’s act say about the creature? The answer to this question is again twofold. First, it means the creature is unnecessary. That is to say, God – contrary to fact and impossible to think – would have been happy enough without humankind. As a result, creaturely existence needs to be understood as a pure gift, which is why Rowan Williams talks of the ‘unbearable lightness of being’.14 When I first encountered Williams’ use of Milan Kundera’s phrase, I assumed that he had got his words muddled and that he must have meant a bearable lightness of being. But Williams is right. The human creature finds the graciousness of its existence – its non-necessity – unbearable. Humans would rather possess a necessary reason for their existence, some eternal foundation on which they could stand and thereby confront God with his need for them. However, creation out of nothing implies that the creature is not that ‘serious’, as Williams puts it. The weight of eternity is not on its shoulders because creation is not designed to prop God up, entertain him, or assuage some existential crisis or eternal angst. That is why the creature can make no demands or negotiate from a point of independence, because the absolute freedom of God’s act removes such possibilities, with sin – again tracking Williams – thereby rendered as the perverse act of the human creatures taking themselves too seriously in an absurd attempt to equate themselves with God. But the doctrine of creation teaches that God alone is God and that everything else is his creature, suspended – as Williams puts it – like a feather on his breath. Williams’ logic makes sense, although another error can encroach at this point. Knowledge of the creature’s non-necessity might make a theologian imagine God’s act of creation as, in some sense, whimsical, conceptualizing his decision to create as somewhat capricious and haphazard. This move could quickly lead to some nihilistic conclusion, imagining a meaningless existence for the unnecessary creature, which is deemed to be without purpose, reason, or possessing any meaning beyond the illusions it can construct. But this train of thought would again be mistaken. God’s creative freedom is not whimsical in that way but instead utterly decisive. In other words, the Christian understands God’s creative freedom in two correlated ways. First, God’s freedom has something to do with non-restriction, in that – as already outlined –

Rowan Williams, ‘Not Being Serious: Thomas Merton and Karl Barth’, accessed 8 November 2022, http:// rowanwilliams​.arc​hbis​hopo​fcan​terbury​.org​/articles​.php​/1205​/not​-being​-serious​-thomas​-merton​-and​-karl​-barth​ .html. 14

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it is free from restraint. For example, God could have created any sort of world, with human beings now having seventeen heads and forty-two legs, with winged elephants flying high above as the rectangular planet circles around three suns; nothing forced God’s hand to make the world the way that it is. But God’s unrestrained act was also a decisive decision that he executed, in that the decision to create is also a judgement for a particular world. In other words, the creator makes a free decision for the creation in the way that he wills it, with the church proclaiming that this positive decision centres on the man Jesus Christ. Creation is made in him, through him, and for him because Jesus is the one possibility to whom God has eternally bound himself. This is the point in the argument where there are unfathomable depths, although that has not rendered theologians mute. Karl Barth, for example, argued that God’s freedom is infinite, which means that his Lordship extends to his sovereignty over his own being. That is to say, God is so free that he chooses the eternal ways of being, with the three ‘Persons’ mutually determining the kind of God that he is. Here I side with Robert Jenson, who has interrogated Barth’s revisionary doctrine of election and dared to think from the hypostatic singularity of Jesus, thereby allowing the Nazarene to be the unique event that defines who God is and how humans stand in relation to him.15 In Jenson’s account, God’s eternal movement towards humanity is the event of God putting it to God whether he will be eternally this God who is infinitely for the creature, with that definitive question being lived out by God eternally through the temporal life of the Son and answered by God the Father in the event of his resurrection. In short, God lives so fully for others even unto death, and then again with death behind him, that that is his infinite being as Spirit. In other words, there is no God behind the triune event of the God of the gospel, all of which is to say – and here it does not matter whether we go with Jenson in all this – that God’s freedom is not simply about infinite possibility, but centres on his infinitely faithful commitment to the eternal decision to bind himself to the creature in Jesus Christ. That is his twofold freedom. This short – and likely controversial – foray into the doctrine of election brings to light the second aspect of the second point about creaturely identity. The creature is not necessary, but God has chosen us in Christ before the foundation of the world, meaning that the creature is summoned out of nothing to share the life of the Three. As a result, though it is correct to say that the creature is unnecessary, it does not mean that the creature is unvalued, unwanted, undesired, or unadored. In fact, it means the exact opposite. Because God does not need the creature, the meaning of its existence is infinite love. The substantive point has now become clear: the creature is unnecessary, but that does not imply the creature is without meaning. And it is that twofold definition of the creature’s meaningful non-necessity that should be kept in mind with regard to sport.

See, for example, Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Volume 1: The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). For an introduction to Jenson’s thought, see Lincoln Harvey, Jesus in the Trinity: A Beginner’s Guide to the Theology of Robert Jenson (London: SCM Press, 2020). 15

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Sport is an unnecessary but meaningful activity In this section, the argument will be straightforward; sport will be defined as an unnecessary, yet meaningful, activity and thereby linked to the dogmatic conclusion just reached, thus allowing the argument that sport expresses the nature of the unnecessary, but meaningful, creature. First point: sport is unnecessary. Why, for example, do four people interrupt a nice country walk to whack golf balls towards a hole? Or why do two people hit a squash ball repeatedly against a wall? On the face of it, these activities serve no obvious purpose. When the games end, nothing valuable is produced, with no products rolling out the factory gates, no works of art to be hung on the wall, and no crops ripe for harvest.16 As Jenson once put it, each game ‘does nothing but itself ’.17 That is, sport is a non-productive activity that serves no obvious purpose. In noting this, sporting activity must be distinguished from the wider economy of human activity. For example, before writing this chapter, I had to get out of bed and come to college to earn my living, to pay my bills, to ultimately keep the wolf from the door, all of which was framed and interspersed by commutes and meals before finally being wrapped up when I once again fall asleep. Each action serves within this greater whole, which – if we trace the links around the chain – centres on my sustenance and shelter, being basically directed towards my survival. This means that the reason for each specific action can be located outside the activity itself. If some visitor pressed me to explain why I was doing what I was doing, for example, I could at some stage say that I needed to do it to survive. But sport is radically different. It is unnecessary. This point can be illustrated in several ways. For example, a person can be forced to do all the necessary things they have to do. They can be put to sleep, for instance, and if anaesthetized, they will really be sleeping. Or they can be force-fed, and if hooked to a drip, they will really be nourished. They can even be enslaved to work, and when they are enslaved, they are still really working. In other words, compulsion does not destroy the nature of these acts. But not so with sport. Sport must be played, and play is inherently free. That is to say, if someone is forced to play, they are not really playing. Or, to put that otherwise, forced play is an oxymoron. In saying this, it needs to be understood that sport – and I am not claiming that it is unique in this respect – exists in a realm of non-necessity. This would explain why people usually set sport apart from all the other things they do, creating a playtime and playground, for instance, which is bounded and marked to create a self-contained universe abstracted from the mundane tasks of existence.18 In so doing, sport can effectively break the instrumental nature of people’s activities, which explains why it is not liked when sport is set to serve outside interests. For example, fans do not want the Olympics to further anyone’s political agenda or for their favourite team to be harnessed to the pursuit of unbridled profit. When a game is

I draw here on Caillois’ language in Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 6. 17 Cf. Jenson’s endorsement of A Brief Theology of Sport. 18 I draw here on Johan Huizinga’s work on the nature of ‘bounded’ play, and am again indebted to Caillois’ Man, Play and Games. See Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). 16

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subordinated to external purposes in this way, the sport is effectively spoiled. And that means sport is an autotelic activity; that is, it is its own end and serves no purpose beyond that. Again, this point is easy to justify. For example, there is no evident reason in the game of rugby why each player cannot have their own ball or pass it forward to a teammate when scoring a try. Nor is there any reason why ten teams are not playing at once, with four players in each. The fact that the sport of rugby is not played in these ways is purely contingent, no more than a matter of arbitrary rules which artificially define the game of rugby, rather than being in any way necessary when viewed from the outside. The contingencies of the game’s rules simply function as the means by which the players create the set-aside sphere, which will always appear absurd from an instrumentalist perspective. There could always be more efficient ways to get the ball in the goal or to hit the stumps. The contingencies of the sport thereby create a peculiar event that makes no obvious sense other than as the game itself. Of course, in arguing this, it cannot be denied that sport has many side effects. Playing sport can be beneficial for someone’s health, for example, improving their fitness and life expectancy. It can also be the source of great camaraderie and fellowship, socializing all the participants for the good. (Although the opposite can be true in both instances, with injury and sectarian rivalry equally possible.) But these positive outcomes are secondary to the act rather than being primary. They do not explain why a player whacks the ball over the net in tennis or uses a hockey stick to hit the puck across the ice. The sport in itself is not for the side effects and cannot be explained by benefits to health or social cohesion. Instead, it remains inherently superfluous. Or to put that otherwise, sport is unnecessary in every way. Now to the second point: though sport is unnecessary, that does not mean it is meaningless. It has just been claimed that sport serves no purpose outside itself while also indicating that it does have a purpose within it. A sport like water polo, for example, has literal goals, and other sports have their equivalent points, targets, and finishing lines. But it needs to be clear: these purposes of the game lie within the sport itself and not outside it. That is to say, a player does not hit a home run because it improves their circulation or gets them a paycheque, though it might do both things. They aim to do it because that is the point of baseball. Or, in technical terms, all sports are autotelic activities. They serve their own end. However, although the goal of a sport is unnecessary, it is positively defined. The games people play amount to an ordered universe, with absolute rules that combine to constitute the meaningful structure within which the players freely play. Sport, therefore, is never spontaneous, whimsical, or haphazard; nor is it capricious and undetermined in the anarchic sense. The player must always be free to play, but once they enter the arena, they are bound by the rigid contingencies of the game they have chosen. That is why cheating and foul play will always be frowned upon because such activity breaks the game and shatters the artificial universe that has been freely created. The whistle will therefore be blown, and the game restarted because – on its own terms – the activity has fallen into nonsense. In other words, sport is only meaningful because the players commit to its sovereign order.19 Sport is not the only activity that can be described in this way, though it can be marked out from many other unnecessary but meaningful acts. Ballet, for example, similarly has its

For more on rules in sport, see Lincoln Harvey, ‘Jesus Christ and the Rules of the Game’, The Other Journal 26 (2016): 95–9. 19

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choreographic rules which define its meaning, and ballet is a radically non-productive act that can be described as unnecessary. But sport is distinguished from this activity by its competitive nature, and Allen Guttmann has sketched out the lines of that distinction: sport is a physical contest designed to produce winners and losers.20 Of course, competition can also be imposed onto something like ballet, and the recent popularity of dancing, singing, and cookery contests on television evidences this. But there is nothing intrinsic to singing or dancing or cooking that makes them competitive. Sport, however, is different. By definition, it has to produce winners and losers.21 This is a point which will be expounded shortly when it will be argued that it is a positive thing that should not be confused with some war-like struggle. But before getting to that point, this section can be summed up as: sport is an unnecessary but meaningful activity. As a result, the overarching proposal is now coming into view: the meaningful non-necessity of sport resonates with the identity of unnecessary but meaningful creatures. Or to join those dots from the other direction: humans are playthings. And if this is so, it implies that anyone playing sport is somehow resonating with their creaturely being, chiming, so to speak, with the fundamental nature of created reality. The final task is to develop this point, and returning to the book of Genesis will help here.

Interruptive sport: Remembering humans are playthings Though there are undoubtedly many ways to interpret the ‘days’ detailed in the first chapter of Genesis, it does – on the face of it – suggest that the act of creation takes time.22 In the beginning, God creates a ‘formless void’ beneath which the chaotic threat of deep waters lies and over which the Spirit of God hovers. This implies that God calls creation into being and plans to shape it thereafter; or, to put that differently, the beginning of creation is perfect, but only as a beginning, and the perfection of the beginning consists in the fact that it has a directedness towards an end. Creation can therefore be described as God’s project; that is, it is ‘an order of things that is planned to go somewhere; to be completed or perfected, and so projected into time’.23 Seeing creation as God’s project helps to make sense of the second chapter of Genesis, where Adam is placed in a garden. A garden is not a static state of paradise but instead signifies how the human creature is placed amid growing trees, ripening fruits, and a flowing river. Adam is commanded to ‘till’ and ‘keep’ this garden, nurturing it and helping God preserve it against the background threat of chaos. ‘Tilling’ denotes active service, and ‘keeping’ implies active preservation, and so – whatever the details of Adam’s work – there is clearly a job to be

Allen Guttmann, Sports: The First Five Millennia (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 1–3. See also Lincoln Harvey, ‘Theology of Sport: On the Rebound’, First Things, 17 November 2014, http://www​.firstthings​.com​/ blogs​/firstthoughts​/2014​/11​/a​-theology​-of​-sport​-on​-the​-rebound. 21 For more on the competitive nature of sport, see Lincoln Harvey, ‘Someone Must Lose: A Theology of Winning in Sport’, in Theologies of Failure, ed. Roberto Sirvent and Duncan B. Reyburn (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2019), 45–53. 22 For an exploration of these themes, see Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Spirit Moved over the Face of the Waters: The Holy Spirit and the Created Order’, The International Journal of Systematic Theology 4, no. 2 (2002): 190–204. 23 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 1997), 181. 20

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done by the human creature.24 God has placed him in a dynamic project where he is to labour energetically. If Adam’s work in the garden is considered basic to the human creature’s existence, it can be used to underwrite a positive theology of culture. In effect, Adam’s commission to tend and keep the garden sets human beings on a trajectory, whereupon the created garden is transformed over time into an eschatological garden–city. Of course, the journey from Genesis to Revelation is long and complex, yet whatever else it is – and it is much else besides! – it appears to be a movement from a garden to a garden–city. In effect, the garden is transformed. Horticulture leads to culture.25 In positing the garden–city as the goal of creation, the church can affirm human industry. Of course, it does as much each time it celebrates the Eucharist, in that the liturgy does not involve the raw products of nature – the grain and the grape – but instead centres on bread and wine; that is, ‘the work of human hands’. The grain was farmed in the fields, the grapes drawn from the vineyards, with both transformed through manual labour. The church is therefore not offering God the Father creation in its original form, but instead offers him ‘nature manufactured’, as Gunton puts it.26 With this being so, it should also be noted that the liturgy pivots on the epiclesis, the specific call to the Spirit to transform the eucharistic elements to become Christ-with-us and bring uswith-Christ into the presence of his Father. It is the Spirit who thereby transforms individuals’ work into God’s work of self-giving on the cross, but nonetheless, the elements do constitute a human work within the sacramental act. Given this, the church’s understanding of the Spiritenabled sacramental nature of human work can be read out into wider culture. Human beings – again in concert with the Son and Spirit – are set to work within the created order to offer in thanksgiving the work of their hands to their heavenly Father. Human labour is, in that sense, priestly, in that the activity gives voice to creation, freeing it to reach its intended end, which is to serve the worship of its creative Lord. The work of the artist (labouring with paint and stone), the work of the author (labouring with words and meaning), the work of the scientist (struggling with microscope and telescope), the artisan, the farmer, the musician, the factory worker, whatever task God calls them to perform, are continuing the priestly act of tilling and keeping the garden, thereby freeing creation to blossom and bloom in praise and thanksgiving to the glory of the Father. In short, creation is perfected by human labour as it is drawn towards its eucharistic end. And so, back to sport. I propose that sport is designed to interrupt this laborious movement towards the telos of Eucharistic worship. In so being, sport functions much like a religious liturgy in that it is a communal act, choreographed by rules, in which people perform something meaningful. But it differs from religious activity in an important sense. Sport enables the community to shake itself momentarily free from the laborious movement towards worship so that the people can resonate with the beginning from which their priestly vocation is launched. Or to put that otherwise, sport occupies the space that a ‘Creation Season’ would

J. Andrew Kirk, What is Mission? Theological Explanations (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1999), 177. Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 50. 26 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 153. 24 25

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fill in the church’s liturgical year, being nestled alongside work and worship, yet distinct from them within the ordering of human life. In other words, when playing sport – in its non-necessity and contingent meaning – the players interrupt their lives to enter a liturgical space where they compete in pursuit of an unnecessary goal. Through the unscripted drama of the game, they thereby pirouette on their ontological foundation as playthings, meaning that they instantiate what it means to be created out of nothing. At the end of the game, one of the players or teams will have been defeated and therein face the nothingness out of which the creature has been summoned. The other player or team will have won and therein face the life to which the creature is called. But only together, in being strung between nothingness and life, in the unnecessary but meaningfulness of the competitive act, do the players capture a snapshot of the creature’s ontological profile. In other words, this chapter argues that the ritual snapshot provided by sport interrupts the human vocation to work towards praise and thanksgiving, and therein reminds the participants that they are playthings who are called to work towards worship. Sport essentially reminds the human creature that it is ‘not that serious’, thereby punctuating the egotistical desire to see human labour as much more important within the economy of God than it really is. From a certain perspective, this proposal could look like an instrumentalizing of sport, effectively setting it to serve an outside purpose within a wider economy. However, I do not think that this is the case. Sport is still doing nothing but itself because it simply is human beings expressing themselves, no more, no less. Thus, it remains a self-contained act which is a constitutive component within a wider – and narratable – story of who the creature is, but it is not for anything extrinsic to its own place within that story. It is instead a partial expression of human beings’ dynamic creatureliness, set alongside the other elements of priestly labour and praise, rather than being a servant of these other elements outside itself. Of course, in that respect, the autotelic nature of sport is just like worship, which similarly should not be set to serve outside interests because it is an end in itself. But in this account, sport is definitely not an act of worship – contrary to current trends in the theology of sport where ‘transcendence’ serves the ‘Transcendence’ – but instead a self-referential act entirely distinct from any doxological practice. This account thereby complements the church’s historical critique of idolatrous worship in sport by separating it from worship and flagging the danger that individuals can forget what it is really about and end up worshipping the false god of themselves. However, it should come as no surprise that there is a family resemblance between worship and sport if both are aspects of who the creature truly is. But what is surprising is that sport interrupts individuals’ laborious communion with God to remind them of their origination. Or, to put that otherwise, it amounts to a different form of remembrance than is found in the Eucharist. There is no transubstantiation in sport because the players simply bounce up against the dynamic substance of who they are in a radically self-contained act that recollects their identity as playthings. That, I propose, is how the Christian is to understand sport. Further reading Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Ellis, Robert. The Games People Play: Theology, Religion, and Sport. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2014. Guttmann, Allen. Sports: The First Five Millennia. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. 879

T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation Harvey, Lincoln. A Brief Theology of Sport. London: SCM Press, 2014. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Watson, Nick J. and Andrew Parker. Sport and the Christian Religion: A Systematic Review of Literature. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. White, John. ‘Sacramentally Imagining Sports as a Form of Worship: Reappraising Sport as a Gesture of God’. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 11, no. 1 (2018): 1–21.

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CHAPTER 67 MAKING PLACES ARCHITECTURE Murray Rae

Among the striking features of the account of creation presented in Genesis 1 is the care taken by God to craft a place for his creatures. The fruits of each day’s work – the heavens, the oceans, the dry land, the flora and fauna that spring forth from land and sea – are declared by God to be good in their own right. But they constitute, in addition, an environment that is well suited to the habitation of human beings. God’s work in creation establishes a place for humanity to dwell and to flourish. As the biblical story unfolds, human beings are called to make something of the place in which they have been set. They are to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1.28); they are to have dominion (Gen. 1.28); they are to till and keep the garden (Gen. 2.15); they are to sow the land and harvest its yield (Exod. 23.10); they are to build houses and plant vineyards (Isa. 65.21). To inhabit the world is to engage in projects concomitant with God’s good purposes for creation. Architecture is one of the human endeavours included among the projects in which humanity is called to engage: the Lord instructs his people to ‘build houses and live in them’ (Jer. 29.5; and again, Isa. 65.21). Other building projects too – altars, temples, and cities – appear to receive divine approval when undertaken as a gesture of obedience or in response to the guidance of the Lord.1 This chapter considers how human architectural endeavour might be understood as a response to the divine mandate to live well in the world that God has made.

Architecture and the order of creation Architecture serves, in the first instance, a basic human need for shelter, but architects, along with those who study architecture, have generally resisted a merely utilitarian account of what architecture is for. Architecture also provides a sense of orientation, an articulation of humanity’s place in the world, an expression of our deepest aspirations and of our understanding of what the good life consists of. These concerns have typically been developed theologically as a response to an order perceived to have been bestowed upon the world by God, or by the gods. Typically, the order is thought to be present in nature and is discernible through rational deliberation. That was the case for the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio whose work The Ten Books on Architecture, written around 30–15 bce, is the oldest known text of architectural theory. When explaining the principles of symmetry essential to the design of temples, for example, Vitruvius takes as his template the proportions of the human body. ‘Since

See, for example, Gen. 8.20; 12.7; 1 Kgs 9.3; Ps. 48.1-3.

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nature has designed the human body so that its members are duly proportioned to the frame as a whole’, Vitruvius writes, ‘it appears that the ancients had good reason for their rule, that in perfect buildings the different members must be in exact symmetrical relations to the whole general scheme.’2 Taking his lead much later from the writings of Quatremère de Quincy, Joseph Rykwert explains that ‘It was by emulating nature through taking up the proportions of the human body that the primitive Greek builders raised their craft to the status of great art’.3 In further confirmation of the point, the great English architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, contends that ‘the perfection of the [Classical] Order is far nearer nature than anything produced on impulse or accident-wise’.4 Emulation of the mathematical proportions found in nature is thus the generative impulse of the classical orders of architecture developed in Greece and Rome and is displayed, for instance, in the architecture of the Acropolis in Athens or in the forum of ancient Rome. This desire to emulate nature accords with the Aristotelian conviction that ‘Nature is everywhere the cause of order’.5 This conviction produced an architecture which seeks to reveal the eternal and unchanging order of the universe; it strives after a static representation of the perfect and enduring order of the cosmos itself. Although such architecture has been widely embraced in the Christian tradition, especially through the Renaissance, it is founded upon a Greek conception of the nature of things rather than upon a biblical one. One should be cautious in drawing too sharp a distinction between Greek and Hebrew conceptions of how reality is constituted, for there was a good deal of cross-fertilization in the development of the two traditions, especially, of course, in late second-temple Judaism, but there are differences between the two, and this is one of them. Whereas the Greek mind conceived of truth and order as, by definition, eternal and unchanging, the Hebrew mind sought understanding of the divinely bestowed truth and order of things in the dynamic unfolding of life in covenant relationship with YHWH. These two approaches yielded in Greek thought an anti-historical tendency, as R. G. Collingwood put it,6 in contrast with the Hebrew and Christian conviction that the truth is learned not through rational speculation, nor in the first instance through the contemplation of nature, but, above all, through attentiveness to the God who reveals himself through the course of human history. It is within this Hebrew and biblical conception of things that it becomes possible to confess, as at the beginning of John’s Gospel, that the eternal Word of God ‘has become flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth’ (Jn 1.14). The truth of things, it is hereby proclaimed, is revealed in the life lived among us by the one in whom ‘all things in heaven and on earth were created’ and in whom ‘all things hold together’, as the Apostle Paul puts it in Col. 1.16 and 17. The truth, biblically conceived, as also God’s ordering of things, is revealed not in the static proportions of an eternal cosmic order but rather in the dynamic unfolding of a history whose true end and purpose are revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Creation is thus conceived to be the terrain in which truth

Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris H. Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), 73. Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981), 37. 4 Sir Edwin Lutyens, in a letter cited in John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1963), 20. 5 Aristotle, Physics, 8.1. 6 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 29. 2 3

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and order are revealed, but in a very different way than was imagined by Vitruvius as he laid out the laws of ‘Arrangement, Eurythmy, and Symmetry’ as derived from the proportions of the human body and applied them to the design of buildings.7 A further illustration of the difference between the Greek and the biblical views can be found in Irenaeus’ contention that the creation account in Genesis 1 does not conclude with a created order that has already been perfected. Rather, Genesis tells of the commencement of a divine project in which humanity is called to grow into fullness of life in communion with God.8 The divine project will be completed at the end when the Son hands the kingdom to the Father (1 Cor. 15.24). In the meantime, there is a whole history of covenant relationality to be worked out through which the formative and perfecting work of the divine Word and Spirit will bring creation to its true end in reconciled communion with the Father. It will be shown in due course how this might shape a Christian understanding of architecture. Before that, however, it is important to acknowledge that the Vitruvian and Greek view of an architecture that reflects the eternal order of the cosmos has been widely influential in Christian history, especially during the Renaissance when the philosophy and the architecture of Greek and Roman antiquity were enthusiastically reclaimed and adapted to Christian use. Referring to Pope Pius II and to the architect Leon Battista Alberti’s enthusiasm for classical architecture, David Mayernik observes: By tapping into the order of a cosmos where God, according to the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, ordered everything in measure, number and weight .  .  . and where the heavenly spheres revolved to perfect music, our environment as a mirror or vestige of heaven could, they believed, have a heavenly effect on its inhabitants and orchestrate society into a microcosmic paradise of peace and justice.9 Mayernik appeals to the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, but that is a text heavily shaped by a Greek perspective on the nature of reality. The Greek impulse is to conform to the existing order of things inscribed in the cosmos and to create architecture that reflects the eternal, unchanging forms. The more typical biblical impulse, however, is to look towards a new creation and to participate in its formation. Christianly conceived, such participation involves leaving one’s nets and following the Son of Man who has nowhere to lay his head (Mt. 8.20). In Israel, too, participation in the coming reign of God and in the outworking of God’s purposes for creation involved journeying; it involved a departure from the land of Abram’s fathers, departure again from Egypt, faithfulness through years of wandering in the wilderness, displacement in exile, and the readiness to journey again, back to Zion in anticipation of the day when people of all nations might be gathered in praise of YHWH and learn to walk in his ways (Isa. 2.1-3). This distinction between the Greek and the biblical view of how creation is ordered is captured, in part, by Robert Jan van Pelt, who writes:

For an explanation of these and the other ‘fundamental principles of architecture’, see Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, 1.2. 8 See Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.38.3. 9 David Mayernik, Timeless Cities: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy (Boulder: Westview Press, 2003), 216. The Wisdom of Solomon reference is to Wis. 11.20b. 7

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If the Greeks invited (wo)man to assimilate himself to the enduring order of things, the Jewish and Christian tradition confronted people with the responsibility to make a new world, a new creation. Greek historiography tried to reveal the enduring and universal within the temporal and the particular; Judeo-Christian historiography tried to show how individual choices and decisions conceived in freedom and made in the actuality of the historical moment could and would bring about a dialogue between time and eternity. It proclaimed the essence of human existence to be its historicity, understood not in the relative terms of post-Enlightenment historiography, but in the absolute terms that are generated by the need to make choices.10 Van Pelt’s account needs theological elucidation to make it clear that God is at work in the drama of history and that the freedom accorded to humanity is a freedom to participate or not in the noncoercive economy of the coming kingdom of God. Nevertheless, a different kind of architecture than that of classical Greece and Rome is required to express this biblical understanding of creation as a project that is brought to fulfilment through the course of history. It will be an architecture resistant, as Jesus was at his transfiguration, to the proposition that the true essence of things can be captured in the building of booths (see Mt. 17.4). Allegiance to that proposition is evident in Mircea Eliade’s influential phenomenology of the sacred and the profane in which he claims that sacred space is ‘the only real and real-ly existing space’.11 The manifestation of the sacred in a particular location, Eliade contends, is the ‘revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expanse’.12 This understanding of the matter may be found in some cultures, but it does not represent the biblical view. In Genesis 1, the whole of creation is declared to be good by God, and no differentiation is made between the reality of sacred space and the non-reality of the profane. As I have argued elsewhere: [T]here are occasions in Israel’s story when sacred space is demarcated, as in Exodus 3.5 when the Lord says to Moses, ‘Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground’. Similarly in the temple, Israel has its Holy of Holies that is not to be entered except on one day a year by the chosen priest. But these sacred spaces operate on the same principle by which the representative action of the priest is effective for all in Israel [even though they] do not enter the sacred place. The particular relates to the universal by way of effective representation. The sacred place surrounding the burning bush or in the midst of the temple . . . indicates God’s claim upon the whole earth and sets it all in relationship to him.13 Thus in Psalm 24, the invocation, ‘Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in’, does not indicate the absence of God otherwise, for the opening verse of the Psalm has already affirmed that ‘the earth is the Lord’s and all that is

Robert Jan van Pelt, ‘Prophetic Remembrance’, in Architectural Principles in an Age of Historicism, ed. Robert Jan van Pelt and Carroll W. Westfall (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 77–8. 11 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (Orlando: A Harvest Book, 1959), 20. 12 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 21. 13 Murray A. Rae, Architecture and Theology: The Art of Place (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2018), 27. 10

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in it’. God’s possession of the earth and all that is in it means that God is distinguished from the creation in such a manner that he can be present to all of it as the giver and sustainer of its life. Participation in God’s project To return then to the question of what kind of architecture might reflect God’s ordering of creation as a project to be developed and brought to fulfilment in covenant relationship with him: the two earliest biblical examples of human architectural endeavour provide salutary warnings against an architecture constructed in defiance of God’s good purposes. The first is the city of Enoch, built by Cain shortly after he had murdered his brother. That architectural endeavour took place, as Gen. 3.16 puts it, ‘away from the presence of the Lord’. This spatial reference is not a contradiction of the Bible’s consistent declaration elsewhere that there is no place that one can flee from God’s presence, but indicates rather the state of Cain’s heart and mind. A city built in defiance of God and of God’s call to be his brother’s keeper has little prospect of success. The same is true of a city or a tower built, as at Babel, to serve humanity’s aspiration to ‘make a name for ourselves’ (Gen. 11.4). The concern for self-aggrandizement yields an architecture that defies the good purposes of God. A more promising beginning to human architectural endeavour can be found one chapter later in Gen. 12.7, where God appears to Abram at the oak of Moreh and says: ‘To your offspring I will give this land. So [Abram] built there an altar to the Lord.’ Abram builds in order to mark the place of divine encounter. But Abram does not remain there; he moves on to Bethel, where another altar is built, and then moves on again. Abraham and his descendants build more altars as they continue to learn what it means to live in covenant relationship with YHWH; these altars become coordinates of an emerging theology and of a developing story, a story of divine promise, of vocation, and of divine leading.14 Creation, these altars indicate, is a project that proceeds under God’s guidance but depends on human participation and obedience. The human propensity to build cities ‘away from the presence of the Lord’ and towers dedicated to humans’ own glory is an expression of defiance, a refusal to participate in God’s project, and a mark of disobedience. It is the work of Christ to rescue humans from their waywardness, to redeem all human endeavour, including architecture, and to set creation again on its trajectory to fullness of life in loving communion with the creator. It is possible and appropriate to build buildings that stand like Abraham’s altars as markers of this developing story, as coordinates of a theology built upon the foundation of Christ. Buildings for worship and for the gathering of the church should serve this purpose, but all architecture, whether explicitly religious or not, can be more or less expressive, or more or less defiant, of the creative and redemptive purposes of God. Architecture that is hospitable to the stranger, for instance, or that offers shelter to the vulnerable; architecture that utilizes the earth’s resources without destroying the earth’s capacity for replenishment; architecture that provides space for communion and that responds obediently to the command to love one’s neighbour; this kind of architecture can be understood as a form of human participation in the creative and redemptive purposes of God.

I have discussed this phenomenon of altar building at greater length in Rae, Architecture and Theology, 22–30.

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Anticipating the heavenly Jerusalem An architecture that speaks of the biblical God’s work in creation will not be a static representation of eternal forms. It will speak instead of the ‘wayfaring God’15 who is at work throughout history, forming a people and bringing creation towards its goal. That creation is a project still unfolding towards its end means, of course, that it is a work in progress. An architecture that speaks of and participates in this reality will therefore have a provisional and anticipatory character. It will look to that which is yet to come. In Christian Europe during the late Medieval and Renaissance eras, city planners and builders frequently took inspiration from the biblical promise of a heavenly Jerusalem. They knew that the heavenly city was an eschatological reality and that God was to be its builder, but they commonly thought that the earthly city should bear witness in its architecture to the future heavenly city and provide a foretaste of the same. Although that theological impulse was applied to the shaping of many cities throughout Europe, Rome, in particular, was thought to be the nearest thing on earth to the heavenly Jerusalem. This is evident in the instructions given to the artist Enguerrand Quarton (c. 1410–66) for the painting of an altarpiece to be placed in the church of the Carthusians in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.16 Quarton is instructed: to show the form of paradise in which will be depicted the Trinity, Mary, the angels the apostles and various other saints. Beneath this paradise the heavens should appear and then the world ‘in which should be shown part of the city of Rome’ including the church of St Peter, the Ponte Sant’Angelo, part of the walls of Rome, ‘houses and shops of all types’, the Castel Sant’Angelo and ‘a bridge over the river Tiber which goes into the city of Rome’. The inclusion of various churches around Rome is then specified. From Rome a river should be shown flowing down to the sea, on the other side of which Jerusalem should be depicted. Farther afield various other biblical scenes were to be shown, including, especially, scenes involving Moses. The arrangement described gives pride of place among all the things of earth to the city of Rome. . . . The instructions given to the artist reveal the belief, found well beyond Rome itself, that the city had indeed become a foretaste of the New Jerusalem.17 Even Augustine, who did not have much to say in favour of the earthly city, acknowledged that the civitas terrena (the earthly city) could point towards the city yet to come: There was, indeed, a kind of shadow and prophetic image of this City of the Saints: an image which served not to represent it on earth, but to point towards that due time when it was to be revealed. This image, Jerusalem, was also called the Holy City, not as being

The phrase has been taken from Timothy J. Gorringe, A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 86. 16 See ‘Contract for Painting an Altarpiece for Dominus Jean De Montagnac, Priest’, in A Documentary History of Art, Volume 1: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Elizabeth G. Holt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 298–302. 17 Rae, Architecture and Theology, 80. 15

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the exact likeness of the truth which is yet to come, but by reason of its pointing towards that other City.18 What architectural devices were used by city builders in Christendom to point towards the city yet to come? I have discussed this extensively elsewhere,19 but it can be noted briefly here that there is exquisite architecture built to care for the destitute and the vulnerable. Take, for example, Filippo Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, a home built for abandoned or orphaned children. The Ospedale provides refuge for the vulnerable in beautiful surroundings designed by one of the most celebrated architects of the day. Likewise, the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, designed by the renowned architect Filarete and opened in 1456, was founded by the Duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza, as a hospital for the poor. Although it now houses part of the University of Milan, the building constructed to provide care for the vulnerable remains today one of Milan’s architectural gems. These buildings, along with many others throughout Europe from that era, give expression to the biblical imperative to care for the vulnerable, typically represented in scripture as the orphan, the widow, and the stranger, and they gesture towards that day in which every tear will be wiped from one’s eyes, and suffering and death will be no more (Rev. 21.4). Thus will creation be brought to its promised end. Medieval and Renaissance cities typically gave expression as well to the importance of community. The great piazzas of Rome, Siena, Venice, and Milan, for example, were places of communal gathering on a daily basis. They were used for all manner of civic and ecclesiastical events. They were places of refuge in times of peril; they were used for public discussions and for religious theatre; they were arenas for preachers such as San Bernadino who preached regularly in the Piazza del Campo in Siena, and they were sites for the daily celebration of the Mass, for the casual meeting of neighbours, and for the hospitality extended to strangers. Such amenities brought people together and supported a common life. It should not be supposed, of course, that communities of that era were not prey to the forces of sin and evil that undermine the common good, give rise to conflict, and lead to injustice and oppression – my contention is not that this was a golden age – but the architecture of the piazzas, and of other public places dedicated to communal gathering and engagement, expressed through their built form the biblical vision of koinonia (communion) whereby the welfare of the community as a whole took precedence over private and individual interests (see Acts 2.44-46). Although it could not be fully realized, the vision accords with the biblical hope of the new creation in which reconciliation, an end to rivalry and enmity, and the harmonious coexistence of all God has made are key features. The life of the new creation in Christ is a communal life represented by Paul through the metaphor of a body in which all have their particular role to play and contributions to make. Another feature of Medieval and Renaissance cities that gestured towards the final realization of creation’s purpose is the abundant provision made for worship. ‘Worship is . . . the gift’, as James Torrance has put it, ‘of participating through the Spirit in the incarnate Son’s communion with the Father’.20 Central to the biblical understanding of creation’s true

Augustine, The City of God, 15.2. See Rae, Architecture and Theology, especially chap. 5. 20 James B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 20. 18 19

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telos is the gathering of all nations in worshipful communion with God.21 This is reflected in Augustine’s vision of the heavenly city in which he draws a strong link between the gathering of God’s people in worship and the completion of creation on the seventh day: Nothing will give more joy to that City than this song of the glory of the grace of Christ, by Whose blood we are redeemed. Then shall these words be fulfilled: ‘Be still and know that I am God’; then shall be that great Sabbath which has no evening, which God celebrated among His first works, as it is written: ‘And God rested on the seventh day from all His works which He had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it; because that in it He had rested from all His work which God began to make’. We ourselves shall become that seventh day, when we have been filled up and made new by His blessing and sanctification. Then shall we be still, and know that He is God.22 Augustine himself was not inclined to the view that this theological vision might be realized in the architecture of the earthly city, but the city builders of Christendom, while recognizing that the heavenly city will need no temple, saw that it is necessary for the earthly city to provide places in which people might gather for worship. It was not uncommon for those churches to express in their decoration the biblical vision of creation set free from its travail and gathered in praise of its creator. An especially striking example is the Basilica di San Clemente al Laterano in Rome, with its spectacular apse mosaic depicting the flourishing of creation with Christ the lamb at its centre. Among the profusion of biblical reference and imagery, the prophet Isaiah stands with a scroll on which are inscribed the words, ‘I saw the Lord sitting on his throne’. These opening words of Isaiah 6 are enough to evoke the following lines: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory’ (Isa. 6.3). Those who come to worship in the church of San Clemente are reminded by the architecture of the great eschatological vision of creation redeemed, flourishing, and filled with the glory of God.23 Although the eschatological vision of the heavenly city in Revelation 21 promises that God will dwell with his people, this does not mean that God is absent from creation in the meantime. Again, in the towns and cities of Christendom, the presence of God was acknowledged everywhere. Lewis Mumford explains: Whatever the practical needs of the medieval town, it was above all things, in its busy turbulent life, a stage for the ceremonies of the Church. Therein lay its drama and its ideal consummation. . . . For the key to the visible city lies in the moving pageant or the procession: above all, in the great religious procession that winds about the streets and places before it finally debouches into the church or the cathedral for the great ceremony itself. Here is no static architecture.24

See, for example, Ps. 86.9; Rev. 9–12; 15.4; 22.1-5. Augustine, The City of God, 22.30. 23 For a more extensive description of the Church of San Clemente, see Rae, Architecture and Theology, 140–4. 24 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 277. 21 22

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Note the narrative aspect of this built environment. The architecture of the Christian faith does not offer a static representation of eternal forms, as in the Greek temple; it offers instead places in which the drama of covenant relationship with God may be worked out and developed. That is what creation is for, and that is what human culture is for. The created world is the terrain upon which God undertakes the work of forming and perfecting a people to live in loving communion with himself and to fulfil the divine command to share with him in the stewardship and the enjoyment of creation. The whole of history is concerned with this one work of God. It is, unquestionably, the work of God to redeem and renew and finally bring to completion his purposes in creation. God does so in the face of human defiance and of humanity’s tragically misguided determination to go its own way. Yet, just as through Word and Spirit, God the Father brought the world into being and fashioned humankind in his image, so the Son and Spirit are at work still, releasing humanity, and all creation along with it, from its bondage to decay and breathing new life into its dry bones and withered flesh. Humanity is called to participate in this work of Christ and is enabled to do so just as the Spirit empowers it so to do and gives gifts suitable for the task. Every effort of human culture, therefore, including architecture, finds its true vocation and proper end in the invitation to participate in this work of new creation. Recognition of the divine work that precedes and enables one’s own saves one from Promethean delusions, reminds one that nothing worthwhile can be accomplished without the assistance of God (cf. Ps. 127), and yet gives reason to believe that every effort of one’s own offered in obedience to God’s direction ‘will find itself redeemed and fulfilled in the new creation’.25

Sacred space If, as has been claimed earlier, the created order is legitimately understood as the terrain within which God is about the work of forming and perfecting a people to live in loving communion with himself and to share with him in the stewardship and enjoyment of creation, then one must be able to say of the material world that it is not antithetical but rather integral to the working out of God’s purposes. The fabric of creation and the fruits of human culture, including the built environment, can become instruments of God’s communicative presence. This must be assumed if one is to speak of sacred space. But what is it that makes a space sacred? There are no architectural techniques or specifications that will make it so. A space may be dedicated to the glory of God, but it becomes sacred only by virtue of God meeting people there. This is implicit in Solomon’s prayer of dedication for the temple: But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built! Have regard to your servant’s prayer and his plea, O Lord my God, heeding the cry and the prayer that your servant prays to you today; that your eyes may be open night and day towards this house, the place of

This point has been taken from Richard Bauckham, ‘Eschatology’, in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, ed. Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason, and Hugh Pyper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 208. 25

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which you said, ‘My name shall be there’, that you may heed the prayer that your servant prays towards this place. Hear the plea of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray towards this place; O hear in heaven your dwelling-place; heed and forgive. (1 Kgs. 8.27-30) Whether or not the temple becomes a place of encounter with the Lord, a sacred place, depends entirely on the divine promise – ‘My name shall be there’ – and upon God’s receiving the prayers of his people. The place becomes sacred just insofar as the drama of covenant relationality is played out. Yet there is nevertheless a role for the architect in crafting space that bears witness to the story of God’s redemptive engagement with the world God has made. It is a role akin to that which Shakespeare’s Theseus envisages for the poet: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.26 The architect, likewise, can, in the crafting of space, provide a local habitation for the sacred, a local habitation, that is, for the manifestation of God’s glory and love and for the working out of the covenant relationality into which God calls his people. This sacredness has a ‘vertical’ dimension in the worship offered to God and is commonly expressed in church architecture through steeples, towers, soaring vaults, and arches; it also has a ‘horizontal’ dimension in the love extended to neighbours and expressed in all the spaces where hospitality is offered to strangers, where the weary and heavy laden find rest, where the poor hear good news, and where those held captive find release. Wherever places are created for and dedicated to such ends as these, a local habitation is provided for the sacred. In this sense, the sacred, the manifestation of God’s glory and love, is not some static quality of a building; but it is something that takes place.27 Its taking place, furthermore, is precisely the end to which creation has always been directed.

Further reading Bartholomew, Craig G. Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011. Bess, Philip. Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006. Craft, Jennifer A. Placemaking and the Arts: Cultivating the Christian Life. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2018.

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 5, scene 1. I owe this insight to Philip Bess, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006), 76. 26 27

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CHAPTER 68 CREATION, CREATIVITY, AND ARTISTRY

Trevor Hart

Begotten, not created One of my liturgical hobbyhorses concerns the church’s continuing inclusion of the NiceneConstantinopolitan Creed at the heart of its regular eucharistic worship rather than, say, the Apostles’ Creed. As public professions of faith go, the latter may neither be technically ‘catholic’ nor be written by the apostles, but its articles enjoy the distinct advantage of being intelligible to people who have not studied the niceties of patristic theology and are unlikely ever to do so, in this world at least. No doubt fingers may from time to time be found crossed discreetly behind backs, or disclaimers registered inwardly as confident utterances about virginal conception, descent into Hades, and final judgement on the Day of the Lord are called for. But these might well be judged preferable to the blank incomprehension of congregations required, in the thick of it, to declare their assent to a set of finely tuned metaphysical distinctions articulated in terms proper to a remote and largely alien intellectual milieu. No doubt liturgy will and should always involve human beings in saying or singing things the semantic depths of which lie beyond their current grasp and indwelling a faith into the fullness of which all are at best still ‘growing up’, whether one knows the difference between homoousios and homoiousios (the diphthong that changed history as it has been called) or not. Words, whether in liturgy or elsewhere, though, if they would nurture growth into the surplus of potential meaning with which reality always confronts, must be used in ways that remain open to possibility, their surfaces craggy and porous rather than hard and sharp-edged. Regular reiteration, even over many years, of a phrase such as ‘Begotten, not made’ (gennetos, but not genetos), for instance, seems likely, in and of itself, to leave one unscathed by the dawning of any deeper realization, its thin, hard-edged, and razor-sharp vocabulary being intended precisely for the splitting of doctrinal abstractions rather than the provision of handholds for faith’s gradual exploration of mystery. For those drafting this portion of the creed in the early fourth century, of course, resorting to such precise technical apparatus was vital to their anti-Arian purpose. ‘Begetting’, they held, was a relation of origin that did not necessarily presuppose or coincide with the most fundamental and vital distinction of all; namely, that between the uncreated Creator (God) on the one hand, and God’s creature (anything and everything else that exists other than God) on the other. The Greek term mostly translated ‘made’ in English versions of the creed (genetos) might thus actually be better rendered here as ‘created’, its connotation being that of something that has come into existence – in this particular case by virtue of the creative will and action of God alone – which hitherto had no existence or ‘was not’. To confess that the Son of God is ‘Begotten, not made’ is, therefore, to insist that while he is known to us in human, creaturely form nonetheless, the Son himself is no creature, but God’s personal presence among us, the personal distinction between the Father and himself arising properly and eternally within the

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very being of God. Thus, the Son is as much Creator as the Father is. Meanwhile, the Arian claim that ‘there was when he (the Son) was not’1 amounts to an unashamed classification of Jesus as the incarnate presence not of God himself at all but of one of God’s creatures (albeit the ‘first’ or ‘foremost’ creature [prōton ktisma], as Arians typically conceded) conscripted to do God’s dirty work, thereby evacuating the incarnation of God’s direct personal involvement at a stroke, and leaving God, as it has been put pointedly, hidden behind the back of Jesus rather than made known in his personality, actions, and passion. The reason for starting this chapter somewhat obliquely by paying attention to the vocabulary of ancient christology is to recall just how heavily laden and highly charged the language of ‘creation’ once was in Christian theology, and to prompt wonder, perhaps, about the legitimacy and the dangers attendant upon the democratization of that language which has certainly occurred in the past few centuries, most notably in those formerly Christian cultures where the idea of ‘creating’ had any traction at all. If identifying Jesus as ‘not created’ (or, more properly, ‘uncreated’ [agenetos]) was, tout court, to include him unambiguously within the being or the ‘identity’ of God,2 so too, conversely, there was understood to be an activity and prerogative of God that also marked God out as unambiguously ‘other’ than ‘all things visible and invisible’;3 namely, God’s unique role as their Creator. Not just the technicalities of incarnational orthodoxy, then, but the doctrine of God as such and a proper theological understanding of human creatureliness too were at stake in the careful drawing and articulation of this distinction. The importance attached to all this is reflected in a fact that is now often overlooked. For the first millennium of the Christian era and a reasonable chunk of the second, the Latin term ‘creo’ and its various cognates were found only in the lexicons of theology and liturgy and set aside scrupulously to refer to the person and prerogatives of God alone. For the citizens of this earlier linguistic era, George Steiner reminds us, ‘Tautologically, only God creates’.4 Nothing could be further from all this than contemporary speech with its prodigal gilding of the merely mundane with talk of ‘creativity’, ‘creating’, ‘creatives’, and the like. This metaphorical redeployment of terms, arguably more profligate than profound, has accelerated in the past seventy-five years or so and shows no sign of abating. Writing in the 1960s, the art historian Erwin Panofsky could already note with disdain the then modish talk of ‘creative hairstyles’, ‘creative play’ for small children, and university courses designed to unlock the mysteries of ‘creative writing’.5 In the decades since, things have progressed further and rapidly in the same egalitarian direction, the epithet ‘creative’ having successfully been colonized (or been dragooned into service) by the self-descriptions of a wide range of economic, cultural, and media industries, one famous motor manufacture proudly proclaiming itself (its tongue

Socrates, ‘The Ecclesiastical History of Socrates Scholasticus’, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series. Volume II: Socrates, Sozomenus: Church Histories, ed. A. C. Zenos (Edinburgh/ Grand Rapids: T&T Clark/Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989), 3. Italics added. 2 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: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008). 3 The Nicene Creed. 4 George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), 20. 5 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 187n3. 1

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only half lodged in its cheek in doing so) ‘Créateur d’automobiles’.6 Most of this is far removed from those territories of human concern with which talk of ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’ has more traditionally (and, some would insist, more properly) been associated. The religious and theological worlds in which its roots lay and which were for more than a thousand years its sole habitation have already been mentioned. That art historians and critics (rather than theologians) should constitute the most vocal majority of those calling ‘foul!’ and alleging a defiling of language in all this, though, betrays the fact that the pass had, in reality, already been sold. The most significant shift had occurred long since when, in the late fifteenth century, the hitherto hallowed semantic range of creare, creator, and creatio was desecrated with a high hand by those seeking a language adequate to celebrate the splendours of certain sorts of human endeavour and accomplishment – specifically, those of the poets, painters, and sculptors of the burgeoning cultural Renaissance.7 Only the superlative in human terms, that is to say, might be permitted to indulge in the ‘presumption of affinity’8 with God to which this initial linguistic trespass points, doing so precisely in order to set a particular class of ‘gifted’ individuals apart from hoi polloi rather than suggesting, as more recent use tends to, that, as far as the capacity for ‘creativity’ is concerned, ‘everybody has won, and all must have prizes’.9 Its sense of entitlement bristling with offence, the art world (or those parts of it inclined to endorse rather than to abandon the strands of humanistic individualism in its heritage) has generally pushed back by insisting that if everyone is ‘creative,’ then nobody is, the very point of the language having been surrendered to a politically correct impulse which, as a matter of principle, refuses to employ discrimination and critical judgement. Whether this should be dismissed as symptomatic of the death agonies of an outdated elitism or welcomed as a valiant rearguard action against the avant-garde’s deconstruction and homogenizing of all human difference on the specious ground that ‘empowerment’ and equality are thereby to be had, is for the reader to decide. Whether consciously or not, though, those who avail themselves of this vocabulary incur the risk of interference from background noise; for the semantic fields of ‘creation’ overlap and interfere with one another,10 and those who borrow and try the language on for size or lay claim to it as part of the ‘commons’ of our shared humanity, therefore, situate themselves and their actions of ‘making’ bravely in relation to divine precedent.

Grammars of creation It is with tracing the ‘grammars of creation’, as Steiner calls them, that we shall be concerned in the remainder of this chapter. There is more at stake in this task, though, than mere etymological curiosity, let alone any misplaced concern with how a lexical genie, once escaped or deliberately released, might even yet be coaxed reluctantly back into its lamp (as some would

See Rob Pope, Creativity: Theory, History, Practice (London: Routledge, 2005), xix. See E. N. Tigerstedt, ‘The Poet as Creator: Origins of a Metaphor’, Comparative Literature Studies 5, no. 4 (1968): 455–88. 8 Steiner, Grammars of Creation, 18. 9 The Dodo, in Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 25. 10 Steiner, Grammars of Creation, 17. 6 7

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undoubtedly prefer, were such a feat possible). This chapter will suggest duly that, far from raising considerations of propriety and verbal precision alone, the trespass onto holy ground that occurred 450 years ago had a profound shaping impact on the emergent notion of artistry in western culture which, despite having been challenged and railed against for more than a century now, continues to set the agenda for discussion about the nature and significance of artistic making, perpetuating an image of the artist and ‘the Arts’ whose hold on the popular imagination has not yet successfully been dislodged. This prevalent notion is problematic from the perspectives of both theology and various phenomenologies of artistic making alike, and the more problematic elements on both fronts are traceable in one way or another to origins in the appropriation and unashamed deployment of the verbal root creo and its cognates, the background noise from earlier sacred uses of which refuses to die down, but continues to throb incessantly. All language, of course, is constantly changing, and resisting (let alone attempting to reverse) such change when it occurs is a thankless and mostly futile endeavour. Not all change is for the good, though, and not all is of the same sort. Those typically to be found celebrating change as such will rarely be found doing so in order to celebrate the sort of poetic recalibration of words that aids a more fulsome and fitting response to the world; more likely, they will be excusing a clumsy incapacity, regrettable ignorance, or lazy disregard for those conventions (of word selection, spelling, grammar, or whatever) that cultures typically codify and hand on as the ‘rules’ permitting differentiation between good and bad language use. The momentous transfer whereby poets became ‘creators’ in the fifteenth century was itself an act of conscious poesis (making) – a powerful recasting of language that in turn recast western civilization’s ‘cosmic imaginary’, and thereby the shape and substance of reality itself. It was not, though, altogether a felicitous or fitting one, and a long history of cultural (and social, political, economic, and ecological) problems have followed in its wake. The more recent ‘free for all’ pattern of use also has its roots in a deliberate linguistic act. Responding to some of those same problems, its strategy has been to deconstruct the metaphor of ‘creation’, wresting it from the grasp of the privileged few who once determined and jealously guarded its range of ‘this-worldly’ uses, and sabotaging its poetic power by a strategy of overuse – speaking it into a jaded and more or less transparent spectre of itself, hardly able any longer to gain significant purchase on the world’s surfaces. Most users of the language, of course, remain blithely unaware of its contested history or of the reality that, far from saying something significant about those to whom it is applied, the democratized term ‘creative’ nowadays says very little at all, having been spread around far too thinly for far too long. These shifts in language may be regretted or bewailed, but as established social phenomena one can hardly imagine their reversal, except, perhaps, in the determined refusal of individuals to acknowledge them, insisting instead – by way of protest – on the authority of a private, counter-cultural lexicon in the relevant contexts. ‘Private’ language, though, is always a fragile venture, language as such demanding the life of a community to sustain it, and risks death by isolation whenever it is used to exclude rather than to include others. If reversal is no longer an option, though, nor is mere resignation to these changes, the only alternative available to those who grieve over the consequent shrivelling of meaning. Might it not be that the language of ‘creation’ could instead be redeemed, restoring some of its semantic depth and reminding even its most casual users of the sacred resonances of their utterance? This would be a powerful and transformative act of witness-bearing to the shape of reality rather than the 895

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mere ostentatious dangling of historical curios before people’s eyes. Assimilating the wider range of uses of the metaphor of ‘creation’, it might transpose them into a refreshed semantic field where, rather than contradicting or distorting the entailments of the core image, they are taken up into its natural and proper range of resonances, identifying the reality of every creaturely act of composition, making, and remaking as participant in (and accountable to) the scope and the terms of God’s own continuing energy and action as the world’s Creator. In what follows, this chapter will argue that, quite apart from arguments based on words alone, such a vision is mandated by an adequate theology of creation itself, and, while continuing to insist on the importance of certain vital distinctions being drawn and grasped, offers to redeem the ‘presumption of affinity’ in both its wanton and its wandering versions by situating it identifiably within a theology of prevenient gift and promise.

Creative process and the mind of the maker Christian theology in the modern age has, it must be admitted, wavered in the extent of its scrupulousness or concern about the patterns of creation-talk. Some have been quite untroubled by its appropriation within the worlds of the arts and aesthetics in particular, identifying no necessary risk of irreverence or idolatry in its re-purposing to describe merely human activities, aptitudes, and accomplishments. On the contrary, there have been enthusiastic attempts to establish the analogy as a core theological insight, claiming benefits for theology and (a now necessarily theological) anthropology alike. Prominent among these is Dorothy L. Sayers, whose popular and influential work The Mind of the Maker (1941)11 is, in practice, as much a treatise on Trinity, Incarnation, and the Creator–creature relationship as it is an account of the phenomenon of artistic composition, drawing directly as it does on a range of then only recently published sources, including the monumental first volume of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, to the shape of the trinitarianism articulated in which Sayers’ argument is identifiably indebted.12 The structure of every act of artistic creativity, Sayers argues in chapter 3, reflects its eternal exemplar in God’s own triunity where Idea (the ‘person’ of the Father), Energy (Son), and Power (Spirit) coexist in harmonious simultaneity within the divine Mind. Rather than a persuasive apologetic for trinitarian dogma (its ostensive purpose), what Sayers offers here and throughout her book is, in reality, a comprehensive metaphysic, linking the three distinct modes of God’s existence within the divine life decisively to forms of genuine ‘creativity’ apparent in the world. Tellingly, in her insistence that, while the ‘Idea’

Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (London: Methuen, 1941). The persuasive force of Sayers’ appropriation of the analogy on the shape of subsequent Christian reflection is apparent, for instance, in the relatively untroubled adoption of it by Makoto Fujimura in his book Art and Faith: A Theology of Making (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), chaps. 1–2. Fujimura does not, it should be noted, subscribe to the peculiarly muscular form in which Sayers presents the analogy, with roots sunk deep in a trinitarian metaphysic. 12 Salient texts lying behind Sayers’ own, include Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, With Other Essays, trans. Joseph F. Scanlan (London: Sheed and Ward, 1930); Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1, trans. George T. Thompson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936); Nicholas A. Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937); R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938). For a fuller account of Sayers’ treatment, see Trevor A. Hart, Making Good: Creation, Creativity, and Artistry (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), 267–76. 11

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may take flesh it need not do so, the creative act being in principle entirely within ‘the mind of the maker’,13 the analogy’s theological improprieties begin to show through. In theological terms, this amounts to saying (correctly enough) that the Father–Son relationship is not tied to the fact of the incarnation but eternally ‘pre-exists’ the Son’s flesh-and-blood appearance in the world. Aesthetically, it reflects the sort of unhealthy idealism to which so much of western philosophical and theological aesthetics has been beholden, the ‘flesh’ of a work of art too often (as, for example, in the aesthetics of Sayers’ contemporary R. G. Collingwood) being held to be but an inconvenient necessity enabling the work to be shared with and appreciated by other embodied beings. But this insistence, as part of an analogy for human artistry (‘creation’), locates the analogy in the so-called ‘immanent Trinity’ rather than the ‘economic Trinity’, thus compromising the careful distinction between the Father’s ‘eternal begetting’ of the Son and God’s act as Creator of the finite and contingent cosmos – the very distinction with which this chapter opened, and which was drawn precisely to insist on the absolute qualitative difference between God’s ways of being God, God’s ways of being God for the world, and the world’s way of being the world. Analogies, as C. S. Lewis observes in an early review of Sayers’ book, are always prone to attract the attention of pedants insisting that there are differences as well as similarities to be taken account of between the two terms drawn together, ‘to which the only reply seems to be “Quite!”’.14 And yet, he notes, where one of the relevant terms is ‘God’, the question seems to be far more urgent than otherwise, and the dangers of overlooking the nature of the difference entailed are those of falling inadvertently into a form of idolatry unhealthy in its impact on our understanding both of God and of our own humanity. Nowhere is this danger more menacing, he suggests, than in the case of the metaphor of ‘creation’. Evidence that Sayers tilts precariously with it is to be found in her unguarded statement that ‘between the mind of the maker and the Mind of the Maker’ there exists ‘a difference, not of category, but only of quality and degree’,15 and Lewis is quick to remind his readers of the risks of leaving this lacuna unclosed: ‘In an age when idolatry of human genius is one of our most insidious dangers’, he writes, ‘I am afraid that some vainglorious writers may be encouraged to forget . . . that an unbridgeable gulf yawns between the human activity of re-combining elements from a pre-existing world and the Divine activity of first inventing, and then endowing with substantial existence, the elements themselves. All the “creative” artists of the human race’, he continues, ‘cannot so much as summon up the phantasm of a single new primary colour or a single new dimension’.16 What Lewis does not say (but what I believe to be the case) is that modernity’s ‘idolatry of human genius’ and injudicious use of the metaphors of creation and artistry are organically – rather than merely accidentally and unfortunately – linked, the former having been conceived, born, and nourished (and not merely given a serendipitous boost) by changes attendant upon the latter. More will be said about this shortly.

See, for example, Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 29–31. C. S. Lewis, review of The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy L. Sayers, Theology 43, no. 256 (1941): 248. 15 Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 147. 16 Lewis, review of The Mind of the Maker, 248. 13 14

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Creating, making, and finding Like much else in his literary and aesthetic thinking, Lewis’ worry about crediting humans with the capacity for acts of ‘creation’ was learned from his self-appointed guide, the nineteenthcentury Scots poet, novelist, and Professor of English Literature George MacDonald. Far from being resistant to the analogy between human and divine artistry, though, MacDonald celebrates it loudly. It is in their capacity to imagine (the power to give form to things) and their tendency to do so, he suggests, that humans draw closest to God’s own disposition towards them as Creator, being themselves not just ‘the offspring of [God’s] imagination’,17 but uniquely made in the image of one who is above all things himself a Maker. The imaginatio Dei and the imago Dei are, in other words, bound up closely with one another, and imaginative making is of the essence of true humanity. And yet, MacDonald insists, precisely as human beings recognize and celebrate this rich and positive vision of their creaturely capacity and calling, they run up quickly and hard against a fundamental difference between God and humans and between the power of God’s imagination and that of God’s creatures. For God himself is not the product of anyone else’s imagining, whereas humans are always the product of God’s. And whereas whatever human beings imagine must always begin with the world God has placed them in and borrow from its storehouse of available forms and possibilities, God’s own imagining borrows from nothing and no one, being the sole instance of absolute origination, and unique in its capacity to grant its imaginings substantial existence – what Thomas Aquinas refers to as existence tout court.18 Not everything that God imagines, one may suppose, is thereby possessed of actual existence alongside him; but whatever has existence necessarily begins with an act of divine imagining, and not otherwise. In the strict sense, therefore, MacDonald insists, the acts or the products of human imagining should never be referred to in terms of the language of creation. No human artist, no matter how exalted, is ever a ‘creator’,19 but at best capable of acts of poesis or compositional making that must begin and work with materials and possibilities contingent and constrained by their own creaturely ‘givenness’, a givenness, furthermore, that should be respected rather than railed against impetuously. A better metaphor yet for what human artistry and imaginative response to the world more widely really amount to, MacDonald suggests, is that of the trouvère or ‘finder’ – one who uncovers things (meanings, possibilities, ‘works’, and ‘worlds’ of art) that God has hidden in the world precisely so that there may be delight in discovering them and sharing them with others.20 If, at first blush, this image seems unduly to belittle or even deride the power and accomplishments of human imagination and fashioning as such, it is certainly not meant to. Its point is rather to ensure, conversely, that human creatures never forget to exalt God’s own capacity and accomplishments sufficiently. One should not forget that MacDonald wrote

George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, & Co., 1895), 4. 18 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920–5), 1, Q. 45, Art. 4–5. 19 Thus: ‘We must not forget . . . that between creator and poet lies the one unpassable gulf which distinguishes . . . all that is God’s from all that is man’s; . . . It is better [therefore] to keep the word creation for that calling out of nothing which is the imagination of God’. MacDonald, A Dish of Orts, 2, 3. 20 See MacDonald, A Dish of Orts, 20. 17

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in a century where Romantic excess had in earlier decades sometimes slipped all too easily into a conflation of the divine and the creaturely through enthusiastic but careless use of the shared language of Geist or S/spirit. MacDonald drew gratefully on the thought of such great Romantic writers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Novalis and shared with them the conviction that the power to imagine and to make, to invent and then to form, is what makes humans truly human; but he is too good a theologian to suppose that this capacity furnishes any sort of evidence that humans are ultimately to be reckoned ‘divine’. Even in their most exalted imaginative ventures, therefore, he insists, humans are in truth only ‘following and finding out’ what God has already imagined and given to the world as part of its developmental potential,21 and in poetry as well as in science (albeit often in a rather different mode) the chief role of imagination is to ‘inquire into what God has made’ and lay bare what is to be found there.22 What science lays bare, for its part, though, is but a world of material substances and processes which MacDonald (himself trained as a natural scientist) knew to be shot through naturally and properly with non-material realities, being wedded naturally and properly to an order of meanings, values, persons, and possibilities with respect to which its forms were to function sacramentally, not by sheer convention and the arbitrary designs of human imagining, but naturally, by virtue of a deeper connectivity forged in the creation of the world itself, that it might be a habitation fit for the flourishing of human beings, those most imaginative of creatures. For it is precisely the human capacity for imagination, for acts of an imaginative sort, MacDonald holds, that keys humans into this supra-material fullness of life, just as surely as human bodies embed human creatures as animals within the processes and potentialities of material ‘nature’. This, then, is how MacDonald understands the world – as crying out for imaginative response because already laden by its divine Creator with a surplus or excess of symbolic significance. A world, furthermore, teeming with further meaning and potential as yet to be discovered or broken forth from it at the hands of creatures endowed, like God, with the imaginative vision to do so. Thus, in an age already beset by those reductionist philosophies which are the natural parasites of every legitimate celebration of the explanatory power of the natural sciences, MacDonald’s celebration of imagination is precisely a positive and elevated account of the involvement of the human creature in bringing God’s world into being, allowing it to be most fully itself, and affording it those qualities proper to a habitat fit for distinctly human indwelling. The same note is struck more recently by Jürgen Moltmann. ‘Nature is not itself a home for human beings’, he writes. ‘It is only when nature has been moulded into an environment that it can become the home in which men and women can dwell’,23 and, we might add, dwell together in covenant with God. As I have noted elsewhere: Nature alone will not suffice to engender or sustain truly human existence. Human beings being what human beings are, something more is needed, something that human beings themselves can and must provide through appropriate acts of cultivation. Endowing the

MacDonald, A Dish of Orts, 10. MacDonald, A Dish of Orts, 2. 23 Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1985), 46. 21 22

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world with human meanings, we might say, the symbolic habitus provided by culture both arises from the needs and demands of a distinctly human existence in the world and in turn renders such an existence possible.24 At this point, in order to protect the all-important gap between Creator and creature, one may be tempted to resort again to the sort of terminological distinction favoured by MacDonald, finding recent echoes as it does in the work of systematic theologians such as Colin Gunton and Wolfhart Pannenberg.25 ‘Creating’ as a divine act necessarily entails the donation of existence (esse) as such and the gracious invitation to be alongside God and with God, who alone is uncreated and self-existent. It is contingent on the radical transcendence and sovereignty of God with respect to all things and entails the concomitant radical dependence of the world on God, not only for its inception but for its moment-to-moment continuance on the very edge of non-being and the gradual unfolding of its contingent wealth of potential and promise as ‘the external basis of the covenant’26 between God and humankind. In the biblical ‘creation narrative’ of Gen. 1.1–2.4, the arrival of the seventh ‘day’ certainly seems to mark a firebreak in the characterization of the divine action, the establishment of a world now finished (Gen. 2.1) and ready for occupation, beyond which, in a fundamental sense, ‘God does not bring forth any new creatures’.27And yet, wherever in prehistory we imagine this point in time to have arisen (in the text, it is only with the appearance on the earth of human beings), it is clear that in another equally fundamental sense, all this is only the beginning of ‘God’s project’28 in creation, and not its divinely intended end. The fulfilment of God’s creative labours, shaping a world fit for human and divine cohabitation, lies not here but in a future still to come. It belongs properly not to protology but to an eschatology christologically determined and oriented, the divine declaration that ‘it is finished!’ (Jn 19.30) arising mysteriously but decisively already at the centre of the history of human action and passion straddled between the beginning and the promised end. What distinguishes ‘creation proper’, Gunton argues, is its status as something done and dusted, spoken of only in the grammar of the perfect tense (God always has created), and what remains, strictly speaking, is not ‘more creation, but simply what creator and creature alike and together make of what has been made’.29 Creating; and making; and, ‘tautologically, only God creates’.30 And yet, Gunton is forced to concede, there is, scripturally and theologically speaking, an important sense in which ‘creation’ itself (the output of God’s creative action) remains incomplete and a work very much still in progress.31 While one may wish to continue speaking of ‘creation proper’, therefore, it is nonetheless clear that the English

Hart, Making Good, 113. See Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998); Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology: Volume 2, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994). 26 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey, and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 94–228. 27 Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 2:36. 28 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 202. 29 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 89. My italics. 30 Steiner, Grammars of Creation, 20. See note 3 earlier. 31 See Gunton, The Triune Creator, 88–9. 24 25

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term ‘creation’ has a penumbra already gesturing towards its wider (‘improper’?) use, even within the grammar of theology itself.

A biblical perspective on ‘creativity’ The shape of the biblical witness to creation is entirely consonant with such semantic overspill. Hebrew possesses no single term covering the range of meanings of the English ‘creation’, and while the Hebrew poets certainly take the trouble to demarcate some lexical holy ground that must never be trespassed upon (the singular verb bārā’ – to create, shape, form – being set apart deliberately from the wider imaginative field to name a unique and non-transferable activity of creation proper), their witness to God’s primordial performance equally resists reduction to any ‘single or simple articulation’ of the matter.32 Instead, the writers deploy a string of verbal images, many of which are unashamedly suggestive of human analogy to some, at least, of what occurs ‘creatively’ at God’s hands in the beginning and beyond. So, for instance, the verb asah (to make or form) and the recurring image of God as a yotser (craftsman, though, in the light of Gen. 2.7, typically translated more specifically as ‘potter’) picture a God who, while sovereign over all things, is perfectly content to get his hands dirty in fashioning goodness and beauty from the same raw materials he himself has summoned into being, working with them and drawing out their potential rather than simply commanding or waving a divine wand to secure their easy compliance with his will. While instances of the noun yotser, itself referring directly to God, are relatively infrequent, the image conjured up by it is sustained and developed in a much wider pattern of description – in the prophets and the Wisdom texts as well as the poetic accounts of creation in Genesis 1–2 – depicting God as one who, in his actiones ad extra, does precisely those sorts of things most naturally associated with a human master craftsman/artist. Again, the imagery of one who works skilfully with his hands is central: God forms the dry land and stretches the heavens into position with his hands (see Ps. 95.5; Isa. 45.12), crafting the intricate jewelled splendour of the starry night sky with his fingers (see Ps. 8.3; cf. Ps. 102.25); the creation as a whole (cf. the formulaic ‘heaven and earth’ [Isa. 66.2; Ps. 92.4]) and human beings at the heart of it (see Gen. 2.7; Job 10.8–9; Isa. 29.23; 64.8) are explicitly referred to as divine handiwork, works wrought by God with his bare hands from the material at his disposal. Other texts take God’s hands (and any other presumed tools of his trade) for granted, directing our attention instead to the actions of design, composition, and construction performed with them: laying the foundations on which the earth itself rests (see Job 38.4; Ps. 102.25); measuring, prescribing, and establishing bounds sufficient to keep the sky, sea, and dry land in their respective places (see Job 38.5, 8-11; Isa. 40.12; Gen. 1.6-10, etc.). And, whether one’s mind’s eye takes one into the privacy of an artist’s studio or out onto a building site where a grand cosmic design is taking shape, all that is being made is ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ (Ps. 139.14), an instance of ‘making’ done to the highest standard and fit for purpose rather than any sort of ‘botched’ job (see Isa. 45.18). Not only is it worthy of human praise (see Ps. 92.4), but when finished it

Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 149. 32

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attracts the artist’s own judgement of satisfaction, being pronounced ‘very good’ and meriting time out from further industry in order that it might be contemplated and enjoyed (see Gen. 1.31–2.2). All of this, too, with its unashamed resort to thoroughly human analogy, lies securely within the domain of a theology of God’s actions as Creator. These, in other words, are things that God does, which humans, in their turn and in proper creaturely mode (mutatis mutandis), are also to be found doing and called to do. Indeed, according to persuasive studies by some biblical scholars and systematic theologians,33 one may and must go further even than this and acknowledge that within the imaginative logic of scripture one finds the clear suggestion that some of what God does ‘creatively’ in fashioning a cosmos is not only analogous to but actually conscripts and, by some presumed kenotic self-accommodation, requires the active participation of creaturely forces and agencies as such. Creation, in other words, may well be ex nihilo; but God’s creative vision is ultimately to be achieved and reach its fulfilment not by sheer divine fiat but per collaborationi.34 This poetic suggestion concurs, of course, with what is now understood of the shaping of the material cosmos, which, far from being containable within the labours of a single working week situated in ‘the beginning’, precisely because it harnesses and involves the created capacities of the cosmos itself, cannot be hurried but takes considerable time. And, wherever one locates the advent of creation’s seventh day, to the best of our knowledge, those same creaturely (and creational or ‘creative’) forces and processes rumble on beyond it, possessed of an abiding remit, a temporal future as well as a murky prehistoric past. Furthermore, if by ‘a world fit for human indwelling together with God’ one should understand the creation traditions of scripture to intend not only a physical cosmos but, of a piece with and inseparable from it, a non-material ethos too – that sphere or dimension of meanings, values, persons, and possibilities referred to earlier in which our humanity is equally fully immersed and apart from which no properly human existence can finally be imagined – then acknowledgement of our own creaturely participation in the act of ‘making’ it is inevitable. Of course, God remains uniquely the one who generates the conditions for its incipience and continuation, and remains sovereign over it; but such an integral material– spiritual–social ‘world’ demands acts of human response and meaning-making as part of its own unfolding and realization (there can be no cultivation or culture without human activity), acts which, just as surely as the ‘objective’ physical, chemical, and biological processes of material nature, are themselves conscripted by God into his creative vision and the artistic fashioning of it. In fact, currents in the psychology and physiology of perception ever since Immanuel Kant, and others in contemporary cultural theory, point to the likelihood that categories such as ‘object’ and ‘subject’, and ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (cosmos and ethos), are themselves far more closely entangled than is typically supposed, the boundaries between them being permeable rather than absolute. However much they may stand over against humans as something

See, for example, William P. Brown, The Ethos of the Cosmos: The Genesis of Moral Imagination in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999); Michael Welker, Creation and Reality, trans. John F. Hoffmeyer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999); Terence E. Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005). 34 See Brown, The Ethos of the Cosmos, 41. 33

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already divinely ‘given’, in other words, it seems that the reality of the ‘human world’ (the world as experienced humanly)35 is, in any case, always one mediated by some relevant human activity of making – whether individual or social, explicit or occult. ‘The world’, philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch avers, ‘is not given to us “on a plate”, it is given to us as a creative task. . . . We work, . . . and “make something of it”. We help it to be’.36 If so, Steiner avers, then the hermeneutics of ‘reception theory’ offers human creatures a vital aesthetic analogue for the creation of a ‘world’ that comes to them thus deliberately (and marvellously) ‘incomplete’ and full of promise, implicating them directly and dynamically in the processes by which the ‘work’ takes shape, realizing (and doing so only gradually) some if not all of the plenitude of potential meaning invested in it by the divine artist.37 Is there not the danger here, though, of precisely the sort of hubris alluded to earlier, claiming far too much for the human creature and failing to acknowledge sufficiently the differential between divine capacities and prerogatives on the one hand, and those properly to be ascribed to humans on the other? Not necessarily.

From Deus Artifex to Divino Artista There is no doubt that inflated, careless, and idolatrous ideas about human capacity and status in the larger scheme of things gained a foothold in the culture of early modernity and that these were closely wedded to emergent notions of artistry and the power of imagination to make, unmake, and remake the world in accordance with the desires, needs, convenience, and preferences of its human tenants. Furthermore, all this had distinctly religious and theological roots and forms of expression. Margot and Rudolf Wittkower observe that the notion of the artist that emerged at the Renaissance had, in fact, a complex heritage, marrying ancient Hellenistic sources and examples with the well-established biblical imagery of God as ‘artist’ which has just been considered – the divine architect or master craftsman responsible for the imaginative vision, consummate design, and skilled construction of the cosmos in all its complexity and beauty.38 The poetic appropriation, though, was clumsily done. The logic of poesis with its careful acknowledgement of that paradoxical interplay of like and unlike which inheres every image (the stakes of elision being highest and most costly precisely when the thread of connection glimpsed by the poetic eye is most surprising, striking, and profound) was insufficiently attended to, with fatal consequence. For, not only were the predicates proper to acts of skilled human making and imagining ascribed fruitfully to God as in scripture itself, but in the Renaissance celebration of God as Deus Artifex (God the artist) the imaginative flow was quickly and decisively reversed, with God’s own, necessarily unique, instantiation of ‘artistry’ now functioning as the prime analogate, providing the template and the ideal for all human

See Anthony O’Hear, The Element of Fire: Imagination in Science and Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 14. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Vintage, 2003), 215. 37 Steiner, Grammars of Creation, 53. 38 See Margot Wittkower and Rudolph Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), 98. 35 36

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participation in ars (skilled work, craft, ‘art’). The impact of this reversal was immediate, though its subsequent colonization of the modern imagination leads one easily to forget just how recent and vulnerable to criticism it actually is. Here the reference is, of course, to the notion of the true artist as a one-in-a-million figure, set identifiably apart from and elevated above the crowd by the possession of some remarkable gift or talent, an individual creative genius who, in moments of profound inspiration and self-expression, wrestles autonomously and freely with form and matter to bring forth ‘works’ of art unique both in their originality and their power to enchant and bewitch others, and which are duly celebrated and set apart from the mass of human-made artefacts to be contemplated and enjoyed for their own sake. The misleading and inadequate nature of this popular image of what artistry (or, at least, productivity in the world of ‘High’ or ‘Fine’ Art) consists of has been laid bare by others, though its specifically theological roots have not always been noticed. It is, of course, not all bad or false; but its adoption of God as the prime exemplar of what artistry amounts to led it to all manner of unhelpful assumptions and aspirations regarding the capacities and prerogatives of those ‘creative’ individuals (as they now came to be called) who were deserving of the soubriquet Divino Artista (divine artist). At the height of the Renaissance itself, the idea soon arose of the artist (whether working in words, paint, stone, sound, or whatever material) as striving to produce a ‘second nature’ to rival and even improve upon the given world,39 a theme taken up into the self-perception of many artists in the increasingly post-religious intellectual cultures of late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe. The creative imagination of the individual artist in their garret, tortured by the meaninglessness and cruelty of a disenchanted cosmos, could take solace at least in the meaning and beauty summoned into being by way of protest in artistic alternatives to it. The idolatrous and blasphemous undercurrents of all this are obvious enough. Here, ironically, the careless poetic transposition of capacities and prerogatives proper to God alone – and characterizing the shape of God’s artistry precisely and only because it is God’s artistry and not ours – into creaturely form results eventually in the displacement of God from his throne in heaven and the substitution of ‘aesthetic’ vision, endeavour, and experience for the religious and theological acknowledgement and celebration of God’s role as Creator of all things visible and invisible. It may all drive one rapidly back in the direction of MacDonald’s determination to keep ‘creation’ language safe in a hermetically sealed box and deny its legitimate application to any human activity whatever. That would certainly be understandable. But I believe it to be precisely the wrong response.

Redeeming creativity Having first acknowledged and underlined the uniqueness and incomparability attaching properly to God’s role as Creator, we may nonetheless understand certain acts of human poesis or ‘making’ (including but not restricted to those habitually identified as ‘artistic’) as participating in the fulfilment of the project of creation, adding to the sum of things extant

See Hart, Making Good, 177–95.

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in the world in ways consonant with the pattern of God’s own creative vision for it, drawing on an excess of value and meaning invested in it by God in the beginning, but deliberately left for creaturely discovery, unpacking, and realization. To speak of such acts of imaginative modification and construction as ‘creative’ need not be hubris at all but simply the joyful acknowledgement that God, being the sort of God God is, gladly conscripts human beings into this task and shares it with them, limiting his own freedom and dominion in the process, and inviting them to realize the capacities he has invested in them by making them the sorts of creatures that they are – imaginative and capable of skilled and responsible acts of making. As a habitus intended finally not only for human habitation but for the dwelling of God and God’s creatures together, the world, Rowan Williams reminds us, is not and cannot be ‘given’ all at once; its inner reality ‘unfolds in time’,40 shaped and reshaped by what Creator and creature make of it together, acts of creaturely response and representation being integral not just to the process but to the very nature of the outcome itself – a ‘covenanted’ way of existence. In this very precise sense, as Barth suggests, creation and covenant are bound up together, being external and internal aspects of the self-same thing. That this opens things up to all manner of abuse, misuse, and misappropriation is, of course, quite true. But then that is the burden of the doctrine of sin which, despite its potential to offend and so risk cultural ‘cancellation’, remains the uncomfortable and finally liberating premise of so much in the story Christians have to tell about the world. In this story, though, ars need not and finally does not have its origin in an act of violence – mythologized in the primeval burglary whereby Prometheus steals creative ‘fire’ from heaven and bestows it illicitly upon mortals – but precisely in an act of grace. God creates human beings as those whom he longs to draw into the imaginative dynamics of his own creativity, sharing fully in it in their own creaturely modes and so sharing fully, too, in God’s own joy as its depths of goodness and glory are gradually laid bare. The irony of Promethean excess in the arts or elsewhere is thus apparent; to steal or take by force that which was always intended to be ours as the gift of God’s love is a tragic act and one that threatens to turn the gift itself to ashes. That God does not permit it to do so is, of course, a further manifestation of grace. That’s why, earlier, it was suggested that an adequate theology of creation should have its centre of gravity not in protology but in christology and eschatology. As scripture repeatedly reminds us, the ‘work of human hands’ (what we make of what God has made) all too often collapses into idolatry, wickedness, and the chaos of a good thing spoiled.41 It is not here, therefore, that one should look to find ‘what God and creature make of the world together’, but first and foremost to Jesus, the one in the very depths of whose personal being the trajectories of all divine and human action and reaction come to a head and take proper shape. Acts of genuine human poesis must therefore finally be grounded and must participate in the once-for-all priestly and theopoetic humanity of Christ, and be viewed from the perspectives afforded by the doctrines of Trinity and redemption. That ‘in him all things in heaven and earth were created’ and ‘in him all things hold together’ (Col. 1.16, 17) are statements typically supposed to refer properly only to the divine identity of Christ, to his ‘divinity’ as distinct from his humanity. The perspective on creation explored in this chapter, though, suggests a different reading. It is not only God but

Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (London: Continuum, 2006), 139. See further Hart, Making Good, 51–8.

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Jesus – the creature who, by taking our flesh upon himself God here becomes – by and in and through whom from all eternity creation is grounded and comes to its promised fulfilment. And while this, as the fullest expression of God’s grace and love, is done ‘for us’, it was never meant to be done without us.42

Further reading Fujimura, Makoto. Art and Faith: A Theology of Making. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Hart, Trevor A. Making Good: Creation, Creativity, and Artistry. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014. MacDonald, George. A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare. London: Sampson, Low, Marston, & Co., 1895. Maritain, Jacques. Art and Scholasticism, with Other Essays. Translated by Joseph F. Scanlan. London: Sheed & Ward, 1930. Sayers, Dorothy L. The Mind of the Maker. London: Methuen, 1941. Seerveld, Calvin. Rainbows for the Fallen World: Aesthetic Life and Artistic Task. Toronto: Toronto Tuppence Press, 2005. Steiner, George. Grammars of Creation. London: Faber & Faber, 2001. Williams, Rowan. Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love. London: Continuum, 2006.

For a more developed treatment of the substance of this chapter, see Hart, Making Good.

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CHAPTER 69 SOUNDS

Jeremy Begbie

At its simplest, sound can be defined as ‘vibrations transmitted by an elastic medium’.1 A vibrating object (e.g. a vocal cord) sets up a disturbance in the surrounding medium (air). This disturbance takes the form of the medium’s compression followed by a decompression: in other words, a wave is set in motion – more typically, many waves are generated. Whether or not humans perceive sound waves or attend to them, they are ubiquitous in the physical world that humans inhabit. Humans live in a sounding world. What significance might these sound waves have within a Christian theology of creation? Stephen Webb’s The Divine Voice is probably the most extended recent attempt to give a theological account of sound on the broadest scale.2 The scope of this chapter is rather more modest. It concentrates on the art form that, more than any other, has harnessed sound, namely music, and on some of the distinctive features of the perception of sound, especially musical sound. Its main argument is that music has the capacity to deepen one’s theological wisdom about the nature of sound as a feature of God’s creation and about humanity’s calling as creative agents within the created world. To this end, first, this chapter examines the ancient tradition of viewing the cosmos as a ‘musical’ ecology and the ways in which this vision was appropriated by the Christian church. Second, in light of a modified version of this tradition, it considers what it means to set music in a creation-wide perspective, wherein it can be heard as a way in which physical sounds are combined in such a way as to articulate creation’s praise of the creator. Third, it proposes that this opens up a theology of human creativity in which discovery plays an intrinsic part, where musical creativity enables a sonic indwelling of the physical world. The concluding section shows that a phenomenological account of the perception of sound – especially musical sound – can serve to enrich and enhance a trinitarian theology of creation and creativity: in other words, a Christian doctrine of creation can not only illuminate the nature of sound but in turn be illuminated by reflection upon it.

A ‘musical’ ecology The earliest theological accounts of musical sound in the Christian church drew on venerable pre-Christian philosophical traditions. The most important flowed from the semi-fictional figure of Pythagoras (sixth century bce) and the philosopher Plato (c. 427–c. 347 bce), the central notion being that the musical sounds human beings construct should concur with

Roberto Casati, Jerome Dokic, and Elvira Di Bona, ‘Sounds’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 23 April 2022, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/win2020​/entries​/sounds. 2 Stephen H. Webb, The Divine Voice: Christian Proclamation and the Theology of Sound (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004). Cf. Edward Foley, ‘Toward a Sound Theology’, Studia Liturgica 23, no. 2 (1993): 121–39. 1

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and give expression to the order of the cosmos at large. Pythagoras is credited with having discovered the critical links between number and musical pitch, and was associated with the beguiling notion of the ‘music of the spheres’ – that celestial bodies give out their own distinctive tones, thus producing a cosmic, yet unheard, music. This outlook was mathematical through and through: the relationship of planets and stars in motion, of parts of the world to each other, of soul to body, of one person to another – all these were thought to be bound together by a single cosmic mathematics. In his celebrated work, the Republic, Plato alludes to the Pythagorean heavenly music: the eight spheres ‘together combine to produce one single harmony’;3 and in his dialogue Timaeus, he brings together Pythagorean and other streams of thought in a striking confluence: despite his suspicion of certain forms of music, Plato believes sounding music can both model cosmic harmony and implant it in human souls. Sound, therefore, comes to have ethical force with social and political consequences. The earliest major Christian figure to develop these currents was St Augustine (354–430). In his day, ‘music’ (musica) was first and foremost a mathematical discipline concerned with measuring the relations between sounds – usually as pertaining to poetic rhythm, meter, and verse. In his early and unfinished De Musica (387–91),4 Augustine holds that music, as sung and played, makes numbers-in-relation audible, numbers that derive from the unchanging, eternal numbers that proceed from God. A rather more systematic outlook was propounded by the philosopher Boethius (c. 475–c. 526), for whom hearing humanly made music (musica instrumentalis) was a first step (but only a first step) towards apprehending the unheard harmonies of the soul and the universe, harmonies ultimately grounded in God. These key elements were modified and extended throughout the medieval period and became deeply implicated in the church’s understanding of the role of music in liturgy. For all its sweep and theological power, this broad and honoured tradition was beset by a number of weaknesses, some of which were to contribute to its relative demise in the early modern period. Speaking in very general terms, there was a proneness to underplay a major and deeply rooted theme in scripture: the primordial goodness and full reality of the physical world as created by God. One finds a keenness to look beyond material sounds to the order or beauty they reflect or point to – in such a way as to risk leaving the sounds themselves behind – resulting in an ambivalence about whether they could be regarded as embodiments of order and beauty in their own right. Related to this, the intellectual and the sensual tended to be set against each other, and the bodily dimensions of making and hearing sounds were downplayed in the interests of the intellectual insight that sonic phenomena could afford. Moreover, there was an eagerness to give the world’s observed order an immediate rooting in God’s being and nature in such a way as to marginalize another scriptural leitmotif: that the created world gives glory to God in its ontological distinctiveness and otherness from God. These and other factors led to something of a crisis of confidence in the cosmological tradition, a crisis deepened by the growth of the natural sciences: it was found that the mathematics once thought to order

Plato, Republic, 10.617b. Augustine, ‘On Music (De Musica)’, in The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (New York: CIMA Publishing, 1947), 4:153–379. For a fine account of Augustine on music, see Carol Harrison, On Music, Sense, Affect, and Voice (New York: T&T Clark, 2019). 3 4

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the universe was rather less evident than had been thought.5 By the early eighteenth century, it seems that the Pythagorean–Platonic musical imaginary was largely discarded except as a literary trope: ‘stars no longer sang, and scales no longer laddered the sky’.6 Music came to be construed increasingly as a constructive, anthropologically determined art form – an outlook largely taken for granted today. Indeed, in contemporary musical–theoretical circles, it is common to find an extreme wariness of speaking of music as reflecting realities that transcend the constructive interests of a particular social or cultural group. Some will simply assume without question that there are no musical universals, that music is sociocultural ‘all the way down’. Failure to acknowledge this, it is said, risks foisting one cultural frame or world view upon another, a move especially pernicious when made in the name of a supposed ‘objectivity’. What is suggested here, however, is that despite its undeniable drawbacks as elaborated in antiquity and the Middle Ages, there is a profound wisdom implicit in the ancient outlook that one would be foolish to discount when attempting to account for the meaningfulness of musical sounds. At the very least, even without invoking theology directly, the confident pronouncement that there are no musical universals is arguably no less naïve than claims to have definitively identified them, and the same could be said of the stronger contention that there cannot be universals of any sort (clearly a self-undermining statement). As it happens, there is substantial evidence that certain sound structures (discrete pitches, octave equivalence, phrase structures, musical scales, etc.) and certain actions associated with certain sound patterns (the roles music is used to play, bodily movement, etc.) are remarkably widespread in musical behaviours worldwide. And there is good reason to suppose that, in many cases, these relate both to the constitution of the non-human materials that music involves (air vibrations, animal skin, wood, etc.) and to humans’ biological makeup.7 In other words, the notion of some form of extra-human ‘sonic order’ cannot be lightly dismissed. The distinguished musicologist Julian Johnson – with no theological axe to grind – offers a telling comment in this respect: If it now strikes us as amusing that music was once linked to astronomy or natural science, that is only because we fail to recognise ourselves there and the historical development of our own attempts to understand the world. If we no longer take music seriously as a

For discussion, see Stuart Isacoff, Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization (London: Faber and Faber, 2007); Rudolf Rasch, ‘Tuning and Temperament’, in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas S. Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 193–222. 6 Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21. 7 Iain Morley summarizes a mass of research thus: ‘[I]t would appear that musical behaviours amongst all humans involve the encoding of sounds into pitches (usually between three and seven) which are unequally separated across the scale, including the perfect fifth, favouring consonance and harmony over dissonance, and organizing sequences of sounds so that they have a deliberate temporal relationship to each other. It is clear that although the cultural manifestations of these behaviours are very varied, frequently incorporating other features too, the variation builds upon a limited number of core common elements, which are derived from underlying biological predispositions. The ways in which these elements and their relations are used varies from culture to culture but the mechanisms required to make use of them, and to process that use, are universal, varying only in their application relative to the conventions of the culture.’ Iain Morley, The Prehistory of Music: Human Evolution, Archaeology, and the Origins of Musicality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7. 5

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way of defining our relation to the external world, perhaps we have become not more sophisticated but simply more self-absorbed.8

Creation’s sonic praise How, then, might one understand theologically the rootedness of musical sound in some kind of sonic order, but in a way that offsets the weaknesses of the cosmological tradition and simultaneously takes account of cross-cultural musical diversity? There are some elements of a scripturally oriented doctrine of creation that are especially relevant here. In Christian theological terms, much depends on what is presumed about the nature and character of the creator, which in turn pivots on maintaining a focus on the one in whom the creator is decisively self-disclosed: Jesus Christ, incarnate, crucified, and risen. In the New Testament, Christ is presented as the central clue as to why God created the world, how God relates to the world, and the world’s final telos or end. In Christ, the creator has re-created creation within creation, freeing it from all that thwarts it (above all, from death) and for a new future, thus enacting a promise within the cosmos of its final union with the creator (see Col. 1.15-20; Eph. 1.8-10; Jn 1.1; Heb. 1.3). In this scenario, the Holy Spirit can be seen as the one who brings about in the world (albeit partially and provisionally) what has already been achieved in Christ, and in so doing anticipates the final re-creation of all things. This resonates with a theme in the tradition of Basil the Great (c. 330–79), for whom the Holy Spirit is creation’s ‘perfecter’, instantiating in this world particular fulfilments of what has already been secured in Christ.9 What, then, might one say about the created ecology of which the sonic order is part and with which music engages?10 Several points may be made. First, the order of sound is one crafted in freedom and love. The fact that vibrating matter produces sound and that sound can be crafted into music can be seen in the light of the unconstrained divine love (enacted supremely in Christ) that has brought all things into being. That there is a cosmos where music can occur, that there is matter that oscillates regularly and resonates, that there are waves that constitute sound, that humans have bodies that can sense and process these waves: all this has its source in the liberty of God’s eternal love. One’s first response to such a sonic order can be one of gratitude. Second, it is an order that is primordially good and fully real. As noted earlier, the church has often faltered insofar as it has failed to give adequate attention to material realities as embodiments of God-given order and beauty, and not merely witnesses to something wholly beyond their materiality. Sounds (physical vibrations of the air produced by flexible, material objects) – including the musical sounds human beings make by pushing air through vocal cords, plucking wire, drawing rough hair over catgut, depressing a piano key – are not to

Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 13. 9 See Patrick Sherry, Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics (London: SCM Press, 2002), chap. 7. On the Holy Spirit as the one who frees creation, see Sigurd Bergmann, Creation Set Free: The Spirit as Liberator of Nature (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005). 10 For a fuller treatment, see Jeremy S. Begbie, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), chaps. 8–9. 8

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be shunned as theologically suspect simply because of their physicality. Further, these things come to praise God in their own way, in their own created integrity: the biblical writings resist any ontological confusion of creator and created. Creation praises God as created, as not-God. It is from this perspective that Karl Barth’s famous celebration of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in volume three of his Church Dogmatics needs to be read.11 The context is a discussion of the ‘shadowside’ (Schattenseite) of creation – Barth is probably thinking of finitude and its effects (including death).12 This shadowside is not evil (Das Nichtige). Rather, God gives limits to things, and these limits are part of their created goodness.13 Authentic praise can only arise when things and persons refuse to be God, when finite limits are not abrogated. According to Barth, in hearing Mozart’s music one is perceiving the product of a finite person singing praise to God, someone who does not attempt to step out of the world’s finitude in a prideful bid for divinity. What does it matter if Mozart died in misery like an ‘unknown soldier’, Barth asks, ‘when a life is permitted simply and unpretentiously, and therefore serenely, authentically and impressively, to express the good creation of God, which also includes the limitation and end of [human beings]?’14 Mozart perceived creation’s order in such a way that ‘the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, sadness cannot become despair, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway’.15 Mozart himself does not obtrude in some ‘mania for self-expression’,16 nor try to impose a ‘message’ on the listener.17 He does not ‘will to proclaim the praise of God. He just does it – precisely in that humility in which he himself is, so to speak, only the instrument with which he allows us to hear what he hears: what surges at him from God’s creation, what rises in him, and must proceed from him’.18 ‘He simply offered himself as the agent by which little bits of horn, metal and catgut could serve as the voices of creation.’19 In other words, for Barth, Mozart’s music ‘voices creation’s praise’ as created, not divine.20 Third, the order of sound is also one of diversity. There is little, if anything, in scripture to suggest that creation’s diversity is an accident or an unhappy consequence of ‘the fall’.21 And different things praise God in different ways – indeed, the Holy Spirit is the one who enables the particulars of creation to flourish as diverse. Colin Gunton succinctly writes: ‘All things hold together in Christ: there is the basis of the wonderful order and unity revealed in the

See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.3, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and R. J. Ehrlich (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 297–9. 12 Cf. Barth, CD III.3, 349–68. 13 See Barth, CD III.3, 350. 14 Barth, CD III.3, 298–9. Italics added. 15 Barth, CD III.3, 298. 16 Barth, CD III.3, 298. 17 Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, trans. Clarence K. Pott (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1986), 37. 18 Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 37–8. 19 Barth, CD III.3, 298. 20 See Barth, CD III.3, 472: ‘Surely the playing of musical instruments is a more or less conscious, skillful and intelligent human attempt to articulate before God this sound of a cosmos which is otherwise dumb. Surely the perfect musician is the one who, particularly stirred by the angels, is best able to hear not merely the voice of his own heart but what all creation is trying to say, and can then in great humility and with great objectivity cause it to be heard by God and other [people].’ 21 See, for example, Gen. 1.11-12, 21, 24-25; 6.20; 7.14. 11

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miraculous world of the scientist. But all things are particularised, each in their own way, by the Spirit, who relates them through Christ to God the Father.’22 As far as sound is concerned, to state the obvious, different material objects generate different sounds. In ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’ (1880), Gerard Manley Hopkins draws attention to the way each thing – whether a bird or insect, a stone thrown down a well, a swinging bell – can express its ‘self ’ (inscape) and thus give praise to the Father in its own way: As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves – goes its self; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.23 Stones and bells have their own sound, expressing their ‘indoor’ ‘selves’. Each has a signature of sound; the way it sounds belongs to what it is – its character, its singular identity. I speak with this voice, and not that – the sound of my voice is part of what identifies me as this person and not another. Insofar as music brings to light – or brings to the ear – the diverse particularities of the one sonic order, it is opening up for human creatures the diverse unity of the created world. Even a single note played on a piano is, in fact, diverse: a sounding chord. For the string that is struck vibrates not just across its whole length but also in halves, in thirds, in quarters, and so on. Each of these extra vibrations creates an ‘overtone’. Multiple overtones are present in any sounding string, even if one is not usually conscious of perceiving them as such, and their relative strength contributes to the characteristic sound of that string. Most systems of music worldwide take account of this overtone series, even if different systems can navigate and shape it in radically divergent ways. Fourth, the sonic order includes the possibility of dissonance. Most music has come to depend at least to some degree on the interplay between consonance and dissonance: ‘the impression of stability and repose (consonance) in relation to the impression of tension or clash (dissonance) experienced by a listener when certain combinations of tones or notes are sounded together’.24 Understood in this way, it is not surprising to find considerable variation among cultures regarding what is to count as dissonant. Indeed, many would say that the consonance–dissonance distinction is best understood as a spectrum, ranging from the most consonant to the most dissonant. However, wherever one draws the line, that there is a spectrum seems to be assumed in most cultures, something that appears to derive from the relative simplicity of the frequency ratios between two or more sounds (or from the degree of

Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 35. Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Dráw Fláme’, in Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953), 51. 24 ‘Consonance and Dissonance’, Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed 23 April 2022, https://www​.britannica​.com​/art​/ consonance​-music. 22 23

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congruence between the overtones of any two, or more, tones). In other words, one is not lost in a relativistic fog: there seems to be fairly wide cross-cultural agreement about certain sounds belonging together more readily than others.25 All this suggests that, when seen from a biblical perspective, music can hold out the possibility of bearing witness to, and mediating, a distinctive sonic order that precedes one’s constructive activity, one that is (in more than one sense) ‘there before us’.26 It is telling that a significant cohort of philosophers have urged that music be regarded as a way in which humans are enabled to inhabit their physical environment as physical creatures more deeply and fruitfully, to attain a new form of ‘being-at-home’ in the world.27 The theological resonances of this hardly need pointing out.

What of creativity? Even so, where does this leave the business of human creativity? If it is the human vocation to voice creation’s praise, which includes taking what is given to hand and mind (e.g. material objects that produce certain sounds) and bringing about fresh forms of order (music), how might one speak of this in light of the horizons this chapter has just been opening up? The danger here is to assume that all formative activity – including making music – will, of necessity, be a denigration of the created order, given humanity’s sinful proneness to thoughtless domination and control. Many will recall the breakdown of pre-modern assumptions about universal ‘resemblances’ between the particulars of creation, of a sense of the comprehensive interconnectedness of all things. It will be urged that without some belief in the value and inherent good order of the physical world as a prior gift, as ‘there before us’, then for all its efficacy, modernity’s constructive drive will all too easily lead to tyranny, something to which contemporary ecological devastation poignantly testifies. And the distinctively modern use of the word ‘creator’ applied to the artist, and associated assumptions about the artist as one who brings about order in an essentially disordered world, could be cited as indicative of this very outlook. However, despite the undeniable elements of truth here, one needs to be hesitant about assuming a simple opposition between ‘making’ and ‘discovering’; that the ‘constructive’ dimension of, for example, music, necessarily works against an honouring of the integrities of sound. In other words, the pernicious tendency (all too often encountered in modernity) to suppose that the relation between ‘nature’ and ‘artifice’ is to be regarded in zero-sum terms, that the greater the human constructiveness or inventiveness the less room there is for respecting a prior order, and vice versa, needs to be challenged. At stake here is the relationship between divine and human agency (of which more in the following): instead of imagining an

For a good and concise discussion, see Imre Lahdelma, ‘Is the Perception of Consonance and Dissonance Universal?’, Durham University, accessed 23 April 2022, https://musicscience​.net​/2019​/04​/26​/is​-the​-perception​-of​-consonance​ -and​-dissonance​-universal. 26 See Roger Lundin, ed., There Before Us: Religion, Literature, and Culture from Emerson to Wendell Berry (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2007). 27 See Julian Johnson, ‘Music Language Dwelling’, in Theology, Music, and Modernity: Struggles for Freedom, ed. Jeremy Begbie, Daniel K. L. Chua, and Markus Rathey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 295–316. 25

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inherent rivalry between two enactments of creativity, one would do rather better to speak of God inviting the human creature into God’s own re-creative project – the creative artist being given to participate by the Spirit in the creativity already embodied and achieved in the person of Christ.28

Interpenetrating and resonant sounds This final section turns the tables by attempting to demonstrate how the human perception of sounds – especially musical sounds – can enhance a theology of creation, especially with respect to conceiving the relation between creator and creature. This turns on marking out a basic difference between aural and visual perception.29 Objects in one’s visual field typically occupy bounded spaces such that they cannot overlap without compromising their integrity. So, for example, one cannot see a patch of blue and a patch of yellow in the same space as blue and yellow. The colours either hide each other, or, if the colours are allowed to merge, one sees green. The space one perceives here is one of juxtaposition and mutual exclusion: things can be next to each other but cannot be in the same place at the same time. Almost inevitably, this will encourage zero-sum thinking: the more of one thing, the less of another. Objects are imagined as related to each other against the backdrop of a spatial whole. Space becomes, in effect, the aggregate of bounded and mutually exclusive places.30 Conceiving space in this way is habitual for most human beings. However, a moment’s thought shows that this can spawn considerable difficulties when taken into theology, not least in theologies of creation. If, for example, God and the created world are imagined as two quasi-objects within a pre-existing space, both belonging to the same genus or type of thing, each contending for the same place, one will struggle to avoid implying that the more active God is in the world, the less the world can be itself. Transcendence will tend to be opposed to immanence in a contrastive or oppositional way. Likewise, divine and human agency (and hence creativity) will tend to be imagined in terms of ontologically comparable realities striving for the same territory. Models of salvation will readily take on a contractual air: God occupies one zone of the salvific space and humans the other, making some kind of agreement or compromise necessary in order to divide up the available terrain. And, needless to say, human freedom will tend to be envisaged primarily as liberation from the ‘other’ (and the same will go for divine freedom). The world as perceived through the ear is strikingly different. If one depresses a key on a piano, for example, the note one hears fills the whole of one’s aural field. It does not occupy a bounded location. It is ‘everywhere’ in one’s aural space; there is no place where the sound is not present. If one plays another note along with the first, that second note fills the whole of the same (heard) space, yet one perceives it as distinct. In this aural world, two distinct

The most extensive discussion I have found of this, and one that to my mind says most clearly what needs to be said, is to be found in Trevor A. Hart, Making Good: Creation, Creativity, and Artistry (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014). 29 For a much fuller treatment, see Jeremy S. Begbie, Music, Modernity, and God: Essays in Listening (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 6. 30 Here I am drawing especially on Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, Volume 1: Music and the External World, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), 82–5, 93–4, 275–6. 28

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entities occupy the same space at the same time and can nonetheless be heard as irreducibly distinct. There is another potential feature of the perception of sound that is especially relevant here, and it is one that music exploits to the full. Depending on its frequency, a vibrating string can provoke others to vibrate – a phenomenon known as ‘sympathetic resonance’. This is because of something noted earlier: a string vibrates in multiple ways, creating a cluster of tones (overtones) along with its basic or ‘fundamental’ tone. If one plays middle C and opens up the string an octave above by silently pressing down the appropriate key, the upper C string will vibrate even though it has not been struck. In this case, the more the lower string sounds, the more the upper string sounds. There is no zero-sum game here: the strings do not compete for sonic space, nor do they simply allow each other room. The lower string is heard as enhancing the upper, bringing it to life, freeing it to be itself, compromising neither the integrity of the upper string nor its own. Here, then, humans have concrete practices that generate (perhaps better, perform) conceptual possibilities for theology. Indeed, they can reshape the way humans commonly think about God’s free agency as creator in relation to the world, and human persons’ own freedom as creative agents. And they can do this in ways that directly address and sometimes significantly alleviate numerous dilemmas that mar theology’s conceptions of the God–world relation and our calling vis-à-vis God as creatures. To return to the creator–creature relation, once one is freed from the supposition of an area of super-space in which God and the world are situated, the ontological and conceptual machinery of contrastive transcendence will seem far less apposite, with its tendency to posit transcendence and immanence as polar opposites and thus to elaborate various compromises and mediations between them. The way is opened up for far more biblically grounded accounts, congruent with God’s covenantal commitment disclosed in his triune self-revelation. God’s transcendence transcends a merely creaturely understanding of transcendence – it transcends the contrasts by which finite beings are distinguished and differentiated, and cannot be conceived as a spatial relation in the visual– measurable sense. Rather, God stands in a creative (covenantally propelled) relation to created space. Because God is radically for the world, one may speak of a dynamic transcendence: the transcendence of a God who creates all things out of nothing, and who sustains and redeems all things towards their eschatological fulfilment. This is a transcendence of the Giver, fundamentally oriented to and for the world’s flourishing. Divine immanence can, accordingly, be conceived as a creative involvement with the world: such an immanence does not simply allow for transcendence, or tolerate it, but requires it, for only a God who is non-identical with creation can be truly and savingly present to and for the world in its wholeness, directly and immediately. Similarly, little is to be gained from trying to ensure some perilous equipoise between divine and human creativity (as if both belonged to the same system of causes), just as there would be little point in speaking of the sympathetic resonance of one string with another as a matter of balance or compromise. Again, the key concept is participation: the creature’s sharing in the agency of the Spirit, who liberates the creature to be creative. The grounding of all this in the triune ‘space’ of the creator God should be clear by now. As I have asked elsewhere: What could be more appropriate than to conceptualize and articulate God’s triunity in terms suggested by hearing a three-note chord – that is, as a resonance of life-in-three; 915

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the three reciprocally interpenetrating, without exclusion yet without merger, irreducibly distinct yet together constituting the one divine space . . . each animating, establishing and enhancing the others in their particularity?31 This does not, of course, ‘prove’ the truth of this or that account of the Trinity, but it does suggest that the world of sound-as-perceived holds considerable theological promise for those whose task it is to articulate a doctrine of creation that finds its ultimate ground in the triunity of God.

Further reading Begbie, Jeremy S. Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. Begbie, Jeremy S. A Peculiar Orthodoxy: Reflections on Theology and the Arts. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018. Erlmann, Veit. Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Feld, Steven. ‘Acoustemology’. In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 12–21. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Labelle, Brandon. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. New York: Continuum, 2010. Webb, Stephen H. The Divine Voice: Christian Proclamation and the Theology of Sound. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004.

Begbie, Music, Modernity, and God, 169–70.

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Kevin Hart

Sometimes a poem can fold an entire tradition into itself, even when the poet is not in full command of that tradition. In doing so, the poem can recover it, revive it, or even redirect it. This last possibility is startlingly true of Geoffrey Hill’s lyric ‘Genesis’, which opens his first volume of poems, For the Unfallen (1959), and every selection or collection of his poems thereafter. The poem presents itself as a hexæmeron, a commentary on the six days of creation: a genre common in the early church and throughout the Middle Ages and well into early modernity. The word comes from the Greek ἑξαήμερον and means ‘six days’, namely the so-called ‘second creation’, the brief period from the creation of light to the making of human beings, as detailed by the Priestly Author in Gen. 1.3-26. Philo Judæus initiated the genre in his De opificio mundi, and the tradition entered Christianity with commentaries by Theophilus of Antioch (d. c. 184) and Origen ( c. 184– c. 253).1 Basil of Cæsaria reacted against Origen’s liberal use of allegory in the nine Lenten homilies that compose his Hexæmeron (370).2 He attends quite literally to the creation of the natural world, mostly exempting the making of human beings, a lacuna impressively filled by his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa, in his De hominis opificio (379).3 Ambrose of Milan was heavily influenced by Basil’s work, and his Hexæmeron (387) is important partly for its polished Latin style and mostly because it covertly introduced Basil’s reflections to Western Europe.4 Sometimes the scaffolding of the ‘six days’ is augmented by all manner of theological speculation, and the neatness of the biblical structure is lost. Augustine’s great De Genesi ad litteram (401–15) is a case in point. Of its twelve books, only the first four can be taken to be hexæmeral in any narrow sense of the word, while Book Ten is a treatise on the human soul, and Book Twelve is a disquisition on paradise.5 Thereafter, examples of the genre proliferate: Anastasios Sinaita (d. post-700) and Aelfric (c. 955–1010) supply quite different responses to the tradition, the former notable for its christological concerns and the

See Philo, ‘On the Account of the World’s Creation Given by Moses’, in Philo, trans. F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 1:6–137; Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum, trans. Robert M. Grant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 3; Origen, ‘The Homilies on Genesis’, in Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 1. 2 See Basil of Cæsaria, ‘On the Hexæmeron’, in Exegetic Homilies, trans. Agnes Clare Way, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1963), hom. 1–9. His remark on allegory may be found at the start of the ninth homily. 3 See Gregory of Nyssa, ‘On the Making of Man’, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, Volume 5: Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, Etc., ed. Philip Schaff (Edinburgh/ Grand Rapids: T&T Clark/Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997), 387–427. 4 See Ambrose, Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, trans. John J. Savage (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1961). 5 See Augustine, ‘The Literal Meaning of Genesis’, in On Genesis, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2002), 155–506. 1

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latter for adding the story of the fall of Satan to the original text and setting the whole narrative in alliterative verse.6 Around the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the hexæmeral tradition quietly passes from preaching and independent volumes of biblical exegesis to poetry; it does so in an impressive manner. One finds Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas’ La Semaine ou creation du Monde (1578) and Torquato Tasso’s Le sette giornate del mondo creato (1594).7 The former was a popular success and influenced Milton, who provided his own hexæmeron in the seventh book of Paradise Lost (1667) by way of Raphæl’s answer to Adam’s question about the creation.8 Perhaps the sheer brilliance of Milton’s genius both initiated and terminated an English verse tradition of narrative hexæmerons. A belated attempt to revive the genre, this time in lyric poetry, was made by James McAuley in his ‘The Six Days of Creation’ (1969), which accompanies Leonard French’s rich prints on the same theme. The resulting booklet is the work of a Catholic poet and a Catholic painter responding to the biblical narrative in their own ways, and with a frisson between the verse and the painting. In its final form, the sequence consists of seven sonnets, each with short lines. The fifth lyric exemplifies the whole: Tomorrow is the time Of the Paradisal Man. In first darkness he began, A soup of slime. Tomorrow will emerge From every living form, From anther, tendril, bud, and corm, This strident urge.

See Anastasios Sinaita, Hexæmeron, ed. Clement A. Kuehn and John D. Baggarly (Rome: Pontificio Istituo Orientale, 2007); Samuel J. Crawford, Emameron Anglice or The Old English Hexameron (Hamburg: Verlag von Henri Grand, 1921). Other prominent examples of hexæmeral literature include the first book of Bede’s On Genesis, trans. Calvin B. Kendall (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 68–105; Robert Grosseteste, On the Six Days of Creation: A Translation of the ‘Hexæmeron’, trans. Christopher F. J. Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Bonaventure’s Conferences on the Six Days of Creation: The Illumination of the Church, trans. Jay M. Hammond (St Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute, 2018). Examples of the tradition can be found generally in medieval exegesis, sermons, and theology. See, for instance, Hugh of St Victor’s hexæmeron embedded in his ‘Sentences on Divinity’, in Trinity and Creation, ed. Boyd Taylor Coolman and Dale M. Coulter (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 133–9; and his ‘Notes on Genesis’, in Interpretation of Scripture: Practice, ed. Frans van Liere and Franklin T. Harkins (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 63–9. Also, the hexæmeron in Godfrey of St Victor’s Microcosmus, ed. Philippe Delhaye (Lille: Facultés catholiques, 1951), §§20–201. Aelfric’s poem is indebted to Bede in particular. It should be noted that Aelfric’s is not the earliest verse hexæmeron. That honour goes to Blossius Aemelius Dracontius (c. 455–c. 505) whose first book of his De laudibus dei was commonly known as the Hexæmeron. Following him is George of Pisidia’s prose Hexæmeron, composed in the early seventh century. See David M. Olster, ‘The Date of George of Pisidia’s Hexæmeron’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991): 159–72. For a useful survey of hexæmeral literature, see Frank E. Robbins, The Hexæmeral Literature: A Study of the Greek and Latin Commentaries on Genesis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1912). 7 See Torquato Tasso, Le Sette Giornate del Mondo Creato (London: Forgotten Books, 2018); G. de Salluste, La Sepmaine, ou Creation du Monde (Paris: Feurier, 1578). 8 See George C. Taylor, Milton’s Use of du Bartas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934). The discussion of La Sepmaine’s influence on book seven of Paradise Lost occurs on pp. 85–100. 6

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In him will be comprised The world as animal: Organs in their dim cabal Imparadised; Eye, membrane, genital – The flesh of Christ.9 An emphasis on love as ‘strident urge’ runs throughout the sequence, which is permeated by a calm, thoughtful elegance combined with a strong sense of formal ease. When one looks back a decade or so from McAuley’s lyrics to Hill’s ‘Genesis’ one can only be struck by a more restless and powerful mind at work, all the more so in that the first version of it was written in 1952 when the poet was just twenty. If McAuley had been reading Georg Trakl and mediating him through plain English speech and set forms, Hill had been looking elsewhere. Elegance was not on his mind; a degree of roughness in verse was, however. Nor was love as a primal urge foremost for him; love would come only with blood. Hill had been immersing himself in American poets of the period, especially the muscular lyrics of the young Robert Lowell (‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’, for instance), along with poems by Dylan Thomas and R. S. Thomas at home and Blake further back in literary history. Hill’s poem as it appears in its final version, in Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, is as follows: I Against the burly air I strode Crying the miracles of God. And first I brought the sea to bear Upon the dead weight of the land; And the waves flourished at my prayer, The rivers spawned their sand. And where the streams were salt and full The tough pig-headed salmon strove, Ramming the ebb, in the tide’s pull, To reach the steady hills above. II The second day I stood and saw The osprey plunge with triggered claw, Feathering blood along the shore, To lay the living sinew bare.

James McAuley, ‘The Seven Days of Creation’, in Collected Poems, 1936–1970 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1971), 185–6. The first six lyrics appeared as the twelfth booklet in the ‘Australian Poets and Artists’ series (Adelaide: Australian Letters, 1969). It consists of ‘The Six Days of Creation’ and includes illustrations by Leonard French. McAuley added the seventh lyric to the series for publication in his Collected Poems. 9

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And the third day I cried: ‘Beware The soft-voiced owl, the ferret’s smile, The hawk’s deliberate stoop in air, Cold eyes, and bodies hooped in steel, Forever bent upon the kill’. III And I renounced, on the fourth day, This fierce and unregenerate clay, Building as a huge myth for man The watery Leviathan, And made the glove-winged albatross Scour the ashes of the sea Where Capricorn and Zero cross, A brooding immortality – Such as the charmed phoenix has In the unwithering tree. IV The phoenix burns as cold as frost; And, like a legendary ghost, The phantom-bird goes wild and lost, Upon a pointless ocean tossed. So, the fifth day, I turned again To flesh and blood and the blood’s pain. V On the sixth day, as I rode In haste about the works of God, With spurs I plucked the horse’s blood. By blood we live, the hot, the cold, To ravage and redeem the world: There is no bloodless myth will hold. And by Christ’s blood are men made free Though in close shrouds their bodies lie Under the rough pelt of the sea; Though Earth has rolled beneath her weight The bones that cannot bear the light.10

Geoffrey Hill, ‘Genesis’, in Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3–4. 10

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A poem that troubled Hill over a long period, ‘Genesis’ was subject to several small revisions until it achieved canonical form in Broken Hierarchies.11 Its argument is compressed, perhaps overly so at points. Yet the lyric’s spiritual intensity cannot be gainsaid in any of its versions; it revives a genre not known for originality, one that cannot have been at all well known by the young poet, and redirects it in a way that is explored in this chapter.12 * * * The ‘second creation’ in the opening chapter of Genesis shows God first dividing what he has made in the ‘first creation’: light from darkness, and firmament from water, the latter of which includes establishing dry land so that plants may grow on it. Then God adorns what he has made with lights (so there can be day and night), then come fish and fowl, then land animals, and, finally, human beings. Hill departs from the Priestly Author’s narrative in several ways. First, he considers both narratives in Genesis, that of the Priestly Author and also the Yahwist (in Genesis 2–3), which details the fall as well as creation. Second, the speaker – why not just call him Hill? – is active and reactive in the created world from the start; and this will be explored further shortly. And third, he identifies six stages of another genesis: (1) a making of waves to crash over the land in order to encourage fertility; (2) the witness of birds of prey in their quests for food; (3) a reaction to violence in the animal and human worlds; (4) a renunciation of the human body; (5) a return to the constraints of flesh and blood; and (6) a recognition that violence is needed in the world, both naturally and supernaturally. Creation, for the Priestly Author, is carefully, peacefully ordered and then blessed, leading to the establishment of a royal kingdom of men and women who will oversee the whole. Hill, however, addresses an agonized personal genesis, a coming to terms with a creation that has fallen, needs redemption, and to which he belongs. It is important to note that the poem’s title is not given in the Hebrew, Bereshit (‘In the beginning’), but in the Greek of the Septuagint, ‘Genesis’. For the title names not only the divine creation over six days but also how Hill is formed in and to some extent by the natural life of the Worcestershire and Shropshire landscape of his youth. To some extent only: the

The poem appeared in the Fantasy Press booklet of Geoffrey Hill’s poems published when he was an undergraduate at Oxford in 1952 and was given the subtitle ‘A Ballad of Christopher Smart’. It was the third poem in the booklet. The poem also appeared in The Paris Review 1, no. 2 (1953): 31–2. The version of the poem in Somewhere Is Such a Kingdom: Poems 1952–1971, introduced by Harold Bloom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1975) is the same as in the booklet and in The Paris Review, except for the modernization ‘charmed’, which is ‘charmèd’ in the booklet and journal publications. In the booklet and journal appearances, the first line ends with a comma and is followed by: ‘Where the tight ocean heaves its load’. Hill dropped this line in his Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), presumably in response to John Matthias’ faulting of the line in his review ‘Such a Kingdom’, Poetry 128 (1976): 234. Matthias later wrote of the line, ‘Some drunken sailor stumbling / From a pub and barfing in the street, I thought’, ‘On the Later Manner of Geoffrey Hill’, part two of ‘Hoosier Horologe’, in Collected Shorter Poems (Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2011), 2:115. The penultimate line of the first section, as it appeared in the booklet and in The Paris Review, had the verb ‘Curbing’ and the phrasing ‘and the tide’s pull’. Later, in the Collected Poems, Hill replaced ‘glove-winged’ by ‘long-winged’, which was retained in the Selected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006), and then restored the original image in Broken Hierarchies. For more information about the manuscripts of the poem, see Piers Pennington, ‘The Manuscripts and Composition of “Genesis”’, Geoffrey Hill and His Contexts, ed. Piers Pennington and Matthew Sperling (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 25–42. 12 This is not to say that there are no original hexæmerons in the Christian tradition. Anastasius of Sinai’s Hexæmeron, along with Godfrey of St Victor’s hexæmeron in his Microcosmus, remain powerful and original works. 11

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poem cannot be set in either county since part of its action takes place near the sea, presumably in Scotland. In any case, the poem’s landscape is presented as primordial; first, there is air, water and land, and then birds and animals are introduced. Human beings appear only briefly, as agents of violence. Thereafter the speaker makes myth (a word that will require further inspection) out of what he has read (or heard about) but presumably has not seen. There is the great sea monster Leviathan from Job, the Psalms, and Jonah.13 There is the albatross from Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), and there is the phoenix from De ave Phœnice, ascribed to Lactantius (c. 250–c. 325). Culture and society are otherwise occluded. Hill’s self-presentation is stark, decisive, and stated with visionary directness: ‘I strode’, ‘I brought’, ‘I stood and saw’, ‘I cried’, ‘I renounced’, ‘[I] made’, ‘I turned’, and ‘I rode’. There is Hill, there is God, and there is the world that God has created. ‘Genesis’ begins with Hill roughly opposing himself to the elements: ‘Against the burly air I strode’, he writes, as though capably setting himself in competition against a strong man. The ground of his motivation is directly given: ‘Crying the miracles of God’. Is Hill a prophet or a preacher? (We are likely to think of ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness’ (Mk 1.3, KJV).) Or is he a bard? Or is he just an ordinary man shouting out of a personal anguish? Certainly, the natural world is unable to account on its own terms for miracles, whether they be the seven signs that Jesus gave, others that have been credited to saints, or even the very creation of the cosmos out of nothing in six fiats (or one fiat in six stages). Hill seems to make a stronger claim than this, however: he cries out God’s miracles against the forces of nature. Almost immediately, there is a shift from divine power to Hill, and it is not apparent whether this power derives from God or is set in rivalry with him: ‘And first I brought the sea to bear / Upon the dead weight of the land.’ This is presumably the first act of the young Hill’s crying of miracles, or perhaps the very performance of one of them, and on reading it, the opening two lines seem to parallel the ‘first creation’ of Gen. 1.1-2 with the ‘second creation’ only now beginning. Yet there is a shift from the biblical genesis to the poet’s personal genesis, for Hill does not speak of ‘dry land’ but of ‘the dead weight of the land’: The fall has taken place before the poem begins or perhaps with Hill’s initial ambition to perform a miracle by himself. Where the biblical narrative concerns the unfallen, Hill’s narrative is ironically postlapsarian. What is this miracle – divine or human, real or feigned? The land is separated from the sea, and Hill apparently bids the sea to crash its waves upon the land. It promptly does so: ‘the waves flourished at my prayer, / The rivers spawned their sand’. This could be Mt. 21.21-22, where Jesus points out the power of faith to move mountains. Equally, however, it could be the fall occurring precisely because of human distraction from God’s power by virtue of the richness and beauty of the world, which it willingly mistakes as properly its own. If so, the lines bespeak a fatal overreaching of the human with respect to God.14 Yet again, King Canute is showing his court the power of God: ‘I command you, then’, he says to the sea, ‘not to flow over my land, nor presume to wet the feet and robe of your lord’. And when the tide continues to come in, he says: ‘Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there

See Job 3.9; 40.15–41.26; Pss. 74.13-23; 104.26; Isa. 27.1; and Jon. 1.17–2.10. Jonah speaks of a big fish, the other writers of Leviathan: sometimes the two are distinguished, sometimes they are conflated. 14 See, above all, Augustine, The Trinity, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991), 10.2.7. 13

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is nothing worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.’15 Again, the figure cut by the young Hill does not settle neatly in the mind. Is he exercising the powers of an inspired bard, a vates, or serving as a chosen vessel for divine authority, or competing with that authority, or merely fooling himself, since the sea will pour over the land at high tide regardless of his words? We cannot readily decide which of these options has the greatest weight in reading the poem, and the flaring force field of meaning that results may itself be an oblique effect of the fall.16 Yet the first section ends, with a sense of calm satisfaction, in the sight of an Atlantic salmon run: the poet has made (or has taken himself to have made) nature reproduce itself. The land is no longer an oppressive burden (‘dead weight’) but is teeming with life. There are the salmon at the very start of their run, where at high tide the salt ocean water meets the fresh water of the stream, which is when the fish have the most zest for climbing the hills in order to spawn. The whole vignette is marked by natural energy: the streams are ‘full’, the salmon ‘strove’, all ‘Ramming the ebb’ and doing so in the tide’s ‘pull’. Energy is expended, and for most female salmon, death ensues quickly after spawning in the ‘steady hills above’. No life without death. Yet life and death here are wholly natural; they do not involve any questions of damnation or redemption. From mating salmon in freshwater rivers, and from a reported speech act that may or may not have been felicitous, the poet turns on the second day to see how osprey hunt. Mostly, these large birds eat fish: they plunge anywhere from 30 to 130 feet above the water for prey, which they capture with clawed feet. Osprey will sometimes eat rodents, frogs, or smaller birds. Hill imagines the bird’s prey dripping blood along the shore as it is carried to the nest to be eaten, presumably while still alive. ‘I stood and saw’: on the second day, Hill is passive, with no prayers to utter, perhaps appalled by what he sees. The following day he has thoroughly considered what he has witnessed, and he cries out a warning about the owl and the ferret, which deludes the sentimental observer, along with the hawk that hovers and then ‘stoops in air’ to catch its prey. Perhaps there are similarities with Milton: the fall utterly changes his charming picture in Paradise Lost of a world that once featured ‘without thorn the rose’ (4.254).17 Before the advent of sin, the Garden is peaceful, an animal kingdom in which predators play with non-predators while Adam and Eve sit by and enjoy what they see: About them frisking played All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase In wood or wilderness, forest or den; Sporting the lion ramped, and in his paw Dandled the kid; bears, tigers, ounces, pards, Gamboled before them; the unwieldy elephant, To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed

See Thomas Forester, ed. and trans., The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon and The Acts of Stephen (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853), 199. 16 The connection between language and the fall is a theme of Michael Edwards’ Towards a Christian Poetics (London: Macmillan, 1984). 17 This view of paradise goes back at least as far as Basil of Cæsaria, Hexæmeron, 5.6. Augustine agreed in On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, 11.13.19, but departed from him in The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 3.18.27–28. 15

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His lithe proboscis. (4.340–47) Notice that in ‘Genesis’ the owl, the ferret, and the hawk are seen only in Hill’s self-quoted words. The stanza is shot with a wide, maximum aperture, as it were: the focus is the ‘I’ who, if he does not have dominion over the scene, at least sets it only in relation to himself. To whom does Hill cry his warning, though? The landscape held in his gaze is populated only by animals in their elemental lives, not by human beings. Except for one detail, which presumably comes from the German bombing of Britain, especially Coventry, near Bromsgrove, where Hill lived as a child. The bombing lasted from August to November 1940 and gave the eight-year-old Hill plenty of experience for the lines evoking ‘bodies hooped in steel, / Forever bent upon the kill’. The German Junker (JU 87), like the hawk, would dive almost vertically upon its target so as to maximize accuracy.18 Coventry was mostly destroyed. Like the biblical narratives it shadows, ‘Genesis’ passes quickly from creation to fall, and from fall to human violence. Although the Second World War was regarded as a ‘just war’ (most notably in the United States by Reinhold Niebuhr), there is no warrant in the poem for any appeal to Christian Realism. Rather, there is a sense that the war is an occasion for human violence to manifest itself. The whole book introduced by ‘Genesis’ is offered ‘for the unfallen’, those who have survived the devastation of war. Hill’s formal abandonment of his right to use his physical body and take pleasure in it comes on the fourth day. For he knows very well that his flesh, made from clay, is fallen.19 It is ‘fierce’, as witnessed in the image of the Blitzkrieg; more disturbing, it is also ‘unregenerate’. After the evocation of ‘eyes. . . . / Forever bent upon the kill’, there is a self-condemnation along spiritual lines, not a condemnation of the Germans along political lines or of the violence being perpetrated by both sides of the conflict. That the body is obstinate in its commitment to what is morally wicked is clear from what has already been seen in the second part of the poem. The word ‘unregenerate’ suggests more, and does so quite sharply in a Calvinist register, that the whole created person is depraved, has not sought to turn to God and revive the imago Dei that has been (at best) damaged by original and actual sin, and (at worst) rendered inoperative. If Hill started with prophetic zeal, real or imagined, in part one of the lyric, he has now become personally convicted of sin; his path back to intimacy with God must go by way of ascetic practice. No more is there the apparently easy and successful prayer that leads to the flourishing of nature. Yet Hill’s renunciation of the allurements of the flesh goes not by way of spiritual exercises but by the imagination. He engages in ‘Building as a huge myth for man / The watery Leviathan’. Two things are worth comment here. First, assuming that the participle (‘Building’) modifies the ‘I’, Hill takes it upon himself to build the myth of Leviathan when, presumably, he is already perfectly well aware of it in the Hebrew Bible and surely also of its allegorical significance as given in the Gospel (Mt. 12.3941), if not in patristic exegesis of Jonah.20 He says, ‘The watery Leviathan’ and not ‘A watery

R. S. Thomas used a similar image of a hawk in his lyric ‘Homo Sapiens 1941’, in The Stones of the Field (Carmarthen: The Druid Press, 1946), 12: ‘Murmuration of engines in the cold caves of air, / And, daring the starlight above the stiff sea of cloud, / Deadly as a falcon brooding over its prey’. The poem is not included in Thomas’ Collected Poems. 19 That God made human beings from clay derives not from Genesis but from Job 10.9; 33.6; and Isa. 45.9. 20 See Timothy M. Hegedus, ‘Jerome’s Commentary on Jonah: Translation with Introduction and Critical Notes’ (MA diss., Wilfred Laurier University, 1992). 18

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Leviathan’. The poet’s vatic ambition is considerable, even if ‘building’ is taken to mean no more than develop or increase. And second, he takes the allegorical reading of Jonah to yield a myth (μῦθος), a non-biblical word, and not a sign (σημεῖον), as Jesus puts it when talking about the whale. For Christians, the sign points to an eschatological truth: ‘For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth’ (Mt. 12.40). To build ‘a huge myth for man’ out of a great whale is something that can be associated in very different ways with Jesus as the firstborn of the resurrection and with Ahab’s romantic quest for the white whale in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). In the former story, human beings have the hope of overcoming final death; in the latter, they go on a quest to kill a whale (a symbol of God, Nature, or something else), even at the cost of their own deaths. At this level of generality, human beings may seek meaning in their lives in love or death. Melville’s quest can be thought of as a myth, both in the sense that it is a set of beliefs about the world and that it is a narrative which arranges those beliefs into a whole. It is different for Christians. Unless they are on the far liberal edge of the faith, in which the New Testament has been thoroughly demythologized apart from a thread of κήρυγμα (proclamation), followers of Jesus will not be at ease using the word ‘myth’ to describe the resurrection.21 For in this situation, ‘myth’ is usually taken to contrast with ‘truth’ (understood as the ideally unconditioned truth made available by the methods of natural science), whether boldly or weakly, which yields modern inflections of the word. Either way, what is striking is that Hill proposes to take each story and expand it, making himself stronger in literary ability than either Jesus or Melville. Such would be high Romantic creativity. One might think of Coleridge’s repetition of the infinite ‘I AM’ in the primary imagination.22 In Hill’s poem, the project hardly inspires much trust, though, for the Leviathan is acknowledged to be ‘watery’, which surely suggests something more than the ocean in which it swims, namely something thin and weak. Could it be that Hill has Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) somehow in mind? An absolute State might be a way of improving humanity’s sad lot in a state of nature as evoked in the second section of the poem; however, Hill the vates might figure the State as ‘watery’ insofar as Hobbes is concerned in his great treatise to support what he calls ‘true religion’, which looks spiritually weak compared with the potent extremes of Cromwellian Puritanism and Counter-Reformation Catholicism, both of which are firmly rejected in the treatise.23 In any case, if it is a literary, political, or at best spiritual myth (in a modern sense), the Leviathan will have little or no power to improve one’s lot, especially perhaps if one embraces it while rejecting one’s created flesh and blood. Hill does not rest with the myth of Leviathan but has direct recourse to two other animals of literary–theological significance. The first is the albatross, taken from Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798; 1817 with gloss). Hill insists, in an astonishing act of appropriation, that he ‘made the glove-winged albatross / Scour the ashes of the sea’. In Coleridge’s poem –

See Rudolf Bultmann, The New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984). 22 See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: Or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, ed. J. Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1:304. 23 See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1688, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 1.7, 2.31, 3, 4. 21

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quoting from the text of 1834 – an albatross becomes the apparent agent of helping sailors lost in the snow–fog to regain their journey. As soon as the albatross emerges from the fog, the ice splits, and ‘a good south wind sprung up behind’, and the bird follows the ship (71). The ancient mariner, who tells his story to a man he has buttonholed on his way to a wedding, shoots the bird, which is then hung about his neck in lieu of a cross. Only when the mariner begins to pray, at the end of the fourth part of the poem, does the albatross fall from his neck. In the fifth part of the poem, the sailors of the ship have been overcome by the nightmare Life-in-Death who has found them on the high seas. The sailors die, and their bodies are taken over by angelic spirits; they become ‘a ghastly crew’ (340), living out what Hill calls ‘A brooding immortality’. No fecundity here: the salty southern Atlantic is experienced as no more than ‘ashes’. The idea of a living death averts Hill to the post-biblical story of the phoenix that nested in the Tree of Life. It was first told by Lactantius, or someone once associated with him, although it mostly became popular in the Middle Ages (as in the Exeter Book and Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarium) when it was often taken to be an image of Christ’s resurrection.24 The story is that of all the creatures in the Garden of Eden, the phoenix was the only one that did not sin, and consequently, there was no reason for it ever to leave paradise (which is why no one ever sees a phoenix). A spark from the flaming sword that came with the cherubim who hastened Adam and Eve from the Garden ignited the phoenix’s nest, and the bird burned only to be reborn. Hill’s image of the phoenix is less sanguine; its immortality seems somewhat lonely and tedious. The implication of both stories in the economy of the poem is that renunciation of the flesh leads only to a pallid immortality, which is the theme of the brief fourth (and weakest) section of the poem. There is such a thing as ice burn, yet the oxymoron and simile introducing part four (‘burns as cold as frost’) are overly familiar from earlier literature. One can immediately think of William Shakespeare’s ‘cold fire’ in Romeo and Juliet (1.1.185) and Thomas Wyatt’s version of Petrarch’s sonnet 134 (number twenty-six of the Egerton Manuscript) with the line ‘I fear and hope; I burn and freeze like ice’.25 The albatross in the poem ranges across the southern Atlantic Ocean, closer to the west coast of Africa than the east coast of South America, but apparently to no purpose (unlike the Atlantic salmon rushing up the stream to mate). The evocation of a ‘brooding immortality’ and the Tree of Life as merely ‘unwithering’ is already quite sufficient to show the unsatisfactory consequence of any renunciation of the flesh. Hill needs another section of the poem, or at least another stanza, to justify his renunciation of renunciation and to add another day to his sequence for there to be a proper hexæmeron: ‘So, the fifth day, I turned again / To flesh and blood and the blood’s pain.’ Hill is now properly situated to consider the fall and redemption as they are actually offered, in and through the embodied sacrifice of Christ. He has quietly realized that the immortality offered by Life-in-Death and by the phoenix is anaemic because it has no relation to Christ. With the sixth section, Hill acts with haste, riding a horse and using his spurs to make it gallop more quickly (‘I plucked the horse’s blood’). The opportunity to complete his personal

See The Exeter Book: An Anthology of Anglo-Saxon Poetry Presented to Exeter Cathedral by Leofric, First Bishop of Exeter (1050–1071), and Still in the Possession of the Dean and Chapter, ed. Israel Gollancz (London: Early English Text Society, 1895), 207, 215, 235, 237. See also Willene B. Clark, ed. and trans., The Medieval Book of Birds: Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarium (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), chap. 54. 25 See Thomas Wyatt, Collected Poems, ed. Joost Daalder (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 24. 24

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genesis is running out: the six days of creation are also the six ages of human life. No particular aim is given to warrant Hill’s speed; there is no crying of miracles and apparently no one to hear him in any case. There is only a sense of temporal pressure, as in the allusion to Horace (Carpe diem, ‘Pluck the day’), and perhaps an image of the horse’s snorting, as though it were being mistreated as a harp or lyre.26 Most spurs are round, not pointed, and no competent horse rider would use spurs to draw blood from the side of the animal. However, there is a theological realization that is urgently communicated in this blood imagery. Hill embraces ‘the blood’s pain’ in seeing that ‘By blood we live, the hot, the cold, / To ravage and redeem the world’. The ‘we’ draws attention to itself, for although human beings, including some church folk, certainly ravage the world, as has already been seen in the poem, and in which description Hill includes himself, the redemption of the world occurs only through Christ. The ‘we’ is brutally divided unless one identifies with Christ. And this is precisely what Hill does or seems to do when he says: ‘There is no bloodless myth will hold.’ No doubt bloodless myths become literary very quickly; one reads Ovid’s Metamorphoses for aesthetic, not spiritual, satisfaction; and the allegorizing of Jonah’s sojourn in the whale’s belly will seem literary without the cross. But if the sacrifice of Christ is only a myth, in one or another modern sense of the word, it is questionable that it will ‘hold’; it simply cannot grip us at the level required for faith, hope, and love to flourish. If it is read slowly, however, another possibility comes into view; we are being urged to accept that Christ’s sacrifice is not only not ‘bloodless’ but also that it is not a ‘bloodless myth’. It is of another order entirely – the truth of redemption, which is ‘by Christ’s blood are men made free’. ‘Blood’ appears six times in twelve lines as the poem curves towards its conclusion, if that is not too settled a word to use, each time deepening the image of the blood ‘along the shore’ in the second section of the poem, which is lightly recapitulated in the image of plucking blood from the horse as Hill rides. ‘Christ’s blood’ is, of course, the blood that poured from him during his scourging, crucifixion, and piercing by Longinus’ spear, but there is also his hæmolacria in the Garden of Gethsemane when, anticipating a hateful death, Jesus wept tears of blood (Lk. 22.44), which makes one remember and revalue ‘the blood’s pain’ of the previous section. The lyric ends with an invitation to consider the word ‘free’ in the soteriological confession ‘by Christ’s blood are men made free’ by way of two subordinating conjunctions. It is freedom from sin, first of all, and presumably also freedom from the flesh. For as it is told, the sailors of Coleridge’s ballad, along with other real mariners, have left their bodies ‘Under the rough pelt of the sea’. (Once more, there is an animal image, although this time it is unclear whether the sea is living or dead, able to help new life flourish or is merely lifeless as ash.) Then, in the second subordinating conjunction, which conclusively ends the poem, there is ‘Earth has rolled beneath her weight / The bones that cannot bear the light’. This recalls the ‘dead weight of the land’ in the poem’s first section, and one notes that its oppressiveness now applies to the ocean as well and does so more finally than before. There is no question here of a prayer making the waves do as Hill wishes. There is a final ambiguity in the last lines of the poem. Are the dead bodies eventually crushed to death by the tremendous weight of the ocean (or land), and are their souls released?

See Horace, Odes, 1.11.

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Such liberation would be to a spiritual eternity only since the resurrection of the flesh is not countenanced in the poem’s final section. The very phrasing of the lines recalls Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ (1800), in which the dead Lucy is merely ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees’.27 The allusion gives reason to doubt any resurrection. The second subordinating conjunction is also disturbing. Does it merely reinforce the physical deaths of the sailors? (They cannot continue to bear the light of the sun, which is to say their mortal lives come to an end. One may recall Guiderius’ song [as Polydor] ‘Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun’ in Cymbeline, 4.2.331–42.) Or does it suggest that some or even all those people are not raised from the dead, not even in a spiritual resurrection, because ‘they cannot bear the light’? The cause might be sin, or predestination to eternal death, or, just as troublingly, their rejection of the light. The gaps between these possibilities make one question the firmness of the soteriology in the apparently resounding line, of a sort one might associate with the young Dylan Thomas, ‘And by Christ’s blood are men made free’. For it may well be that the atonement is limited, as it is for Calvin, or if unlimited, as it is for Catholics, not claimed by all who need it. * * * When ‘Genesis’ first appeared in the eleventh of the Fantasy Press poetry series in 1952, Hill’s second year as an undergraduate at Oxford, it bore the subtitle ‘A Ballad of Christopher Smart’. The subtitle was deleted in all subsequent publications; nonetheless, its trace should make one cautious about identifying the ‘I’ of the poem so closely with Hill, as has been done throughout this chapter. If the generic marker ‘ballad’ makes one pause, it is most likely because it needs to be thought of in its eighteenth-century sense: a poem that narrates a story in short stanzas. Why Christopher Smart? This question can be answered by reading or re-reading Smart’s poems and reflecting a little about his life. Hill’s poem can be thought of as an anomalous fugitive contribution to the Hymns and Spiritual Songs, but one will get further, and that more quickly, by considering his Jubilate Agno (1759–63). In some ways, the latter poem, parts of which resound with a prophetic intensity and which often sounds like a disordered psalm, reiterates much of creation. Flowers, fish, birds, and land animals are all named and placed in conjunction with biblical persons, some of them not at all well-known these days. Almost all the animals in Hill’s poem are named there. Consider ‘Let John, the Baptist, rejoice with the Salmon – blessed be the name of the Lord Jesus for infant Baptism’ (6.70); ‘Let Hushai rejoice with the Osprey who is able to parry the eagle’ (6.31); ‘Let Shephatiah rejoice with the little Owl, which is the wingged Cat’ (5.68); and so on for other owls, for the ferret, the hawk, Leviathan, and the horse.28 Looking elsewhere in Smart’s poetry, one finds in the second book of ‘The Hop-Garden’, ‘In vain forlorn / I call the Phoenix, fair Sincerity’ (ll.11–12). There are several other birds in Smart’s poems, but no albatross is mentioned. The honour is Coleridge’s alone.

William Wordsworth, ‘A Slumber did my Spirit Seal’, in Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. edn, Ernest de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 149. 28 See Christopher Smart, ‘Jubilate Agno’, in The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart: I. Jubilate Agno, ed. Karina Williamson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 1–129. 27

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That Smart was a highly devout evangelical is well-known, as is the melancholy fact that he was confined for a spell in St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, near Bedlam, supposedly for religious mania, and then in Mr Potter’s private madhouse in Bethnal Green (1759–63). Does the subtitle invite one to think of the poem as imagined to be spoken by Smart or to be about Smart, presumably before or after his incarceration? To be sure, one might presume the ‘I’ to be Smart, or at least to be crucially informed by aspects of his religious derangement and go in quest of suitable interpretations of some of the more puzzling features of the lyric, such as taking a prayer to move the waves. (We might even try to justify the excluded second line of the poem – ‘Where the tight ocean heaved its load’ – on the grounds of the barely controlled excess apparent in parts of ‘Jubilate Agno’.29) One remains more surely on track simply by thinking of Smart, like Hill, as an outsider in his literary world: after his release from Mr Potter’s care, he enjoyed no literary success. ‘Against’: the opening word of the poem should not be undervalued, for the ‘I’, whether Smart or Hill or a compound of the two, sets himself in opposition to the prevailing winds. For Hill, that claim includes the poetry of the day, from the Movement to those such as Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn, who for some decades attracted far more critical acclaim than Hill, including an appreciation for their celebration of energy, whether natural (Hughes) or counter-cultural (Gunn), while Hill was widely regarded as ‘academic’ or ‘difficult’. Also, it includes the Church of England, the ‘literary spirituality’ which is something the poet came explicitly to oppose.30 ‘Genesis’ surely responds directly to the biblical narrative of creation rather than to any familiarity with the tradition of commentary on it. Whatever influence the hexæmeral tradition in patristic and medieval times exerts on the poem is most likely by way of what Edmund Husserl calls secondary passivity: the mind quietly picking up tradition from the community without having any first-hand knowledge of it.31 And yet ‘Genesis’ offers a commentary of its own on the making of the world, oriented to the creative or spiritual genesis of the author or, if not him, a poet he admires.32 In this lyrical hexæmeron, the poet finds himself in a world created and fallen and must seek to work out the values of ‘creation’, ‘fall’, and ‘redemption’. That creation is miraculous and has fallen is entirely orthodox, as is the belief that Christ came to redeem humanity through the preaching of the kingdom and the sacrifice that was consequent on him doing so. But Hill’s understanding of salvation departs from tradition. His emphasis on the blood of Christ is one that Smart would have shared, although the dark image of the lost being crushed by the sheer weight of the earth is his alone. ‘Genesis’ shows the young Hill negotiating two traditions, one biblical and one poetic, and finding a place where he can insert a ligature: a ‘ballad’ associated with Smart that responds to creation and

Before Hill must have realized that ‘tight ocean’ can be taken as ‘drunken ocean’ and ‘heaved’ as an act of vomiting, he may have had Prov. 8.29 in mind with respect to ‘tight’: ‘when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command’. The loss of the image of the ocean heaving its load is perhaps regrettable, since it anticipates the final lines of the lyric, although Hill was surely right to delete the line. 30 See the interview with Hill in John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 78–9. Years later, in ‘Dividing Legacies’ (1996), Hill would write of the ‘torpor’ of ‘Anglican literary “spirituality”’. Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 379. It is probable that Hill has T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in view. 31 See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), appendix 6. 32 For Hill’s admiration of Smart, see Haffenden, Viewpoints, 79. 29

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to his own spiritual formation. In doing so, Hill allows the ‘I’ of the poem not to be invested in self-expression so much as to be committed to vigilance with respect to the expressive powers of poetry in a world beset by moral and spiritual ambiguities and by dire challenges to life.33 There is an internalization of the hexæmeral tradition so that it concerns how an individual – a poet in particular – is formed in a world as hostile as it is starkly beautiful. There is no division, however, between ‘religion’ and ‘aesthetics’ because the poet formed in ‘Genesis’, in dialogue with Smart and biblical narrative, is a religious poet of an unusual sort. If Hill is closer to R. S. Thomas than to George Herbert or Henry Vaughan in some aspects of his sense of religion – a bare landscape, a comfortless world, a harsh price for redemption – he is more taken with the pressure of divine presence than with its doleful absence.34 ‘Genesis’ is a thinking, if not a complete thinking through, of what it means for a poet to regard himself as fashioned in and by Christianity. To some extent, one has become familiar with rethinking and relaunching Midrash as a way in which some poems are written, and with re-interpreting biblical characters and their situations in ways that are congenial or urgent.35 ‘Genesis’ indicates the possibility of using biblical narratives, and even commentaries on them, as ways of extending the field of modern poetry by way of appropriating a larger world of experience than is available to any individual, a world marked by suffering of one kind or another in which survivors (‘the unfallen’) can reflect on what threatens us, even as we acknowledge our fallen state. Whether this possibility can be fulfilled with as much assurance and originality as Hill has done in ‘Genesis’ is another matter. Sometimes a tradition is deflected only for the new path to become a dead end. An example is G. M. Hopkins’ experiments with the sonnet. In the same way, perhaps Hill’s hexæmeron has marked a turn in a tradition only to end it. There is a last question to pose and ponder. Does ‘Genesis’ contribute in any way or to any extent to the hexæmeral tradition itself? To be sure, it does not delineate Hebraic cosmogony or seek the sources of it, nor does it attempt any exegesis of the narratives, whether literally or allegorically. The poem does not look primarily, as much of the Christian commentary tradition does, at the divine power behind the act of creation; instead, being modern, it attends to nature, although nature as fallen. It brings to mind Alfred Tennyson in In Memoriam (1850) when he evokes human beings: Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law – Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed.36 That said, Hill’s poem is a spiritual appropriation of the biblical narratives, one that offers itself to a wide range of readers for whom questions of creation, fall, and redemption are tightly

For this distinction, see Sameer Rahim, ‘An Interview with Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016)’, Prospect, accessed 6 January 2020, https://www​.prospectmagazine​.co​.uk​/blogs​/sameer​-rahim​/an​-interview​-with​-geoffrey​-hill​-1932​-2016. 34 See, for example, R. S. Thomas, ‘Via Negativa’, in Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 220. 35 See, for example, Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); and, with respect to the reinterpretation of biblical characters, Thomas W. Shapcott, ‘Portrait of Saul’, in Selected Poems (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978), 61–2. 36 Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (London: Edward Moxon and Co., 1863), st. 55. 33

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and perhaps awkwardly tied together and are not to be readily ordered by the consolations of orthodox belief. A reading of the three great biblical events – creation, fall, and redemption – has been a theme of some hexæmerons – Anastasius of Sinai’s, above all – but Hill’s poem prizes questions over traditional answers, even mystical ones. It opens ambiguities, broods on them, and, doubling a ‘personal’ genesis with a divine one, offers rhythms that are far more confident than the poet’s response to the relation of creation, fall, and redemption. If one were to look far ahead to one of Hill’s distinctions drawn as a literary critic and say that ‘Genesis’ seeks to bring style and faith into accord, one would find Hill already in tune with some of the seventeenth-century poets he admired, especially John Donne, adding a grace note or two from modernism and the new criticism.37 For he seeks to match a faith in personal genesis as a poet with a style that thrives on ambiguity. At the start of the poem, one thinks that for Hill God is the ground against which he proposes to cut a figure. Yet by the end of the lyric, it can be seen that no personal genesis of any sort can lead one to fathom the proper relations of creation, fall, and redemption.

Further reading Hart, Henry. The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Knottenbelt, E. M. Passionate Intelligence: The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990. Robbins, Frank E. The Hexæmeral Literature: A Study of the Greek and Latin Commentaries on Genesis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1912. Roberts, Andrew M. Geoffrey Hill. Horndon: Northcote House, 2004. Sperling, Matthew. Visionary Philology: Geoffrey Hill and the Study of Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

For the difficulty in modern times of bringing style and faith into accord, see Hill’s preface to Style and Faith (2003) in his Collected Critical Writings, 263–4. 37

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CHAPTER 71 LITURGY AND CREATION

Christopher Irvine

Introduction Liturgy is a richly nuanced term that eludes any single definition. It is derived from a Greek word (λειτουργία; leitourgia) which is rooted in that which makes provision for and accrues to the public good. In relation to worship, liturgy refers to the forms and structures of the church’s corporate worship – the celebration of prayer and praise by assembled Christians. In this sense, liturgy facilitates corporate prayer by giving it a structured framework. Besides the texts to be read, said, or sung, worship in many traditions also includes movement, or ritual gestures, and the handling of material symbols. Liturgy extends beyond the ordering of worship to the ordering of time, the pattern of Christian prayer, and worship through the day, the week, and the year. And although this ordering of time focuses primarily on the events of the Christian story, underlying it is the cyclical patterns of the natural world, of night and day, life and death and rebirth, the rhythm of creation that is encapsulated in the form of the covenant God made with Noah: ‘While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease’ (Gen. 8.22). This covenant of creation stands behind the prophet’s promise of a renewed covenant (Hos. 2.18) and is echoed in the later New Testament text of Acts 14.17. The message these texts deliver when they are read alongside each other is that the creator intends that the patterns and turning seasons of the natural world should continue and sustain life as long as the world exists. Further, given the God-given role assigned to humankind that they should ‘till and keep the earth’ (Gen. 2.15b), one can infer that maintaining the rhythms and processes of the natural world is a joint enterprise and one that is shared between divine and human agency. Simply put, human beings are obliged to actively respond to the covenant of creation by observing the pattern of the seasons and by protecting and fostering life on earth. The ordering and sustaining of life are pledged by God’s promise – ‘while the earth remains’. And according to the Genesis narrative, this promise is validated by the natural sign of the rainbow, a sign that is greeted in Jewish tradition with a formal expression of praise and supplication: ‘King of the Universe, since you are mindful of your Covenant, keep it faithfully and keep your word.’1 From the human point of view, the earth is God’s gift: ‘the earth he has given to humankind’ (Ps. 115.16), and the life it sustains in all its colour, form, and variety is understood to be conditional upon humanity living in good faith with the creator (cf. Lev. 26.3-4, 20), the One who provides nature’s abundance and ‘crowns the year with his goodness’ (Ps. 65.11). These texts testify to the fact that the covenant of creation is fundamental to whatever may be said

Cited in Cas J. A. Vos, Theopoetry of the Psalms (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 236.

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about the nature of God, and of God’s purposes and relationship to the physical order of earth, sea, and sky.

Times and seasons The rhythm and pattern of the natural world have their counterpart in the rhythm and round of Christian prayer throughout the year. It has long been recognized that the significance assigned to the hours of daily prayer through the day and night, or following the Jewish precedent, from night to day, has varied through Christian history, especially in those early centuries when patterns of prayer were being established.2 However, references to creation are embedded in some of the deepest forms of daily prayer, and the theme surfaces explicitly in the content of the prayer. An early example of this is found in a passage in the third-century document The Apostolic Tradition that explains why Christians rise to pray at midnight. The answer is that at midnight, in the still darkness of the dead of night, all creation paused momentarily to praise God.3 Over time, the hours of prayer became the short services that punctuated the day, revolving around the two major services, one in the morning (Mattins/Lauds) and one in the evening (Vespers). In this way, the pattern of prayer followed the natural rhythm of night and day and soon attracted biblical texts of praise that were appropriate to the time the prayer was offered. In examining the structure of early liturgical forms of daily prayer, Robert Taft and Gregory Woolfenden4 concluded that psalms referencing creation were appropriated for both Vespers and Lauds; Psalms 104 and 148, respectively. A rationale for the choice of the morning psalm was given in a Commentary on Psalm 148 by a young North African monk who was living in Rome. In a lyrical passage, he explains that as the day dawns and life begins to stir, ‘the sound of this psalm calls upon everything in heaven and earth to praise and bless God’.5 An early, possibly exaggerated, witness to the use of Psalm 104 in the evening was made by Caesarius of Arles (c. 470–542), who claimed that the psalm featured universally in both monasteries and churches during the service of Vespers. This evening psalm, Psalm 104, is quintessentially a creation psalm and one that expresses both senses of ‘creation’ – the sense of a beginning, of God bringing order out of chaos; and, second, of God constantly energizing the world’s ecology and holding it in being, moment by moment, by regulating day and night and turning the cycle of the cosmic order, the sun in the day and the moon and stars in the night. As such, the psalm evokes the wonder elicited by creation and, in its liturgical performance, functions as an invitation to worship the creator. The morning psalm, Psalm 148, is equally an exuberant psalm of praise to the creator of heaven and earth, but its syntax and structure extend the invitation to praise God to the

See Paul F. Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church: A Study of the Origins and Early Development of the Divine Office (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2008). 3 See Hippolytus, The Apostolic Tradition, 41. 4 See Robert Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1986); Gregory W. Woolfenden, Daily Liturgical Prayer: Origins and Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 5 Jacques Paul Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina, 53.566. 2

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whole created order – the landscape, and all the plants and animals on the earth, and in the seas. Furthermore, as the opening and closing lines suggest, the praise that is invited from all creation is joined to the joyful praise of heaven through the work of Israel, God’s people, in their singular calling to offer the sacrifice of praise to God in the temple. In Christian worship, Daily Prayer, the offering of prayer and praise, consists not only of psalmody but also canticles and hymns. The canticles are largely scriptural passages of a poetic structure, many of which may well have been used as vehicles of praise for the earliest praying Christian communities. The canticle that most revolves around a creation theme is the Benedicite. This canticle orchestrates the different elements of creation – the wind, rain, snow, flora and fauna, and humankind – into a chorus exalting the creator above all else. And the sense of the creation worshipping the creator is jubilantly asserted in the Canticle Te Deum laudamus: ‘all creation worships you: the Father everlasting’. In the western church, both these canticles belong to the offering of praise on Sunday mornings, and in the Byzantine (Orthodox) tradition the Benedicite has pride of place in the Easter Vigil. It is this canticle that supremely articulates the Christian hope of a renewed creation, of the natural world being made anew.6 The reference to creation is evidently embedded in these early sources and forms of daily prayer, and in the Syro-Malabar tradition the very function of morning prayer is specifically to voice the world’s praise of its creator. In turning to contemporary liturgical provision, the reference to creation is shown in two concluding collects, one for Evening Prayer and one for Morning Prayer in the Church of England’s Common Worship: Daily Prayer. The Evening Collect addresses God as the beginning and the end and asks God to bring humankind and creation to God’s glory, thereby acknowledging God as both the source and the fulfilment of all things. The Morning Collect speaks of the new day being offered to God with all creation. The striking feature of both these prayers is the implied synergy between humankind and the remainder of the natural world, and the presupposition that humankind has a distinctive role and place in the realm of creation. This is a key issue, and it is addressed herein; however, there is another key aspect of times and seasons, and that is to register the coordinates between the celebration of the Christian Year, its cycle of feasts and the theme of creation. The round of the Christian Year, known as the temporale, consists of two epicycles, the Easter cycle and the Christmas/Epiphany cycle. The feasts of Easter and Christmas (the Nativity of Christ) are respectively associated with the dyad of the sun and the moon, the cosmic symbols that mark the changing seasons of the natural world. Easter, with some of its roots in a spring fertility ritual, is set on the Sunday following the full moon of the spring equinox, and Christmas (25 December) follows the winter solstice.7 Consequently, in the northern hemisphere, Christmas marks the birth of the ‘sun of righteousness’ (Mal. 4.2) in the darkness and apparent death of nature in winter, while Easter coincides with the greening and burgeoning of the natural world. Each of these pivotal feasts has its period of preparation – Lent before Easter and Advent before Christmas. The Easter season culminates after fifty days with the Feast of Pentecost, or Whitsunday. Christmas, in the western calendar, is generally

See Christopher Irvine, The Cross and Creation in Christian Liturgy and Art (London: SPCK, 2013), 203–4. For sources and detailed discussion, see Raniero Cantalamessa, Easter in the Early Church: An Anthology of Jewish and Early Christian Texts (Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1993); Susan K. Roll, Toward the Origins of Christmas (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1995). 6 7

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reckoned to end with the Feast of Candlemas, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple on 2 February, and begins on Advent Sunday. Advent (from the Latin adventus, literally meaning arrival) focuses on the hope of God’s coming, of his presence pressing in on the life of the world. According to the Old Testament prophetic texts that are read and heard in this season, the Lord’s coming is greeted by the whole realm of nature: ‘Sing, O heavens, for the Lord has done it; shout, O depths of the earth, break forth into singing, O mountains, O forest and every tree’ (Isa. 44.23; cf. Isa. 55.12f. and Ps. 96.10-13). These texts speak not only of the coming of God’s saving presence and just judgement being greeted by the realm of nature but also of it being transformed by the appearance of the divine. God’s righteousness descends as the gentle rain, and even the arid wilderness puts forth new growth and blossoms like the crocus (see Isa. 45.8 and 35.1). These prophetic texts are listed in the Lectionaries (tables of biblical readings set for the services for each day), and through the centuries their imagery has featured in Advent hymns and seasonal sermons. Advent specifically looks forward to the embodied presence of Christ in the infant Jesus, and even here the creation theme is appropriated in terms of the Word, through whom all things were made, becoming in the birth of Jesus what he himself has made. As one Christmas carol puts it: ‘Behold the great Creator makes himself a house of clay’.8 The setting of the nativity has been embellished in the Christian imagination, and apocryphal literature and later iconography included an ox and an ass in the stable, demonstrating that the animal world recognized the creator in the Word made flesh.9 The Easter cycle begins with the preparatory season of Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday. In the traditional liturgy for this day, Christians are marked with the sign of the cross in ash on their foreheads and are reminded in haunting words that mortal women and men will return to the earth from which they were made: ‘dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return’. This is a stark statement of human mortality, but also a reminder that humankind has an affinity with the earth and, as such, belongs to nature. The Gospel reading for the first Sunday in Lent is the account of Christ’s trial in the wilderness, and this sets the tone of the season as a time of testing and of growing in the things of the Spirit. It is the time for each person to honestly face themselves and their world, a world so distorted by human avarice and violence that it contaminates the world of nature. As one prophetic voice lamented: ‘[T]he land mourns, and all who dwell in it languish, the beasts of the field and the birds of the air; and even the fish of the sea are taken away’ (Hos. 4.3; cf. Rev. 11.18). The cosmic dimension is very much present in the liturgies of Holy Week and Easter, the climax of the Christian Year celebrating the Paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. The Liturgy of Good Friday commemorates the crucifixion, the calamity of the death of the Son of God when even the sun was darkened. The mood of the service is quietly reflective, punctuated with silence and lament. And this service stretches back into the history of Christian devotion. In the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood, which echoes the early liturgy of the cross, the tree from which the cross was made becomes the protagonist

Thomas Pestel (1584–1659), who echoes the ancient Office hymn attributed to Sedulius (c. 450), O Solis Ortus, celebrating the maker who came and wore the human form he himself fashioned, and whose hymn is in The New English Hymnal (Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 1987), hymn 23. 9 See David R. Cartlidge and J. Keith Elliott, Art and the Christian Apocrypha (London: Routledge, 2001), 18; David Brown, Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 98–101. 8

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and witnesses to how ‘all creation wept’ at the horrendous sight of the dead Christ. It is the wood of the cross that is honoured in the liturgy of Good Friday, and in a verse of the Crux fidelis, a sixth-century hymn by Venantius Fortunatus, the wood of the cross is described as coming from the noblest of all trees, and one that was unequal in its foliage, blossom, and fruit.10 Here the cross is the tree of life, planted in the earth as Christ was placed in the dark cavern of the tomb. And yet it is in the deep darkness of death that God is understood to perform his work of salvation, and it is into the darkness of the church that the newly lit Easter Candle is brought at the beginning of the Easter Vigil on the night of Holy Saturday. This Easter light is greeted and blessed with an ancient song, the Exultet, that asks that the Easter Candle may remain alight when the morning star arises, heralding the bright dawn of the resurrection. A creation theme is even more explicit in another prayer text composed to praise God for the Easter light, the Deus mundi conditor. This text, included in the so-called Gelasian Sacramentary, probably reflected the liturgical practice of seventh-century Rome and opens by addressing God as the creator of the world, the author of light, and the maker of the stars. It also voices a paean for the bees that produce ‘a miracle of nature’, both honey and the wax from which candles are made.11 The origins of the lighting of the Easter candle in northern Italy, and possibly also northern Africa, date back to the fourth century. But the earliest song of praise to greet the Easter light is attributed to Magnus Felix Ennodius, who became the bishop of Pavia around the year 514, and in this text it is the composition of the candle that seems to be significant, leading one commentator to conclude that the God praised in the blessing of the Easter Candle was the God who sanctifies the ‘material world, and by extension, the whole of creation’.12 So even within the compass of this brief summary of the major themes of the different liturgical seasons of the Christian Year, it can be seen that the theme of creation is inextricably bound up in the story of Christian salvation as that mystery unfolds and is appropriated through the observance of the Christian Year. But a further element of marking time needs to be mentioned to complete the account of times and seasons. Running alongside the temporale is the sanctorale, the calendar listing the saints’ days designated as either feasts or commemorations. The two calendars run in parallel, and many of the stories of the saints, those Spirit-filled lives that impressed themselves on the Christian corporate memory, also speak of how the wider world of creation is implicated in the wider Christian story. The two major sources for the lives of the saints are hagiography and iconography. Two examples show this. St Giles of Provence, who died around the year 710, is generally depicted in a verdant setting with the hind that he shielded from harm during a royal hunt.13 Both the composition and the setting evoke the prophetic vision of the messianic age in which both human beings and other animals are shielded from hurt and harm and peacefully coexist (see Isa. 11.6-9). The other example is Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, another eighth-century

See Irvine, The Cross and Creation, 116–21. See Leonel L. Mitchell, ‘Deus Mundi Conditor’, in Creation and Liturgy: Studies in Honor of H. Boone Porter, ed. Ralph N. McMichael Jr. (Washington, DC: The Pastoral Press, 1993), 43–53. 12 Alastair J. MacGregor, Fire and Light in the Western Triduum: Their Use at Tenebrae and at the Easter Vigil (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 303. 13 See, for example, the two altarpiece panels by Master of Saint Giles, St Giles and the Deer, c. 1500. Oil on oak, 63.4 × 48.4 cm. The National Gallery, London, England. 10 11

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saint, who, according to the chronicler Bede,14 having spent a night standing in the North Sea to pray, was comforted by three otters who warmed his feet with their breath and dried them with their fur. Given the nature of the source, this is not a sentimental image but a telling of the ‘right ordering of creation’, a view of restored humanity, ‘the New Adam at peace with all creation’.15

Priests and poets of creation O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare; A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware.16 The aforementioned references to the saints lead to a further consideration of humankind’s place in the world of nature, not least in the composition of the human person within the order of creation. A seventh-century theologian, Maximus the Confessor, whose thinking straddled eastern and western theological thought, considered the human person to be a microcosm of the created order insofar as each human being combined the earthly and the heavenly, the material and the spiritual, in their very being. And it is precisely in this sense of relating the one to the other that the person at prayer fulfils humanity’s role vis-à-vis the remainder of creation. In the western tradition, morning prayer opens with the phrase: ‘O Lord, open our lips’; words drawn from Ps. 51.15 that ask that those who pray may be drawn into a conversation, a two-way conversation between creation and its creator. It is both a hearing and a voicing of praise, and in voicing praise, the worshipping community is joined to the constant praise of heaven (see Neh. 9.6). This sense of adding one’s voice to what is already and constantly happening is supremely expressed in that climax of praise in the Sanctus in the Eucharistic Prayer when the congregation acknowledges before God that ‘heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest’. Acknowledging that glory, which is the imprint of the creator’s hand on all created things, was expressed by the seventeenth-century Anglican priest and poet George Herbert in his poem ‘Providence’ where he speaks of humankind as being the ‘Secretary of thy praise’.17 This role may be taken to be the noting (in the sense of noticing) and the articulation of the silent praise that all created things offer to the creator simply by their very existence. In this, Herbert is indebted to the creation psalms that tell how those at prayer enjoin and exhort creation to praise its maker: ‘Let the heavens and the earth praise him, the seas and all that moves in them’ (Ps. 69.36), and who also act as the audible voice in creation in the articulation of prayer and praise that is both for and on behalf of creation.18

See Bede, Life of Cuthbert, trans. J. F. Webb (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 84–5. Benedicta Ward, The Spirituality of Saint Cuthbert (Oxford: SLG Press, 1992), 10. 16 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, pt 4, lines 282–5. 17 George Herbert, ‘Providence’, in George Herbert: The Country Parson, The Temple, ed. John N. Wall Jr. (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 238. 18 For an account of praying for the environment, see Christopher Irvine, ‘A World Made New in Christ’, in Lively Oracles of God: Perspectives on the Bible and Liturgy, ed. Gordon Jeanes and Bridget Nichols (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2022), 186–205. 14 15

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This view resonates with the status and role assigned to humankind in the Hebrew hymn of praise for creation in Genesis 1, a role that is increasingly described in terms of humans being ‘priests of creation’.19 This role has been given further systematic consideration by an Orthodox theologian, John Zizioulas, who affirms that the primal priestly act is the claiming and reclaiming of elements of the material world as being part of God’s good creation. It is, as he says, the referring of all existent things back to their source.20 The dynamic of this sacrificial exchange is well captured in the worship text from the Church of England’s Communion Service (Common Worship Rite A), derived from 1 Chron. 29.14b, which states: ‘all things come from you, and of your own do we give you’. The articulation of praise both with and for creation is expressed in the church’s ‘sacrifice of praise’, the great thanksgiving prayers of the Eucharist, both ancient and contemporary. Without exception, the earliest extant prayers of thanksgiving focus on Christ; however, behind the thanksgiving for all that Jesus did, offers, and gives, there is a reference to creation. Indeed, the apologist Justin Martyr, writing from Rome in the mid-second century and seeking to offer a rationale for the practice of Christian worship to both critical Jewish and pagan audiences, explained that Christians gathered for worship to ‘give thanks to God for having created the world’21 and gather on a Sunday, the day of Christ’s resurrection, as it was the first day of creation when God made the world.22 Unsurprisingly then, God is acknowledged as the creator in some of the earliest fixed Prayers of Thanksgiving,23 and, according to one commentator, a tacit sense of the goodness of creation can be detected in one of the short table prayers in the earliest church order, the Didache, which sets out the patterns of prayer and life for Christians in Syria towards the end of the first century of the Christian era.24 In the early extant written prayers of thanksgiving, the references to creation vary, both in wording and in length. In some of these, such as the one in the Apostolic Tradition, a document of uncertain provenance, and the earliest (Egyptian) Thanksgiving Prayer, known as the Anaphora of Basil (the prayer that is basically still used by the Coptic Church today), there is but the briefest reference to creation. In the Anaphora of Basil, God the Father is acknowledged as the maker of heaven and earth and the sea and all that is in them, and in the thanksgiving prayer in the Apostolic Tradition, the reference to creation is condensed in a sub-clause in reference to Christ: ‘through whom you made all things’. A slightly longer reference to creation, and one that echoes some of the creation Psalms, is found in the so-called Strasbourg Papyrus (c. 200), the phrasing of

See Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (London: T&T Clark, 2010), chap. 5. See John D. Zizioulas, The Eucharistic Communion and the World, ed. Luke B. Tallon (London: T&T Clark, 2011), chaps. 7–8. See also, In the Image and Likeness of God: A Hope-filled Anthropology. The Buffalo Statement Agreed by the International Commission for Anglican-Orthodox Theological Dialogue (London: The Anglican Consultative Council, 2015), section 16, 28–30. 21 Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 41.1–2. 22 Justin, First Apology, 67. 23 For the text of this and the other Eucharistic Prayers referred to here, see R. C. D. Jasper and G. J. Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed, 4th edn, ed. Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2019). 24 See Thomas O’Loughlin, The Didache: A Window on the Earliest Christians (London/Grand Rapids: SPCK/Baker Academic, 2010), 94. 19 20

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which was woven into the Thanksgiving Prayer of the Liturgy of St Mark, a prayer associated with Alexandria in Egypt. In this prayer, thanks are offered to God for all living things on earth and in the seas, rivers, and lakes. But the most expansive praise for creation is set out in a prayer in Book 8 of a Syrian Church Order known as the Apostolic Constitutions (c. 378–80). The status of this text is contested by scholars, and although it is thought unlikely to have been commonly used as a liturgical text in Antioch, it may represent a model prayer demonstrating the full range of reasons why Christians offer the sacrifice of praise. Its opening section seems to mirror the structure of Genesis 1 in its reference to creation; it then goes on to specify the diverse forms of plant and animal life, including domestic as well as wild creatures, birds, and reptiles. A less expansive, though interesting, reference to creation in a Eucharistic Prayer is in the influential Liturgy of St James. This Liturgy is associated with fourth-century Jerusalem and spawned a variety of later liturgical forms and usages from Armenia to India. But in this text, the elements of creation themselves – the sun, the moon, the earth, and the sea – are said to praise and glorify the creator. Thus, from the traditions of both east and west, it is evident that God’s work of creation was a motive for the offering of thanks and praise, one of the reasons why the Christian community gave thanks to the triune God over bread and wine at the Eucharist. And this persists, again in varying degrees, in many of the Prayers of Thanksgiving used today in those churches across the ecumenical spectrum that have revised their Eucharistic liturgies in recent decades. Regarding contemporary Eucharistic Prayers, the opening section of the first two prayers of the Church of England’s Rite A of Common Worship includes a clause acknowledging God’s work of creation, as do the second and fourth Eucharistic Prayers in the new Roman Catholic Missal. At the other end of the ecclesiastical spectrum, one of the variable prefaces for the Eucharistic Prayer in the First Order of Communion in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland’s First Order for Holy Communion sounds a cosmic note, celebrating how it is by God’s will that ‘the vast expanse of space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home were all created and have their being’.25 In the section after the Sanctus in Prayer B in the 1979 Prayer Book of the Episcopal Church in the United States, there is a statement that God’s love and goodness are made known in creation, and, similar to what has been noted in the Anaphora of St James, both the Roman Catholic Eucharistic Prayer III in the 2011 Missal and the Church of England’s Prayer G in Common Worship,26 acknowledge that all created things praise the creator, thus combining a sense of the Christian sacrifice of praise being offered both for and with creation. A sacramental universe The voicing of creation’s praise is also predicated on a presumed ongoing relationship between the creator and creation. There is a clause in one contemporary Eucharistic Prayer that sees

Book of Common Order of the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1994), 136. The expression ‘this fragile earth, our island home’ was borrowed from Prayer D in the 1979 American Episcopal Church’s Prayer Book, and it is certainly one that resonates in our time of environmental and climate crisis. 26 ‘[A]ll you have created rightly gives you praise’. Preface Eucharistic Prayer III, Roman Missal 2011, and ‘from the beginning you created all things and all your works echo the silent music of your praise’. Prayer G, Order One, Common Worship (2000), a prayer that has in origins in a modern Roman Catholic English composition. 25

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‘creation’ not only in terms of origins or beginning but as a relationship of dependence between creation and creator – a continuous relationship of sustaining the world in being.27 The earliest Christian reflection on the relationship between the creator and creation appropriated the notion of wisdom. Wisdom was the agent of creation (Prov. 8.22–31; Ps. 104.24b) and permeated the creation itself (Wis. 7.22–30). This double view has inspired countless Christian poets; examples being from Thomas Traherne (c. 1637–74), who saw the glory of God reflected in the shimmering ripe corn on a summer’s day, and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), who saw the physical world as being charged with the grandeur of God and eliciting a sense of wonder and praise. Poets may enlarge the vision, but the qualification remains that creation should not be confused with the creator. For the triune God invoked and responded to in worship is, as George Herbert asserted in his poem ‘The Pulley’, not nature, but ‘the God of nature’. This view has its roots in the New Testament (Rom. 1.25) and has been explicated in various ways through the Christian centuries. Some Orthodox thinkers,28 for example, often make the helpful, if speculative, distinction (first coined by St Basil of Caesarea in the fourth century) between God’s essence (what God is in God’s-self) and the energies of God that interpenetrate all things. This is developed by Maximus the Confessor, who argues that God may work in and through the matter of creation without being wholly identified with it. An understanding that God is and can be involved from the ‘inside’ of creation is singularly affirmed in the incarnation, of the Word being made flesh and of salvation being acted out in the physical world, the theatre of God’s glory. As Elizabeth Theokritoff wrote, it is this definitive mode of God’s presence in the incarnation that finally makes sacramental life and worship possible.29 God may speak and allow himself to be known through the order of the cosmos, but the corollary of this is that the physical stuff, the material of creation, can become a vehicle of God’s engagement with humankind. And so it is that Christian worship is played out in and through the material elements of God’s creation. Accordingly, as early as the second century, when Christianity had to define itself within a pagan environment, Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 202) reminded those who considered the very idea that God could be involved in mere matter to be repugnant that the bread of the Eucharist was made from grain that was grown in the earth.30 And even at the Reformation, when the complex sacramental system of Catholicism was being critiqued and reconceived, Martin Luther emphasized material things as being the constitutive elements of the gospel sacraments. He argued that a sacrament was a material thing to which the divine promise was attached, the bread and wine of Communion and the water of baptism. The sense of living and worshipping within a sacramental universe is vividly illustrated by baptism, the primary sacrament, whereby individuals are incorporated into Christ’s body, the church. Water is one of the four primal elements of the cosmos, and, as such, has a deep ambivalence, for it can be a force of destruction and death, and yet without it there can be

See Scottish Liturgy 1982 (Edinburgh: The Representative Church Council of the Scottish Episcopal Church, 1982), 7: ‘All power is yours. You created the heavens and established the earth; you sustain in being all that is’. 28 See Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1987), 28; Elizabeth Theokritoff, Living in God’s Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009), 63–4. 29 Theokritoff, Living in God’s Creation, 176. 30 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.18.5. 27

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no life. The early Christian apologist Tertullian (c. 155–c. 240?) highlighted the symbolic significance of the element of water and attributed a particular dignity to the element on account of its prominent place in the Genesis creation narratives – the dividing of the waters, the separation of land and sea (Gen. 1.2, 6, 7), and water as the source of fecundity (Gen. 2.7). Further, in his treatise De Baptismo,31 Tertullian drew a vivid picture of Christ immersing himself in his creation as he stepped into the water to be baptized by John in the river Jordan. This primal element of creation becomes the basic element for celebrating baptism; as the Ethiopian eunuch said to the apostle Philip: ‘See here is water! What is there to prevent me from being baptized?’ (Acts 8.36b). And as the element evokes deep mythic images of creation, it is unsurprising to see a strong emphasis on the theme of creation in the Prayer over the Water in the Byzantine Rite of Baptism. Here, in a typical Orthodox way, the baptism of Jesus in the river Jordon is presented as a cosmic event as well as an epiphany of the Trinity: ‘the whole creation hymns [Christ’s] appearing’.32 Baptism is a multivalent act, and as the liturgical prayer texts are laden with references to creation, so the rite evokes the hope of a new creation – of the newly baptized being made new in Christ. This double reference to both the material creation and the new creation has led the liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann to regard the element of water of baptism as representing the whole of creation. For Christ’s baptism not only affirmed the goodness of creation in its use of the primal element of water but also pointed forward to the perfection of creation, the consummation of God’s purposes when God will fill all things with God’s-self.33

Redeeming creation – through sacramental action The earlier reference to God’s final purposes for the created world leads into the penultimate section of this chapter, which seeks to demonstrate how elements of the material and natural world become signs and tokens of the unfolding of God’s purposes in the performance of sacramental worship. The ancient story of Cain and Abel shows that offering is a primal act of humanity (Gen. 4.3-4) and that a sense of gratitude for what is received is expressed by offering part of it back to the giver. In this way, there is an acknowledgement of the sense of dependence upon what is given and cultivated in the natural world and made through human labour, and also an awareness that what is received is received as gift. From the human point of view, it can be seen how the giving and receiving of a gift from another person can deepen the bonds between people by forging, restoring, and strengthening relationships. And if this is true of how human relationships play out, it is perhaps even more so in the relationship between God and humankind. In his historical overview of the offering of the firstfruits, Paul Bradshaw identifies the Jewish antecedents and marshals the evidence to show that it was relatively common in the

Unfortunately, these sections are omitted in the selection provided in E. C. Whitaker’s Documents of The Baptismal Liturgy, 3rd and rev. edn, ed. Maxwell E. Johnson (London: SPCK, 2003). 32 Whitaker, Documents of The Baptismal Liturgy, 120–1. 33 Alexander Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 49. 31

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early church for material foodstuff to be offered during the Christian Eucharist.34 But the focus here is on the basic elements of the Christian Eucharist, the bread and the wine, and how these may be seen as the effective signs of God’s intention to redeem and renew creation. The primary theological source for tracing this aspect of sacramental worship is the work of Irenaeus. In his writing, Irenaeus presents more of a continuum rather than a radical disjunction or rupture between the physical world that God made and the final fulfilment of God’s purposes for creation. The polemical aspect of his work that led to his emphasis on the materiality of Christian worship has already been noted, and this is sharply focused by what he has to say about the elements of the Eucharist.35 Irenaeus underlines that the bread used in the Eucharist is ‘from creation’ and that the cup of wine is equally ‘part of creation’.36 The bread and the wine are apt symbols of the transformation, for each one is the result of a series of complex natural processes (in the soil, germination, growth, fruition, fermentation) as well as human agency in the preparation and processing of food (harvesting, milling, pressing, baking, and bottling). And when these elements are taken and placed on the altar-table at the Eucharist, there is, according to Irenaeus, a further transformation that occurs when thanksgiving is made, and the Holy Spirit is invoked, for then it is no longer ‘common bread’ but consists of ‘two realities, the earthly and the heavenly’.37 This is a stupendous claim, and it implies that through the Eucharist the material of creation becomes a figure of a world made new through the sanctification of the created world. The act of making Eucharist involves both a taking and a blessing in the way that Jesus took and blessed the bread in the Gospel stories of the feeding of the multitude (Matthew 14; Mark 6; Luke 9; John 6), and both of these aspects need to be taken in turn. The first is the taking of the bread. This aspect of the Eucharistic action is an acknowledgement that what is received has the nature of a gift and is grounded in the stuff or materiality of creation.38 This is well expressed in a prayer that often accompanies the presentation of the elements: ‘Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation . . . of your goodness we have this bread . . . this wine to offer/set before you.’ Following the trajectory suggested by Irenaeus, one could argue for a continuum between what is presented and placed on the altar-table and what is received in Communion. Indeed, that is why the gifts of bread and wine are referred to in some Eucharistic Prayers as the ‘gifts of God’s creation’39 before the words of Institution and the Epiclesis (the invocation of the Holy Spirit), as well as after the recital of those words.40 What is received in Holy Communion is understood to be blessed – in some sense, set apart and made holy. But how might this be understood in relation to the materiality of the sacrament? It could be that what is blessed is, in some sense, set free to be what God intends

See Paul F. Bradshaw, ‘The Offering of the Firstfruits of Creation: An Historical Study’, in Creation and Liturgy: Studies in Honor of H. Boone Porter, ed. Ralph N. McMichael Jr. (Washington, DC: The Pastoral Press, 1993), 29–41. 35 See David N. Power, Irenaeus of Lyons on Baptism and Eucharist: Selected Texts with Introduction, Translation and Annotation (Nottingham: Grove Books, 1991). 36 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.17.5. 37 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.18.5. 38 See David Grumett, Material Eucharist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 39 See Prayer C Common Worship Rite One, which is basically the ‘Consecration Prayer’ in the Order of Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer (1662) cast in contemporary English. 40 Prayer F and G, Common Worship Rite One. 34

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it to be. It is the stuff of creation that has become the most it can materially be, perfected in its reference to Christ, the one in whom all created things will find their ultimate coherence and meaning (see Eph. 1.9-10; 3.9; Col. 1.16-17). And it is in relation to Christ that the destination or purpose of the Eucharistic bread and cup is declared in the final climactic doxology in the Eucharistic Prayer: ‘through whom and in whom, and with whom’; namely, as the means by which the triune creator God extends hospitality to humankind, and humankind may ‘see God and eat and drink’ (Exod. 24.11).

Connection, commitment, and care The Lord’s Supper, the Holy Communion, the Mass, whatever name it is known by, is, as is emphasized by the Byzantine title, The Divine Liturgy; essentially, the liturgy. The liturgy is not so much a concept as it is an act – what is done, a corporate act enacted by embodied worshippers here and there, at different times, and in different cultural contexts. But on every occasion when the liturgy is celebrated, the individual and corporate cares and concerns of those who constitute the worshipping assembly are blended with the ‘sacrifice of praise’ as prayer is offered for the wider social world and the natural environment. Furthermore, a sense of the creation as a gift that is engendered in sacramental worship can be a prophetic sign in affluent societies that are driven by an insatiable appetite to consume and discard. And in relation to the act of worship, this may be particularly seen if the water of baptism and the elements of bread and wine in the Eucharist are handled with sensitivity and care. Whatever eucharistic theology is held, the act of Communion can be construed in three ways: it unites the communicant with Christ; it draws the participants into community, one with another; and binds the worshipper to creation through the organic links with the soil (earth), sun, air, and water.41 It is on this basis that Pope Francis speaks of both the cosmic dimension of the Eucharist and of its power to motivate and inspire concern for the creation.42 In addition, it could also be said that if the consecrated elements are freighted with the promise of divine presence and are signs of God’s love and justice,43 then the ‘Amen’ spoken by the communicant in receiving the gift of Communion also expresses a commitment to practise social justice as well as to care for creation.

Further reading Berger, Teresa, ed. Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation. Collegeville: Liturgical Press Academic, 2019. Bradshaw, Paul F. and Maxwell E. Johnson. The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity. London: SPCK, 2011. Grumett, David. Material Eucharist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Ian A. McFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), 180. See Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015). 43 Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 178–9. 41 42

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T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation Guiver, George. Vision upon Vision: Processes of Change and Renewal in Christian Worship. Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 2009. Irvine, Christopher. The Cross and Creation in Christian Liturgy and Art. London: SPCK, 2013. Theokritoff, Elizabeth. Living in God’s Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009.

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AFTERWORD

Jürgen Moltmann

An anthropological problem exists in the ecology of creation, specifically in the determination of human beings and their tasks. As it is stated in the creation story: ‘fill the earth and subdue it’ (Gen. 1.28). Or, in Jesus’ third beatitude: ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth’ (Mt. 5.5). The task of lordship given to humanity, and told in the story of creation, is controversial today given the ecological crisis because humanity is not only supposed to ‘subdue the earth’ but also to reign over all the beasts on land, in the water, and in the air. Psalm 8.7 deepens this further: ‘You have made human beings lord over the work of your hands; you have put everything under their feet, and only after this comes, as secondary, the beasts on land, on water, and in the air. Anyone who has seen the pharaoh statues in Egypt will have noted their vanquished enemies ‘under their feet’. According to the Noahic covenant, ‘The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered’ (Gen. 9.2). Today, such words sound more like a declaration of war on animals than about a community of creation shared between humanity and animals. In the story of creation, the task of lordship coincides with the ‘divine image’ given to human beings. The modern world often interprets this being created ‘in the image of God’ in relation to the mandate to rule: the more people ‘subdue the earth’, the more godlike they become. It is as if God, like human beings, is the destroyer of nature and not its creator. But, by contrast, it is better to set the image of God theologically in relation to the lordship of God. Doing so orientates the human ‘task of lordship’ to the nature of divine lordship. First, the first commandment says: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery’ (Exod. 20.2). And Paul writes that ‘the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay’ (Rom. 8.21). The rule of God, in other words, is a redeeming liberation. Israel experienced its liberation in that way. In the end, there will be a ‘liberated creation’ (Leonardo Boff). The rule of human beings over nature, the earth, and animals should align with such liberation. Normally, we prefer to cooperate with nature, but if nature threatens or becomes dangerous to life, through sickness or natural catastrophes, for example, we resist and save life. Second, Jesus is Lord. Jesus said: ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth’ (Mt. 5.5). The meek follow the way of Jesus. As he says in Mt. 11.29: ‘Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.’ This orientates the human ‘task of lordship’ to subduing the earth to gentleness and not to violence. After his temptation, Jesus was in the wilderness ‘with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him’ (Mk 1.13) before he came to human beings. One might have expected that Jesus was with the angels and that it was the animals who ministered to him, but Mark put it the other way around: Jesus was with the wild beasts as with friends. He spread neither fear nor terror, and heaven served him. What is it to be ‘meek’ or ‘gentle’? Dealing gently with plants means recognizing their intrinsic value and not just asking about their usefulness to humans. Treating animals gently means recognizing them as ‘fellow creatures’ in the community of creation and recognizing

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oneself to be a ‘fellow creature’ with animals, a recognition articulated in the German Animal Welfare Act. Gentleness means compassion and empathy, attention and mindfulness, patience and ‘reverence for life’ in all living beings. Gentleness seeks to practice cooperation with nature rather than engage in violence against nature. Meekness is love for the other, which is the precondition of all wisdom. As the modern world has combined science with technology, so modernity’s motto holds that ‘science is power’. But gentleness favours both science and wisdom. Why does gentleness take courage? Because when one steps out of one’s protective barrier and fully opens up, one becomes highly vulnerable. In their struggle with nature, the violent wear armour, but it hinders their vision. By contrast, the gentle ‘power of love’ recognizes reality without blinders. It lets things live and come to life. It is ‘deep breathing’, whereas violence is always ‘short of breath’. It is patient, whereas impatience always grasps at violence. Gentleness gives other creatures space and time to live their own lives. In the community of creation, gentleness spares the weaker creatures. These ‘weaker’ creatures are necessary, for everything is related to all in the community of creation. Life in just peace in the creation–community – this is our hope.1

Translation by John Flett and Jason Goroncy.

1

946

SCRIPTURE INDEX

Genesis 1 2–4, 12, 25–6, 30, 44–51, 54, 57, 62, 80–1, 90, 94–5, 170, 176, 183, 185, 235, 237–8, 295, 347, 377, 390, 402, 424–8, 448, 450, 462 n.19, 479, 484, 493, 552–3, 576, 590–1, 623, 625–6, 643–5, 659–63, 665, 667, 671, 674, 678, 698, 728, 740, 752, 772, 788, 790, 807, 812, 834, 847, 855, 861–3, 872, 877, 881, 883–4, 921, 938–9 1–2 287, 342, 645, 659, 790, 853, 867, 901 1–2.4 787 1–3 47 n.16, 50, 53–4, 79, 92–3, 116 n.65, 179, 402, 664, 790, 793 1–9 22, 30 1–11 50 1–Exod. 12 80 1–Deut. 33 47 1.1 24–5, 28, 80–3, 144, 165, 171, 233, 447, 479, 545, 551, 790, 825 1.1-2 94 n.10, 144, 478, 481, 697, 922 1.1-3 548, 753 1.1-4 807 1.1-5 95 1.1-13 787 1.1-31 807 1.1–2.3 21, 26, 45 1.1–2.4 2, 900 1.2 3, 24–5, 84, 165, 237, 273–4, 277, 293, 424, 466, 476, 479, 661, 674, 701, 712, 754, 790, 840, 862, 941 1.3 80, 84, 94, 182, 295, 672, 730, 790 1.3-4 237 1.3-19 862 1.3-26 917 1.3-31 25 1.4 672, 790 1.4-5 790 1.4-7 675 1.6 672, 730, 941 1.6-10 901 1.7 171, 672, 825, 941 1.9 21, 28 1.9-10 25 1.9-30 26

1.10 1.11 1.11-12 1.12 1.14 1.14-18 1.14-31 1.15 1.16 1.16-17 1.16-18 1.17 1.18 1.20 1.21 1.22 1.24 1.24-25 1.24-31 1.25 1.26

807 788 25, 241, 911 n.21 241, 788, 807 235, 730 788 788 825 673 295 295, 672 166 807 448, 791 44, 788, 791, 807, 911 n.21 44, 295, 862 29, 238, 241, 448, 788, 791 911 n.21 790 44, 791, 807 4, 15, 44, 120, 135, 140, 143, 166, 553–4, 668, 713, 793–4, 825, 855, 857, 863 1.26-27 4, 120, 136, 147, 294 n.23, 674 1.26-28 87, 825, 831 1.26-29 428 1.26–2.25 167 1.27 85, 166, 547, 656, 661, 671, 678, 681, 704, 793 1.28 25–6, 44, 120, 166, 293, 295, 448, 663, 672, 676, 772, 793, 825, 830, 862–3, 881, 945 1.29 788–9 1.29-30 25, 28 1.30 44, 293 n.22, 672, 791 1.31 44, 448, 473, 475–6, 478, 656, 660, 807 1.31–2.2 902 2 8, 11, 14, 30, 95 n.13, 553, 604, 645, 661, 663–7, 674, 678, 713, 772, 789, 861, 863, 877 2–3 8, 11, 49–50, 92, 921 2.1 15, 25, 900 2.1-3 24, 86, 849 2.1-4 788 2.3 25–7, 45 2.4 4, 45 n.4, 81, 184 2.4-25 179

Scripture Index 2.4–3.24 49, 787, 789 2.5 120, 789, 826 2.5–3.24 36 2.7 21, 22 n.1, 95 n.13, 136, 143, 160, 274, 293, 554, 901, 941 2.7-9 789 2.8 30, 165, 791 2.8-10 667 2.8-16 90 n.29 2.9 36, 49, 826 2.10-14 790 2.15 42, 120, 668, 770, 772, 790, 826, 831, 853, 881, 932 2.16 789 2.17 49, 160, 645 2.18 665, 678 2.18-25 678 2.19 95 n.13 2.19-20 793 2.20 848 2.23 790 2.24 85, 141 3 5, 11–13, 26, 238, 287, 659, 666, 679–80, 715, 789 3–4 811 3.1-24 90 n.28 3.5 49 3.6 50, 294, 679, 789 3.7 30, 789 3.8 36, 293 n.22 3.8-9 160 3.14 679, 791–2 3.14-19 49 3.15 679 3.16 678–9, 885 3.17 790, 835 n.58 3.17-18 22 3.19 126, 790 3.20-24 50 3.22 50, 713 3.23 826 3.24 120 4.1 141 4.2 293 n.22, 826, 853 4.3-4 941 4.4 793 4.7 49 4.10 22 4.10-14 853 4.12 22 4.21-22 853 4.22 853 5.1 81, 793 5.22 29 5.24 29 5.29 27, 853, 856 5.32 27 6 29

948

6–8 90 6.5 50 6.7 22 6.8 27 6.9 29 6.12 29, 790 6.13 21 6.14-16 853 6.17 21, 790 6.19 790 6.19-20 50 6.20 50, 911 n.21 6.21 28 7 29 7.4 28–9 7.6 27 7.10 29 7.11 28 7.14 911 n.21 7.15-16 790 7.21 790 7.22 293 n.22 8 27, 29 8–9 341 8.3 28 8.4 28 8.8 28 8.9 28 8.10 28 8.11 28 8.12 28 8.14 28 8.17 28–9, 790 8.20 42, 881 8.21 27, 30, 50 8.21-22 27 8.22 826 n.8, 932 9 29 9.1 50 9.2 945 9.4 790 9.6 793 9.8-17 29, 55 9.9-17 493 9.11 337, 721 9.13 21 9.15 721 9.15-16 790 9.16 41 9.17 721 9.18 30 9.18-27 30 9.18-28 105 9.20 27, 30, 826 n.8 9.21 27, 30 9.21-23 30 9.22 30 9.25-27 30

Scripture Index 9.28 28 10 771 11 348, 771 11.4 885 11.10 27 12 398 12.1-3 22, 48, 50 12.3 336 12.7 22, 881, 885 12.16-20 22 13.14-18 22 15 22 15.1 22 15.5 222 15.13 22 15.14 22 15.15 22 15.16 22 15.18-20 22 17.6-7 41 n.17 17.8 22, 30 17.13 41 n.17 17.19 41 n.17 21.6 647 22.14 304 23 23 n.3 23.1-20 22 23.9 23 23.12 23 23.19 23 25.9 23 26.3-5 22 27 46 n.14 28.11-12 35 28.12 99 28.17-22 35 32.22-32 46 n.14 32.31 499 35.29 23 45.5 547 45.8 547 47.7 53 48.5 115 49 47–8 49.1-28 47 49.25 48 49.26 48 49.29-33 47 49.31 23 50.4-14 47 50.13 23 50.24 23 50.24-26 23 Exodus 1.15–2.10 371 3 248 3.5 884 3.12 52 n.36

3.13-15 34 3.15 247 3.28 139 6.6 708 6.7 336 n.7 7–14 840 12.25 23 13.19 23 14.1–15.22 90 15 89 16 21, 29–30 16.4 29 18.4 675 19 51 19–34 50 19.5-6 35, 52, 55 20.2 945 20.2-3 251 n.5, 401 20.8-11 21 20.10 45 20.11 26, 82, 86 20.12-16 108 20.12-17 35 20.22–23.33 38 20.24 51 22 371 22.21 35 22.22 648 23.10 881 23.12 35 23.20 81 24.4-11 41 24.7 38 24.11 943 25–31 51, 53 n.45, 54 25–40 826 25.8 34 25.10-22 35 29.38-46 38 31 51 31.12-17 21, 51 31.16 41, 51 31.17 51 34.21 21 35–40 53 35.2 21 35.2-3 838 37.1-9 35 40.17-33 51 Leviticus 1–7 51 2.11-13 40 8–10 53 n.45 8.33 51 9 53 9.22-24 53 10.1 53 10.10 37

949

Scripture Index 13.1-59 38 14.1-57 38 15.1-33 38 16.31 21 17–26 90 18.6 548 19.18 401 19.23 23 20.26 672 23 21, 38 23.10 23 24.8 41 n.17 25 797 25–26 31 25.1 31 25.1-7 21 25.2 31 25.3-4 789 25.5 789 25.8-24 21 25.18 23 25.21-23 789 25.23 26, 31, 773 26 21 26.3-4 932 26.6 23 26.12 36 26.20 932 26.34 27, 31 26.43 27 Numbers 3.7-8 42 5.1-3 38 5.3 38 6 53–4 6.21 53 6.22-27 52–4 6.24 826 n.7 6.24-26 39 7 53 n.45 7.1 52 8.14 672 9 52 n.36 10.9 251 n.6 10.11-12 52 n.36 14.23 23 14.30 23 15.18 23 15.32-36 21 15.37-41 42 18.19 41 n.17 20.12 23 20.24 23 22–24 46 n.14 22.22-35 74 28–29 38 28.11-15 40 34.2 23

950

Deuteronomy 4.24 552 4.35 708 5.6-7 251 n.5 5.12-15 21, 86 5.14 27, 45 6.4-8 648 6.5 401 7.6 336 8.3 52 10.18 648 12–26 46 12.5 23 12.7 41 12.9 23 16.1-17 38 16.16 38 16.20 52 17.14-20 23 23.14 36 24.1 85 26.12 648 26.18-19 55 27–28 46 27–33 50, 53–4 28 47 n.16, 714 29–30 46 29.19 46 30 47 n.16, 714 30.1 46–7 30.1-5 47 30.5 47 30.9 47 30.11 774 30.14 774 30.15 46, 774 30.16 47 30.18 47 30.19 46 30.20 47 32 46 32.5-6 114 32.19-22 114 32.21 47 32.46-47 52 32.48-52 47 33 46–8 33.2-3 46 33.2-5 46 33.7 46, 675 33.11 46 33.12 46 33.13 46, 48 33.13-16 46 33.15 48 33.16 48 33.17 46 33.20 46

Scripture Index 33.20-22 46 33.23-24 46 33.26 675 33.26-29 46 33.27 46, 508 33.28 46 33.29 46, 675 34 46 34.1-8 47 34.5-6 23 Judges 2.8 113 3.10 838 5.20 222 16.13-14 242 n.34 1 Samuel 1 41 3.12-14 648 10.19 251 n.6 13.10 53 16.13 838 20.5-24 40 n.15 23.2 838 2 Samuel 7.5 113 7.6-7 36 7.12-16 648 13.25 53 23.5 41 n.17 1 Kings 8.27 34 8.27-30 890 8.62-66 41 9.3 881 n.1 2 Kings 4.23 40 n.15 17.23 30 18.12 113 25.21 30 1 Chronicles 4.4 675 12.9 675 16.15-17 41 n.17 28.11-12 838 29.14 938 2 Chronicles 7.14 375 36.21 21, 27 Ezra 10.11 672 Nehemiah 3.19 675 9.6 937 9.14 21 10.32-34 21 12.42 675 13.15-22 21

Esther 4.14 358 Job 1–42 67 1.1-5 77 1.2 77 1.3 70 1.9 75 n.30 1.19 72 1.21 241 3.9 922 n.13 8.9 557 9.4-11 89 n.27 10 490 10.8-9 901 10.9 924 12.7-8 87 24.4 73 26.6-13 251 26.6-14 435 26.11-12 89 26.14 72 29.25 74 30–42 602 30.8 73 30.28-29 77 33.4 277 33.6 924 38 340 38–41 56, 70 38–42 606 38.1 71 38.3 73 38.4 901 38.4-7 222 38.4-38 74 38.5 901 38.8-11 901 38.16 72 38.17 72 38.18 72 38.19 72 38.22 72 38.25-27 72 38.31 72 38.39 73 38.39-40 72 38.39-41 795 38.39–39.30 72, 74 38.41 87 39.1-4 73 39.5-8 73 39.6 74 39.21-25 74 39.24 74 39.26-30 74 39.29-30 795

951

Scripture Index 39.30 74 39.38 74 40.4-5 71–2 40.6 71 40.8 76 40.11-12 74 40.15-19 76 40.15-24 74, 792 40.15–41.26 72, 922 n.13 40.19 554 n.26 41 792 41.1-34 74 41.34 74 42.3 71 42.6 71 42.7 71 42.7-17 77 42.13-15 77 42.17 78 Psalms 1.3 35 8 571 8.1 571 8.2 571–2 8.3 571, 901 8.3-7 222 8.3-8 5 8.4 572 8.7 945 10.4 517 11.4 82 14.1 517 15.2 475 16.5-6 51 16.10-11 51 18.15 89 19 209 19.1 543 19.1-4 707 19.3 773 19.4-6 426 24 884 24.1 422, 780 29.2 541 32.11 426 33.6 84, 276, 424 n.6, 661 33.6-9 82, 245, 251 n.7 33.6-11 435 33.9 424 n.6 33.20 675 37.3-4 51 37.28 52 38.10 139 42.2 54 47.2-4 89 47.8 299 48.1-3 881 n.1 51.15 937

952

53.1 517 63.3-4 51 65.4 51 65.9-11 51 65.11 932 69.35 251 n.6 69.36 937 70.5 675 72.28 475 73.25 51 74.12-15 423 74.12-17 793 74.13-23 922 n.13 74.14 792–3 80.1 34 82.6 556 84.2 54 84.19 675 89.5-13 793 89.6 888 n.21 89.7-8 89 89.8-11 89, 251 n.7, 435 89.14 422, 433 90 11 90.10 835 n.58 90.12 508 92 21 92.4 901 93.1-4 89 95.5 901 96 849 96.1-4 89 96.10-13 935 96.11-13 426, 434 99.1-3 89 102.25 901 103.2-5 51 103.19 82, 236 n.11 103.19-22 35 103.24 138 104 15, 67, 75–6, 82, 340 n.23, 426, 604, 795, 933 104.2-3 426 104.4 552 104.6 426 104.6-7 89 104.8 426 104.10 426 104.12 75, 426 104.14-15 426 104.17 75 104.18 75 104.21 73, 795 104.22 75 104.23 835 n.58 104.24 75, 552, 940 104.25-26 426 104.26 922 n.13, 792

Scripture Index 104.29-30 274, 276, 551, 661 104.30 840 105.8 41 n.17 106.3 52 106.9 89 107.23-32 89 110.1 157 n.59 110.10 158 n.65 111.10 69 n.13 111.15 41 n.17 115.2-3 236 n.11 115.9-11 675 115.16 932 121.2 675 121.4 297 124.8 246, 675 127 768, 889 133.3 51 139 241–2 139.7-10 754 139.7-12 280 139.8 514 139.11-12 508 139.13 241–2 139.14 901 139.15 241–2 145.15-20 299 146.6 82 147.8-9 299 147.9 87 147.18 424 n.6 148 933 148.1-3 222 148.2-3 43 148.5-6 424 n.6 Proverbs 1.3 77 1.7 158 n.65 3.19-20 75 6.6-11 87, 835 n.58 8 604 8.22 545, 551 8.22-31 450 n.8, 940 8.29 929 n.29 8.30 149 n.3 9.10 69 n.13 13.10-31 242 n.34 16.10 838 24.10 802 30.18-19 67–8, 71 Ecclesiastes 5.15 241 Isaiah 1.2-4 114 1.13 21, 40 n.15 2.1-3 883 2.4 61 5.1-2 60

5.1-4 58 5.1-7 88 5.5-6 60 5.7 88 5.25 60 5.26 60 5.30 60 6.3 37, 888 6.11 60 10.5 64 10.6 64 11.6 4, 61, 85 11.6-8 648 11.6-9 936 11.8 61 11.9 61, 85 13.11 65 13.12 65 13.13 65 13.20-22 77 n.32 24–27 59 n.9 27.1 3, 424, 792, 922 n.13 28.16-17 434 29.16 64 29.23 901 30.1 114 30.9 114 30.14 66 30.23 61 30.25 61 34.13 77 n.32 35.1 935 35.5-6 90 40.3 81 40.12 901 41.1 247 42.8 247 43.15 58 43.15-17 59 43.16 58 43.17 58 43.19 283 44.23 935 44.24 57 45.1-3 761 45.7 237, 461 45.7-9 435 45.8 935 45.9 924 n.19 45.12 57, 901 45.18 248, 901 45.22 251 n.6 48.11 247 48.12-13 246 48.13 57 48.18 63 48.19 63 49.19-20 61

953

Scripture Index 51.3 90 n.29 51.9 3 51.13 57 55.3 41 n.17 55.10 62, 88 55.11 62 55.12 426, 935 56.1-8 21 56.3 672 58.6 90 58.13-14 21 61.1-2 90 61.8 41 n.17 64.1 84 64.8 58, 229, 901 65.11 61 65.12 61 65.17 84, 122 n.10, 665 65.17-25 839 65.21 881 65.25 61, 759 66.1-2 422 66.2 901 66.22-23 62 66.23 21, 40 n.15 66.24 63 Jeremiah 1.4-5 496 3.19 115 4.3 88 4.6-7 60 4.23-26 60 7 56 8.13 88 9.11 77 n.32 10.22 77 n.32 11.4-5 59 11.17 58 17.19-27 21 18.2-6 58 18.4 61 18.5 64 18.5-11 130 18.6 61, 229 18.11 61 18.12 61 23.3 61 25.15 64 25.16 64 27.5 58 29.5 881 31.32 59 31.33 721 32.17 251 n.6 32.40 41 n.17 44.7 300 49.33 77 n.32 50.5 41 n.17

954

51.7 64 51.15 57 51.20 64 Lamentations 2.6 21 5.17-18 77 n.32 Ezekiel 1.4 548 13.4 77 n.32 16.13 59 16.14 59 16.39 66 16.40 66 16.42 66 18.20 503 18.31 60 18.32 60 20.12-24 21 22.8-26 21 23.38 21 28.11-19 50 28.13-14 85 31.8 90 n.29 34.25 61 36.10-11 61 37 761 37.1-14 13 37.23 251 n.6 37.26 41 n.17 40–48 36 44.24 21 45.17 21 46.1-3 40 n.15 46.1-4 21 46.12 21 48.35 36 Daniel 4.30 117 n.71 12.3 222 Hosea 1.10 114 2 59 2.8 59 2.9 59 2.13 21 2.18 61, 932 2.19-20 62 4.1-3 60 n.12 4.3 935 8.12 62 10.12 88 11.1 58, 114 11.3-4 58 13.4-5 59 13.9 675 Joel 2.22 61 2.24 61

Scripture Index Amos 2.6-7 61 2.10 59 3.7 113 8.5 21 9.1 60 9.5 60 9.6 60 9.7 523 9.13 61 Jonah 1.9 57 1.14 57 1.17–2.10 922 n.13 Micah 1.8 77 n.32 4.3 61 Habakkuk 3.17 62 3.19 62 Zephaniah 1.2-3 60 n.12 Zechariah 1.6 113 1.15 64 2.4 61 7.9 63 7.11 63 7.12 63 7.14 63 8.4-5 648 8.8 63 8.16-17 63 8.22 59 12.1 57 Malachi 1.3 77 n.32 2.10 59 3.1 81 3.6 375 4.2 934 Matthew 1.1 81, 83 1.1-17 714 1.20 83 1.23 83, 251 n.9, 256 2.2 83 2.7 83 2.9-10 83 2.13 83 2.13-18 649 2.13-19 371 2.19 83 4.17 83 4.23 83 5.1 402 5.3 295 5.3-11 295

5.4 541 5.5 126, 945 5.6 295 5.12 124 5.14 295 5.32 86 5.34-35 82 5.43-48 402 5.44-45 295 5.45 83, 234, 295, 300 6.9 83, 91 6.10 124, 295 6.19-24 87 6.20 124 6.21 207 6.25-26 87 6.26 15, 83, 87, 300 6.28 83, 657 6.34 657 8.12 124 8.20 883 8.23-27 427 n.16 10.23 128 10.28-31 87 n.22 10.29 459 10.29-30 297 10.29-31 234, 300 10.39 294 11.2-6 83 11.25 83 11.29 945 12.1-8 86 12.8 21 12.11 15 12.39-41 924 12.40 925 13.24-30 461 13.25 461 13.41-42 83 13.42 124 13.49-50 83 13.55-56 250 n.3 14 942 16.19 295 17.4 884 18.3 654 18.3-5 649 18.10 83 18.18-19 295 19.8 141 19.9 86 19.12 86 19.17 157 n.56 19.28 83, 122 21.16 572 21.18-22 88 21.21-22 922 22.37-40 401

955

Scripture Index 22.40 666 24 125, 128 24.3 128 24.15-22 128 24.27 128 24.31 83 24.37 128 24.37-39 128 24.39 128 25.14-30 42, 678 25.25-26 678 25.30 678 25.31 83 26.38 501 27.31 715 27.45-46 501 27.46 251 n.12 27.50 504 27.51 83 27.51-54 126 28.2 83 28.18 83, 840 28.19 83 28.20 83, 128 Mark 1.1 790 1.1-15 84 1.2-3 81 1.3 922 1.6 790 1.10 84 1.12 16, 84, 123 1.13 84, 945 1.15 83, 85, 233 1.23-27 90 1.25 89 1.32-34 90 2.23-28 86 2.25 86 2.27 86 2.28 21 3.1-6 86 3.22-27 90 4 88 4.1 89 4.1-34 89 4.3-8 88 4.9 427 n.17 4.11 87 4.14-20 88 4.20 88, 427 n.17 4.23-24 427 n.17 4.26-32 88 4.35-41 89 4.39 89 4.41 89 5.1-20 90 5.15 89–90

956

5.19 90 5.19-20 90 5.33 89 5.34 384 5.35-43 513 6 942 6.39 124 6.45-52 89 6.47-52 89 7.24-30 649 8.13-21 89 8.27–10.45 85–6 8.31 126 8.34-38 88 8.35-40 427 n.16 9.14-29 649 9.31 126 9.47 85 9.49-50 88 10.2-12 85 10.6 81 n.6, 250 n.1 10.6-9 85 10.9 86 10.10-12 86 10.13 649 10.14 649 10.14-15 85 10.18 251 n.11 10.23-25 85 10.32 89 10.33 126 10.35-40 88 10.42-45 120 n.3 11.1-11 16 11.12-14 88 11.20-23 88 12.1-12 88 13 81, 122, 125 13.2 81 13.6 125 13.7-8 81, 125 13.8 81, 125 13.9 81 13.9-13 88 13.12-13 81 13.19 81, 250 n.1 13.24 82 13.24-25 81 13.24-27 125 13.24-31 122 n.10 13.27 81 13.31 81, 125 13.32 126 14–16 82 14.21 358 14.33-34 501 14.58 82 15.16-32 82

Scripture Index 15.24 715 15.29 82 15.33 82 15.38 82, 84 15.39 84 16.1-8 84 16.6 126 16.8 89 Luke 1.41 496 1.50 90 1.54 90 1.58 90 1.72 90 1.78 90 2.32 125 2.36-38 86 2.47 649 2.49 649 3.21 123 3.23-28 81 3.23-38 714 3.38 81 4.16-30 90 4.31-37 90 5.12-16 90 5.16 123 5.17-26 90 6.1-5 86 6.5 21 6.12 123 6.20 126 6.21 703 6.25 703 7.11-17 90 7.13 90 7.21-22 90 7.36-50 90 8.22-25 427 n.16 8.26-39 90 8.40-42 90 8.42-48 90 8.49-56 90, 649 9 942 9.28 123 9.57-62 86 10.22 252 n.15 10.33 90 10.35-42 830 11.2 91 11.20 90 12.4-7 87 n.22 12.6 234 12.22-24 87 12.49 552 13.10-17 86, 90 13.31 507 13.31-35 507

13.32-33 507 13.34 507 14.20 86 15.1-32 90 15.3-7 15 15.20 90 16.18 86 16.19-31 368 17 125 17.26-27 86 17.33 294 18.29-30 86 19.1-10 90 20.34-36 86 20.38 508 21 125 21.11 125 21.28 117 n.71 22.44 927 23.42-43 90 24.25-49 546 24.32 552 24.43 795 24.50 91 24.51 90 John 1 253 1.1 80, 97, 150 n.5, 251 n.9, 499, 697, 825, 910 1.1-2 7, 94 1.1-3 448, 754, 790 1.1-5 93–4 1.1-18 93 n.8, 135, 144, 247–8, 252 n.16, 253, 341, 790, 792, 796 1.2 252–3, 257 1.2-4 97 1.3 94–5, 98, 100–1, 234 n.7, 252, 552 1.3-4 370, 499 1.3-5 792 1.4 94–5, 448 1.4-5 790 1.5 93 n.8, 94–5, 500 1.7 189 1.9 80, 189, 499 1.10-11 95, 100 1.12 101, 257 1.12-13 676 1.13 100, 553 n.24 1.14 99–100, 253, 448, 463, 494 n.36, 499, 790, 882 1.16 97 1.17 93 1.18 100, 499 1.29 97, 792 1.24-31 790 1.32-34 792 1.35 97, 792 1.43 97

957

Scripture Index 1.51 99 2.1 97 2.1-11 500 2.21 99 3.3-8 84 3.6 499 3.8 293 3.12-13 99 3.13 99 3.16 99 n.32, 124, 255 n.24, 357, 556 3.19 99 3.19-20 95 3.35 100, 252 n.15 4.21-24 99 4.34 84 4.35-38 98 4.46-52 649 5.17 84 5.20 84 5.24 231 5.26-27 99 5.29 124 5.36 84 6 942 6.1 93 n.8 6.27 124 6.33 99 n.32, 124 6.51 99 n.32, 124 6.51-55 499 6.54 124 6.62 99 6.63 100, 124, 499 7.7 99 n.32 8.12 124 8.23 99 8.24 99 8.26-27 99 8.56-58 98 8.58 248 9.3-4 84 10.10 124, 657, 660 10.17 556 10.18 500 10.30 251 n.9 10.37-38 84 11.1-44 500 11.25 124 12.25 95 n.13 12.32 100–1 12.32-33 99 13.3 100 14.2 124 14.6 449 n.3, 697 14.13 712 14.17 99 n.32 14.19 234 14.28 251 n.11 15.5 475

958

16.4 98 16.8 543 16.13-16 101 16.16-18 98 16.23 712 17.2 100 17.10 100 17.21-26 101 18–20 92 19.5 553 n.23 19.24 715 19.30 553 n.23, 900 20 14 20.1 791 20.15 791 20.17 101, 256 n.27 20.22 101, 791 20.27 101 20.28 251 n.9 20.30-31 98 20.31 124 21.5-13 101 21.13 795 21.25 255 n.24, 372 Acts 1.9-11 90 2.19-20 125 2.23 556 2.25-28 91 2.43-47 90 2.44-46 887 2.46-47 91 3.13 251 n.10 3.20-21 508 4.32-37 90–1 7.51-52 502 7.55-56 125 8.8 91 8.36 941 8.39 91 10.34 90 10.34-35 523 10.44-48 91 13.14 21 13.27 21 13.42 21 13.44 21 13.44-49 91 13.48 91 13.52 91 14.17 932 15.8-9 91 15.21 21 16.13 21 16.34 91 17 307 17.2 21 17.23 523

Scripture Index 17.28 721 18.4 21 20.7 21 Romans 1.1 103, 111, 113 n.48 1.7 251 n.10 1.16 114 n.53 1.25 116, 940 1.26-27 763 2.5-16 128 2.14 763 2.14-15 404 3.23 659 3.24 117 3.26 503 4.17 5, 590 5.12 12 5.12-17 117 5.12-21 11, 81 n.8 5.14 547–8 6–8 112 6.15-23 103, 113 n.48, 117 6.23 503 8 113–14, 118, 129–30, 465, 773 8.1-16 116 8.11 508 8.12 113, 114 8.12-17 114 8.13 113 8.12-25 103, 111, 113–19 8.14 114 8.14-16 256 n.27 8.14-17 115 8.15 103, 113 n.48, 114–15, 650 8.17 115–16, 505 8.17-39 116 8.18 115–16 8.18-23 341, 404 8.18-25 557 8.18-30 840 8.18-39 117 8.19 113–14, 116, 127, 134, 542 8.19-22 116 8.19-23 773, 796 8.20 117 n.70, 118, 508 8.21 114, 342, 465, 945 8.22 117–18, 759 8.23 114–15, 117 8.24-25 118 8.25 113 8.34 509 8.35 449 8.35-39 449 n.4 8.38-39 449 8.39 116, 449 9.2 121 n.4 9.4 114 n.53 10.4 405

11.5 336 n.5 11.36 305 12.1-2 825 12.8 838 12.21 508 13.1 453–4 13.8-10 401 16.25 505 16.25-27 546 1 Corinthians 1–2 287 1.2 826 1.3 251 n.10 1.30 117 2.6 449 2.26 826 3.11 434 4.5 128 n.18 7.6 828 7.9 828 7.11 828 7.15 828 7.17 826 7.17-19 828 7.20 826, 828 7.21-24 828 7.22 103, 113 n.48 7.23 111 7.24 826 7.29-31 829 7.31 222 8.6 234 n.7, 248, 251 n.10, 253 n.18, 753 n.26 11.14 767 11.26 128 n.18 12 662 n.8 12.3 543 12.12-31 763 13 287, 696 13.1-13 286 13.13-14 271 14.6 127 14.12 839 14.26 127 14.30 127 15 126, 129, 548 15.3-5 546 15.12-57 122 15.14 234 15.19 509 15.20 14 15.22 234 n.5 15.23 128 15.24 449, 882 15.24-26 452 15.24-28 544 15.26 501 15.27-28 553 n.22

959

Scripture Index 15.28 129, 147, 552 n.17, 553 15.29 532 n.92 15.35-42 129 15.40 4 15.42-49 795 15.44 129, 220 15.45-47 548 15.45-48 554 15.46 129 15.48 795 15.49 795 15.50 129 15.51-52 129 15.54 514 16.17 128 n.17 2 Corinthians 1.3-4 504 1.5 504 3.12–4.6 546 4.4 467 4.5 103, 113 n.48 4.8-12 505 4.10-11 231 4.12 509 4.16 225 5.1 129, 506, 557 5.4 129 5.6-8 508 5.8 506 5.17 233, 283 5.17-19 123, 795 5.17-20 129 5.19 345 6.1 509 7.6 128 n.17 10.10 128 12.1-5 122, 127 12.2 161 12.9 553 12.10 703 Galatians 1.1 251 n.10 1.3 251 n.10 1.12 125 2.2 125 2.19-20 231 3.15-22 398 3.19-24 401 3.23-25 523 3.28 104, 143, 675–6 4.1-5 523 n.41 4.4 358, 550 4.5 650 5.1 103, 113 n.48, 294–5 6.2 405 Ephesians 1.3-4 554 1.3-14 80 n.2

960

1.4 539, 556 1.7 117 1.8-10 910 1.8-12 435 1.9 342 1.9-10 536, 943 1.10 342, 370 1.11 753 n.26 1.20-21 451 1.23 97 2.10 546 3.4 505 3.9 943 3.17 721 3.19 97 4.1 827 4.8 502 4.10 536 4.11 838 4.13 97, 538 4.24 715 4.30 117 5 676, 680–1 5.31-32 680 5.32 676 5.33 680 6.1 650 6.4 650 6.12 451, 814 Philippians 1.1 103, 112 n.43, 113 n.48 1.26 128 2 253, 381 2.4-11 113 n.50, 116 n.64 2.6 294 n.23 2.6-7 253, 266 2.9-11 536 2.10 552, 553 n.22 2.12 128 2.12-13 286 3.6 128 3.20 124, 222 3.20-21 557 4.15 763 Colossians 1 179, 370, 451 1.10 676 1.13 253 1.14 117 1.14-20 341 1.15 257, 260, 342, 467, 509, 547, 551 1.15-16 248 1.15-17 450 1.15-20 80 n.2, 234 n.7, 435, 450, 910 1.15-23 849 1.16 545, 754, 882, 905 1.16-17 250, 342, 510, 943 1.16-18 545

Scripture Index 1.17 253, 505, 545, 882, 905 1.18 14, 509, 545 1.19 97, 254, 551 1.19-20 253, 342 1.20 451, 551 1.24 505 1.27 721 2 370, 450–1 2.2 505 2.3 371 2.9 97, 254 2.10 450 2.14 451 2.14-15 504 2.15 451 3.2-5 505 3.3 372 3.10 250 3.11 104, 508 3.12 336 3.15 721 3.20 650 3.21 650 1 Thessalonians 1.10 128 n.18 2.19 128 n.17 3.13 128 n.17 4.15 128 n.17 4.17 121 n.9 5.2 128 n.18 5.23 128 n.17 2 Thessalonians 1.10 128 n.18 2.1 128 n.17 2.3 128 n.18 2.8 128 n.17 2.9 128 n.17 1 Timothy 1.10 108 1.11 108 2.14 12 Titus 1.1 112 n.43, 336 Hebrews 1 80 n.2 1.1 680 1.1-2 523 1.2 250 n.2, 253 n.18 1.2-3 234 n.7, 248 1.3 910 1.7 552 2.11 538 2.12 538 2.14-15 504 4.9 21 5.7 502 5.9 502 9.15 117

11.3 5, 209 11.21 508 11.35 117 12.29 552 13.14 17 13.20 251 n.10 James 1.17 508 1.27 851 3.6 125 1 Peter 1.3 251 n.10 1.20 538 2.9 336 2 Peter 3.7 122, 126 3.10-13 122, 126 3.12 294 3.13 122 n.10 3.18 538 1 John 2.9-11 99 3.14 231 4.19 285 n.2, 401 Revelation 1.1 125 1.3 130 1.6 120 n.3, 131 1.8 248, 434, 839 1.9 131 1.13 498 1.17 250 n.2, 498, 839 1.17-18 498 1.18 14, 132, 514 2–3 130 2.2 133 2.8 250 n.2, 839 2.11 133 2.19 133 2.26 133 3.1 133 3.2 133 3.8 133 3.14 545, 551 3.15 133 4.1 122 4.11 753 n.26 5.5-6 133 n.27 5.6-14 434 5.10 120 n.3, 131 6.1 129 6.2 131 6.4 131 6.5-6 122 6.8 129, 131–2 7.2 131 8.7-9 130 9–12 888 n.21

961

Scripture Index 9.1-11 122 9.3 131 9.5 131 9.11 132 9.20 130 9.21 130 10 812 10.11 130 11.2 131 11.15 129 n.19, 131–2, 134 11.15-18 434 11.18 134, 368, 935 12 812–13, 817 12–14 817 12.2 813 12.3 813 12.4 813 12.5 813 12.6 813 12.7-9 811 12.9 133, 813 12.10 131 12.14-16 130 13 129, 814 13.4 122 13.5 131 13.7 131 13.8 133, 538, 554, 556, 823 14 813–14 14.13 508 14.14-20 813 15.4 888 n.21 16.8 131 16.9 130 16.11 130 17.4 122 17.9 122 17.14 132 17.18 122 18.2 129 18.4 132 19.10 133 19.11-16 128, 133 n.27 19.13 253 n.17 19.16 132 20.2 133 20.6 133 20.12 133 20.13 132–3 20.14 132–3 21 839, 888 21.1 126 21.1-5 122 21.2 124 21.3-5 658 21.4 887 21.5 124, 240 n.26, 657 21.6 839

962

21.8 133 21.12 368 22.1-5 888 n.21 22.5 240 n.26 22.7 130 22.9-10 130 22.12 133 22.13 79, 250 n.2, 536, 839 22.18-19 130 Deuterocanonical Books Wisdom 1.13-14 513 5.9-14 68 n.5 7.22 149 n.3 7.22-30 940 7.25 552 11.20 883 n.9 Sirach 33.13 229 1 Maccabees 7.28 5 2 Maccabees 7.22-23 246 7.28 590 2 Esdras 4.26-32 88 n.24 8.41 88 n.24 9.31 88 n.24 Pseudepigrapha Apocalypse of Adam 64, 7–13 152 n.16 64, 15 152 n.17 65, 11–18.31-32 152 n.16 66, 14–27 152 n.16 69, 20 152 n.17 71, 13 152 n.17 72, 11 152 n.17 75, 8 152 76, 2.5.27 152 n.17 77, 20 152 n.18 78, 13 152 n.17, 152 n.18 80, 5.26 152 n.17 81, 11 152 n.18 82, 1 152 n.17 83, 17 152 n.18 85, 17 152 n.17 2 Baruch 51.10 222 56.6 86 1 Enoch 67 90 Jubilees 1.27 80 n.3 1.29 80 n.3 2.1 80 n.3 2.11-13 162 n.92

Scripture Index 2.2 149 3.1-2 162 n.92 3.28 162 n.92 5.2 150 10.1-14 90 31.14 35 Psalms of Solomon 5.9-10 87 Apostolic Fathers 1 Clement 55.2 111

Didache 2.2 108 Ignatius, To the Romans 6 553 Qur’an 24.45 25.59 35 36.82 75.40

191 n.3 191 n.3 3 n.9 191 n.3 13

963

NAME AND SUBJECT INDEX

Abelard, Peter  179, 185–6, 352 Abraham, William  442 abundance  61–2, 65–6, 171, 210, 426, 649, 683, 781–3, 932 accommodation  69–70, 76, 211, 213–14, 326, 466, 643, 902 Adam  8, 11–14, 21–2, 30, 35–6, 42, 81, 85–6, 117, 150, 152–3, 155–8, 160, 162, 167, 170–1, 189–90, 209, 239, 293, 335, 338, 359, 370, 538–9, 542, 547–56, 605, 626, 645, 663–7, 673–4, 678–80, 713, 764, 769, 785, 787, 790, 792–3, 795, 805, 825, 877–8, 918, 923, 926 adoption  113–15, 117–18, 459, 556, 650, 676 Adoptionists  247 Advent  935 Aelfric of Eynsham  179, 185, 917–18 aesthetics  221, 260, 263–6, 268–72, 391 n.29, 529, 613, 624, 628–30, 684, 689, 735, 826, 857, 864, 896–8, 903–4, 927, 930 agriculture  16, 49, 87, 609–11, 624, 685, 713, 741–2, 765, 772, 774, 787–90, 797, 826 Ailred of Rievaulx  181 Alan of Lille  181 Albert the Great  189, 199–200 Alberti, Leon Battista  883 Alcuin  184 Alexander, Cecil  768 Alexander, Samuel  389 Al-Ghazali  194, 197, 199 Al-Hazen (Ibn al-Haytham)  601 Alison, James  513–14 Allen, Colin  635, 637, 639 Allison, Dale  87 Alpher, Ralph  585 Alt, Albrecht  761 Alter, Robert  22 n.1 Althaus, Paul  770, 833 Althaus-Reid, Marcella  729 Althusius, Johannes  766 ambiguity  317, 357, 459–61, 468, 476, 484–5, 626, 628, 721, 745, 839, 853–4, 856, 930–1 Ambrose of Milan  145, 179, 182–4, 186, 188, 763–5, 817, 917 Amelius  135 Amery, Carl  302 Ammann, Carole  750 Ammonius Saccas  139–40, 142 analogia entis  264–5 Anastasius of Sinai  921 n.12, 931 Anatolios, Khaled  247 n.8

ancestors  122, 523, 526–7, 530, 532, 624, 685–7, 714 Anderson, Gary  31 Andolsen, Barbara  831 Angelomus of Luxeuil  184 angels  5, 8, 12, 34–5, 43, 80, 82–4, 130–1, 136, 140, 143, 150–2, 154, 156–8, 163, 166, 168–70, 172, 174, 180, 182–3, 186–9, 222, 244, 246–7, 259 n.30, 278 n.25, 356, 360, 369, 455, 461, 475, 486, 487 n.8, 554, 556, 812–13, 815, 816 n.16, 911 n.20, 926 animal theology  542, 544, 635–46 animals  2, 4, 12, 15–16, 26–30, 36, 44–5, 48, 55, 60 n.12, 72, 74–5, 77, 82 n.10, 84, 95 n.13, 104, 123, 129–30, 145, 147, 150–1, 157, 161–2, 234–5, 241, 247, 275, 304, 319, 327, 333, 344, 356, 383, 400, 429, 460, 463, 466, 487–9, 493, 542, 615, 625, 627, 629, 631, 635–46, 666, 668, 670, 672, 674, 677, 683–90, 692, 718, 720, 737 n.1, 766, 769, 787–97, 806, 830, 851, 858, 862, 869, 899, 909, 919, 921–5, 927–8, 934–6, 939 animism  620–1, 623, 625, 628, 631–3 Anselm of Canterbury  186–7, 199, 456, 503 Anthropocene  120 n.1, 354, 510, 608–22, 725, 737–8 anthropocentrism  14–16, 76, 100, 128, 327, 330, 338, 340–1, 344 n.39, 356, 387, 415, 429, 431 n.37, 432, 494, 501, 542, 623, 628, 643–6, 704, 718, 720–2, 724–5, 729, 739, 772, 862 anthropology  4, 116, 118, 162, 170, 220–2, 224–5, 227–8, 287–8, 324, 328, 343, 386, 429, 487, 489–90, 494, 610, 619–21, 623–4, 632, 637–8, 667, 710, 725, 728, 731–6, 738, 744–6, 833–6, 842–4, 847, 851, 859–63, 896, 909 Anzaldúa, Gloria  625 apartheid  347–9, 351–3, 355, 751, 758, 771, 840 apocalypse  79, 125–7, 502, 546, 557 apocalyptic  82, 87, 113–14, 119, 122, 125, 219, 221–7, 434, 545–57, 776, 801, 811–13, 839 Apollinaris of Ravenna  498 Apostles’ Creed, the  1–2, 17, 207, 233, 235–6, 335, 342, 503, 543, 892 Aquinas, Thomas  2, 8, 14, 188–9, 198–202, 223, 228–9, 262–3, 265, 287 n.5, 288 n.6, 292, 301, 310, 313–14, 319–21, 360–1, 396, 400, 412, 424, 429–33, 444, 466, 587–90, 600, 636, 640, 645, 652, 675, 714, 766–8, 773, 781–4, 817–18, 829, 898 architecture  32–3, 138, 206, 517, 752, 756, 881–90 Arendt, Hannah  455, 778–9 Aristobulus of Alexandria  141–2 Aristotle  5–6, 8, 104–6, 112, 141, 173–4, 176–7, 185, 191–2, 195–6, 198, 200, 202, 205–6, 213, 228,

Name and Subject Index 245, 261, 263, 301, 310, 319, 364, 394, 570, 578–9, 596–603, 636, 644–5, 763, 765–7, 859–62, 866, 882 Arminius, Jacob  419 art  69, 263, 264 n.12, 330, 380, 526, 769, 783, 857–8, 865–7, 892–907 bioart  857, 863–4 artificial intelligence (AI)  854 Arzt-Grabner, Peter  108 Assmann, Hugo  729 n.26 astronomy  205–6, 208, 210–14, 561–2, 564–9, 571, 596, 909 astrophysics  245, 363, 561–82 Athanasius of Alexandria  174, 247 n.8, 252, 256, 282, 311, 354, 507, 551 Athenagoras of Athens  140 Attfield, Robin  460–1 Auden, W. H.  603 Augustine of Hippo  8, 11–13, 179–80, 182–4, 186–9, 214, 245, 262, 265–71, 301, 312–13, 336–8, 354, 360, 419, 436, 466, 470 n.62, 472–80, 482–5, 506, 537, 549, 577, 589–90, 598–600, 617, 636, 639–40, 645, 650–5, 745 n.22, 757, 765–8, 781, 783, 817–18, 828, 886–8, 908, 917 Augustus  252, 422 Aulén, Gustaf  350–2 Aurelius, Marcus  764–5 authority  56–61, 63, 65, 82–3, 85, 89, 100, 105 n.15, 106, 116, 130–1, 146, 157, 160, 176–7, 186–9, 204, 213–15, 222, 229, 288 n.6, 322, 326, 332 n.22, 398, 417, 422, 449–51, 453–4, 519, 690, 708, 711, 766, 769, 814, 840, 867, 923 Averroes (Ibn Rushd)  194–5, 197–8, 201–2 Avi, Dick  522, 525 Avicenna (Ibn Sina)  192–5, 197–201, 598–9 awe  67–78, 150, 245, 271, 394, 502, 571–4, 580, 630, 707, 711, 714–15, 809, 848 Babylon  26–7, 35, 57–60, 64–5, 122, 131–2, 164, 178, 210, 347, 447–8, 453, 457, 761 Bacon, Francis  601–2, 618, 772 Bacon, Roger  600 Baillie, John  14 Balasuriya, Tissa  618 Balentine, Samuel  51–2 Ball, John  764 Balthasar, Hans Urs von  264–7, 270, 502, 540 Bar Hebraeus  165, 174 Bardaisan, Bardaiṣan  135, 137–8, 148, 165–7, 174 Barr, James  49, 518 Barrera, Albino  782 Barrow, John  591 Bartchy, S. Scott  105 n.15 Barth, Karl  17, 127, 224–5, 227–8, 238, 240, 253 n.17, 256, 263–4, 288–9, 291–3, 301 n.4, 302–8, 320–1, 338–41, 344, 367–70, 398–402, 406, 450, 461, 478– 85, 490, 494, 657, 696, 704, 762, 769–73, 818–23, 829, 832–8, 840, 844, 874, 896, 900, 905, 911

Basil of Caesarea  2, 142, 170, 173–4, 176–7, 179, 182–3, 185–8, 274, 763, 910, 917, 923 n.17, 938, 940 basileia  123, 126, 128, 131–2, 134, 381, see also kingdom of God Basilides  151, 158 Bauckham, Richard  246–7, 813–14, 817 Bauks, Michaela  24 n.7 Bauman, Whitney  729–31 Bauman, Zygmunt  839 Baumgarten, Alexander  261 Beardslee, William  379 n.31 beatific vision  6, 220, 288 n.6, 360, 364–5, 367, 369 beauty  2, 5, 10, 40, 69, 136 n.10, 157, 159–60, 171, 176, 182, 187–8, 208, 210–11, 233, 260–72, 298, 346–7, 357, 364, 379–80, 383, 461, 466, 468, 470, 541–2, 555, 571, 574, 652, 657, 664, 684, 687, 689, 720–1, 768, 778, 781, 807, 826, 862, 901, 903–4, 908, 910, 922 Becker, Gary  777 Bede  183–5, 188, 918 n.6, 937 Bediako, Kwame  524 n.46, 532 Bekoff, Marc  641, 642 n.38 Belhar, the Confession of  348 Bellarmine, Robert  214 Benedict XVI (pope)  832 Bentham, Jeremy  640 Bentley, Richard  578–9 Berdyaev, Nikolai  392, 829 n.24 Bergmann, Sigurd  608, 615, 621 Berkeley, George  408, 411–12 Berkhof, Hendrikus  276–7 Berry, Thomas  612, 627 Berry, Wendell  511, 772, 775, 781, 783 Bethge, Eberhard  404 Bhabha, Homi  451, 452 n.19, 625, 732 Biden, Joe  326 n.8 Big Bang, the  3, 9, 226, 313, 363, 378, 411, 469, 566, 571, 575–6, 583–8, 592–4, 599, 603 Biggar, Nigel  820 Biko, Steven Bantu  349 binaries  83, 98–9, 104, 129, 247, 626, 670–6, 680, 732–4, 812, 862, 865 biodiversity  75, 617–18, 771, 775 bioethics  842–4 biology  37–8, 47, 76, 238, 257, 278, 356, 378, 407–13, 417–18, 421, 460, 467, 470, 569, 574, 596, 602, 604, 627, 638, 650, 795, 843–4, 847, 857, 902, 909 n.7 birth  49, 73, 81, 109–10, 117, 126, 161, 228, 295, 324, 356, 391, 482, 494–7, 510, 530, 542, 549, 565, 647, 649, 653, 679, 712, 715 blackness  684, 686, 689 blessing  22, 25, 30, 35–6, 39–41, 44–55, 97, 141, 171, 208, 256–8, 285, 290–5, 343, 506, 508, 647–50, 656, 680, 713–14, 742, 826 n.8, 888, 933, 942 block theory  364–5, 370 n.36 Bloesch, Donald  279 n.26 Blumhardt, Johann Christoph  277

965

Name and Subject Index bodies  38, 63, 115, 118, 129, 139–41, 143, 145, 155, 208, 222, 231, 270, 278, 281, 328, 344–5, 358–9, 362, 367, 384, 451, 490–1, 495, 496 n.42, 505, 508, 510–11, 596, 598–9, 620 n.56, 627, 629, 631–3, 638, 653, 661, 666–7, 684–92, 781, 801, 848, 851, 857, 869, 899, 910, 920, 926–8 heavenly  5, 35, 84, 166, 212, 564, 908 Boemus, Johannes  771 Boesak, Allan  840 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus  361, 364–5, 373 n.2, 606, 908 Boethius of Dacia  198 Boff, Leonardo  619 Böhme, Jakob  391–3 Bonaparte, Napoleon  256, 314 Bonaventure  181, 189, 198–200 Bondi, Hermann  575, 584 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich  241, 402–6, 506, 508, 512, 630, 666, 770, 781, 819, 836, 840 Bordeianu, Radu  542 Borgia, Rodrigo  323 Botting, Eileen Hunt  864 Bowens, Lisa  105 Boyle, Robert  601–2 Bracken, Joseph  392 Bradshaw, Paul  941–2 Brautigan, Richard  854–8, 860, 862–3, 866 Bray, Karen  630 bread  21, 29, 34–5, 39–42, 101, 162, 205, 495, 542, 679–80, 835, 878, 939–40, 942–3 Brecht, Bertold  825–6 Bremer, Ingrid  756 Brett, Mark  621, 806–7 Bria, Ion  539 Brock, Sebastian  170 Brown, Michael  379 n.31 Brown, William  424–5 Brownlee, Kimberley  756 Brueggemann, Walter  65, 379 n.31 Brunelleschi, Filippo  887 Brunner, Emil  233, 288–9, 291–3, 769–70, 819 Bruno, Giordano  626 Brusco, Elizabeth  535 Buck, Holly Jean  615 Buddhism  164, 524, 628, 694–5, 719, 727 Bulgakov, Sergei  461 Bullinger, Heinrich  338 Bultmann, Rudolf  225, 230–1 Burgundio of Pisa  180 Burke, Edmund  263, 271 Burney, C. F.  545 Burrus, Virginia  467 Bushnell, Horace  653–4, 657 Butler, Judith  677, 680–1 Byrne, Jason  755 Caesarius of Arles  933 Calcidius  135

966

calendar  17, 28–31, 79, 236, 936 Calvin, John  5, 17, 204, 207–11, 213–14, 223–4, 227, 302, 337, 343, 354, 398–9, 718, 837, 843, 928 Cantwell Smith, Wilfred  700 Canute (king)  922 Capes, Justin  438 capitalism  325, 349, 418, 454–5, 612, 724–5, 776, 829 n.24, 829 n.25, 830–1, 835–6, 838, 849 capital punishment  21, 821 Caputo, John  132, 425 care  16–17, 35, 41, 109, 122, 299, 329, 404–5, 418, 420, 422, 493, 615, 652, 654 n.20, 655–7, 668, 741, 745, 756–7, 772, 802, 805, 831, 842–3, 845–6, 848–9, 851–2, 864, 866, 877, 943 Carlyle, Robert  763–5 Carpocrates  151 Carroll, Lewis  894 Carroll, Robert  62 Carruthers, Peter  640 Carter, Brandon  469, 591 Cassian, John  789 Cassuto, Umberto  25–6 Castillo, Daniel  619 cause, causality  5–6, 8, 12, 177, 185, 192–5, 198–202, 207, 230, 233, 235–6, 238, 245, 255–8, 262, 266–7, 274, 279–80, 297, 313–14, 320, 377, 379, 383–4, 388, 391, 408, 411–16, 418–20, 436–8, 440–5, 467, 470, 473–4, 477 n.23, 485, 554, 556–7, 575, 587–8, 671, 734, 762, 848, 854–5, 859–67, 882 Causey, Matthew  864 Causse, Jean-Daniel  733–4 Cavendish, Margaret  602 celebration  12, 34, 38–9, 41, 420, 426–7, 540, 542–4, 661, 665, 685, 720, 729, 757, 836, 870–1, 878, 887, 904, 932, 943 Celsus  144–5 certainty  214–15, 366, 374, 614, 629–30, 633, 735, 823 Chai, David  699 Chakrabarty, Dipesh  613, 617, 725–7 Chalcedon, Council of  168, 170, 267, 269, 368 n.30, 404, 701, 871 Chan, Kai  642 n.44 change  5–6, 40, 84, 139–40, 194–5, 199–201, 208, 271, 278, 294, 301, 316, 343, 366 n.26, 375, 392– 3, 396, 409, 412, 499, 508, 564–5, 569, 586, 597, 605, 621, 629, 666, 677–8, 681, 688, 699–702, 713, 762, 839, 857–60, 863, 866, 895, 897 chaos  9–10, 37, 57–9, 66, 73–5, 89–91, 132, 154, 178, 235–7, 242, 248, 274, 307, 318, 353, 390–1, 422–7, 478–9, 483–4, 503, 576, 596–7, 601, 603–4, 606, 674, 694, 697, 701–2, 705, 728–30, 733–5, 748, 776, 781, 877, 905 Chaoskampf  57–8, 66 Cheney, Dick  453 Chenu, Marie-Dominique  291 Chernilo, Daniel  13–15

Name and Subject Index children  108–9, 115, 359–64, 366, 368–9, 380, 457, 572, 647–58, 687, 769 Chirongoma, Sophia  803 Chitando, Ezra  802–3 ch’ixi 731, 734–6 Choi, Jin Young  452 Christian Faith and the Earth project, the  352–5 Christianity  581, 608, 615–16, 621, 626, 628, 631, 633, 678, 688, 690–1, 694–6, 698, 704, 711, 716–17, 722, 727–8, 736, 763, 765, 772, 783, 785, 818, 870, 917, 930, 940 Christmas  934–5 christology  79–80, 98, 101, 132–3, 168, 220, 224–5, 250–72, 306, 311, 338–40, 353, 370, 405, 434, 456, 481, 494, 527, 529, 543, 619–21, 676, 697, 700, 722, 790, 792, 795–6, 819, 833–4, 837–9, 871, 892–3, 900, 905 hypostasis  260, 265, 267–9, 271–2, 482, 871 hypostatic union  268–71 church  113, 118, 221–2, 226, 499, 509, 517, 522, 525–6, 528–9, 531–44, 659, 665, 676, 680, 683–4, 691–2, 756–7, 768–70, 816, 838, 843, 845, 870–1, 878, 888, 910, 932 baptism  162, 205, 361, 526, 532 n.92, 542, 651, 676, 791–2, 828, 928, 940–1, 943 eucharist  42–3, 66, 162, 358, 539, 542–3, 680, 878–9, 937–40, 942–3 Cicero  762–3, 765, 817 cities  77, 116 n.65, 748–59, 885 Claudius of Turin  184 Clayton, Philip  273, 376 n.16, 377, 391–4 Clement of Alexandria  135, 138, 142, 148, 151, 445, 763 Clement of Rome  111, 826 Clifford, Richard  58 climate  568, 608–10 change  133, 342, 565, 617–18, 662, 667–9, 758, 771–3 crisis  93, 120, 740, 771–3 Clines, David  48 Clough, David  344, 487, 494, 642–4, 795 Cobb, John  392, 796 Cocceius, Johannes  340 Coda, Piero  759 coexistence  6, 164, 303–8, 734–5, 835, 887, 936 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  606, 899, 922, 925, 927–8 Collingwood, R. G.  882, 897 colonialism  104, 112 n.47, 229, 322–33, 348–9, 351, 353, 451, 455, 516–17, 521, 524–30, 614, 618, 621, 625, 683–92, 723–36, 751 Columbus, Christopher  212, 323 commerce  685, 776 common good  413, 430–2, 779, 781, 783–5, 831 common ownership  763–5 communion  541–4, 638, 692, 703, 725 n.7, 753, 783, 785–6, 879, 883, 885, 887–9 compatibilism  375, 435–45 concordism  177, 227

Confucianism  694–6, 700, 704–5, 707–21 Confucius  695, 707, 711–12, 715, 717 Congar, Yves  254–5 Constantine  546, 826, 830 Constantinople, the First Council of  250 contingency  6–7, 192–3, 298, 364, 368, 381, 390, 394, 410, 419, 427, 463, 475–6, 484–5, 499, 529, 575, 588–90, 729, 783, 876, 879, 897–8, 900 Cook, S. D. N.  861–2 Cooreman-Guittin, Talitha  664–5 Copernicus, Nicolaus  204, 211–13, 224, 578–9 cosmogony  96, 142, 151, 153, 159, 251, 407, 599–600, 603, 694, 697–8, 701, 704–5, 862, 930 cosmology  5–6, 8, 83, 90, 95–6, 116, 125, 135, 146, 157, 161, 164, 166, 173, 177, 190, 220, 222–8, 231–2, 252, 256, 301–2, 311, 356–7, 363, 371, 422, 425 n.9, 426, 466–9, 521, 524, 561, 572, 575–6, 580, 583–95, 623, 627, 630–1, 700–1, 707, 710–12, 715, 724–5, 736, 813, 908, 910 Couenhoven, Jesse  436 n.2 Coulson, Charles  575 covenant, covenants  17, 21–2, 29, 32, 34–5, 37–8, 40–1, 46, 50–5, 59, 79, 86, 221–2, 225, 239, 286, 293–5, 305–7, 335–46, 375, 398, 478, 493–4, 619, 626, 648, 657, 676, 685, 743, 833–4, 836, 838, 882–3, 885, 889–90, 900, 905, 915, 932 Covid-19/Coronavirus  357, 748, 799–809 Cowles, C. S.  379 n.31 Craig, William  587, 641 creation book of nature  215, 616, 626 care  55, 123, 282, 348, 459, 626–7, 668, 772, 783, 865 consummation  128, 219, 224–32, 274 creatio continua  279–81, 302, 313, 377, 393–4, 396, 403, 633, 635, 665, 730–1, 752, 828–9, 840 creatio ex nihilo  1, 3, 5–11, 13, 135, 139, 142, 144, 158, 161, 167, 171, 178, 180, 187, 191, 195–6, 198–9, 201–2, 244–7, 249–50, 252, 274, 311, 313–14, 317–20, 356, 364–5, 376–8, 387–8, 390–2, 394–6, 425, 435, 445, 461, 463–4, 466, 469 n.60, 470, 474–7, 484, 529, 576–7, 590, 596, 603–5, 625–6, 674, 697–9, 705, 710–11, 728–9, 731–3, 736, 780, 785, 871–3, 902 creatio ex profundis  318, 425, 626, 730 kenosis  167, 171, 381, 392, 734, 902 orders of  39, 42, 187, 333, 348, 353, 356, 405, 650, 679, 728, 768, 770–1, 783, 812, 818 n.31, 819, 828–9, 833, 840, 881–5 siblings  720 creationism  135, 356, 409, 425, 575, 733, 740 creativity  42, 74, 169, 238, 241–2, 260, 346, 376, 394, 409, 413, 418, 425, 448, 565, 603, 606, 609, 620, 627, 653, 700, 703, 726, 776, 783, 829 n.24, 832, 857–8, 864–8, 892–907, 913–15 Creegan, Nicola Hoggard  461 Cress, Donald  476 Crisp, Oliver  436

967

Name and Subject Index Crist, Eileen  618–19 critical planetary romanticism (CPR)  630–3 Crombie, Alastair  601 cross  137–8, 141, 232, 253, 255, 266, 272, 290, 305, 341, 345, 352, 358, 381, 451, 501–3, 505, 509, 514, 547–8, 550–3, 581, 701, 878, 927, 935–6 Crouch, Carly  59 Crouse, Robert  180–1 Crutzen, Paul  610–11, 613, 615, 619 Culpepper, Alan  97 culture  17, 42, 111 n.42, 121–2, 235–6, 285, 291, 315, 324, 325 n.7, 333, 410, 418, 421, 516–32, 610, 631, 662, 692, 724–5, 742, 770, 772–3, 826, 828–9, 833, 835, 850, 878, 889, 895, 900, 902, 909, 922 curse  12, 22, 27, 30, 45–7, 49–50, 53–4, 170, 679–80, 713, 771, 790, 814, 853 Curtis, John  56 Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera  734–5 Cuthbert of Lindisfarne  936–7 Cuvillier, Élian  733–4 cybernetics  853–68 Cyril of Alexandria  174, 267–8 Dai-Nian, Zhang  710 damnation  12, 146, 336–7, 419, 445, 507, 923 D’Angelo, Mary Rose  450 Dante Alighieri  5, 124 Dao  694–706, 719 Daoism  694–5 dark energy  567, 571, 580, 630, 702, 705 dark matter  567–8, 630, 702, 705 darkness  49, 60, 72, 82, 84, 92, 94–5, 98–9, 124, 144, 166, 171, 173, 178, 181–3, 186–8, 237–8, 240, 242, 424, 448–9, 451–2, 473, 482, 500–1, 504, 508, 532, 670, 672–5, 678, 697–8, 701, 787, 790–2, 812, 814, 862, 911, 918, 921, 933–4, 936 Darwin, Charles  409, 412–13, 420, 572–4, 643 Davidson, Donald  636–7 Davies, Paul  409 n.12, 572, 581, 591 Davis, Ellen  25–6, 31 Dawkins, Marian  641 n.34 Dawkins, Richard  588 De Beer, Stephan  752, 755 De Gruchy, John  840 Dead Sea Scrolls  28 Deane-Drummond, Celia  461–2, 470 death  11–13, 23, 38, 49, 68, 82–5, 90, 99, 122, 124, 126, 129, 132–3, 156, 170, 224–5, 228, 234, 239 n.24, 242, 262, 270–1, 279, 344, 359–63, 366, 392 n.37, 463–4, 482–3, 496 n.43, 498–514, 532, 549–51, 556, 565, 580–1, 688, 743, 795–6, 806–8, 846–7, 865, 874, 894–5, 910–11, 923, 925–6, 936 suicide  300, 821 decolonization  324, 328, 331, 349, 629, 631, 723–36 decreation  455, 775 DeGrazia, David  642

968

deism  11, 13, 265, 302, 310, 313–14, 356, 379, 410, 576, 710 Deleuze, Gilles  633 demiurge  135, 136 n.12, 149–63, 245, 425, 466–7, 590 Democritus  409, 597 Denis the Carthusian  189 dependence  1, 40, 79, 127, 194, 201, 224, 408, 421, 475–7, 483, 542, 577, 647, 656, 662, 745, 776, 782, 900, 940–1 DeRoche, Michael  60 n.12 Derrida, Jacques  432, 467 Descartes, René  429, 636, 639–40, 646, 772 desire  35, 38, 58, 61, 63, 65, 68–9, 122, 134, 145, 152, 205, 228, 263, 287, 288 n.6, 292–3, 327, 381, 399, 403, 405, 436, 608–9, 650, 683, 719, 744, 746, 778–82, 785, 854, 874, 879, 882, 903 determinism  166, 175, 279–80, 300–1, 365, 371, 375, 410, 414, 418–19, 435–9, 442–4, 446, 860 Deuser, Hermann  300 n.3 DeVries, Dawn  662–4 Dicke, Robert  585 Didymus the Blind  145 Dietrich of Freiburg  601–2 dignity  76–7, 161, 352, 417, 428, 486, 496, 579, 668, 718 n.46, 821, 829 n.24, 831–2, 843 Dio Chrysostom  106 n.19 Dionysius Exiguus  179 direct argument  435–40, 442–3 disability  383, 486, 488, 640, 652, 659–69, 844, 847, 850–2 discipleship  339 disease  7–8, 12–13, 38, 157, 238–9, 351, 414, 464, 510, 624, 664, 745, 807, 843–4, 846, 849–50 disorder  5, 12, 38–9, 96, 311, 363, 377, 476, 479, 588, 603–4, 730, 767, 778, 781, 792, 846, 913 disvalues  459–70 diversity  3, 15–16, 75–7, 117–18, 197, 259, 282, 370, 461, 466, 468, 470, 525–7, 531, 556, 563, 569, 633, 637–8, 646, 656, 659–62, 675, 681, 700, 724, 726, 732, 736, 848, 850, 910–12 Djiniyini, Terry  523, 525–6 DNA  409, 429, 489–90, 494–6, 857, 864, 866 Doering, Lutz  86 Dolamo, Ramathate  753 dominion  4, 9, 11, 15–16, 44, 75–7, 104, 106, 109, 113, 120, 125–6, 318, 322–3, 326, 327 n.11, 402, 413, 426–30, 432, 448–58, 462 n.19, 520, 529–30, 611, 623, 643–5, 668, 703, 724, 729, 731–2, 757, 762, 764, 769, 772–3, 778, 780–1, 783, 794–5, 808, 816–17, 822–3, 831, 835, 837, 840, 850, 855–6, 860–7, 905, 913 Domitian  450 Donatello  330 Dongmei, Fang  721 Donne, John  931 Douglas, Mary  670, 865 Doxiadis, Constantinos  749–50 dreams  526

Name and Subject Index Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste  918 dualism  4, 7, 13, 94, 98–9, 101, 121–2, 127, 131–3, 142, 166–7, 175, 220, 277, 284–9, 299, 318–19, 340–1, 344–5, 393, 411, 429, 448–9, 461, 576, 627, 661, 696, 700–1, 705, 728, 732, 812, 828–9 Dube, Musa Wenkosi  800–1, 803, 807 Dunn, James  12 n.28, 400 n.10 Dunyi, Zhou  700 Dyson, Freeman  581 earth as mother  242, 333, 403, 530–1, 698, 702–3, 808 Easter  934–6 Eastman, Susan  114 Echlin, Edward  620 Eckhart, Meister  229, 390, 701 ecological crisis  25, 120, 123, 129, 428–9, 432–4, 619, 668, 759, 772, 778, 806–8, 823 ecology  9, 16–17, 26, 42, 92, 121–3, 125, 127, 133, 432, 496 n.42, 609, 619, 623–33, 668, 704, 758, 778, 910, 933 economics  77, 104, 106, 108–9, 332–3, 348–9, 359, 412, 417–18, 454–5, 458, 742–3, 749–51, 757–9, 769, 775–86, 828, 830, 835–6, 862 ecotheology  318, 321, 352–3, 356, 619, 627, 862–3 ecstasy  433, 541 ecumenism  265, 354, 517, 939 Eddington, Arthur  363, 584 Eden  81 n.7, 157–8, 165, 169–70, 534, 538, 626, 630, 664–8, 759, 787, 789–91, 805, 808, 825, 861, 926 Edwards, Jonathan  436 Einstein, Albert  568, 574, 580, 583–4, 587, 604, 705 election  12, 46, 81, 88, 128, 227, 256 n.25, 257, 304, 308, 335–46, 419, 478, 481, 833–4, 836, 874 Eliade, Mircea  884 Elliott, Neil  449, 451–2 Ellul, Jacques  835, 860, 863 emanation  1, 5–7, 10, 148, 151, 194, 197, 202, 229, 265, 312, 316, 365, 388, 390–2, 393 n.44, 396, 436, 475, 552, 768 embodiment  11, 14, 97, 99–101, 126, 220, 268, 277, 281–2, 295, 315, 317, 325, 361, 367, 388, 433, 447–54, 456, 501, 506, 517–25, 527–32, 538, 620, 632, 656, 664, 712–13, 715, 727, 745–6, 781, 845, 847–8, 850–1, 857, 897, 908, 910, 914, 943 emergence  376 n.16, 377, 409–10, 413–17, 425, 460, 596–7, 604–5, 623, 629–31, 633, 732 empire  106–8, 113, 128, 130–2, 222, 447–9, 451–8 Endale, Tarik  756 Engdahl, Hans  350 Ennodius, Magnus Felix  936 entropy  226, 234–5, 363–5, 411, 588, 603 Enūma Eliš  57, 164, 178 n.6, 423, 448, 761, 863 environmental theology  618, 620 Ephesus, Council of  168, 255 n.23, 267 Ephrem the Syrian  24, 137, 165–70, 174, 762 Epicureans  96 n.23, 143, 207 Epicurus  143

Epiphanes  151 equality  349, 432, 619, 661–2, 751, 763–6, 773–4, 780, 894 Erickson, Millard  279 Eriugena, John Scottus  146–8, 180, 184, 370, 388–91 eschatology  79, 82–8, 90, 98, 113, 117, 120–34, 146, 167, 219–32, 273–4, 276, 280, 283, 287, 289–91, 293–5, 301, 303, 316–17, 328, 340–1, 344, 366, 380–1, 384–5, 434, 457, 460, 465, 479, 536, 539, 543, 551, 553, 612, 615, 617, 635, 736, 752, 773, 797, 811–13, 822–4, 829, 832, 837–40, 849–51, 878, 886, 888, 900, 905, 915, 925 Escobar, Arturo  724–5, 731–2 estates  43, 761, 768–9, 828 Estes, Joel  664–7 eternity  5–7, 96, 138–40, 142 n.71, 143–4, 146–8, 152, 159, 183, 192–202, 219, 221, 223, 228–32, 245, 251, 255–6, 289, 301, 306, 308, 311–12, 358–73, 391–2, 394, 550, 556, 572, 581–2, 624, 654, 873, 928 ethics  108, 111, 151, 386 n.2, 404–5, 413–16, 430–1, 618, 623–33, 640, 645, 714, 721, 729, 735, 763, 771, 817–22, 826, 831, 839, 843–4, 854, 858–68 technology  854, 858, 863, 866 ethnicity  17, 164, 692 Euclid  586, 600 eurochristian  322–33 Eusebius of Caesarea  139, 142, 546, 826, 830 Eustathius  179 Evagrius Ponticus  145–6, 789 Eve  8, 11–14, 30, 36, 86, 152–4, 156, 158, 160, 167–8, 171–2, 239, 335, 370, 538–9, 626, 663–6, 678–9, 790, 805, 825, 923, 926 evil  7–8, 12–13, 49–50, 82, 86, 90, 95–8, 105, 122, 124, 129–31, 133, 135–6, 140, 142 n.71, 143–7, 150, 152–3, 157–9, 161–3, 182, 187, 237–40, 294–5, 301, 303, 308, 311, 317, 331, 349, 351–2, 376–7, 381–3, 385, 392, 395–6, 410, 414, 419, 445, 460–2, 464–6, 472–85, 500–1, 504, 507–8, 510, 512–14, 617, 629, 661, 664, 667, 688, 705, 715, 745, 812–14, 816, 820, 823, 887, 911 evolution  9, 12, 15, 122, 238–40, 257, 279, 354–6, 377–8, 408–18, 424, 459–63, 465, 467–70, 530, 532, 578, 583, 591, 627, 629–30, 637–8, 640–1, 713–15, 793–4, 796–7 exile  26, 30–1, 47, 58–9, 447–8, 455–7, 461, 883 exoplanets  563–4, 568–9, 578 exorcism  85, 89, 90, 351, 526 extinction  130, 342, 366, 460, 470 n.61, 609, 638, 668 Faber, Roland  726–7 Fall, the  11–13, 143, 224, 292, 340, 392, 405, 502, 512, 534, 664, 811, 929–30 Fanon, Franz  349 Faraday, Michael  278 Farmer, Ronald  379 n.31 Faw, Miller  677 n.19, 678 n.21 Fay, Jacques de la  386 n.1

969

Name and Subject Index Fechner, Gustav  387 n.3 Federal Theology  337–8 Feldmeier, Reinhard  44 n.3, 45 n.9, 46 n.14, 50 n.28 Fergusson, David  308 n.31, 336, 340, 518–19, 661, 665 Fermi, Enrico  578 Feuerbach, Ludwig  228, 315, 847 Fichte, Johann  388–9, 394 Fiddes, Paul  462, 470 Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino)  887 Filmer, Robert  769 fine-tuning  572–3, 577, 583, 591–4 Fingarette, Herbert  695 Finger, Thomas  283 Finnis, John  766 first cause  6, 238, 411–12, 414–16, 420, 575, 588 flesh  7, 28, 98–101, 113–14, 231, 253–6, 269, 498–9, 645, 790, 847, 897, 924–8 Flood, the  21, 27–31, 90, 790, 859 food  16, 25–6, 28, 36, 463, 662, 741, 758, 781, 787–97, 826, 942 meat eating  16, 332, 788–9, 793–6 vegan diet  789 vegetarian diet  16, 150, 789 Ford, Josephine Massyngbaerde  812–13 Förster, Till  750 Fortunatus, Venantius  936 Fourth Lateran Council, the  198, 265, 871 n.12 Fox, Matthew  291 Francis (pope)  17–18, 92 n.2, 344 n.40, 638, 646, 721, 740 n.6, 830–2, 862–3, 943 Laudato Si’  17–18, 92 n.2, 344 n.40, 400, 621, 638, 646, 721, 740 n.6, 830, 862 Francis of Assisi  344 n.40, 623, 701 Frankel, David  29–30 Frankfurt, Harry  436 Franklin, Benjamin  453 Fredriksen, Paula  222 free market  777, 779–80, 782, 784–5 free will  8, 136, 144, 166–7, 285, 301, 383, 413, 419, 443, 445, 643–4 freedom  8–10, 37, 76–7, 105, 110 n.39, 166, 224, 238–9, 251, 294–5, 297, 300–1, 306, 312, 319–21, 339, 371, 375–6, 380, 382, 392 n.41, 393–5, 402–4, 410–15, 426–7, 435–6, 440–1, 443–5, 454, 462–3, 465, 470, 472–3, 512, 527, 533, 537–8, 688–90, 739, 764, 776–81, 820, 822, 827–8, 831, 833–7, 872–4, 884, 910, 914–15 Fretheim, Terence  64, 379 n.31 Friedman, Milton  417, 776–7 Friedmann, Alexander  583, 586 Fujimura, Makoto  896 n.11 future  4, 14, 21, 36, 47–8, 98, 116, 118, 171, 220–1, 226–8, 230–1, 234, 240, 283, 289, 294, 303, 348, 351–2, 373–5, 379–81, 384, 413, 452, 495, 509, 540, 549, 551 n.14, 552, 580–2, 614–15, 628–30,

970

657, 737–9, 752–3, 761–2, 773–4, 776, 797, 867 n.48, 900 Galilei, Galileo  190, 204, 211–15, 561–2, 564, 570, 601–2 Galli, Mark  535 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand  703 Garden of Eden  11–12, 14, 30, 33, 36, 42, 50, 81 n.7, 85–6, 90 n.29, 92–3, 120, 157–8, 165, 169–70, 172, 534, 538, 626, 630, 663–8, 759, 787, 789–91, 805, 808, 812, 825–6, 839, 861, 877–8, 923, 926 Gaventa, Beverly  117 Gavrilyuk, Paul  466 Gebara, Ivone  625, 729 n.26 gender  96, 136, 143, 330, 366, 458 n.36, 626, 670, 675–7, 680–1, 728 George, Bishop of the Arabs  173 gift  39–40, 42, 45, 50, 97, 182, 205–7, 210, 231, 238, 242, 245, 291–5, 305, 312–13, 317, 325 n.6, 327, 337, 339, 411, 417, 420, 427, 433, 462, 501, 527, 538, 570–1, 579, 615, 636, 650, 655–7, 663, 740, 742–4, 773, 780, 782–3, 785–6, 829–30, 835, 837–9, 848, 873, 889, 894, 904–5, 913, 932, 941–3 Giles of Provence  936 Gilkey, Langdon  303 Gilson, Étienne  263 Gini coefficient  349 glory  17, 34, 37–8, 92, 98, 209–10, 223, 264–5, 267–8, 271, 289–90, 293, 295, 312, 337, 340, 343, 346, 356, 422, 552–4, 578, 677, 888–90, 905, 937, 940 Gnosticism  6–7, 97–8, 135–6, 142 n.69, 144, 149–66, 175, 247, 311–12, 315, 353–4, 386, 576, 657, 677–8 God architect  13, 138, 208, 576, 903 artist  10, 63, 141, 207, 311, 577, 590, 898, 901–4 care  77, 83, 87, 271, 300, 305–8, 398–401, 418, 435, 470, 510, 572, 606, 740 freedom  7 n.17, 9, 34, 167, 192–4, 197, 199, 202, 207, 244, 251, 304, 307, 312, 317, 319–21, 339, 371, 375–6, 381, 393–5, 402–3, 435, 462, 473, 481, 504, 538, 541, 570, 579, 833, 872–4, 905, 914–15 goodness  5, 10, 15 n.34, 51, 138, 140, 146, 157–8, 205, 207–11, 235–6, 239, 240 n.24, 311–12, 335, 340, 361, 390–1, 407, 414, 419, 421–2, 461–2, 466, 468, 470, 473–6, 484–5, 502, 508, 510, 645–6, 675, 677, 720, 767, 792, 811, 816, 881, 885, 942 immanence  9, 37, 236, 262–3, 272, 282, 310–21, 378–9, 388–9, 395–6, 474, 633, 719, 721, 726, 731–2, 736, 762, 796, 833, 914–15 im/mutability  199–200 n.33, 358, 374–5, 392, 475 im/passibility  374–5, 385, 392 incarnation  35, 167, 171, 175, 252–7, 264–9, 290, 362, 368–70, 427, 467, 484, 494, 499, 513, 529, 538, 579, 620, 796, 813, 893, 897, 940

Name and Subject Index Logos asarkos  252, 254, 255 n.21, 255 n.24 Logos ensarkos  252–3 love  14, 234, 274, 290–1, 295, 317, 357, 376, 379, 382–5, 396, 398–403, 405–6, 413, 428, 449, 478, 485, 503–4, 512, 539–40, 542, 556, 620 n.56, 648, 680, 721, 757, 759, 782–3, 792, 833, 905, 910, 939, 943 necessary  7, 116, 192–4, 303–8, 314, 410, 415, 418, 476, 484, 588–9, 671 omnipotence  14, 69, 142, 191–2, 280, 282, 304, 365, 387, 392, 410, 439, 456, 474, 485, 552–3, 609, 624, 715, 728, 730–1, 799 omnipresence  123, 280–1, 379, 382, 384, 394, 624 omniscience  282, 374, 385, 387, 392, 624, 711, 715 power  5–6, 10, 13–14, 57–64, 78, 87, 89–90, 115, 135, 137–9, 141–2, 146, 150–1, 201 n.39, 205–6, 208–10, 213, 215, 229, 238, 241, 245, 251 n.8, 258, 264, 274, 280, 291, 303, 307, 318, 324, 326–7, 333, 365, 376–7, 382, 385, 390, 396, 419, 448, 455–6, 477 n.23, 479, 550, 552–3, 556, 561, 572, 589–90, 625, 709, 711, 716, 729, 731, 734, 737, 742, 776, 783, 794, 808, 822, 898, 922 simplicity  261, 365 sovereignty  3, 6, 8–9, 26, 57, 79–80, 82–6, 89, 192, 202, 229, 231, 247, 251, 299, 301, 304, 322–33, 375–6, 382, 393, 435, 440, 456, 461, 473–5, 481, 537–8, 590, 709, 777, 783, 846–7, 874, 900–2 speech  2, 56, 59, 62–3, 95, 490–2, 712 transcendence  9, 26, 34, 37, 83, 138, 149, 151, 158, 161, 210, 229–31, 236, 254, 261–3, 268, 271–2, 278, 281–2, 310–21, 370, 379, 382, 387–8, 395–6, 407, 414, 420–1, 440–2, 456, 464, 470, 524, 580, 620–1, 708, 710–11, 715–16, 721–2, 731–2, 736, 762, 827, 840, 870–1, 879, 900, 914–15 Trinity  7, 140, 169, 185, 187, 196, 202, 244, 252, 258, 261, 271, 273, 279, 339, 342–3, 354, 356–7, 368, 373, 394, 426, 538–41, 588, 625, 656, 671– 2, 699, 704–5, 727, 753–4, 758–9, 780–1, 809, 829, 837, 839, 873–4, 896–7, 915–16, 940–1 violence  64–6, 125, 422–3, 793 Godfrey of St Victor  921 n.12 Goede, Hendrik  104 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  307, 386 n.2, 454 Goitein, Shlomo Dov  22–3 Gold, Thomas  575, 584 Goldenberg, Gideon  24 n.6 Goldilocks Enigma  572–3 Goldingay, John  379 n.31 González, Justo  290–1 Good, the  146, 157, 158, 361, 390–1, 407, 417, 420, 767 goodness  6, 12–14, 25, 36–7, 42, 44, 49, 94–8, 123, 131, 149, 152, 163, 166, 187, 226, 237–8, 242, 262, 285, 301, 311–12, 317, 331, 335, 340, 345, 383–4, 392, 398, 401–3, 407, 413–15, 426, 430– 2, 462, 465, 472–85, 506, 508, 510–14, 517, 520,

522, 576–7, 609, 615–16, 618, 659–61, 665–7, 671, 679, 681, 683, 689, 705, 711, 714–15, 721, 739–46, 778, 782, 788, 790–2, 806–7, 809, 811–13, 816, 822, 824, 826, 830, 844, 846–7, 849, 851, 901, 905, 908, 910–11, 913, 938, 941 Gorman, Michael  113, 115, 117–18 Goroncy, Jason  806–7 Gottschalk of Orbais  436 Gould, Stephen  410, 465 government  133, 324, 326–7, 330, 332, 333, 454, 687, 714, 755, 758, 768–70, 779 grace  12–13, 97, 221, 223–4, 226, 228, 234, 240, 265 n.17, 284–95, 301, 304–5, 314, 336–46, 348, 354, 399, 416–17, 419, 475–6, 500, 508, 511, 534, 536–9, 541, 581, 630, 650–5, 657–8, 671–2, 686, 734–5, 742, 762, 771, 773, 781, 856–8, 863, 873, 905–6 Graham, Angus  703 gravity  314, 469, 563, 565, 567, 574–5, 583, 587, 592 Gray, Asa  408–9 Gregory of Nazianzus  145, 173, 266, 269, 354, 498–9 Gregory of Nyssa  135, 136 n.10, 137, 140–3, 145, 146 n.108, 147–8, 174, 179, 223, 261, 366, 701, 720, 917 Gregory the Great (Pope Gregory I)  183, 211, 589–90, 789 Grenz, Stanley  643 Griffin, David  373 n.4, 376 n.19, 390–3, 456, 462 Griffith, Sidney  170 Griffiths, Bede  703, 706 Griffiths, Paul  228, 512, 541 Grosseteste, Robert  177, 179–80, 185, 188–9, 599–603 Grotius, Hugo  766 Guattari, Félix  633 Guibert of Nogent  358–9 Guillaume, Philippe  27 n.22, 28, 30 Guite, Malcolm  606 Gunkel, Hermann  57 Gunton, Colin  274, 280, 489 n.15, 871 n.11, 877–8, 900, 911–12 Guth, Alan  593 Guttmann, Allen  877 Haaland, Deb  326 Habel, Norman  30, 58, 121 n.8, 643–4 Haidt, Jonathan  71 Haimo of Auxerre  184 Hall, Douglas  16, 644 Hampton, Alexander  807 Hao, Cheng  719 Haraway, Donna  612, 625 Harbaugh, Henry  359, 367, 369 Harl, Marguerite  554 Harris, Harriet  492 n.31 Harris, Melanie  619 Harrison, Carol  476–7 Harrison, Peter  595 n.4, 602

971

Name and Subject Index Hart, David Bentley  220, 222, 230, 265 n.17, 538, 541 Hart, Trevor  914 n.28 Hartle, Jim  585 Hartshorne, Charles  375, 376 n.19, 390, 392–3 Hauerwas, Stanley  662, 676, 830 n.29, 845 Hausman, Carl  412 Havea, Jione  525 Hawking, Stephen  575–7, 585–7, 589–90 Hayek, Friedrich  777 Hayes, Zachary  291 healing  38, 83, 85, 89–91, 146, 209–10, 238–9, 242, 287, 322, 346, 350 n.19, 351, 375, 383–4, 502, 506, 512, 521–2, 620 n.56, 649, 659–60, 667, 803–5, 808, 838, 840, 844, 846–7, 849–50 health  8, 36, 51, 70, 350 n.19, 351, 370 n.34, 432, 522–3, 526, 606, 755–6, 779, 799, 802–5, 808, 842–6, 849, 864, 876 heaven/s  1, 5, 8, 14–15, 17, 24–6, 32, 34–8, 58–9, 82–4, 90–1, 94, 97 n.27, 99, 120–6, 129, 136, 148, 151, 156, 161, 165–6, 169, 172, 178, 180–2, 210–12, 214, 223, 228, 233–42, 254, 266, 286, 295, 308, 328, 335, 344, 347, 354, 358–9, 361–2, 367–72, 381, 423, 447, 449 n.4, 450–1, 540, 544, 547–54, 561–82, 614, 657, 681, 697–8, 704, 707–22, 797, 813–14, 816, 823, 839, 883, 886–90, 908, 937, see also Tian Heckl, Raik  52–3 Hefner, Philip  609, 759, 860 Hegel, G. W. F.  10, 224, 264, 310, 315–17, 319–20, 388–9, 394, 833 Heidegger, Martin  480, 614, 859, 861 Heisenberg, Werner  280 hell  12, 124, 126, 146, 290, 328, 361, 370–1, 384, 392 n.37, 504, 507, 514 Heloise  186 Henry of Ghent  198 Herbert, George  930, 937, 940 Hermann, Robert  585 Herodas  110 Herzfeld, Noreen  859–60 Heschel, Abraham  4 n.8, 23, 27, 68–9, 550, 772 Hesiod  261 hesychasm  541 hexæmeral tradition, the  142, 170, 175–90, 917–18, 921 n.12, 926, 929–31 Hick, John  481 hierarchy  9–10, 26, 96, 104, 166, 168, 200, 222, 229, 262, 265, 276, 318, 324, 326–7, 329–33, 388, 422, 436, 448, 456, 458 n.36, 521–2, 524, 554, 618, 650, 652–3, 661, 670, 678–80, 689, 691, 724, 728, 730, 732, 761, 768–9, 826 n.9, 829–30, 862 Hierocles of Alexandria  139 Hildegard of Bingen  189 Hill, Geoffrey  917–31 Hippolytus of Rome  139, 151, 157–8, 543 history  87–8, 105 n.15, 225–6, 230–1, 235, 240, 297–301, 303, 305–8, 316–19, 338–40, 343, 364,

972

368–9, 373, 379–81, 410, 417, 419, 520, 523–4, 528–33, 549–51, 589, 665, 728–31, 733–4, 736, 759, 782, 819–20, 830, 884, 889–900 Hitler, Adolf  298, 357 HIV  799–809 Hobbes, Thomas  766, 777–8, 925 Hodge, Charles  279 n.26 Holder, Rodney  573 holiness  36–8, 45, 51, 85, 90, 407, 417, 651, 715, 774, 817 Holocene  120 n.1, 134, 608–10, 612, 614–15, 619, 621–2 Holy Spirit  7, 82, 84, 91, 98, 100–1, 113–15, 126, 129, 141, 145, 152, 169, 172, 185, 189, 205, 207, 209–11, 213, 266, 271, 273–83, 293, 307, 318–19, 328, 335, 342–6, 354, 357, 370, 388, 410, 421, 424, 462, 499–500, 502, 508, 516, 527–9, 537, 539–41, 543–4, 551, 553–4, 633, 652, 670–1, 712, 716–17, 721, 753–4, 762, 790–2, 809, 828–9, 830 n.26, 833, 837–40, 847, 874, 877–8, 883, 887, 889, 896, 910–12, 914–15, 935–6, 942, see also pneumatology Honorius Augustodinensis  185 Hooke, Robert  602 hope  4, 13–14, 34, 117–19, 122, 126–8, 133, 220, 222, 234–5, 240, 242, 283, 286–8, 290, 294, 303, 340–1, 344, 352, 360–7, 369–70, 385, 434, 452–3, 457, 479, 505, 508–9, 512–14, 528, 533, 580–1, 615, 624, 630, 632, 646, 696–7, 720, 722, 748, 765, 774, 778, 783–4, 800, 802, 808, 823, 838, 867 n.48, 887, 925, 934–5, 941 Hopkins, Gerard Manley  17, 268, 912, 930, 940 Horace  927 Horbury, William  246 Hornborg, Alf  612 Horsley, Richard  108, 109 n.33 Hoskyns, Edwyn  92 Hotz, Kendra  661 Hoyle, Fred  575, 584, 592 Huang, Paulos  710 n.17, 719–20 Hubble, Edwin  567, 583, 603 Hubble Space Telescope  562–4 Hufeland, Christophe  359 Hugh of Fouilloy  926 Hugh of St Victor  185–6 human beings co-creators  16, 377–8, 394, 433, 596, 606, 609, 611, 628, 731, 754, 783, 830, 838, 860, 864–7 imago Dei  4–5, 9, 15–16, 95, 136, 143, 147, 166, 171, 289, 294–5, 356, 403, 410, 422, 428, 430, 433, 538, 547, 554, 570, 606, 613, 620, 623–5, 643–6, 651–2, 656, 662–3, 665, 671, 674, 678, 681, 704, 721, 740, 773, 777, 783, 793–5, 825, 843, 847–8, 851, 898, 924 personhood  331, 369, 429, 486–97, 652, 655–6, 668 Hume, David  42 Hutcheson, Francis  263

Name and Subject Index Huxley, T. H.  571 Huygens, Christiaan  578 Ibn al Farabi  601 Ibn al-Haytham, see Al-Hazen Ibn Sahl  601 Ibn Sina, see Avicenna idolatry  103, 124, 131, 247, 249, 252 n.13, 258, 287, 456–7, 527, 621, 629, 730, 816–17, 822, 833, 835, 844, 870, 879, 896–7, 903–5 Ignatius of Antioch  270, 553 images  33, 87–8, 90, 204, 222, 227, 268–70, 350–2, 357, 453, 458, 601, 664, 689–90, 901 imagination  33, 38, 82, 93, 101, 122, 228, 282, 331, 362 n.18, 380, 428, 433–4, 479, 585–6, 599, 602, 606, 613, 657, 692, 736, 815, 898–9, 903–5, 924 incompatibilism  435, 437–45 indigenous knowledge  120 n.1, 242, 331 n.20, 429, 432, 524, 526–7, 621, 624, 631, 683, 690, 725 n.7, 805–6, 809 indigenous peoples  229, 322–33, 517, 522, 526–7, 621, 683–91, 734 individualism  129, 329–31, 333, 492, 612, 627, 653, 655, 667–8, 776–7, 829 n.24, 835, 894 Industrial Revolution, the  112, 609, 776, 856 inequality  349, 619, 751, 765–6, 774 interdependence  9–10, 235, 396, 470, 543, 645–6, 667, 720, 722, 755, 845 Irenaeus of Lyons  7, 137, 139, 142, 150–3, 155, 158–60, 222, 301, 310–11, 338, 354, 445, 466, 500, 507, 538, 547–8, 550, 553–4, 576–7, 677, 883, 940, 942 Isho‘ bar Nun  172 Ishō’dadh of Merv  172 Islam  12, 168, 173–4, 176, 191–2, 194, 196, 198, 202, 244, 246, 535, 587, 596, 598–9, 624, 626, 628, 694–5 Israel  17, 21–3, 25–7, 29–42, 46–8, 50–67, 80, 82–3, 85, 87–8, 91, 111, 113 n.49, 114, 119, 128, 157, 221, 225–6, 244, 251, 335–6, 368, 370–1, 398, 401, 447, 530, 648, 657, 664–5, 672, 680, 683–4, 761, 787–9, 847, 883–4, 934 Jacob of Edessa  173–4 Jacob of Serugh  168–72, 174 Jaki, Stanley  177 Janeway, James  371–2 Jannati, Marjia  756 Janzen, J. Gerald  379 n.31 Jardim, Georgina  104 Jenson, Robert  367–9, 371, 514, 539, 874–5 Jerome  188 John Chrysostom  93 n.8, 651–2, 676, 762–4 John of Damascus  180, 182, 188, 269, 445, 699 John Paul II (pope)  518 n.10, 527 n.65, 781, 825, 829–33, 835, 838 Laborem Exercens  825 n.1, 829–32 Redemptoris Missio  518, 527

John Philoponus  173 Johnson, Elizabeth  239 n.24, 274, 796 Johnson, James  671 Johnson, Julian  909–10 Johnson, Mark  324–5, 333 Johnson, Sylvester  524 Josephus, Flavius  34–5, 80 joy  27, 59, 91, 126, 264, 290, 344, 358, 422, 425–30, 433–4, 462, 504, 506, 533, 538, 541, 544, 574, 658, 671, 704, 745, 796, 833, 888, 905, 934 Judaism  1, 4, 7, 11–12, 24, 26–7, 29, 32–42, 46, 50–5, 80, 82, 85–7, 93, 95, 97, 124–5, 131, 135, 149, 152, 155–7, 162, 164–5, 191–2, 194, 196–8, 202, 221–2, 225–6, 244, 246–7, 251, 257–8, 381, 398, 400–1, 407, 410, 416, 428, 447, 453, 461, 571, 624, 626, 628, 643, 648, 664, 673, 679–80, 695, 714, 790, 812–13, 882, 884, 932–3, 938, 941 judgement  21–2, 83, 88, 122–5, 128, 130–1, 133, 168, 337, 360–1, 368, 424, 426–7, 434, 450, 452, 455, 771, 874, 935 Julian of Norwich  17, 477–8, 483, 485, 701 justice  9, 16, 35, 52, 60, 65, 76–7, 88, 104–5, 122–3, 125–6, 128, 133, 150, 157, 187, 228, 270, 286, 328, 337, 348, 351–2, 407–8, 410, 414, 416–19, 421–34, 451, 537, 714–15, 739, 751, 765, 780–1, 802–3, 943 Justin Martyr  5, 135, 137–8, 445, 518, 520–1, 576, 938 Justinian I (emperor)  109 n.33, 763 Kac, Eduardo  857–8, 863–6 Kairos Document, the  349, 751–2 Kang, Wu  710 Kant, Immanuel  14, 224, 233, 260–1, 263, 271, 417–18, 600, 640, 902 Kanyoro, Musimbi  802 Käsemann, Ernst  127 kataphatic tradition, the  544, 711–12 Kauffman, Stuart  407, 409–18, 420 Kaufman, Gordon  279 n.27 Keller, Catherine  9, 133 n.27, 318–19, 425, 456, 466–7, 625–6, 629, 726–30 Kelsey, David  256 n.26, 486–7, 489–97 Keltner, Dacher  69, 71 kenosis  167, 171, 319, 373, 381–5, 392–3, 413, 418–19, 421, 456, 734, 902 Kepler, Johannes  574, 600 Kepler space telescope  564 Kermode, Frank  228 Keynes, John  776 Kierkegaard, Søren  230, 405 Kii, Masanobu  749 Kilby, Karen  472, 485 Kim, Sung-Sup  305 King, Martin Luther, Jr.  840 kingdom of God  34–6, 82–90, 125, 132, 159, 226, 233–4, 242, 286, 289–90, 295, 308, 317, 341, 402, 427, 434, 449, 534–7, 540, 649, 701, 708,

973

Name and Subject Index 713, 773, 824, 827–8, 832, 835–8, 884, 921, see also basileia kinship  532 n.92, 623, 627–8, 638, 640–1, 643, 645–6, 674, 685–6, 785 Kohák, Erazim  614, 618 Kolbert, Elizabeth  130 Kosanic, Aleksandra  668 Koyama, Kosuke  530 Kraemer, Hendrik  719 Krause, Karl  386 n.1 Krauss, Lawrence  586–7 Krog, Antjie  350 Krötke, Wolf  481–2 Kubiś, Adam  92 n.3 Kundera, Milan  873 Küng, Hans  695 Kureethadam, Joshtrom  862 Kuyper, Abraham  42 La Flesche, Francis  328 labour  27, 42, 106, 108, 457, 508–9, 602, 679, 686, 690, 751, 770, 778–80, 783–5, 825, 831, 838, 850, 853, 856, 859, 863, 878–9, 941 Lactantius  922, 926 Lakoff, George  324–5, 333 Lampe, Peter  808 land  16, 21–31, 35, 45, 47, 49, 51, 60, 81 n.7, 134, 271 n.33, 322–33, 348–9, 426, 467, 523, 531, 628, 673, 685–8, 690, 692, 709, 776, 923 Langdon, Adrian  303, 340–1 language  12 n.28, 17, 96, 183, 205, 213–15, 311, 322–8, 331, 491–2, 516–17, 525, 529, 631, 639, 683–4, 689, 711, 735, 851, 895, 923 n.16 Lao Tzu  698, 702–3 Laplace, Pierre-Simon  314 Las Casas, Bartolomé de  456 Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)  568, 574 law  29–30, 40, 52, 79, 85, 105 n.15, 106 n.21, 110, 178, 196, 204, 322–3, 328, 338, 382, 398–406, 415–16, 431–2, 517, 519, 522–3, 526–7, 530–1, 695, 710, 714, 717, 762–3, 765–7, 769, 773, 818–19, 827, 833, 837 Le Gendre, Charles  417 LeBlanc, Terry  527 Lee, Stephen  57 Legge, James  707 n.1, 708 Leibnitz, Gottfried  603 Lemaître, Georges  583–5, 603, 605 Leonardo da Vinci  330 Leontius of Jerusalem  267 Leopold, Aldo  783 Lessing, Gotthold  224 Levenson, Jon  26, 36, 57, 60 Lévinas, Emmanuel  431 n.37, 739 Levine, Amy-Jill  626 Levine, Michael  387 Lewis, C. S.  580, 695–6, 897–8

974

liberation  12, 86, 90, 115–17, 127, 286, 294–5, 347–52, 447–8, 452, 525, 537, 619, 620 n.56, 690, 729, 819, 838, 840, 856–8, 915, 927–8 libertarianism  285, 294, 375, 441, 443–5 light  35, 94–5, 178, 181–4, 186–9, 237, 240, 424, 426, 473, 483, 500, 562–8, 575, 599–601, 605, 670, 672–5, 787–8, 790 Lindbeck, George  535–6 Linzey, Andrew  637 n.14, 642, 645 Lloyd, Michael  461, 792 Locke, John  329, 429, 686 Lombard, Peter  180, 185, 187–8 longevity  47, 51 Longgar, William  522–3, 526 Longo, Giuseppe  410 lordship  89, 462, 874 Lorimer, Jamie  613 loss  8, 26, 47, 70, 162, 366–71, 459–60, 472–3, 617–18, 666–8, 743, 745, 771, 775, 781–2, 864 Loughlin, Gerard  677–8, 681 Louis XIV (king)  770 love  5, 9–10, 14, 18, 51, 122, 126, 129, 169, 204–5, 207–8, 238, 257, 269–72, 274, 280, 284, 290–1, 295, 301, 317, 319, 338–42, 346, 357, 366–7, 373, 376, 379–85, 390, 393 n.44, 398–421, 431, 445, 478, 504, 512–14, 538–40, 556, 660, 663, 665–6, 671, 680–1, 690–1, 715, 721, 745, 757, 777, 780, 782–6, 827, 905, 910, 919 agape  399–400, 405, 407, 412–13, 416, 418, 420 Lovejoy, Arthur  767 Lowell, Robert  919 Lucretius  411 Lugones, María  724, 732 Lull, David  379 Luria, Isaac  734 Luther, Katharina  653 Luther, Martin  13–14, 188, 204–7, 211, 214, 257, 273–4, 280, 302, 354, 398–9, 652–3, 768–70, 772, 794, 825–9, 833, 838, 843, 940 Lutyens, Edwin  882 Lyman, Rebecca  521 Lyons, George  379 n.31 Macchia, Frank  537 McAuley, James  918–19 McCabe, Herbert  255 n.22 McCay, Layla  756 MacDonald, George  898–900, 904 McFague, Sallie  390, 619–20, 625 McFarland, Ian  335 n.2, 464–5, 477 McGinnis, Jon  194 MacIntyre, Alasdair  387 n.5, 741, 746 n.25, 852 McKenna, Michael  439 McKibben, Bill  775 MacKinnon, Donald  472–7, 482 McLuhan, Marshall  863 Macquarrie, John  393, 518, 625 McTaggart, John  365 n.22

Name and Subject Index Mahmood, Saba  535 Maimonides, Moses  191, 196–9, 202, 244 Malick, Terrence  284 Malthus, Thomas  412, 776, 782 Maluleke, Tinyiko  522 Mandeville, Bernard  777 Mani  166–7 Manichaeism  13, 164, 167, 182–3, 238, 473–6, 479, 485, 705, 730–1, 735 Mara bar Serapion  165 Marcion of Sinope  7, 160–2, 167 Marcionism  143–4, 161–2, 166–7 Marcus, Joel  84, 88, 546 Marshall, Alfred  777 Martyn, J. Louis  127 martyrdom  122, 126, 246, 269–70, 498, 511, 590, 814, 817 Marullus  360 Marx, Karl  779, 830, 834, 836 Marxism  325, 829–30, 835, 838 Mascall, Eric  579 mathematics  206, 212–15, 233, 236, 420, 467, 583–6, 595–6, 599, 602–3, 605, 705, 882, 908 Mathews, Matthew  661 Mathews, Shailer  279 n.27 matter  5–8, 100, 124, 137, 139–40, 142–5, 148, 154, 156, 161, 185–9, 192, 195 n.17, 222, 245, 251, 257, 281, 283, 311–12, 318, 364, 387 n.3, 391, 394, 408, 418–19, 466, 469 n.58, 474–7, 479, 542, 554, 565, 567, 574, 576–7, 581, 584–5, 590, 592–3, 596–602, 604–5, 613, 627, 674, 776, 865, 904, 910, 940 Matthew of Aquasparta  198 Matthias, John  921 n.11 Maurus, Rabanus  184 Maximus the Confessor  137, 146, 180, 267–9, 354, 502, 504–5, 509–10, 512–13, 542, 555–6, 937, 940 May, Gerhard  5 n.11, 160–1 Mayernik, David  883 Meadors, Gary  104 mediation  10, 35, 43, 53, 79, 83, 145, 234, 264, 273–4, 280, 291, 295, 370, 420, 433, 491, 498, 516–18, 527, 542, 609, 614, 620, 720, 724, 744, 827, 833, 858, 903, 913, 915 medicine  370 n.34, 501, 624, 842–52 Melanchthon, Philip  206–8, 210 Melville, Herman  925 Menander  151 Menchú, Rigoberta  241–2 Mengzi  709, 712, 715, 717–19 Messer, Neil  461–2, 470, 797, 844 metaphysics  9–10, 138, 147, 193–5, 200–2, 224–5, 244–5, 260, 264–5, 294, 298, 310–11, 313, 364, 367, 371, 376, 425–6, 440–3, 463–4, 470, 475–7, 481, 573, 584, 624, 716, 728, 731–3, 736 Meylahn, Johann-Albrecht  621 Michelangelo  330, 825

Middleton, Richard  379 n.31, 644 Mignolo, Walter  331 n.18, 631, 732 Milky Way, the  212, 423, 561, 563, 565–6, 568 Miller, David  727 Miller, Jerome  68 Miller, Patrick  52 Miller-McLemore, Bonnie  655 Milne, Edward  579 Milton, John  181, 189–90, 918, 923 Minniecon, Ray  523 miracles  84, 89, 196, 230, 240, 242, 280, 383–4, 478, 673, 922 mission, missions  17, 118, 128, 283, 290, 294, 324, 326–8, 331, 353, 516–17, 521–4, 529, 532, 535, 537, 539–41, 574, 687–8, 690, 711, 720, 870 Mitcham, Carl  859–60 Mitchell, Joni  627 Mlodinow, Leonard  585 Moltmann, Jürgen  275, 277, 279–81, 289–90, 292–4, 318–19, 340–1, 343, 345, 367–8, 381, 390, 392–4, 433, 624–5, 630, 757, 772–3, 838–9, 899 Mombo, Esther  803–4 monism  142, 145–8, 265, 387, 716 monotheism  120 n.1, 159, 196, 244–9, 311, 461, 624, 631, 708–9, 711, 872 Montaigne, Michel de  579 Moore, Henry  244 moral responsibility  380, 435–6, 486, 593 Morley, Iain  909 Morris, Simon  408, 410, 467 Mother Teresa (Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu)  784 motion  5–6, 81, 96, 193, 201, 208, 245, 315, 408, 410, 418, 550, 566, 590, 597–8, 601, 604, 908 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  482, 833, 911 Muddiman, John  790 Muir, John  67 Mullins, Ryan  368 multiverse  9, 573, 576, 591, 593–4 Mumford, Lewis  888 Munteanu, Daniel  542 Müntzer, Thomas  224, 818 Murdoch, Iris  903 Murray, Michael  466, 637, 640 music  124, 208, 260, 380, 404, 433, 482, 853, 883, 907–16 mystery  13, 17, 68, 71, 79, 87, 171, 182, 294, 300–1, 307, 315, 395, 403, 411, 427, 441, 462, 464, 481–2, 485, 498–9, 504–5, 509–10, 537–8, 546, 574, 589, 619, 630, 646, 654–8, 671, 676, 681, 752–3, 892 myth  3, 7, 12, 50 n.28, 58–9, 149–55, 157, 159–60, 162–3, 227 n.26, 228–9, 231–2, 331, 403, 422–4, 428, 448, 479, 518, 530, 581, 645, 662, 664–5, 726, 728, 733, 782, 793–4, 809, 811–12, 814, 816–17, 822, 855, 861–4, 869, 872, 905, 925, 927, 941 Nag Hammadi  99 n.33, 152–5, 162 n.91 Narsai  168–70

975

Name and Subject Index Nässelqvist, Dan  104 natural disasters  7, 163, 238–9, 289, 297, 377, 383, 419, 460, 745, 767, 806, 809 natural knowledge of God  516–19, 525, 527, 602 natural law  400, 695, 761–7, 769, 818–19, 829, 833 natural selection  378, 409, 412, 416–18, 421, 459, 461, 467–8, 470, 572–4 natural theology  224, 226, 265, 356, 516–19, 521, 524, 527, 606, 733, 833, 837 Neander, Joachim  297 necessity  6, 193–4, 197–8, 312, 317, 393, 412, 467, 469–70, 481, 552–3, 589–90, 780, 872–5, 877, 879 Nestorius  255 n.23, 267–8 new creation  4, 61–3, 65–6, 81–4, 172, 223, 225–8, 234, 237, 239–41, 283, 290, 354, 532–4, 537–8, 540, 542–4, 581–2, 734, 752–3, 761, 783, 787, 791, 795, 797, 808, 812, 823, 825, 828–9, 838–40, 883–4, 887, 889, 941–2 Newton, Isaac  280, 314, 365, 409, 413, 418–20, 574, 598 Nicene Creed, the  2, 17, 219, 235, 244, 274, 353–4, 552, 701, 871, 892–3 Nicholas of Cusa  230, 389, 701 Nicholas of Lyra  189 Niebuhr, H. Richard  291–2 Niebuhr, Reinhold  613, 820, 924 Nietzsche, Friedrich  315, 541 Niles, D. Preman  520 nonbeing  730 non-competitivism  314, 320–1, 435, 439–43, 445 Non-Interventionist Objective Divine Action (NIODA)  279–80 nothingness  139, 187, 391–2, 403, 425, 475–6, 478–84, 504, 556, 589, 677, 694, 698–9, 702, 705, 733–5, 872, 879 Novalis  899 Novatian  869–70 Nürnberger, Klaus  227 Nussbaum, Martha  640 Nygren, Anders  399 Obama, Barack  453 occasionalism  192, 409–10 Oden, Thomas  536 O’Donovan, Oliver  681 Oduyoye, Mercy  353, 800 Oliver, Jamie  16 Olthuis, James  291–3 Origen of Alexandria  2, 135, 136 n.10, 137–48, 162, 174, 181–2, 219, 222, 445, 545, 551–5, 557, 580, 917 original blessing  285, 290–5 orthodoxy  143, 153, 166–7, 181, 224, 232, 244, 250, 269, 302, 305, 310–11, 318, 338, 464–6, 516, 539, 697 n.12, 716, 721, 728, 893, 929, 931 Osiander, Andreas  214 Ottati, Douglas  10

976

Outka, Gene  399–400 Outler, Albert  303 Ovid  927 ownership  31, 106, 109, 327–8, 332, 357, 415, 531, 685–6, 763–6, 771, 777, 794, see also private property pacifism  771, 817–18, 821–3 Page, Don  577 Page, Ruth  462–3, 465, 468–70 Palamas, Gregory  556 pandemics  297, 351, 745, 799–809, 843 panentheism  9, 268, 277, 280, 282, 315, 317–20, 370, 378, 386, 389–97, 628, 633, 712, 720 Pannenberg, Wolfhart  276–8, 535–7, 900 Panofsky, Erwin  893 Pantaenus  139, 142 pantheism  11, 17, 154, 230, 268, 277, 302, 310, 313, 315, 317, 320, 370, 386–9, 394–7, 623, 625, 628, 633, 710 parables  3, 15, 87, 89, 123–4, 132, 234, 341, 427, 461 paradox  94, 98–100, 162, 194, 225, 228, 230–2, 293, 403, 410, 432, 479–81, 485, 498, 586, 588, 604, 617, 620, 627, 701, 703, 807, 903 parousia  126–8, 813 participation  42, 45, 87, 116 n.65, 118, 120, 123, 128, 130, 132–4, 200, 228, 231, 239, 254, 281, 293–5, 302, 306, 308, 313, 340, 361, 364–5, 371, 394, 400, 425–7, 474–6, 509, 528, 530, 540–1, 544, 603, 635, 666, 675, 712, 720, 741, 743, 745, 759, 770, 777–8, 782, 784, 787, 796, 821, 831, 846, 855, 860, 866–7, 883–7, 889, 902, 904–5, 914–15 Pascal, Blaise  572 paterfamilias  106 n.21, 108–10, 115, 117 Patterson, Orlando  106, 109–11 peace  3–4, 15, 22–3, 58, 61, 65–6, 84–5, 89, 222, 224, 271, 344 n.39, 348, 360, 362, 451, 520, 648–9, 714, 763, 767–9, 771, 789, 793, 797, 809, 812, 822–4, 830, 883, 921, 923, 936–7 Peacocke, Arthur  391–4, 396, 579, 636 n.3 Peckham, John  198 Peebles, Jim  585 Péguy, Charles  362 n.16, 511–12 Peirce, Charles Sanders  412–14 Pelagius  290 n.13 Pellegrino, Edmund  845, 846 n.11 Penrose, Roger  416, 585, 588, 593 Penzias, Arno  585 perfection/imperfection  6–7, 12, 36, 49, 150, 152–3, 155, 159–60, 162, 169–71, 202, 220, 223, 262, 266, 273–4, 281, 283, 286–90, 292, 360–2, 364–6, 369–71, 465–6, 532–4, 538, 548, 553, 599–600, 655, 661, 663–7, 677, 699, 717, 719, 753, 778, 805, 807–8, 819, 877–8, 882–3, 889, 910, 911 n.20, 941, 943 personhood  327, 331, 431–2, 486–9, 492–3, 496–7, 720 Peshitta  24, 164–5, 173 Pestel, Thomas  935 n.8

Name and Subject Index Peters, Ted  865 Petrarch  926 Petronius  110 Phillips, J. B.  580 Philo of Alexandria  27, 35, 95, 111 n.42, 135–8, 140–3, 150, 179, 181, 222, 644, 917 Philoxenus  174 Phiri, Isabel Apawo  802 physics  177, 278–80, 363–4, 407–8, 410, 413, 420, 469, 552, 561, 568, 573–4, 584–5, 589, 591–2, 595–606, 613, 705, 843 quantum  278, 280, 408, 419, 463, 469–70, 575–6, 586–7, 592, 596, 605, 627 Pieper, Josef  424, 429–33 Pieris, Aloysius  526 Piff, Paul  69–72 Piketty, Thomas  780 Piper, John  375 piracy  108 Pius II (pope)  883 Pius XI (pope)  830 Pius XII (pope)  575 plants  2, 25–6, 44–5, 58, 70, 75, 129–30, 162, 182, 241, 247, 356, 400, 404, 429 n.24, 510, 569, 597, 625, 629, 632, 638, 683–5, 720, 778, 787–92, 794, 797, 806, 826, 921, 934, 936, 939 Plathow, Michael  305–6 Plato  5, 68, 95–6, 99 n.33, 135, 137, 140, 143–4, 147, 149, 152, 174, 196–7, 211, 245, 251, 261, 269, 300, 311, 390, 407, 417, 420, 466–7, 470, 553, 576, 590, 597, 766, 861, 907–8 Republic  135, 152, 766, 908 Timaeus  5, 96, 135, 137, 140, 149, 196, 211, 251, 311, 466–7, 470, 553, 576, 590, 908 Platonism  10, 93, 99, 135–9, 147–9, 153, 161, 244, 252, 260, 266, 269, 310, 312, 318, 361, 467, 470, 474–5, 767, 867 n.48, 909 Neoplatonism  140, 147, 180, 191, 193, 197, 202, 219, 262, 265, 301, 310, 365, 370 n.34, 390, 761, 767–8 play  366, 380, 463, 511, 648, 653–4, 657–8, 783, 875–6 Plotinus  135, 142, 196, 261–2, 266, 312, 388, 390, 462, 472, 550, 767–8 pneumatology  275–83, 343, 527, 532, 537, 543, 633, 829, 837–8, see also Holy Spirit poetry  17, 71–4, 77, 175, 181, 606, 707, 735, 894, 898 n.19, 899, 908, 917–18, 923, 929–31, 940 point of contact  287–8, 290, 524, 527 politics  121, 130–2, 134, 219, 221, 229, 270, 324, 328–33, 398, 412, 417, 433, 449, 452, 454–5, 458 n.36, 531, 537, 614, 617–19, 662, 691, 713, 723–6, 728–31, 733, 735–6, 748–51, 761–74, 814 n.9, 815, 817 Polkinghorne, John  233, 238–9, 377 population  63, 470 n.61, 660, 668, 748–51, 771–2, 776 Porphyry of Tyre  137, 140

postcolonialism  282, 333, 349, 451–2, 455, 625, 723–36 poverty  61, 73, 126, 349, 351, 618–19, 625, 713, 751, 756–8, 768, 831, 887, 890 powers  8, 17, 84, 115, 125, 129, 136, 138, 142, 150–2, 154–5, 159–60, 201 n.39, 209–10, 238–41, 246, 250, 306, 314, 377, 382, 403, 447–58, 503–4, 612, 648, 718, 742, 794, 811, 814–17, 822, 824, 837, 840 praise  1, 16, 35, 43, 132, 299, 304, 426, 433–4, 483, 572, 665, 773, 793, 878–9, 883, 888, 907, 910–13, 932–4, 937–40 prayer  1, 35, 39–40, 80, 83, 124, 205–7, 236, 245, 247, 251, 252 n.13, 279, 306, 308, 328, 374, 383, 391, 473, 502, 506, 508–9, 512, 673, 711–12, 784, 833–5, 837, 890, 924, 927, 932–4, 937–9, 941–3 predation  15, 383, 464–5, 468, 510, 627, 787, 792–7, 923 predestination  227, 256 n.25, 301–2, 304, 337–8, 419, 536, 928 Pregeant, Russell  379 n.31 preservation  10–11, 14, 50, 52, 120 n.3, 204, 206–7, 238, 250, 281–2, 295, 302, 305–6, 313, 335, 405, 459, 478, 665, 713, 764, 820–2, 826, 840, 877 Priest, Josiah  105 priesthood  34–7, 41–3, 52–4, 90, 131, 295, 542, 783, 826–7, 837, 878–9, 905, 938 principalities  154, 238, 377, 382, 477–8, 504, 811, 814–17, 822 private property  332–3, 686–7, 765–7, 771, 778, 780–1, 831, see also ownership privatio boni  480, 482, 484–5 process theology  315, 318, 376–7, 390, 463, 485, 625, 723, 726–7, 733, 796 Proclus  767 promise  22–3, 29, 48, 62, 81 n.7, 113, 179, 205, 221–2, 233–4, 238, 240, 242, 269, 280, 283, 287, 290, 294, 299–300, 303, 307–8, 341, 345–6, 401, 426, 429 n.24, 508–9, 533, 656–8, 665, 847, 887, 890, 896, 900, 903, 906, 910, 932, 940, 943 proportion  260–2, 266, 269, 882–3 prosperity  47, 106, 776, 822 protology  12, 98, 230, 283, 335, 342–3, 551, 793, 828–9, 839–40, 900, 905 providence  13, 41–2, 83, 87, 141, 143, 153, 155, 162, 208, 219, 273, 279–81, 297–308, 355, 373–4, 378–83, 385, 435, 470, 479, 485, 493, 506, 510, 512, 551, 556, 593, 684, 716, 762, 818 n.31, 829, 835–6, 838, 840 Pryor, Adam  620 Przywara, Erich  265 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite  173, 180, 261–2, 264, 270, 701, 768 psychology  67, 69–70, 74, 77, 106, 227–8, 231–2, 348, 409, 420, 436, 443, 596, 610, 613, 639, 652, 660, 745, 815, 847, 902 Ptolemy  174, 176, 211–13, 570, 578

977

Name and Subject Index Pui-Lan, Kwok  731 Pythagoras  261, 907–9 Quarton, Enguerrand  886 Quatremère  882 queer  625, 629, 632, 677 Quijano, Aníbal  724 Qur’an, the  3 n.5, 13, 191 race  105 n.14, 112, 118, 347–8, 458 n.36, 619, 625, 632, 683–92, 714, 724, 728, 779, 800 n.4 Rad, Gerhard von  23, 75, 447 Radford, Tim  606 Rahner, Karl  288–92, 393, 457, 501, 503, 654–7 Ramsey, Paul  820, 843 Raphael  330 Rashi  24, 674 n.13 Ratschow, Carl Heinz  303 Rauschenbusch, Walter  535 Rawls, John  423 reason  96, 138, 151, 159, 169, 177, 186, 188, 191, 197–200, 202, 205–6, 214–15, 233, 260, 263, 265–6, 275, 288 n.6, 301, 306, 308, 319, 400, 411, 415, 418, 420, 467, 469, 487, 516–19, 552–3, 627, 630, 636, 639, 644, 652, 660, 663, 677, 686, 690, 695, 697, 719, 724–5, 762, 764, 766–7, 769, 820, 854 n.6, 873 re-attunement  628–9, 631–2 Reckwitz, Andreas  741 reconciliation  129, 208, 234, 253, 304, 306, 316–17, 328, 335, 340, 342, 344–5, 347–55, 451, 499, 502, 506–9, 544, 770, 795–6, 819, 837–8, 883, 887 redemption  4, 7, 12, 14, 17, 21, 111, 117, 227, 257, 271, 289–91, 295, 302, 328, 340–1, 343–5, 380, 385, 424, 465, 477, 508, 518, 520, 528, 532, 536–7, 539, 579–80, 651, 653–4, 665, 753, 783, 811, 813, 816–17, 823, 825, 849, 885, 923, 926–7, 930 Rees, Martin  572–3, 593 Reeves, Paul  531 Regan, Tom  640 religion  3, 9, 24, 32, 53, 120, 133, 164, 177–8, 196, 202, 207, 244–5, 263, 265, 276, 298–9, 303, 316–17, 321, 323–4, 326, 328–31, 352, 354, 356, 363, 386, 417–18, 449–50, 452–3, 456–7, 502, 517–24, 526, 532, 578, 592, 598, 605, 615, 617, 622–3, 628–9, 631, 654, 694–5, 703, 705, 720, 726–7, 737–42, 744–6, 776, 778, 794, 799, 801–4, 814 n.9, 816, 869, 878, 885, 887–8, 903–4, 925, 929–30 Rendtorff, Rolf  48 n.23, 50 rest  3, 21–3, 26–9, 45, 86, 235, 508–9, 511, 540–1, 783, 789, 797, 808, 834, 849, 890 resurrection  12–14, 17, 79, 83–5, 90–1, 101, 113, 122, 124, 126, 129, 143, 147, 169, 171, 219–20, 222–3, 225–6, 231–2, 234, 242, 246, 260, 271, 274, 276, 290, 308, 351–2, 358, 360–1, 364,

978

366–7, 369, 401, 403, 405, 451 n.16, 479, 506–7, 509, 513, 532, 538, 542, 551, 574, 581–2, 620 n.56, 624, 717, 765, 791, 795, 849, 874, 925–6, 928, 936 revelation  6, 75, 77, 79–80, 92–3, 100–1, 127, 129, 204, 207–8, 213, 221, 231, 261, 264, 289, 304, 371, 399, 479, 518, 529, 574, 579, 686, 770 Ricardo, David  776 Ricci, Matteo  711, 713, 716 Ricoeur, Paul  664 Riley, Stephen  379 n.31 ritual  34, 40, 42, 51, 90, 106, 524, 526–7, 673–4, 871, 932, 934 Rivera, Mayra  282 Robertson, Dennis  777 Robertson, Paul  111 n.42 Röckstrom, Johan  616 Rogers, Eugene F., Jr.  281 Rolston III, Holmes  459–60, 466, 796 romanticism  315–16, 631–2, 653–4, 770, 899, 925 Ross, Glenn  640 Rovelli, Carlo  552 Rowland, Chris  127 Ruddiman, William  611 Ruether, Rosemary Radford  425, 484 Rufinus of Aquileia  139, 143, 181, 554 Ruskin, John  782 Russell, Colin  579 Russell, Robert John  226 Rykwert, Joseph  882 sabbath  21–31, 38, 40–1, 45, 51–2, 54, 79, 86, 146, 209, 356, 501, 509, 550–1, 673, 772, 784, 789, 797, 834, 836 Said, Edward  729 Salminen, Anti  612 sanctification  23, 287, 288 n.6, 306, 335, 337, 346, 357, 419, 430, 538, 696, 753, 827, 830, 856, 942 Sanders, E. P.  400 n.10 Sanders, John  301 Sanneh, Lamin  523 Sartre, Jean-Paul  480 Satan  8, 70, 84–5, 90, 115, 133, 151, 153, 168, 172, 189, 205, 328, 377, 454, 466, 771, 813 n.5, 816–17, 918 Satornil of Antioch  151 Sayers, Dorothy  783, 896–7 scarcity  416, 757–8, 775–7, 781–2, 785 Scheidel, Walter  107, 108 n.26, 110 Schelling, Friedrich  388–9, 392 Schillebeeckx, Edward  500 Schindler, David  782, 784 Schleicher, Renate  404 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  220 n.2, 279 n.27, 302, 390, 393, 456 Schmemann, Alexander  501, 507, 941 Schmitt, Carl  766 Schmitz, Kenneth  780

Name and Subject Index Schnackenburg, Rudolf  452 Schneider, Reinhold  512 Schultze, Charles  779 Schwägerl, Christian  613 Schweizer, Eduard  450 science  2–3, 9, 173, 176–7, 188, 191–6, 198, 200–2, 205–6, 211–13, 221, 226–8, 277–9, 302, 314, 377–9, 419–20, 561, 570–1, 575, 577–87, 589, 592, 595–7, 602, 605–6, 609–13, 616–18, 621, 626–7, 630–1, 635–6, 638–9, 642–6, 705, 899 Scott, Peter  618, 620 scripture  142 n.69, 146, 211, 213–15, 370–1, 374, 545–57, 626, 740, 769 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)  569, 578, 580 Sedulius  935 n.8 Seibert, Eric  379 n.31 Seneca  300, 360–1, 765 sentience  45, 64, 117, 408, 463, 573, 627, 637 n.14, 640–3, 796 Severus  174 sexuality  42, 626, 670–81, 690–1 Sforza, Francesco  887 Shakespeare, William  594, 767, 771, 890, 926 shalom  39, 41, 427, 721, 809, 846 Shelley, Mary  864–5 Sherman, Jacob  753 Shili, Xiong  719 Shoah, the  33, 419 Siger of Brabant  198 Simmel, Georg  755 Simmons, Ernst  807–8 Simon Magus  150 Simonetti, Cristián  617 sin  8, 12–13, 49, 169–70, 206, 477, 483, 536–8, 651, 653–6, 679–80, 743, 745 Sinaita, Anastasios  917 Singer, Peter  640 slavery  103–19, 415, 457, 688–9, 765, 767–8, 771, 825, 840 Smart, Christopher  928–30 Smith, Adam  777 Smith, David  67 n.3 Smith, Quentin  586 Socrates  68, 96, 140, 893 n.1 solidarity  13, 344–5, 619, 791, 796, 846 Sölle, Dorothee  505 Song, Choan-Seng  528–9, 533 soteriology  12, 171, 220, 251–2, 301–2, 328, 345, 351–2, 357, 536, 684, 714, 722, 828 sovereignty  3, 6, 8–9, 26, 79–80, 84–5, 192, 202, 251, 301, 304, 322–33, 376, 382, 393, 435, 440, 456, 537–8, 777, 783, 874, 900 Spencer, Herbert  417 Speth, James  775 Spieckermann, Hermann  45 n.9, 46 n.14, 50 n.28 Spinoza, Baruch  387–9, 394, 773 spirit possession  162, 351, 522

Spitzer, Robert  587 Spivak, Gayatri  631, 724, 733 sport  869–79 Sproul, R. C.  375 Stadelmann, Luis  178 Staniloae, Dumitru  542, 543 n.38 state, the  132 n.25, 323, 332, 349, 713, 725, 765, 769–71, 822, 833, 925 Steffen, Will  609, 611, 614–18 Stein, Edith  504 Steiner, George  893–4, 900, 903 Stengers, Isabelle  633 stewardship  4, 16, 327 n.11, 348, 529, 542, 609–10, 615–16, 624, 626, 628, 685, 739–42, 744, 757, 783, 807, 823, 855, 862, 866, 889 Stoicism  93, 96–7, 99, 122, 126, 141, 147, 207, 252 n.16, 275, 281, 363, 468 n.54, 761–6, 769, 773 Strine, Casey  59 Stroemer, Eugene  610 Struna, Nancy  870 n.6 suffering  11–13, 30–1, 71–2, 81, 115–18, 231, 239 n.24, 240, 270, 290, 297, 299, 302–3, 317, 341, 345, 354, 358, 369, 392, 395–6, 414, 419, 459–60, 462–4, 468, 472–3, 483, 498, 501–6, 555–6, 606, 620 n.56, 630, 640–2, 679–80, 794, 796–7, 806, 814, 821, 844, 846 Sunesen, Anders  185 supersessionism  32, 127, 221, 346, 683–4 Swinburne, Richard  589 Sylvester, Bernard  181 tabernacle  32–4, 37–8, 43, 51–4 Taft, Robert  933 Talbert, Charles  814, 817 Talmon, Shemaryahu  80 Tanner, Kathryn  10, 270, 282, 320–1, 440–3, 743, 840 Tasso, Torquato  918 Tatian  139 Taylor, Charles  314, 317 Taylor, Frederick  836 n.65 Taylor, Nicholas  532 n.92 Taylor, Richard  444 technology  68, 132, 327, 420, 522, 561–2, 564, 568, 581, 609, 612, 614–18, 624, 696, 772, 778, 830, 832, 842–3, 845, 848, 853–68 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre  391, 393, 425 n.9, 609, 626 temple  32–9, 41–3, 82, 88, 90, 99, 122, 128, 131, 222, 422, 424–5, 431, 433–4, 542, 870, 881, 884, 888–90 Temple, William  393 temporality  194, 306, 329, 331, 358, 363–4, 366, 368–9, 371, 375, 528, 616, 731, 733–4, 836 Tennyson, Alfred  930 Teresa of Ávila  626 Tertullian of Carthage  7, 139, 149, 160–3, 301, 360, 576, 763, 941 Thatcher, Margaret  455

979

Name and Subject Index Theissen, Annalea Rose  807 theodicy  135, 143–4, 302–3, 362, 407, 414, 425, 460–6, 468, 472, 480, 641, 776, 782 Theodore bar Koni  172 Theodore of Mopsuestia  168–70, 172–4 Theodore the Studite  269 Theokritoff, Elizabeth  940 Theophilus of Antioch  6, 139, 145, 150, 162, 179, 251 n.8, 576, 590, 917 theosis  269, 290, 354, 681, 716 theotokos  267–8 Thielman, Frank  117 Thierry of Chartres  179, 185–6 Thiessen, Matthew  222 Thomas, Dylan  919, 928 Thomas, R. S.  919, 924 n.18, 930 Thomasma, David  845, 846 n.11 Tian  707–22, see also heaven/s Tillich, Paul  229, 265 n.17, 276–7, 279, 287 n.4, 291–2, 316, 391–3, 612, 699 time  3, 23–4, 27, 29, 79–80, 82, 84, 96–8, 138, 196–7, 201–2, 244–5, 254–7, 289, 301, 306, 338, 358–74, 378–81, 385, 394, 409, 517, 527–33, 549–52, 555–6, 563, 565, 568, 574–5, 581–2, 585–9, 593, 597–8, 600, 616–17, 698, 836, 849, 851–2, 877, 905, 936 Tingyun, Yang  711–12 Tinker, Tink  229, 524, 529–30 Tipler, Frank  591 tohu vabohu  144, 237, 424, 862, 877 Toland, John  386 n.1 Tolmie, Francois  799 Torah  23, 35, 51, 53, 54 n.48, 79, 85, 87, 197 Torchia, Joseph  476 Torrance, James  887 Torrance, T. F.  577 Towner, W. Sibley  644 Tracy, David  745 n.22 Traherne, Thomas  940 Trakl, Georg  919 transfiguration  271, 498–9, 508, 542, 884 Treaty of Westphalia, the  323 trees, see plants Trelstad, Marit  346, 378 n.26 Trestman, Michael  635, 637, 639 Trible, Phyllis  626, 679, 862 Trump, Donald  453 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the  348–50 Tsevat, Matitiahu  26–7 Tutu, Desmond  348, 840 Tuwere, Sevati  530 tzimtzum  381, 392, 734 Ubuntu  755 unemployment  349, 522, 751, 801, 836 universalism  59 n.9, 80–1, 86, 324, 385, 502, 517, 629, 714

980

universe image of God  209 Uppsala Assembly, the  535–7 urban design  752, 754–6 urbanism  748–9 Ussher, James  2 Vadén, Tere  612 Valentinus  143–4, 150, 159 values  315, 322, 459–70, 526, 591, 593, 737 n.1, 738–40, 745, 816–17, 899, 929 van Inwagen, Peter  436–7 van Pelt, Robert Jan  883–4 van Wolde, Ellen  644 Vaughan, Henry  930 vegetation, see plants Venter, Rian  799 Vernadsky, Vladimir  609 Vilenkin, Alexander  587–8 violence  12, 61, 64–6, 103, 106–8, 112, 124–5, 128, 130, 314, 320, 329, 351–2, 422–4, 448, 455–6, 458 n.36, 461, 463, 510, 526, 598, 629–30, 632, 641, 648, 656, 692, 736, 765–6, 794, 797, 811–18, 822–3, 905, 921–2, 924, 935 Vitruvius  881–3 vocation  35, 42, 52, 306, 315, 336, 339, 428–30, 432–3, 512, 540, 542, 596, 616, 678, 687, 689, 772, 783–4, 826–9, 833, 836–40, 842, 846, 848, 878–9, 885, 889, 913 Volf, Miroslav  825, 828–30, 836, 838–40 Vondey, Wolfgang  278 vulnerability  13, 88, 108, 484, 647, 649, 656, 667, 683, 744–6, 751, 807, 844–6, 848, 851–2 Wachowski, Lana  627 Wachowski, Lilly  627 Waelbers, Katinka  859–60 Wahlberg, Mats  468 Wallace, Mark  282, 621 Walton, John  428 Walton, Steve  90 n.30 war  46, 61, 64, 104–5, 107–8, 328, 688, 771, 811–24, 830, 863, 924 Ward, Benedicta  937 Ward, Keith  393 water  14, 21, 25, 166, 171, 173–4, 186, 206, 330, 332, 431–2, 565, 568–9, 597, 601, 604, 670, 673, 687, 758, 771, 788 n.1, 791, 921–3, 940–1, 943 Webb, Stephen  907 Weil, Simone  420–1 Wei-ming, Tu  694 Weinberg, Steven  233, 581 Weitzman, Michael  24 n.5 Welker, Michael  235, 537 Wellhausen, Julius  32, 53 n.45 Wen of Zhou (king)  709 Westermann, Claus  52 n.38, 237–8, 663 Westhelle, Vítor  347, 728–9

Name and Subject Index Westminster Confession of Faith, the  338 Whitaker, Edmund  575 White, Lynn, Jr.  120, 123, 428, 623, 772 Whitehead, Alfred North  375, 376 n.19, 389–90, 393, 456, 467, 726 whiteness  684, 686–92 Whitney, William  753 Whyte, Kyle  621 Wiener, Norbert  854, 860, 867 n.48 Wigbod  184 Wigner, Eugene  233 Wilberforce, William  840 Wilkinson, Alissa  121 Wilkinson, David  663 William of Conches  186 Williams, Bernard  366–7 Williams, Delores  647 n.1 Williams, Norman  12 Williams, Peter  93 n.8 Williams, Raymond  761 Williams, Rowan  474, 475 n.15, 480, 551, 783, 873, 905 Wilson, Brittany  246 n.4 Wilson, Martin  519 n.13 Wilson, Robert  585 Wingren, Gustaf  827–8 Wink, Walter  452, 457–8, 811, 814–17, 822–3 Winslow, Karen  379 n.31 Winstanley, Gerrard  764 Wirth, Louis  749 Wirzba, Norman  795–6 Wisdom/wisdom  2, 5, 7, 14, 67–9, 74–9, 83, 87, 99, 120 n.1, 127, 137–8, 141, 145–6, 148–9, 151–6, 158–9, 173, 183, 188, 208–10, 248, 287, 300, 369, 371, 421, 450, 464, 512, 527, 551–3, 621, 649, 688, 697, 719–20, 727, 771, 848, 940 Wise, Joshua  228 Wittkower, Margot  903 Wittkower, Rudolf  903 Wojtyla, Karol, see John Paul II wonder  67–71, 73–8, 182, 210, 261, 394, 417, 420, 573, 580, 615, 630, 748, 848, 893, 933, 940

Wood, Jordan  506, 512–13 Woolfenden, Gregory  933 Wordsworth, William  315, 386 n.2, 899, 928 work  27, 45, 49, 86, 160, 200–1, 241, 422, 457, 540–2, 668, 686, 754, 756, 769, 774, 778–9, 783–4, 825–40, 856–7, 878–9, 903–5 worship  11, 21, 32–5, 38, 40–1, 43, 51, 54, 67, 82 n.10, 132–4, 244, 247, 249, 251, 260, 328, 367, 414, 419, 465, 523, 540–1, 554, 571, 574, 652, 675, 691, 714, 716, 784, 794, 797, 870–2, 878–9, 887–8, 890, 932–43 liturgy  17, 32, 39, 51–4, 80, 134, 348, 355, 357, 540, 542–3, 547, 878–9, 892–3, 908, 932–43 Worthing, Mark  576–7 Wright, N. T.  225–6 Wüthrich, Matthias  481, 484 Wyatt, Thomas  926 Wynter, Sylvia  724 Xiangshan, Lu  719 Yancheng, Liang  719 Yang-ming, Wang  696, 719 Yarchin, William  719 Yi, Cheng  719 Yi, Jihyun  756 Yong, Amos  537 Yŏng-mo, Yu  701 Yu-lan, Feng  709 Yusoff, Katherine  614 Zacharias, Archimandrite  430 Zai, Zhang  704 Zalasiewicz, Jan  609–11 Zeller, Edward  767–8 Zenger, Erich  47 Zizioulas, John  938 Zoroastrianism  122, 812 Zum Brunn, Emilie  477 Zuma, Jacob  351 Zwingli, Huldrych (Ulrich)  204, 207–8, 338, 436

981

982

983

984

985

986