Theology

Around the traps: To the memory of ulcers scraped with a tin spoon

Rowan Williams on the Big Society.
Les Murray and the Poetry of Depression, a review-piece by Meghan O’Rourke.
The latest edition of Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte (Vol. 18, No. 1, April 2011) is now available and includes an essay on ‘Albrecht Ritschl and the Tübingen School. A neglected link in the history of 19th century theology’ by Johannes Zachhuber. The Forsythian in me is excited to see this. [I also found a version of this essay here].
The preacher your preacher could preach like.
Alain Badiou responds to Jean-Luc Nancy on Libya, and on elsewhere in the Middle East.
Kurt Vonnegut on the simple shapes of stories.
Warner Brothers wins the Roger Awards.
The latest edition of the Journal of Reformed Theology (5/1, 2011) is out.
Robert Manne on the untold story of Julian Assange.
T&T Clark launch Continuum e-Books.
Michael Jensen is blogging on human nature and the arts (parts I, II, III, IV).
The Postcolonial Theology Network and Whitley College are hosting a conference – Story Weaving: Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theology.
Michael Jinkins on Martin Luther King’s questions about the church.
Bruce Hamill reflects on what the church is called to be in our world.
Travis McMaken has been posting on and linking to posts on David Kelsey’s 2011 Warfield Lectures (parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI).
John Pilger on Westminster, Libya and Yemen.

Jürgen Moltmann’s Ethics of Hope: Eschatological Possibilities For Moral Action: A Review

A review of Timothy Harvie, Jürgen Moltmann’s Ethics of Hope: Eschatological Possibilities For Moral Action (Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies; Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).

It was Karl Barth who, in his Ethik (1928), reminded us that Christian theology is always ethics, that ethics belongs to theology proper precisely because God makes himself responsible for us, and that ‘ethics as a theological discipline is the auxiliary science in which an answer is sought in the Word of God to the question of the goodness of human conduct’. It is of little surprise, therefore, that such a commitment is shared by one of Barth’s most prolific students, Jürgen Moltmann, whose own articulations concerning theological ethics remain valuable though, in his own words, ‘an unfinished task and an unfulfilled wish’ (p. ix).

Timothy Harvie’s volume (a ‘slightly revised version’ of his doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Aberdeen and supervised by Professor John Webster) represents an attempt to consider and extend an unfinished trajectory in Moltmann’s theology; namely, and appropriately, an ethics of hope. It is, in the words of its author, ‘not a piece of applied ethics engaging specific moral quandaries or the nature of Christian virtues’ but rather ‘an attempt to theologically describe the sphere of Christian moral action and the means by which this is enabled to take place’ (p. 3). Harvie makes it clear in the Introduction that his essay will argue that Moltmann does not begin with antecedent ethical presuppositions and then mould dogmatics to fit these concerns. Rather, ‘Moltmann begins with an investigation of theological concerns stemming from the biblical history and then attempts to articulate the moral relevance this theological conception has for the current social situation of humanity’ (p. 6).

The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, Harvie attends to the christological, pneumatological and eschatological foundations for an ethics of hope, and offers readers (and particularly those unfamiliar with Moltmann’s oeuvre) an accessible entrée into a number of vistas fundamental to Moltmann’s theological project. Through four chapters, Harvie’s aim is to rehearse how Moltmann is principally concerned with articulating the Christian gospel, and subsequently concerned to point to how the Church’s convictions about the gospel inform her ethical assertions.

He opens with a chapter on hope and promise, noting that the generative thrust and unambiguous priority of Christian hope, for Moltmann, is birthed in the divine promise given in a particular locus in history, and creating and securing a new trajectory for history and for human existence: ‘In the midst of a history wrought with injustice, turmoil and sin, the promise of God (given definitively in the resurrection of Jesus Christ) secures a new future which contravenes the sinful status quo of the present with a new creative work of God for a redeemed cosmos. This new, creative work secured in the promise is a novum in history which moves towards the present’ (p.15). Harvie proceeds to cite Moltmann – ‘The simple prolongation of the status quo no longer provides a future for which it is worth living’ (p. 26) – and avers that eschatological hope grounded in the cross-resurrection means that Christian living becomes subversive, demanding not onlookers but, in Moltmann’s words, ‘combatants’ (p. 26). The promise of God in Jesus Christ creates in history an interval between promise and fulfilment, a Zwischenraum or ‘between-space’, which sets in motion a way of living adumbrated in the promised future but ‘enacted through the creative work of God in such a way that in Christ humans [i.e., the Exodus community, Exodusgemeinde] may now participate in this space … in contradistinction to the world’ (p. 28). This way of living is ‘life commensurate with the Kingdom of God’ (p. 36).

The Kingdom of God, another topic of decided importance for Moltmann, is the subject of Chapter Two. Herein, Harvie outlines the way that Kingdom and christology are inextricably bound up together, and attends to the way that, for Moltmann, the Kingdom represents not only a positive description of the content of Christian hope but also ‘a foil to critique societal situations [Moltmann] perceives to be unjust’ (p. 40). Jesus’ embodiment of the Kingdom, it is noted, means table fellowship with sinners, liberating proclamation and praxis for the poor, and healing to the broken.

Chapters Three and Four attend to the role that pneumatology and the doctrine of the trinity, respectively, play in Moltmann’s theology, and how each informs the ethical shape of his theology of hope. With clarity, Harvie outlines that while, for Moltmann, the trinitarian history of the divine life with the world begins with the history of the promise, a history which culminates in the death and resurrection of the Son, it is the faithful and historical efficacy of the Spirit which ‘constitutes the continuing presence of the Kingdom’ in both Church and world. ‘This’, he continues, ‘in no way denigrates the future horizon of Christian hope for the Kingdom, but rather structures the initial fulfilment of the divine promise, which creates a surplus of expectation and hope for the eschatological novum’ (pp. 57–8). He notes how, for Moltmann, those empowered by the Spirit are ‘led to be non-conformists with the unfulfilled present, which leads to death. The Church, through the work of the Spirit, is empowered to resist in its Zwischenraum of tension, to overcome death with life, violence with peace, and hate with love’ (p. 92). Harvie is critical of Moltmann’s emphasis on a ‘universal society’ (p. 85), arguing that such ambiguity blurs the distinction between the Spirit’s work in the Church and in wider society. In Chapter Four, Harvie gathers up many of the already-attended-to themes and brings them into dialogue with Moltmann’s exposition on the trinity, noting that the creature’s moral living does not equate principally to imitatio of the trine life so much as, by the Spirit, being ‘taken up into the divine communion as an-other … to participate in and live out of the divine love’ (p. 109). Herein, as Moltmann explains it, the ‘lived circulation’ (p. 118) which is the divine life has two kinds of openness: first, there is an intra-Trinitarian openness between the three persons; second, and implying no deficiency of being, the Trinity is open for communion with creation. ‘This divine openness’, Harvie suggests, ‘fundamentally alters the moral life of the Christian through justification and sanctification’ (p. 122). In an interesting conversation with work by Carl Schmitt and Richard Bauckham, Harvie notes how Moltmann’s thoroughly trinitarian theology creates an eschatological ethic which rejects both clerical and political monotheisms, and he follows Bauckham’s critique of Moltmann that the tendency to inadequately distinguish between the triune life in se and the social life of creatures has ‘no biblical basis’ (p. 128). Turning then to the way that creatures participate by the Spirit in the fellowship of love, Harvie considers how, for Moltmann, the notion of divine apatheia both sponsors a utopian hope and undermines the command to be ‘present in open, loving solidarity with those who suffer’ (p. 135).

Harvie then turns – in Part II – to a more focused consideration of the ethical shape that the theological foundations he has outlined in Part I take in creaturely existence. He does this via three discussions on hope: on (i) time and space for hope, (ii) hope for humanity, and (iii) hope for the economy.

In the first of these, what I found to be the most stimulating part of the book, Harvie draws upon Augustine and Bauckham to very helpfully explicate how Moltmann understands, and makes use of, christologically-determined categories of time over against, say, Kathryn Tanner’s ‘futureless eschatology’ (what Carl Braaten calls ‘eschatology sans eschaton’) and time’s modern myths, and how these then inform what Moltmann wishes to aver about the theo-ethical implications of such in the kingdom of God wherein space – conceived as both Zeitraum and Zwischenraum – is opened up for hope and moral action. The present earthly time – the time of promise – is ‘characterized by expectation and anticipation of the novum which is anticipated in the promise and ensured by the divine faithfulness’ (p. 151) and, by the tension created between the divine-human covenant which existentially orients creaturely perspective to the future, sensitises covenant partners to the incongruous nature of their surroundings. Contra Mark Lewis Taylor and Rubem Alves, Harvie notes that, for Moltmann, ‘the ethical space envisioned in a moral theology of hope is not simply the space of human structures where moral action is attempted through one’s own empowerment to one’s own end. Rather, it is a space created by the promise of God through the death and resurrection of Christ in which human structures are transformed by the efficacious work of the Holy Spirit to manifest the eschatological Kingdom. This space orients Christian moral action, through the divine promise, to the future. The result is that this space is then in tension with those structures, circumstances and actions which are not located within the Kingdom of God or brought about through the beneficent work of God through the Spirit’ (p. 167).

Harvie turns, in the final two chapters, to the subjects of human nature, human dignity and human rights, and to outline how he understands Moltmann’s theology of hope might inform conversations about economics. He rightly notes that for Moltmann, the imago Dei depends upon, and says more about, God than it does upon any human trait per se, that the imago Christi is paramount for an ethics of hope, and that ‘it is precisely at this Christologically focused point within eschatological history that the Zwischenraum of tension … is understood to constitute the sphere of Christian moral action’ (p. 172). He also rightly notes that ‘the claim that human beings have equal and intrinsic worth is difficult to maintain as a universal presupposition apart from God’s revelation as creator and redeemer of the world’ (p. 181).

These concluding chapters, however, are disappointingly conservative in their application of the ethic that Moltmann’s thought invites. Harvie proposes no genuine protest to the structures of that world put to death in the crucified God, and very little hint of the novum created by the radical interruption of Jesus’ resurrection and the life that this event births. The praxiological content of the eschatological Zwischenraum which is characterised as life in the Spirit, in other words, is left drastically underdeveloped. The ethical implications of Moltmann’s professional project call for a more radical engagement – or what Ernst Wolf calls a ‘creative discipleship’ – of the ecclesia than Harvie outlines here. Moreover, as Moltmann avers in Theologie der Hoffnung, we must speak not only of the historic transformation of social and public life but also of the suffering, self-surrender, self-expenditure and sacrifice that attend such ‘day-to-day obedience’, and which mark a different way from the glories of self-realisation and the miseries of self-estrangement arising from ‘hopelessness in the world of lost horizons’ – ways disclosed to the laos tou theou in the future of the crucified God in whose life they participate, and to whom they look for the coming of the kingdom in fulness. At the end of the day, Harvie tumbles into the very trap that Hauerwas outlines (and which Harvie cites on p. 183): ‘One of the things that bothers me about such discourse is the designation “us,” meaning Christians, and “them,” meaning the poor. Such language inherently presupposes that Christians have no convictions that might not make them poor. As a result we privilege our place as rich Christians who can justify our being rich because we are concerned about justice’.

While the essay is unduly repetitive, it is amiably unencumbered with distractive engagements with secondary literature and side issues. Where these are relevant, they are appropriately attended to, and that so as not to sidetrack the reader from the main line of enquiry; namely, Moltmann’s own presentation of a foundation for an ethic grounded in trinitarian space-making and orientated toward the future in the kingdom of life and love. And while the ethical implications drawn by Harvie are, to my mind, drastically undercooked, there can be little doubt that those interested in exploring a rich theological foundation for Christian ethics will find much here of value.

God’s Goodness & Trustworthiness

I was glad to be up on Aotea (Great Barrier Island) this week to speak to a group of mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings at an event called Going Further. My brief: talk about (i) God’s goodness and trustworthiness, and (ii) God’s holiness. A number of people have asked me for a copy of the talks. They were not recorded (except by the seraphim), and, as per my usual practice, I departed often and widely from my notes. But for those who may be interested in the thrust of what I said, I thought it worth posting my notes here. I will post those on God’s holiness later.

God’s Goodness & Trustworthiness

There’s a classic passage in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe in which Mr. & Mrs. Beaver are telling the Pevensie children about Aslan, whom they are about to meet. They become quite nervous when they learn that Aslan is a lion:

‘Is – is he a man?’ asked Lucy. ‘Aslan a man!’ said Mr. Beaver sternly. ‘Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion, the Lion, the great Lion’. ‘Ooh’, said Susan, ‘I thought he was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion’. ‘That you will, dearie, and make no mistake’, said Mrs. Beaver; ‘if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly’. ‘Then he isn’t safe?’ said Lucy. ‘Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver; ‘don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the king I tell you’.[1]

I plan to return to this passage when we consider God’s holiness, but tonight is about an invitation to think together about Mr Beaver’s words – ‘But he’s good’.

Life is like an omelette, and jazz

A mature life – which is the life that the Spirit calls us into and gathers us up into in Jesus Christ – is a life that requires a lot of broken eggs. As you already know, life is messy.

I’m suspicious of people who have life sorted out all too neatly. And I’m suspicious of theology that’s too tidy. Theology that speaks to the deep realities of life is more like an omelette than it is like a neat hard-boiled egg. Theology that speaks to the deepest realities of life will have a certain messiness and unpredictability about it – because life is more like a Jackson Pollock painting than it is like a Rubik’s cube. And even the life of faith is more like jazz than it is like techno.

I’m reminded of the book All Creatures Great and Small, where James Herriot tells of how he stripped to the waist one night in a cold barn in the middle of a North Yorkshire winter and laid on his back in cow dung and mud, straining to pull a new calf from its mother. And the whole time he was struggling in the muck and the mud he was cursing under his breath the lovely picture of birth he had been shown in textbooks back at the veterinary college in Glasgow. The photos in the textbooks were of vets dressed in white lab coats, standing in a clean concrete holding stall, delivering a calf without a drop of blood or muck around.

That’s not a picture of reality. Most questions that we wrestle with in life arise when we’re waist deep in muck and mud, when we’re drowning in more questions than we have answers and when we’ve got cold and sharp wind, mud and muck to contend with. And so if we spend our life trying to avoid the muck then we are in danger of living an unexamined life, a life in which there are no longer any satisfying answers at all because we are just too afraid to ask any decent questions. And the mature life is more about questions than it is about answers. And it’s about learning to really define and give voice to the right kinds of questions. And that takes time … and patience … and community … and humility … and a certain resolve.

And it’s the same with our life with God. We don’t start out by thinking about God in sterile settings. We start out by living. And living as we do, we have a bundle of beliefs, mostly passed on to us by others.

And so when it comes to the question of God’s goodness, or of God’s love, or of God’s steadfastness, or of God’s whatever, where do we start? And upon what basis or for what reason do we believe that God is like this and not like something else? And in regards to tonight’s topic, upon what basis might we believe that God is good and trustworthy?

And it gets even more interesting because if we believe that truth is not a set of propositions but that truth is a person (as in John 14.6: ‘I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life), then what we are trying to understand isn’t a something but a someone, and that gets messier and a lot more interesting and a lot more open-ended because to engage with a someone – as opposed to a something – is to engage with a living dynamic who is on the move and who refuses to be contained by us and by our categories of thought.

So what is it about the story that the community of Jesus lives by which makes it believe that God is altogether good, merciful, just and unconditionally loving, rather than unreliable or wicked?

Defining God’s goodness & trustworthiness

For the sake of time, I simply want to say that Christian theology has a very specific logic at work, and that that logic determines what we can and what we cannot say about God. And that logic has a name. His name is Jesus of Nazareth, and Christian theology, at its best, is wrapped up in him and in his own witness to God. Christian theology, at its best, never seeks to say anything new or novel, but only to point, and to keep pointing, like John the Baptist, to the revelation of God in Jesus.

That said, we also need to say that any knowledge that we now have of God is as St Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians 13.12: ‘For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known’. In other words, our knowledge of God is knowledge that reaches across what theologians call an eschatological boundary. In other words, it’s a knowledge that reaches across the discontinuity created by our own death. And what this means is that for now we know God as and only as we are carried into the death of another, and there we share the knowledge that is part of the life of the Kingdom. This is the Church’s story. And in order to breathe in the air of this story and to know the Author of this story we need to be a part of a community where the story is constantly being lived and recited and lived and recited. And the way that the community of Jesus tells this story is through bread and wine and water and words.

Let’s move on.

So why should we think or assume that God is good? More specifically, why should we assume that God is all-good, or even that God is what medieval philosophers called ‘the highest good’? And why should we assume that God’s intentions for us are good?

Let me take a stab at it. I want to suggest that we know that God is good and God is trustworthy because God takes responsibility for all that God makes.

I want to say that ‘goodness’ and ‘trustworthiness’ are not things that can be described in the abstract, i.e., as some sort of independent and pure idea which is then transported onto God. Rather, I want to say that goodness and trustworthiness is defined and made evident in what God does. It’s not that God’s actions make God good so much as it is that God’s actions are the expression or overflow of who God is as the fountainhead of all goodness. If we could somehow get inside of God we would discover a community of persons who know one another fully, who love one another completely, and whose enjoyment for one other another is contagious. And in the Incarnation – i.e., in the act of God, as it were, becoming one of us and sharing our broken humanity – God opens himself up to us so that we can see and so that we can participate in the knowledge and the love and the enjoyment that the Father and the Son and the Spirit have with one another.

So in Christ, and by the sheer gift of the Spirit, we get to listen into and to participate in (which is what prayer is) the eternal conversation that is going on 24/7 between the Spirit and the Son and the Father. And the more we listen, the more we get to see that their conversation does not consist of random updates (like with Twitter or Facebook) but that it’s purposeful. In fact, the reason that we get to listen in is purposeful too. It’s because God doesn’t want to be God without us, and so God lives with us and brings us into his own communion so that we may have no other God before him, so that we may learn that the only way to be fully alive is to be fully alive in community, and so that we may learn to serve life rather than death.

And for those three things – (i) that we may have no other God before him, (ii) that we may learn that the only way to be fully alive is to be fully alive in community, and (iii) that we may learn to serve life rather than death – God speaks torah to us. He gives us his law, his teaching, his instruction. In fact, one of the great blessings that God gives us is his gift of the commandments.

So we have Moses’ great speech in Deuteronomy 4:

So now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live … You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!” For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is whenever we call to him? And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today? (vv. 1–8)

Israel knew that God was good and trustworthy not because they sat around and philosophised about God’s goodness and trustworthiness, nor because they went away to some beautiful island and heard a talk about it. Israel knew that God was good and trustworthy because they had experienced in their own story the saving action of One who had heard their cry and liberated them from Egypt. And Israel knew that God was good and trustworthy because the God who had heard their cry and gave himself to journey with them gave them torah, words by which they might live and order their life, words that would bring life and not death.

You see, the Lord’s commands are not arbitrary. Rather, they are, as the book of Deuteronomy puts it, for our ‘well-being’ (4.40), ‘for our lasting good … to keep us alive’ (6.24); indeed they are our ‘very life’ (32.47). This is because they are that which enables human life in the first place: ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord’ (8.3).[2]

In fact, the Bible also tells us that it’s not just the law that reveals that God is good but also that God ‘has not left himself without a witness in doing good – giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filling you with food and your hearts with joy’ (Acts 14.17). Here is God blessing creation so that creation can be the theatre of his glory and the stage upon which his covenant promises might be acted out. This is echoed again in James 1.17: ‘Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change’.[3]

Here James tells us is that God does not change, that God is faithful, that God is trustworthy, that the God who confronts us when we are 10 and chucking a wobbly is the same God who confronts us when we are 38 and chucking a wobbly. And you see, if you’re like me and you’ve committed the same sin for the 700^th time, and then you ask God for forgiveness, you begin to have a fear in your mind that this time God might say, ‘No! I’ve had enough! That’s it! You’ve blown it!’ We begin to fear that we might wear out God’s patience, God’s will to forgive, God’s friendly welcome of us, God’s joy in our repentance, God’s joy in our presence. But James says, ‘No. God does not change’. God is not erratic or unreliable. God is not soft one day and hard the next. God isn’t like your father or your mother or your boss or anyone else. God is consistent. The God we pray to on Monday is the same God we pray to on Thursday. God is constant in his compassion. He is constant in his love. He is constant in his patience. He is constant in his perseverance. He is constant in his forgiveness. He is constant in his goodness. And he is constant in his determination to know you and for you to know him. Here is a God who is trustworthy.[4]

Certainly the Bible is univocal in the claim that God is good and trustworthy:

‘Good and upright is the LORD’. (Ps 25.8)
‘O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him’. (Ps 34.8)
‘For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations’. (Ps 100.5)
‘Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good’. (Ps 135.3)
‘The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made’. (Ps 145.9)
‘Give thanks to the Lord of hosts, for the Lord is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!’ (Jer 33.11)
‘The works of his hands are faithful and just; all his precepts are trustworthy’. (Ps 111.7)

And then, of course, there are Jesus’ own words as recorded in Mark 10 and Luke 18: ‘No one is good but God alone’.[5]

So what’s at stake in even thinking about God’s goodness and trustworthiness?

And what is the greatest challenge to God’s goodness and trustworthiness?[6]

For everything that I spoken of so far is way too easy, and way too unsatisfactory, to leave the question of God’s goodness and trustworthiness here.

**Suffering – the challenge to God’s goodness & trustworthiness**

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.[7]

So penned Elie Wiesel in his moving record of his childhood in the death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. For Wiesel, as for countless others – both inside and outside of the camps – the systematic extermination of millions of human beings – whether Jews, political activists, or homosexuals – meant the death of faith and of God.

As Wiesel wrote in another place:

In truth, Auschwitz signifies not only the failure of two thousand years of Christian civilization, but also the defeat of the intellect that wants to find Meaning – with a capital M – in history. What Auschwitz embodied has none. The executioner killed for nothing, the victim died for nothing. No God ordered the one to prepare the stake, nor the other to mount it. During the Middle Ages, the Jews, when they chose death, were convinced that by their sacrifice they were glorifying and sanctifying God’s name. At Auschwitz the sacrifices were without point, without faith, without divine inspiration. If the suffering of one human being has any meaning, that of six million has none. Numbers have their importance; they prove, according to Piotr Rawicz, that God has gone mad.[8]

The fact is that ‘suffering is especially a problem for the person who believes, or who wants to believe in God’,[9] and especially for the person or community who want to claim that God is good. For, you see, suffering, the kind of suffering that ‘plucks the tongue from the head and the voice from the heart’,[10] demonstrates the logical incoherence of Christianity. So does the fact that among the six million who died in Auschwitz there were some who sang and shared their soup and sacrificed themselves for others. [Thanks for this point Kim]

But ‘it is in suffering that the whole human question about God arises … [Suffering] is the open wound of life in this world’.[11]

The problem was famously articulated some 300 years before Christ by Epicures (341–270 BCE) who argued that once we recognise the reality and evil of suffering we are forced to choose one of four options if we believe in a good God:

1. God wills to remove evil but can’t.
2. God can and won’t.
3. God can’t and won’t.
4. God wants to remove evil and can.

Indeed, C.S. Lewis once rejected the existence of God on the basis of the existence of evil: ‘My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust’.[12] He reasoned that

(a) there is evil in the world + (b) evil is incompatible with God = (c) therefore God does not exist.

Or as the great Jewish theologian, Martin Buber, put it:

How is life with God still possible in a time in which there is an Auschwitz? … Can one still hear His word [i.e., his Torah]? Can one still, as an individual and as a people, enter at all into a dialogical relationship with Him? Dare we recommend to the survivors of Auschwitz, the Job of the gas chambers: “Give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good; for His mercy endureth forever”?[13]

To be sure, it seems that people of faith, and people of no faith, have always sought to articulate answers to these most challenging of questions.

Here are some inadequate (though not necessarily entirely wrong) responses to the problem of suffering:

1. Suffering is an illusion.

2. Suffering is a product of dualism. Suffering is the inescapable reality of things in a universe where the forces of Sauron and the forces of the Ilúvatar (the All-Father of Middle-Earth and of all other earths) battle it out.

3. Suffering represents the unalterable will of God.

4. Suffering is a punishment for sin.

5. Suffering happens because God is finite or limited.

6. Suffering serves some greater good.

7. Suffering is inevitable.

8. Most suffering – not all – happens because love requires the free to do good or evil.

9. Pain is ‘good’ when it alerts us to problems that require attention. But pain is ‘evil’ when it makes no sense, when it seems to produce harm not good.

10. The religion of the Bible puts human suffering into a cosmic context: the battle of good and evil, God and Satan.

11. God both allows and sends suffering.

12. It’s not our suffering that matters most but our response to it.

13. Suffering can deepen our relationship with God and with one another.

14. Suffering forms us for service.

In his book, The Good and Beautiful God, James Smith writes:

Terrible things happen to wonderful people. Wonderful things happen to awful people. We cannot look around the world we live in and build a case that sinners are punished and righteous people are blessed. Reality simply does not bear this out.[14]

And then Smith goes on to quote from the theological giant of the fourth century, St Augustine:

We do not know why God’s judgment makes a good [person] poor, and a wicked [person] rich … Nor why the wicked [person] enjoys the best of health, whilst the [person] of religion wastes away in illness … Even then it is not consistent … Good [people] also have good fortune and evil [people] find evil fortunes.[15]

Smith and Augustine are both right. But I would want to go even further and say:

We can’t know that God is good by looking at history. John Howard Yoder is right here: ‘we can no longer so simply identify the course of history with Providence. We have learned that history reveals as much of Antichrist as of Christ’.[16]

And we can’t know that God is good by looking at creation. [e.g., The same beautiful bird that God used to speak to Howard was then attacked by his cute friends. And the same beautiful and calm water across which you might come to a peaceful and beautiful island, is the same water that would swallow you up were you to fall in and loose the strength to swim]. So we can’t know that God is good by looking at creation – whether we are talking about a sunset, or about our relationships, or about the fact that something that we have been praying about for 15 years has finally been answered as we had hoped.]

So where can we look?

Jesus – the revelation of God’s goodness & trustworthiness

Consider this poem by Vinicio Aguilar which arises out of the struggle for human dignity in Central America:

Where was god, daddy; where, where, where,
when the commissioners
broke the fence,
burnt the farm,
destroyed the harvest,
killed the pigs,
raped Imelda,
drank our rum?

HE WAS UP THERE, boy.

Where was god, daddy; where, where, where,
when because we complained
the state judge came and fined us
the bailiff came to arrest us
and even the priest came to insult us?

HE WAS UP THERE, boy.

Well then daddy; we must now tell him plainly
that he must come down sometimes
to be with us.
You can see how we are, daddy,
with no fields sown, no farm, no pigs, nothing, and he
as if nothing had happened. It isn’t right, you know, daddy.
If he’s really up there
let him come down.
Let him come down to taste this cruel hunger with us
let him come down and sweat
in the maize-fields, come down to be imprisoned,
let him come down and spew on the rich man
who throws the stone and hides his hand,
on the venal judge,
on the unworthy priest,
and on the bailiffs and commissioners
who rob and kill
the peasants;
because I certainly don’t want to tell my son when he asks
me one day:

HE WAS UP THERE, boy.[17]

The good news is gathered up in the words of one who said about himself, ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (Jn 14.9).[18]

Friends, there is no God behind Jesus Christ. But in Jesus we are given to see God in his fullness. As the Fourth Gospel puts it, ‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth … No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known’ (John 1.14, 18).

Reflect with me for a moment on this ‘Sketch of the Trinity’ by William Blake. And ask yourself, Where am I in this picture? Whether you know it or not, whether this is already or not yet your story, you are in Christ. And where is Christ? Christ is in the bosom of the Father. How? By the gift of the Spirit. Here in the Father’s embrace of the Son by the Spirit is the revelation of God’s goodness and trustworthiness. Here alone, in Christ, can we know that God is good, that God is faithful, that God is trustworthy.

And it is specifically in the wounded Christ that we really see the goodness and trustworthiness of God. In fact, we do more than see God’s goodness and trustworthiness in the wounded Christ – we participate in it. His life becomes ours. His wounds become ours and our wounds are healed in his.

And in that participation – which is the life that the Bible calls faith – we come to see that in the face of unspeakable suffering and tragedy the questions of God’s goodness and of God’s trustworthiness are not ‘problems’ to be ‘worked out’ but realities in which to live, and that that life is opened up to us in the wounded heart of God.[19] There is no ‘answer’ to the problem of suffering!

There’s a very well-known Christian philosopher named Nick Wolterstorff who, some years ago, ‘lost’ his 25-year-old son Eric in a mountain-climbing accident. And I can tell you that there are few things more painful than to bury your own child. Nick decided to pen a memoir of his journey of grief in what was later published as Lament for a Son. And as we draw to a close, I would like to read you some sections of that book:

The world looks different now. The pinks have become purple, the yellows brown. Mountains now wear crosses on their slopes. Hymns and psalms have reordered themselves so that lines I scarcely noticed now leap out: “He will not suffer thy foot to stumble.” Photographs that once evoked the laughter of delighted reminiscence now cause only pain. Why are the photographs of him as a little boy so incredibly hard for me to look at? This one here, holding a fish longer than he is tall, six years old? Why is it easier to look at him as a grownup? The pleasure of seeing former students is colored by the realization that they were his friends and that while they thrive he rots.

Something is over. In the deepest levels of my existence something is finished, done. My life is divided into before and after. A friend of ours whose husband died young said it meant for her that her youth was over. My youth was already over. But I know what she meant. Something is over.

Especially in places where he and I were together this sense of something being over washes over me. It happens not so much at home, but other places. A moment in our lives together of special warmth and intimacy and vividness, a moment when I specially prized him, a moment of hope and expectancy and openness to the future: I remember the moment. But instead of lines of memory leading up to his life in the present, they all enter a place of cold inky blackness and never come out. The book slams shut. The story stops, it doesn’t finish. The future closes, the hopes get crushed. And now instead of those shiny moments being things we can share together in delighted memory, I, the survivor, have to bear them alone.

So it is with all memories of him. They all lead into that blackness. It’s all over, over, over. All I can do is remember him. I can’t experience him. The person to whom these memories are attached is no longer here with me, standing up. He’s only in my memory now, not in my life. Nothing new can happen between us. Everything is sealed tight, shut in the past. I’m still here. I have to go on. I have to start over. But this new start is so different from the first. Then I wasn’t carrying this load, this thing that’s over.

Sometimes I think that happiness is over for me. I look at photos of the past and immediately comes the thought: that’s when we were still happy. But I can still laugh, so I guess that isn’t quite it. Perhaps what’s over is happiness as the fundamental tone of my existence. Now sorrow is that.

Sorrow is no longer the islands but the sea …

I remember delighting in them – trees, art, house, music, pink morning sky, work well done, flowers, books. I still delight in them. I’m still grateful. But the zest is gone. The passion is cooled, the striving quieted, the longing stilled. My attachment is loosened. No longer do I set my heart on them. I can do without them. They don’t matter. Instead of rowing, I float. The joy that comes my way I savor. But the seeking, the clutching, the aiming, is gone. I don’t suppose anyone on the outside notices. I go through my paces. What the world gives, I still accept. But what it promises, I no longer reach for.

I’ve become an alien in the world, shyly touching it as if it’s not mine. I don’t belong any more. When someone loved leaves home, home becomes mere house.[20]

Here Nick describes the suffering which is the valley of the shadow of death. And we must not make light of that shadow for the valley is, in every sense, dark. Death is never OK, and the valley of its shadow is never a location to which we ought to be resolved. But – and it’s a huge BUT – this is precisely the valley in which God too hangs out. As Nick puts it:

For a long time I knew that God is not the impassive, unresponsive, unchanging being portrayed by the classical theologians. I knew of the pathos of God. I knew of God’s response of delight and of his response of displeasure. But strangely, his suffering I never saw before.

God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers. The pain and fallenness of humanity have entered into his heart. Through the prism of my tears I have seen a suffering God.

It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor.

And great mystery: to redeem our brokenness and lovelessness the God who suffers with us did not strike some mighty blow of power but sent his beloved son to suffer like us, through his suffering to redeem us from suffering and evil.

Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.

But I never saw it. Though I confessed that the man of sorrows was God himself, I never saw the God of sorrows. Though I confessed that the man bleeding on the cross was the redeeming God, I never saw God himself on the cross, blood from sword and thorn and nail dripping healing into the world’s wounds.

What does this mean for life, that God suffers? I’m only beginning to learn. When we think of God the Creator, then we naturally see the rich and powerful of the earth as his closest image. But when we hold steady before us the sight of God the Redeemer redeeming from sin and suffering by suffering, then perhaps we must look elsewhere for earth’s closest icon. Where? Perhaps to the face of that woman with soup tin in hand and bloated child at side. Perhaps that is why Jesus said that inasmuch as we show love to such a one, we show love to him.[21]

Friends, we know that God is good, and that God is trustworthy, because – and only because – Jesus, who is God’s Word made flesh, has revealed God’s goodness and God’s trustworthiness to us, and that supremely in his own experience of god-abandonment. And the cross is the word of God’s promise, it is the action of the promise-keeping God. And, of course, there is a sense in which his promises are all we have. God is only as good as his word. So, for example, how do you know that God loves you? Forgives you? Journeys with you? You don’t always feel loved. You don’t always feel forgiven. You don’t always feel accompanied. At the end of the day we only know that we are loved and forgiven and accompanied because of the promises of the promise-keeping God. We literally live by the promises of God. And the promises of God are literally the word of the cross. So think for a moment: when has God ever failed to be for you all that he promised to be in his cross? God is trustworthy! God is good! And we know this only because Jesus, who is God’s promise to us, has proclaimed to us in his own broken body what God’s goodness and God’s trustworthiness look like.

A final thought:

Thinking and talking about God’s goodness and trustworthiness demands an eschatology

That is, it demands a sense of time which has already begun to open up in the resurrection of Jesus but which is yet to reach its fulness. It demands a future, or what theologians call ‘eschatology’. And it is eschatology which makes life so unlike a soap opera, and reminds us that no matter how many glimpses of God’s goodness and trustworthiness we experience now, and no matter how much richer these experiences make life for us, their full satisfaction awaits us, and God.

And so we live now in faith, love and hope. And hope sees in the resurrection of Jesus not the eternity of heaven but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands and which his cross secures.

And so we live now in this tension, in this time between the times, in this linear space between what has passed and all that is coming. This is called living in hope. And hope means that we are unable to reconcile ourselves with the laws and constraints of this earth, neither with the inevitability of death nor with the evil that constantly threatens the end that God is moving all of creation towards.

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: Fontana Lions, 1980), 75.

[2] It’s interesting that the first thing that is named as being ‘good’ in the Bible is not God but ‘light’ (Gen 1.4) – light, to be sure, which appears at God’s bidding; light which is literally spoken into being. In fact, the word ‘good’ appears 12 times in Genesis 1–2 alone, suggesting that if creation is good, it must say something about the Creator and about the way that the Creator who alone is good in himself does not keep that goodness to himself, but longs to share it, longs that creation may mirror it and participate in it. So there is a sense in which creaturely goodness is always borrowed goodness. But what we are given to see in Jesus Christ is that God is in himself perfectly good and that God delights to share that goodness: He is the God who gives of himself so unbegrudgingly and without keeping any records.

[3] And if we read Psalms like Psalm 89, we see that God’s faithfulness to creation is undergirded by his covenant with creation. And we are reminded that creation is good because it is the theatre, the stage, the location upon which and in which the story of God’s covenant can be played out. So what creation is good for is being a object of God’s blessing. What creation is good for is creatures. What creation is good for is the resurrection of Jesus. God’s goodness has to do with God’s ‘beauty’ and God’s ‘excellence’. The Hebrew word for ‘good’ is tob and means ‘pleasant’ or ‘joyful’ or ‘agreeable’. And we see this sense in the Genesis account of creation itself, that when God creates, what God creates is good, even very good, i.e. ‘wholly functional and proper’. It’s not a statement about the moral worth or otherwise of creation. It’s a confession that creation is working, is fruitful and is beautiful. It’s a confession that creation reflects God’s creative goodness, reflects the fact that God is for creation, that God has planned nothing evil, reflects the fact that the pain and brokenness which set the scene from Genesis 3 onwards are at odds with God’s good intention for creation. Thinking more theologically, creation is good because it sets the stage upon which God’s action of creating sons and daughters in Christ might be carried out.

[4] As an aside, it might be worth noting that the Bible rarely describes God as ‘trustworthy’. The word ‘trustworthy’ is used to describe the posture of the person of faith, i.e., those who trust in God and in the promises of God, those who look to God and to God’s righteousness. What the Bible does bear witness to, however, is One who is in every sense worthy of our trust, and it points out why we have every reason to trust in God, and why only the fool would not trust in God, even when the circumstances call God and God’s trustworthiness into question.

[5] One way that the Bible bears witness to this is in recalling the way that God goes into battle against his enemies: ‘The LORD is good, a stronghold in a day of trouble; he protects those who take refuge in him, even in a rushing flood. He will make a full end of his adversaries, and will pursue his enemies into darkness’ (Nahum 1.7–8). Also noteworthy is that sometimes our experience of God’s goodness appears to be qualified. E.g., Lam 3.25; Ps 73.1. Of course, this begs the question of how Israel and then the Church came to believe that God is good. For it is not self-evident that this is indeed the case. So we read in Psalm 4.6, ‘There are many who say, “O that we might see some good!”’. To see God as good, therefore, seems to be something that does not come ‘naturally’ to us but requires the eyes of faith.

[6] Few have put the problem more succinctly than the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (perhaps the most famous atheist of the 20^th century) who argued that if God does not exist, it is meaningless to speak of ‘good’. He wrote: ‘The existentialist … finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that ‘the good’ exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only [people]. Dostoievsky once wrote, ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted’, and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist …’. Stephen Priest, ed., Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings (London/New York: Routledge, 2001), 32.

[7] Elie Wiesel, Night (trans. Stella Rodway; London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1960), 45.

[8] Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 183.

[9] John W. de Gruchy, Theology and Ministry in Context and Crisis: A South African Perspective (London: Collins, 1987), 102.

[10] Daniel Berrigan in Hans-Ruedi Weber, On a Friday Noon: Meditations Under the Cross (Grand Rapids/Geneva: Wm. B. Eerdmans/World Council of Churches, 1979), 28.

[11] Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 47, 49.

[12] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 41. The famous Scottish philosopher David Hume put it thus: ‘Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?’ David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Stilwell: Digireads.com Publishing, 2006), 63.

[13] Martin Buber, On Judaism (New York: Shocken Books, 1967), 224.

[14] James Bryan Smith, The Good and Beautiful God: Falling in Love with the God Jesus Knows (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 45.

[15] Cited in Ibid. 45–6.

[16] John Howard Yoder, A Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), 55.

[17] Cited in Julia Esquivel Velasquez, ‘A Letter from Central America’, International Review of Missions 66 (1977), 249–50. Also in Thorwald Lorenzen, Resurrection and Discipleship: Interpretive Models, Biblical Reflections, Theological Consequences (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995), 261–2.

[18] This means that in order to come to a place where we know that God is trustworthy and that God is good takes a miracle. It is not self-evident. It takes revelation. And it takes faith. And both revelation and faith are gifts. More specifically, it takes being taken down into death – being put to death in the death of Christ, being taken into his personhood, and into his sufferings.

[19] So Donald M. MacKinnon, ‘Atonement and Tragedy’ in Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays (ed. George W. Roberts and Donovan E. Smucker; Philadelphia/New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1968), 104: ‘It is a lesson to be learnt from tragedy that there is no solution of the problem of evil; it is a lesson which Christian faith abundantly confirms, even while it transforms the teaching by the indication of its central mystery. In the Cross the conflicting claims of truth and mercy are reconciled by deed and not by word. The manner of their reconciliation is something which lies beyond the frontier of our comprehension; we can only describe and re-describe’.

[20] Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1987), 46–7, 51.

[21] Ibid. 81–2.

Powerpoint slides here.

Marilynne Robinson on theology and writing

Here’s the ever-captivating and sapient Marilynne Robinson being interviewed by William Storrar, Director of the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, on the topic of doing theology and on writing theology:

To Mend the World (Tikkun Olam): a confluence of theology and the arts

The traditions of artistic expression and of Christian faith are richly intertwined. Artists help us to see differently. They draw attention to the order of things, and to their disorder. They help us to see the world’s beauty; they present us with its simplicity, and confront us with its tragedy. Now and again the work of artists becomes something more. Like all human gestures toward the truth of things, the work of artists can become an instrument through which God calls for our attention.

Attentiveness to God is also the task of Christian theology. Theology is, simply, a mode of attentiveness to the self-disclosure of God, and a striving to see the truth of things in light of that self-disclosure.

A group of us here in Dunedin are organising a conference and exhibition which will bring together artists and theologians to foster this intertwining.

The conference and exhibition are premised on the conviction that artists, theologians and people of faith have things to learn from one another, things about the complex inter-relationality of life, and about a coherence of things given and sustained by God.

The aim is to bring painters, poets, musicians, indeed, artists of all descriptions, together with theologians, and with people of faith, to explore a particular theme; can there be repair? Can there be a mending of the world, wounded as it is by war, by hatred, by exploitation and by neglect. We have chosen the Hebrew phrase ‘Tikkun Olam’ – to mend the world – to signal the conference theme, and to pose the question: Can there be repair? Can art and can theology tell the truth of the world’s woundedness and still speak of hope? Can poetry still be written after unspeakable tragedy, a concerto played, a brush taken up? Must it be written, played, or taken up, perhaps more than ever?

We invite you to join us in exploring this theme.

Conference Dates & Place

29–30 July 2011. Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership, Knox College, Arden Street, Dunedin.

Conference Speakers

The theme will be addressed by a range of speakers including Professor William Dyrness, Professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, California.

Exhibition Dates & Place

An exhibition of work that picks up the theme of the conference – To mend the world: Tikkun Olam – is also being organised and will run for a week over the period of the conference.

Invitation to Artists

Artists are invited to participate in a group exhibition to be held at a Dunedin gallery. Information about submissions is available here.

More information on both the conference and exhibition is available here.

2010: ‘It was the best of times …’

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only’. – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

Best books

Theology

Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ by T.F. Torrance (2009).
The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist by Angel F. Mendez Montoya (2009).
Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity by Paul D. Molnar (2009).
Christ the Key by Kathryn Tanner.
The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel As News by Christopher Morse.
On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene: Unpublished Lectures and Sermons by Ernst Käsemann.
An Alien in a Strange Land: Theology in the Life of William Stringfellow by Anthony Dancer.

Biography

Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir by Stanley Hauerwas.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906–1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance by Ferdinand Schlingensiepen. (For the record, I thought that Eric Metaxas’ ‘Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy was one of the most over-rated and poorly-reviewed books of the year. Clifford Green’s review, ‘Hijacking Bonhoeffer’, published in the Christian Century, 19 October 2010, pp. 34–9, is the review to read).

Ministry

Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral by Thomas Long (2009).
Concerning The True Care of Souls by Martin Bucer (2009).
The Promise of Despair: The Way of the Cross as the Way of the Church by Andrew Root.
The Resurrection of Ministry: Serving in the Hope of the Risen Lord by Andrew Purves.
George Herbert’s Pastoral: New Essays on the Poet and Priest of Bemerton edited by Christopher Hodgkins.

History

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide by Linda Melvern.
Encircled Lands: Te Urewera, 1820–1921 by Judith Binney.

Cooking

A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes by David Tanis (2008).
Harvest to Heat: Cooking with America’s Best Chefs, Farmers, and Artisans by Darryl Estrine.
In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite: 150 Recipes and Stories About the Food You Love by Melissa Clark.
Anjum’s New Indian by Anjum Anand.
Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine by René Redzepi.

Poetry

Angina Days: Selected Poems by Günter Eich.

Best albums

1. Officium Novum by Jan Garbarek & The Hilliard Ensemble.
2. The Age of Miracles by Mary-Chapin Carpenter.
3. Foundling by David Gray.
4. Scratch My Back by Peter Gabriel.
5. Sacrificium by Cecilia Bartoli.
6. Women and Country by Jakob Dylan.
7. 100 Miles From Memphis by Sheryl Crow.
8. Great and Small by Butterflyfish.
9. Downtown Church by Patty Griffin.
10. No Better Than This by John Mellencamp.

Honorable mentions: All Delighted People by Sufjan Stevens; The Age of Adz by Sufjan Stevens; Leave Your Sleep by Natalie Merchant; Go by Jónsi; April Uprising by The John Butler Trio; The Promise by Bruce Springsteen; The Astounding Eyes of Rita by Anouar Brahem; American VI: Aint No Grave by Johnny Cash; San Patricio by The Chieftains & Ry Cooder; In Person & On Stage by John Prine; How I Learned to See in the Dark by Chris Pureka.

Best films

1. How I Ended This Summer
2. Winter’s Bone
3. Abandoned
4. The Infidel
5. Shutter Island
6. Boy

Overrated films

Worst films

Best TV shows

1. An Idiot Abroad (Series 1)
2. Rev

Some Personal Highlights

Samuel arrived.
Found (what we hope is) a great school for Sinead.
Made some great friends.
Defended my PhD.
Participated in the historic first meeting of the United General Council of the World Communion of Reformed Churches, in Grand Rapids.
I went to my first, and possibly last, Leonard Cohen concert.
I began journalling … again.
I stopped wearing a watch.

Sarah Coakley on science and belief in God

Sarah Coakley shares two related articles on the relationship between science and belief in God. In the first, God and Evolution: A New Proposal, she argues that:

[I]t is vital to avoid, in the case of pre-cultural evolution, the presumption that “God” competes with the evolutionary process as a (very big) player in the temporal unfolding of “natural selection.”

Once we are released from that false presumption, “God” is no longer – and idolatrously – construed as problematically interventionist (or feebly failing in such) along the same temporal plane as the evolutionary process itself.

Rather, God is that-without-which-there-would-be-no-evolution-at-all. God is the atemporal undergirder and sustainer of the whole process of apparent contingency or “randomness,” yet – we can say in the spirit of Augustine – simultaneously closer to its inner workings than it is to itself.

As such, God is both “within” the process and “without” it. To put this in richly trinitarian terms: God, the Holy Spirit, is the perpetual invitation and lure of the creation to return to its source in the Father, yet never without the full – and suffering – implications of incarnate Sonship.

Once we see the possibility of understanding the contingency of pre-cultural evolution in this way, we need not – as so much science and religion “dialogue” has done in recent years – declare the evolutionary process as necessarily “deistically” distanced in some sense from God.

Rather, I propose in contrast that God is “kenotically” or self-sacrificially infused (not by divine loss or withdrawal, but by an over-generous pouring out) into every causal joint of the creative process, yet precisely without overt disruption of apparent “randomness.”

In response to the objection that evolutionary contingency – and genuine human freedom – appear to be logically compatible with secret divine guidance, Coakley suggests that ‘God is like a chess master playing an 8-year-old chess novice’.

Coakley then turns to the problem of suffering and sin, noting again that here ‘there is an equally seductive modern misapprehension to avert: the presumption that dying, or indeed evolutionary “extinction,” is the worst thing that can happen to anyone or thing’. Distancing herself from the heresy of Meliorism (of which PT Forsyth was also keen to combat), here Coakley avers that avoidable suffering, victimisation, and abuse are not to justified but are ‘to be heard christologically as an insistence that the deepest agony, loss, and apparent wastefulness in God’s creation may, from the perspective of atemporal divinity (and yet also in the Son’s agony and “wasted” death), be spanned by the Spirit’s announcement of resurrection hope’:

Thus, it is not that God has not intervened in the history of the evolutionary process to put right the ills of randomness and freedom.

For in one sense God is “intervening” constantly – if by that we mean that God is perpetually sustaining us, loving us into existence, pouring God’s self into every secret crack and joint of the created process, and inviting the human will, in the lure of the Spirit, into an ever-deepening engagement with the implications of the Incarnation, its “groanings” (as St Paul puts it in Romans 8), for the sake of redemption.

God, in short, is always intervening; but only rarely do we see this when the veil becomes “thin,” and the alignment between divine, providential will and evolutionary or human “cooperation” momentarily becomes complete.

Such, we might hypothesise, was Christ’s resurrection, which we call a miracle because it seems, from a “natural” and scientific perspective, both unaccountable and random.

Yet, from a robustly theological perspective, it might be entirely natural, the summation indeed of the entire trinitarian evolutionary process and thus its secret key.

In the second article, Bridging the Divide Between Theology and Science, Coakley builds on the aforementioned article and builds a case for ‘a model of science and theology as disciplines that mutually inspire, but chasten, each other’. Again, well worth reading.

Systematic Theology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Annual Conference

The Annual conference of STAANZ will be held at the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership, Knox College, Arden Street, Dunedin, from November 11–12, 2010.

The Conference will include the following papers:

Bruce Hamill, Why Practical Theology Amounts to Ecclesiology: clarifying issues in the current ecclesiology debate
Hugh Bowron, Walter Kasper on the Church and the Churches
Merv Duffy, The True Vine: The Ecclesiology of the First Catholic Missionaries in Aotearoa
Harold Hill, The Salvation Army as a case study of the clericalisation process
Nicola Hoggard Creegan, On the Church and Moral Character (Title to be confirmed)
Kevin Ward, Selling out the house of God?
Andrew Nicol, The Church As Detour: Reflections in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson
Andrew Torrance, Søren Kierkegaard on the Relationship between Human Agency and Divine Agency in the Process of Reconciliation
Don Fergus, Taking up Space on Earth: Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the Visbility of the Church
Mark Gingerich, Kierkegaard’s Understanding of Original Sin and its Implications for his Understanding of the Self.
Christopher Holmes, The Ecclesia and the Presence of Christ.
Myk Habets and Greg Liston, Propositions Toward a Third Article Ecclesiology: Methodological Criteria and Constitutive Features.
Graham Redding, Perspectives on Church and Ministry: Reflections on a Moderatorial Term
Adam Dodds, The Necessity of an Ecclesial Missiology
Alan Thomson, Ecclesiology Between Purpose and Place: Negotiating the Gap

More information is available here.

[Image: bobtravis @ Photography Blogger]

Hauerwas on Christian Ministry and Speaking Christian

‘God knows what possesses anyone to enter the ministry in our day. The lack of clarity about what makes Christians Christian, what makes the church the church, and continuing ambiguity in our diverse denominations about ordination itself should surely make anyone think twice about becoming a minister. Moreover the lack of consensus about what it might mean for anyone to act with authority in our society and the church cannot help but make those of us who are not ministers wonder about the psychological health of those who tell us they are called to the ministry.

Too often I fear the ministry is understood by many Christians as well as many who become ministers, to be but one expression of the more general category of something called a “helping profession.” A minister is a social worker with “a difference.” “The difference” is thought to have something to do with God, but it is not clear exactly what difference that difference is to make for the performance of your office.

As a result many who enter the ministry discover after a few years of doing the best they can to meet the expectations of those they serve— expectations such as whatever else you may do you should always be nice—end up feeling as if they have been nibbled to death by ducks. They do so because it is assumed that since pastors do not work for a living those whom the minister serves, or at least those who pay them, can ask the minister to be or do just about anything. Though it is often not clear how what they are asked to do is required by their ordination vows, those in the ministry cannot say “no” because it is not clear what their “job” is in the first place.

Many in the ministry try to protect themselves from the unlimited demands and expectations of their congregations by taking refuge in their families, some alternative ministry such as counseling, or, God help us, a hobby. Such strategies may work for a while, but often those who employ these strategies discover that no spouse can or should love another spouse that much; that even after you have done C.P.E. you are still stuck with the life you had before you were trained in C.P.E.; and a hobby turns out to be just that—a hobby.

The failure of such strategies, I think, throws some light on clergy misconduct. I wish I could attribute the sexual misconduct characteristic of some Methodist clergy to lust, but I fear that most people in the Methodist ministry do not have that much energy. I think the problem is not lust, but loneliness. Isolated by the expectations of the congregation, or the challenge of developing friendships with some in the church without those friendships creating divisions in the church, too often results in a profound loneliness for those in the ministry. Unfortunately, the attempt to overcome that loneliness can take the form of inappropriate behavior.

There is another alternative. You can become a scold urging the church to become more socially active in causes of peace and justice. This may earn you the title of being “prophetic,” but such a strategy may contribute to the incoherence of the ministerial task. For it is not at all clear why you needed to be ordained to pursue causes of peace and justice. It is a great challenge for ministers who would lead their congregations to be more socially active to do so in a manner that does not result in the displacement of worship as the heart of the church.

… what you have learned to do in seminary is read. By learning to read you have learned to speak Christian. That you have learned to read and speak means you have been formed in a manner to avoid the pitfalls I have associated with the contemporary ministry. For I want to suggest to you that one of the essential tasks of those called to the ministry in our day is to be a teacher. In particular, you are called to be a teacher of language. I hope to convince you that if you so understand your task, you will discover that you have your work cut out for you. But that is very good news because you now clearly have something to do.

Yet in the book of James (3:1-5) we are told:

not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits.

The problem, according to James, is no one has found a way to tame the tongue. Because the tongue cannot be tamed it becomes a “restless evil, full of deadly poison.” The tongue is the source of discord because it at once makes it possible to bless the Lord and Father yet curse those who are made in the image of God. That we bless and we curse from the same mouth is but an indication of how dangerous the tongue is for those who have learned God will care for his world through patient suffering.

If James is right, and I certainly think he is, then how can I suggest to you that if you are to serve the church well in the ministry you must become a teacher and, in particular, a teacher of a language called Christian? I do so because I think the characterization of the challenges facing those going into the ministry is the result of the loss of the ability of Christians to speak the language of our faith. The accommodated character of the church is at least partly due to the failure of the clergy to help those they serve know how to speak Christian. To learn to be a Christian, to learn the discipline of the faith, is not just similar to learning another language. It is learning another language.

But to learn another language, to even learn to speak well the language you do not remember learning, is a time-consuming task. You are graduating from seminary, which I assume means that you have begun to learn how to speak as well as teach others how to talk, as we say in Texas, “right.” For as I suggested there is an essential relation between reading and speaking—it is through reading that we learn how to discipline our speech so that we say no more than needs to be said. I like to think that seminaries might be best understood as schools of rhetoric where, as James suggests, our bodies—and the tongue is flesh—are subject to disciplines necessary for the tongue to approach perfection.

That the tongue is flesh is a reminder that speech is, as James suggests, bodily. To speak well, to talk right, requires that our bodies be habituated by the language of the faith. To be so habituated requires constant repetition. Without repetition—and repetition is but another word for the worship of God—we are in danger of losing the grammar of the faith. At least part of your task as those called to the ministry is to help us, as good teachers do, acquire the habits of speech through the right worship of God’.

– Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Speaking Christian: A Commencement Address for Eastern Mennonite Seminary’, The Mennonite Quarterly Review 84 (2010), 441–44.

Interviews

The folks over at Grace Communion International have recently uploaded the following interviews:

Robert Walker on TF Torrance’s lectures and Christ’s humanity for us
Daniel Thimell on Calvin, Barth and the completeness of Christ’s work
Gerrit Scott Dawson on the God who knows, loves and transforms
Chris Kettler on the three-fold form of the Word of God
George Hunsinger on TF Torrance, Barth and election

Reading Genesis 1:2

A guest post by Rev. Dr John Emory McKenna. [John, a student of TF Torrance, serves as a Doctrinal Advisor to the Worldwide Church of God in California, as Professor & Vice-President at the World Mission University in Los Angeles, and as Adjunct Professor with Haggard Graduate School of Theology. He has published The Setting in Life for The Arbiter of John Philoponus, 6th Century Alexandrian Scientist and The Great AMEN of the Great I-AM: God in Covenant with His People in His Creation]

About Genesis 1:2, Karl Barth has written, “This verse has always constituted a particular crux interpretum – one of the most difficult in the whole Bible – and it is no small comfort to learn from Gunkel that it is a ‘veritable mythological treasure chamber.’”[1] After a rather thorough examination and analysis of the history of the exegesis this verse, the great Swiss theologian concluded in a fine print section of his reading, “Our only option is to consider v.2 as a portrait, deliberately taken from myth, as the world which according to His revelation was negated, rejected, ignored and left behind in His actual creation.”[2] Barth develops his understanding of ‘Das Nichtige’ (‘The Nothingness’), as belonging to the mystery of evil in the Biblical world, a world he reminds us that is very different from the one with which we are already only too familiar. The ‘chaos (תהו) and emptiness (בהו), ‘darkness’ (חשך) and ‘deep’ (תהום) of the ‘waters’ (מים) over which the Spirit of God ‘broods’ (מרחפת) in Genesis 1:2 are terms, then, that belong to the myths and idols of those views of the world that exists outside of God’s Revelation of His ‘Very Good’ Creation. Genesis 1:2 belongs to a confession, in common with the various ‘creation epics’ found among the nations of the Ancient Near East, that contradicts the perfection inherent to the Creation Week according Israel’s view of the world.[3]

In this post, I will argue that Barth’s understanding of the significance of Genesis 1:2 and his assertion that ‘Das Nichtige’ of Israel’s Creation Theory is only a partial grasp of the intent and purpose of the author of the confession of the Creation Week. I would argue that Barth’s grasp of the meaning of Genesis 1:2, achieved in the context of a general consensus accomplished by modern or post-modern methods of historical-critical methods of interpretation applied to Genesis, is only a partial understanding of the purpose of the significance of the confession. I will argue that, for suppositional reasons, the modern mind has become more comfortable with reading the creation out of chaos of v. 2 as the intent of the confession, when we tend to disregard the implication of doctrine of creatio ex nihilo found within the Judeo-Christian tradition of interpretation.[4] The willingness to divorce our understanding of chaos, emptiness, darkness, and the deep of the waters, over which the Spirit of God is said to ‘brood’, is the willingness of modern Biblical Theologians to remain separated from the meaning of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo of v. 1, a meaning with which the early fathers of the Church steadily wrestled.[5] We will argue that the preference for reading the concept of ‘creation out of something’, without a confession of the ‘creation out of nothing’ doctrine, perpetuates a fragmentation in our understanding of the meaning of ‘Day One’ in the Creation Week inherent in the confession of Israel’s Moses, the great prophet of her history among the nations. We need to recover the interpretation of the early fathers of the Church and obtain a fresh grasp of the theological wholeness of the confession in our time our theology and its relationship with science.

The confession of the Creation Week possesses, from beginning to end, a wholeness the polemical power of which is purposed to call Israel among the nations in God’s Creation away from her idols and myths about the gods and the world. It posits a background whereby the other creation epics prevalent in the Ancient Near East are denied their claims to the reality of the world, of mankind, and of God. It would transform any language into that service that is true to the intention and purpose of the Voice Moses heard in the Burning Bush and in the events of the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. ‘The Beginning’ according to Moses’ claims that no other Voice than this Voice is to heard as the Creator of the world and its mankind. Against all the idol and myth-making among the nations surrounding Israel in the ANE, Israel as the People of God must bear witness to this One, who as the Creator is the Great I-AM and Lord of the world’s redemption. In the face of Moses’ witness as the Prophet in the Ancient World, mankind is to throw away its myths and idols about the world of the gods. This One is the Redeemer-Creator who as the Great I-AM would be known as the One He truly is, the Creator of ‘the Beginning’ in the Beginning.

Genesis 1:2 may not be construed as possessing, in common with the creation epics found and read among the nations in the ANE, a language influenced in its significance by the myths and gods of the ancient peoples, but a language meant to transform their beliefs into the real service of the Revelation that drove Moses to his confession. We will claim that, just as the Exodus of Israel is something new in the history of the world, Moses’ confession of the Creator, based upon the Revelation with him of the Redeemer, is something new in the history of the race’s understanding of the Creation and the Creator. The One of this Revelation is to be known as the true Creator of the heavens and the earth. The One of this Revelation, the Redeemer of Israel among the nations in His Creation, is to be known against the myths of the gods of the ancient peoples. This One is the True Creator who possesses nothing in common with the gods of the ancient worlds, with their cosmogonies, with their interactions with our kind, with the idol-making common to the times. Rather, with this One the reality of the world as God’s Creation is to known in its nature, free from the magic and the superstitions of these peoples. This is the One who is Israel’s Lord and God, the One who redemptive acts with Israel would have His People to know their true Creator. With His acts to deliver Israel from her bondage to Egyptian gods and Egypt’s Pharaoh, wrought through the priestly and prophetic servant of God Moses was called to be, Israel is commanded to understand and to throw away all her gods, her Mesopotamian gods, her Egyptian gods, her Canaanite gods, and so forth, and know Him as the Great I-AM He is. When Moses employs, then, the terms of his confession among the nations in the ancient world, he would transform their meaning and give them a new significance never before heard in the history of the world. We do well, I believe, to hear them on his terms and not our own.

The language of Moses’ confession, then, transforms the terms that may be found in common among the peoples of the nations in the ancient world into meaning that serves the Voice of God in His Beginning of the heavens and the earth and so forth. The Voice that spoke with him from the flames of the Burning Bush at Horeb is the Voice that speaks in the Creation Week. The events of the Exodus of Israel from Egypt all belong to this Voice. This is the Voice Moses learns to confess as the Creator with His Creation. To Israel with this Voice is given the knowledge that her Redeemer is none other than the Creator of the Creation. Moses’ confession is purposed to serve this Voice with an intention that belongs to the redemption of Israel in the Exodus and the knowledge of her Lord and God, the Creator of the Beginning. This is the One Lord God Israel must hear and follow. This is the Voice of the Great I-AM the One Lord God is. This is the Creator of the holy ground on which Moses stands at Horeb and on which Israel must always stand. This is the Creator. His Beginning is the Beginning confessed against all idols and idol-making about the gods of the world. This is the Lord God of space, time, and all things that exist as created realities. The power of Moses’ polemic ought never be allowed to escape our attention. It belongs to what is universal. It belongs to what is particular. It belongs to what mankind is under the heavens and upon the earth as rooted in this Self-Revelation of the Great I-AM the Lord God is with Moses, His Servant. The confession of the formation of ‘Day One’ of the Creation Week belongs to this Revelation. It is with this Beginning that Moses knows the ‘Very Good’ orders of the Creation Week, blessed by God. It is in the light of the Great I-AM the Redeemer is with His People among the nations that Israel can confess the Creator and His Creation.[6]

Israel’s history among the nations in God’s Creation then possesses a prophetic and priestly power we need to learn to grasp. Israel is made to bear witness to her Redeemer, Her Deliverer, as the Creator, who is none other than this Great I-AM that sent Moses for His People to Egypt. This One and no other ‘one’ delivers her from her bondage to her idols among the nations. No other One than this One gave her the Torah and Tabernacle of her history. No other One than this One freed her to serve Him as His Witness among the nations. This is the One and Only One, against all idols and idol-making, Israel must serve in her time and times in the world. The whole history of the Creation, Moses affirms, belongs to the priestly and prophetic power of Israel’s witness to this Creator and this Creation. Thus, the significance of the use of the Names, Lord and God, that Israel employs in her history, is to be found with the Voice of the Great I-AM. He is the One with her in His covenanted relationship for her in the world that gives meaning to her history and her language. We need steadily to hear the polemical nature of the argument of Moses’ confession from its beginning to its vision for her future in the world. We would argue that Moses’ confession of the Beginning is to be read, against all the idols and idol-making and mythologizing with the cosmogonies of the ancient peoples recorded throughout the ANE, is made with Israel’s priestly and prophetic service against these views of the world among the nations because it is rooted in the Self-Revealing and Self-Naming of the Great I-AM this Lord and God is for Israel and her history among the nations. It is the power of this redemption and its judgment that is also the history of the Redeemer-Creator of the whole world. When we will not to understand this ‘Beginning’, created out of nothing by this Creator and no other, we will not to understand the Divine Freedom and Sovereign Authority that commanded Moses with the People of God in the
Revelation to which the whole of the Bible is witness. When we will to understand Moses’ Confession in the service of this Revelation, we will to understand the heavens and the earth as home for mankind, created in the Image of God, the space and time that belongs holily to the real ‘Beginning’ begun in the Beginning by this One and no other ‘one’.

Moses confession thus demythologizes the ancient views of gods, men, and the nature of the world. The race is to be freed from the grip the caprice of these gods and their mythical places. Men are no longer to seek to appease with magic rituals and moralizing sacrifices pantheons of these deities. The superstitions of times past are not to shape and form the civilizations of the future. God, the Lord, has judged these gods as no-gods. They are less or worse than nothing. They belong to the wastelands of time and times past in the time of world history. In the light of Israel’s Exodus from the Egyptian pantheon, then, walks with Israel, as He did once upon a time in Paradise, the Creator God, known as the Lord, who would convert all peoples from the mythologies of their gods and cults to the freedom whose truth rests in the Great I-AM He truly is for them, a new found freedom made firm in the light of the Voice of the Great I-AM with Moses, the Servant of God. He is endowed with priestly and prophetic power for Israel’s freedom from her bondage to the idols and for her Redeemer-Creator, the One Creator of the heavens and the earth and their mankind as the Creation.

‘The Beginning’ of Moses’ Confession is to be understood, hand in glove then, as embracing the significance of Genesis 1:2, within the orders of the Creation established as the ‘First Day’ of the Creation Week in the life of Israel as the People of God among the nations. The whole of Week is blessed as ‘Very Good’ and a finished work with a polemical nature, then, we cannot allow to escape our attention. The gods and the myths of the nations are not ‘true’ about the Lord God of the Beginning of the World and its Mankind. The power of the ‘brooding’ (מרחפת) of God’s Spirit in v.2, interacting with ‘the Nothingness’ of the Creation in this ‘Beginning’, is to resonate with the whole of the blessed and very good Creation. Our understanding of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo with His act in this ‘Beginning’ (ברא) as the God and Lord He is must be accomplished within the orders of this wholeness. We are invited to read the ‘speaking’ of God in verse 3 in resonance with ‘the Nothingness’ of v. 2. and the ‘brooding’ in concert with verses 4 and 5 and the formation of ‘Day One’ of this Week. Genesis 1:1 is thus meant to entail all the acts of the Creator in the Creation Week. We are invited to listen in on an account of the harmony of the ‘Days’ from the Beginning to the Blessed finish of the work of Creation. Without this concert, we will miss the beauty of the Week, its polemical intention and it purpose as background for Moses’ confession about the ten generations that are told as the Book of Genesis in Moses’ service to the Great I-AM. We purpose that we are meant to hear as listeners a symphony intended to move the hearts of the People of God about what is true and beautiful about the Beginning of a world that is indeed to be seen as ‘Very Good’ with its Mankind and its fall from the One He truly is.

We need to seek to understand the wholeness of all the particular actions from the Beginning to the ‘Day One’ of verses 1–5 then. These are acts that together shape a harmony of action that makes ‘Day One’ what it actually is in the confession. They are the acts of the One who is the Redeemer-Creator of the Self-Revelation Moses experienced at the Burning Bush, at Sinai, and so forth, for Israel, as the priestly-prophet-servant of the Lord God he became for Israel among the nations in God’s Creation. It is this Revelation that stands as the origin of the power to create something new in world history, a new event in the space of the world this comes against all the idols and idol-making and myth-making that belong to mankind’s gods and its past times in the history of the world. It is the power of this Day from this Beginning to which Israel’s faith belongs in this world. It is truly something new, a beginning like no other beginning ever found on the mind of the human race in its past with its gods. It is this ‘the Beginning’ that is not any other kind of beginning. It is the Beginning not out of a war against chaos but out of nothing with a freedom then that with transcendent power transforms out of the something that chaos and emptiness is into what is the will of the Hand of God. Here is the place where God has chosen to speak into existence the orders of His light. Out of nothing and out of this something the First Day of the Creation Week, from the Beginning is given existence. When we read Genesis 1 with a sense of this wholeness, I believe we may and we must interpret v.2 in a resonance with the whole of in the ‘Very Good’ Creation, the blessed and finished work of the God who is the true Creator of the world (Genesis 2:1–3) against all other views about Him.

Barth found among scholars both ready support and opposition to his position on v. 2. We may survey their interpretations in Bernard W. Anderson’s collection of essays about God’s Creation from eight Old Testament scholars.[7] Hermann Gunkel thought that the chaos and so forth of v.2 ‘belongs to mythology and cannot be viewed as the invention of an author, least of all the person of P’.[8] Gerhard von Rad believed[9] that the Creation, as read in conjunction with texts in the Old Testament other than Genesis 1, was written under the influence of Egyptian Wisdom, when Israel is dependent upon such Wisdom for her grasp of the skills for success in life.[10] Then the Jesuit Father, Dennis McCarthy, suggests that we ask the wrong question when we think to contend that Genesis 1 means to teach us the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.[11] The text is concerned with what German scholars have named Chaoskampf, a ‘war on chaos’. The Creator is thought to be a warrior at war with the ‘chaos’ and ‘emptiness’ that belongs to the ‘dark depths’ of the primeval ‘waters’, thus easily compared to what we read across the mythologies about the Creation among the nations. Westermann argues that Genesis 1:1–2:4a reflects a composition whose long history shows us a steady struggle and evolution of understanding of the myths and legends about the world. The lasting value of the texts in time and times are a result of this long evolution in our understanding of the nature of the world. In this sense, we may interpret the developments in the history of the cosmologies of the Western World, the Ptolemaic Cosmology of the Middles Age, the Newtonian ‘System of the World of the Age of the Enlightenment, and even Einstein’s Universe of Light as all related to the concerns of the confession Genesis 1 is.[12] Reminding his readers that the confession must possess in this way some eschatological significance, H.H. Schmidt believes that the ‘righteousness’ of the Creator must be implied in the significance of Creation texts. Moral law and natural law must possess similar values, even though they are difficult to heard as one law.[13] Working with the assumptions made by both Zimmerli and von Rad about the relationship between redemptions and creation, H.J. Hermission is yet unable to understand that the chaos and emptiness and so forth of Genesis 1:2 can be a part of what Creation is. Creation is still conceived as something done perfectly from ‘the Beginning’, without any chaos or emptiness and so forth belonging to its nature.[14] All of these scholars affirm with Anderson that the Chaoskampf , the war in this ‘Beginning’ is against the chaos and emptiness of v.2. The consensus is that Genesis 1:2 signifies some condition of pre-creation that is contrary to the Creation, when the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo does not obtain in the confession of the Week.[15]

Only Walter Eichrodt[16] and G.M. Landes[17] wanted to argue for the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo as obtaining in our exegesis of Genesis 1:1–3. Landes wrote concerning v.2 that ‘At the beginning of its creation, the earth is empty, enclosed by waters in total darkness. But when God’s Spirit moved over the waters to separate them, the earth can be born, so to speak, i.e. it can emerge from its primordial darkness into the light of time, its surrounding waters filled with plants, animals, and humanity.’[18] But with all of this interpretation of ‘Day One’, we find the study of R.C. Clements, investigating the covenant relationship from Abraham to David in Israel’s long history among the nations, without mention of Genesis 1. The Pentateuch is thus read without a grasp of the wholeness between Creation and Redemption, between Creator and Redeemer, as Israel’s covenanted witness to the Lord God of the Revelation in the histories of the nations in the world. The Witness of the Bible to this Revelation with Moses may become lost upon our understanding of its relations with us.[19] It is little wonder that Karl Barth, with his rejection of ‘natural theology’, can conceive that no antecedent conceptual system may provide a framework for interpreting the texts and he must be free to exegete them from any particular cosmological development we might experience from the history of science in our civilization. His opposition to the German Church’s association with Hitler and the Nazi Socialism at the heart of World War II could certainly provide the need for his argument against the spell of the consensus on v.2 on modern understanding of the confession of the Beginning according to Moses in the light of the Incarnation.[20]

After observing the various possible interpretations of v.2 in his time, Barth read with Augustine and Luther, and decided with Zimmerli on the ‘rudiments’ of the verse. He concludes that it possesses no positive connection with v.1.[21] He then contends for the position that v.2 belongs to a past that was never the will of God, a time the Creator never intended to fashion. The tohu and bhohu, ‘chaos and emptiness or the ‘unformed and unsubstantiated’, mean to point as a whole the reader to the ‘rudimentary’condition of the Creation that existed outside of the will of the Spirit of God, when the Spirit ‘…is not known in His reality and therefore hovers and broods over it impotently or wordlessly.’[22] The ‘speaking’ of the Word of God against this primeval condition does what the Spirit could not do. It posits an order of time and times of the ‘light’ that belongs to the ‘speaking’ of God. The argument then follows the views of the ‘Priestly Writer’, in some relationship with the ‘Yahwist’, and the prophets of Israel who contend for the creation of ‘things’ as perfectly good, over which the Spirit of God once brooded so impotently. Genesis 1:2 are the ‘old things’, ‘the things that have passed away’, and according to 2 Corinthians 5:17, ‘the things’ that must vanish in created time and times. Such ‘rudimentary things’ belong to a past that has been superseded, when evil has been rooted out of the Creation, by the time of light in the world’s order.[23] Therefore, Genesis 1:2 posits that which can only be found outside of God’s will for His Creation, even from ‘the Beginning’.[24]

With this position, Barth has thus embraced a very common rendering of the exegesis of the v. 2. In contrast, Brevard Childs, while addressing these same problems, concludes that there was and must be a real connection between v.1 and v.2 and that the ‘brooding’ of the Spirit of God in v.2, the power of God in v.1, and the speaking of God in v.3 must be heard to resonate with one another in some way for any full appreciation of what ‘Day One’ means in the confession. In this way, a full chord of action is struck in ‘the Beginning’ that must be heard with the divine intention and authoritative purpose of a wisdom with which the confession has to do. It is because of this Will and Wisdom that the confession’s polemic against the mythologies of the idol makers of the ancient world may be understood with its prophetic thrust. It is the resonance of this chord that allows the exegete to hear the uniqueness of Moses’ contentions. It is this resonance that allows the interpreter to hear the prophetic power of Moses’ affirmation of the times with Israel. It is this resonance that allows the Great I-AM who is the Lord God of the Revelation in the Exodus of Israel from Egypt to be understood as the Creator of ‘the Beginning’ and the Only One that Israel is commanded to love with all of her heart and strength and might (Deuteronomy 6:4). The One who is the Lord of Israel’s redemption in time and times is none other than the Creator of all the time and times that is ‘the heavens and the earth.’[25] The emphatic use of the verb ‘to be’ in v.2, rather than signifying a disconnect with v.1, affirms concretely that the whole of the Creation is, with its particular orders experienced upon ‘the earth’, belong to a universal created and sustained according to the power of the Spirit of God’s embrace with this ‘Beginning’. The primordial condition of the world’s particulars are thus made to wait on the ‘Speaking’ of God and His ‘light’.[26] It is this world, before the time when ‘light’ was spoken into existence, that the clause intends to signify, this world of time past in the formation of the First Day. The verse thus signifies the condition of the earth under the heavens in a span of time that belongs to a duration before the speaking of God occurred and before the purpose of light gave the order of this time upon the earth in God’s Creation. The emphatic use of the verb ‘to be’ signifies the dynamical nature of the relationship between God, His Spirit, and His Speaking in the Beginning, when the divine actions of creating, brooding, and speaking all, each in their own ways, shape the cause of a world that is meant to be a home for mankind.

The ‘dark’ continues to exposit, then, this signification of the ‘chaos and emptiness’. Childs can consider its meaning as closely related to what death is, opposed to the ‘light’ and the life of the world. But for Childs, the ‘deep’ (תהום) belongs to the primordial waters in relationship to the Spirit of God possesses both negative and positive power (Deuteronomy 32:11). This is no ‘wind’ of God but real power that, when resonated with the meaning of ‘create’ (‘bara’, ברא), removes the confession from comparative into polemical relations with the myths of the gods and the cosmogonies of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and so forth. For Childs, the confession is to be read as the kind of transformed language I have already discussed. The ‘theogonies’ of the polytheism of the ancient peoples found in the history of the Ancient Near East world are to be transformed into serves of the Revelation and Prophecy of the Lord God with Israel among them.

Yet Childs embraces the notion that a ‘Priestly Writer’ from the post-exilic period in Israel’s history, as the compiler of the Genesis 1, and the ‘Yahwist’ of the Monarchial period are correlated to form two accounts of the Creation far after the time and times of Moses, with all the questions about their intentions and purposes with us to this day. Childs can finally write about the two accounts: Both accounts (P= 1:1–2:4a, J=2:4b–25) begin according to an ancient convention by describing the effects of creation in contrast to a condition which prevailed previously (1:2, 2:5–6),[27] leaving ambiguous any resolution to the problems of myth, reality, and Israel’s confession of the Creation.[28]

Among the more conservative exegetes of v.2 we continue to read a level of understanding that does not reach into the real significance of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. While not identifying v.2 with the mythologies found among the polytheists of the Ancient Near East and while understanding the terms of the verse to speak of the actual Creation in ‘the Beginning’ as not in contradiction with v.1, Bruce Waltke, a conservative scholar about the methods of the historical-critical schools of interpretation, makes no mention of ‘creation out of nothing’ as significant to the confession and the stories of its generations.[29] The Jerusalem Bible can still translate v.2: ‘And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was on the surface of the deep. And a wind of God moved over the surface of the waters.’ We remain, left and right, a long way from taking seriously the Judeo-Christian tradition of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo in ‘the Beginning’, according to the divine words of Moses’ priestly-prophetic-polemical confession of Israel’s past and present and future among the nations of the Creation that is the work of the Great I-AM the Lord God is His People in the world.

Yet when we read some older exegetes on v.2, we find no sense of the influence of mythologies upon the intent and purpose to be read as ‘Day One’ of the Creation Week. The days and nights of the first light and the first darkness belong to God’s ‘Good’ Creation, to the space and time that is the Creation before the Fall of Adam. Unlike most modern or post-modern exegetes, we find the willingness to argue for the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.[30] When we go back even further to John Calvin, we can read the Reformer’s belief that v.2 intends to signify the ‘confused’ place of the Creation, the status of which is sustained for the purpose of the speaking into existence of the ‘light’ and its orders as the heavens and the earth. We also read that the wholeness of this created reality is a result of the dynamical actions of God, the Spirit of God, and the Speaking of God in ‘the Beginning’ of ‘the heavens and the earth’. v.2 may then be read rightly as a part of the prophetic power of Moses’ confession, far from any embrace of the mythologies of the Ancient Near Eastern peoples.[31] If we go even further back to the early fathers of the Church, we find an even greater grasp of the polemical nature of Moses’ confession and the prophet’s power to grasp conceptually the wholeness of the meaning of the doctrine of ‘creation out of nothing’, creation that is sustained out of the nothing as well as out of the something that is described in v.2, something that waits as ‘cherished’ the ‘Speaking’ of God and the existence of light in its midst.[32] When we read as a whole in this way the existence of the heavens and the earth, with all the appropriate differentiations in the dynamics of this active chord of integration dependent upon the Freedom of God, the Spirit of God, and the Speaking God as the Creator of the Creation, then I believe we are getting in touch with Moses’ confession of ‘the Beginning’ of Israel’s history in the history of the Creation.[33]

What may we make of the intention and purpose of the confession in a positive way for us today? I have argued against the consensus in our day about its meaning and significance, and that Genesis 1:2 is better interpreted by attending to the earlier exegetes of the Genesis 1. Modern critical-historical scholarship may possess sensitivities unknown to the early fathers of the Church, who may seem quite quaint as some level to us today, but I would argue that, for all our technical progress, we are in danger in our time of the loss of the conceptual tools once developed in our history, tools the power of which were meant to be used to integrate the transcendent and the phenomenal levels of realities implicit and explicit in the confession the passage is. The ‘Very Good’ Creation of God, the Creator, blessed as His ‘finished’ (שבת) work, needs to be understood as a wholeness the particulars of which are to be dynamically integrated beautifully and truthfully with the ‘Good’ God has created in the Beginning. The whole with its parts belong to the Hand and Spirit and Speaking of God, the One who from ‘the Beginning’ with His Seeing and Differentiating (v. 4) and His Naming of things (v. 5), caused ‘Day One’ to be what it is in the Creation Week.[34] What has been revealed to the Moses of Israel’s Exodus and his confession of the Great I-AM the Lord God is in the history of His People and in the history of His Creation belongs to an action the acts of which are to be heard resonating together as one and many in an harmony that belongs to the symphony between the transcendent and the phenomenal inherent in the meaning of the confession.[35] It is with this purpose that Moses becomes the enemy of all idol and myth-making among the peoples in his time. It is with this intention that the priestly-prophet can general Israel from Egypt towards the Promise Land, when Israel’s time past and time present and time future belong to a created time that is marked with God’s time for His People in His Creation. It is in this way that we may read the confession of the orders of light and time that belong to the Beginning that marks Israel’s history with the Providence, Presence, and Prophecy of her Redeemer-Creator. There is nothing then in Genesis 1 that is to be confessed as ‘evil’. Nothing is to be understood here in opposition to or in contradiction to God’s Divine Freedom and Sovereign Authority and Power to will to act with wisdom as the Lord God of all space and time and so forth, as their Redeemer and Creator. When we say that He ‘created out of nothing’ the world that is the world that is this one and no other, against all idols, we mean a ‘nothingness’ that belongs, if as the past of His Creation, to His ‘Very Good’ Creation, blessed as His Finished Work and to be celebrated as the origin of all that Sabbath must mean to His People.

Genesis 1:2 ought to be understood, then, as laying down a condition that is cherished by the Spirit of God, and into which the God who is free to speak does speak and did speak the orders of light into the time and space of v.2, moving it to become a home for Mankind as that created reality made both out of nothing and out of something into the ‘Very Good’ and ‘Finished’ work it is of Him, the Great I-AM of Moses’ confession. In this way, human experience is confessed as bound up, under the heavens and upon the earth, with the evenings and mornings of the time and times the world of light is. As ‘day’ and ‘night’ then, the first ‘evening and morning’ of ‘Day One’ belong both phenomenally and transcendently to what Man is at home under the heavens on the earth. The created reality of the heavens and the created reality of the earth with the created reality of Mankind, male and female, are given their form and content in this place as the Image of God. The rational unity and objectivity of the Creation is this whole with these parts and no other. Even today, we may not allow the phenomenal-empirical realities of Moses’ confession to become divorced from the invisible and non-observable dimensions in the dynamical reality of the contingent wholeness of these created orders, given by the Hand and Spirit and Word of God to be what they are, according to Moses’ confession. This is, I believe, Moses’ confession of the Beginning of a world that is the background, primordial, primeval, and ancestral of Israel’s witness with her history among the nations in God’s Creation. We do well in our time, I believe, as best we can and as far as we may to spend our time seeking to penetrate as deeply and profoundly as we can into the significance of its intent and purpose and significance from the Beginning even with us on the moon and in space today. I would like to see our schools recover an attention to this Beginning and spend whole semesters on it as foundation to our theologies and sciences in our time.

Perhaps a short survey of the work of John Philoponus, the great theologian and physicist of the Museum at Alexandria, will suffice to draw out some of the content such a course could take, against great consensus we have developed among our scholars today. Even with the ‘Grammarian’ beginning to obtain today some of the credit he deserves as forerunner in the ancient world to the science of Galileo and so forth,[36] much of our appreciation of him does not yet shake itself loose from his condemnation by the Byzantium East and the Sixth Ecumenical Council of the Church in AD 680.[37] No one has championed Philoponus, not just as a commentator in his time on the works of Aristotle, but as the theologian in the early Church whose thought sought most profoundly to penetrate into the nature of the relationship between the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Redeemer-Creator of the world, and the conceptual foundations necessary for the development of a real empirical science, than Professor Thomas F. Torrance.[38] Philoponus needs to be given credit, not only for his contributions to the developments we have experienced with Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and even Einstein,[39] but for the success of his ‘thought experiments’ and the conceptual tools he was able to develop to penetrate into the real ‘nature’ of physics and cosmology of the world and argue against Aristotle and the Neo-Platonists of his day. We find the secret to his ‘thought-experiments’ lies with the fecundity of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo the Alexandrian believed was bound up the Incarnation of the Word, pre-incarnate in the Old Testament’s witness, become flesh in the New Testament’s witness to the Great I-AM the Lord God is. The revolutionary aspects of his success is found in the way he allowed the Incarnation and Creation ‘out of nothing’ to resonate together to inform a dynamical view of the nature of the Cosmos. His development of a ‘light theory’ and his ‘impetus theory’ together appear compellingly as a field physics of a dynamical nature that cannot, a priori, be grasped in all of its depths. He finds by integrating the wholeness of things with the particulars of things in a open-structured effort to grasp the nature of the world with the transcendent reality of the Great I-AM revealed in the Jesus Christ, the Word come as a man in the Cosmos, the power to disclose the actual laws by which things are experienced in this nature. Thus, he lays the ground for the theoretical-experiential science whose laws we still seek to understand today, when a new window onto the ‘glorious beauty of the fundamental laws’[40] of the ‘nature’ of the world belongs on our horizons. The dynamical reciprocities of his categories of thought, entailing both the uncreated and created realities of God and the world, may very well serve to give us that poise allowing us to make real progress in science in our times. We need with the same freedom he knew to be able to deal with an objectivity the Universe is as God’s Creation, especially now that we possess a sense of a Big Bang Beginning to the space/time of the world today.[41] Integration of theory and experiment is just as vital for us now as it was for the thought of Philoponus. Because of his belief, he was able to articulate theories of the Cosmos, against the Master Aristotle and the Eternity of the World, whose roots in the ground, the holy ground, belong to the Divine Power of the Incarnate Logos as the Redeemer-Creator of this world as our home. The beauty and truth of this kind, argued the Alexandrian, opposes all the gods and the mythologies the Greeks knew well with a science grounded in a belief seeking real understanding of the contingent rationality and unity of the heavens and the earth as they have come from the Hand and Spirit and Speaking of the Creator, as they have come from the transcendent One and truly free God, with a wholeness that takes us quite beyond the dualistic splits we read in Aristotle’s physics. There exists no logical necessity between God and the heavens in this poise. There is no arbitrariness in this poise. All dualistic splits that would cut in two the chord of the symphony of the Redeemer-Creator the Great I-AM truly is are to be overcome. Perhaps we may say that what Moses was to the gods of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Canaan, Philoponus was to the gods of the Greeks and the Pagans.[42]

The polemical nature of the Grammarian’s theological science and scientific theology was met with more than fierce opposition both within and without the Church. Debates raged throughout Justinian’s Empire, East and West, and John Philoponus found himself in the midst of them. In those times, the relationship between theology and science could indeed pit Athens against Jerusalem, the Philosopher or Scientist against Christian Dogma.[43] We would argue with Philoponus and the fathers of the early Church whose thought he inherited, though against much modern or post-modern critical-analytical trends in our efforts to interpret the ‘logic’ of Genesis 1:2, have real and definite contribution to make to our struggles to understand in our own times. Not the way that the ANE mythologies and cosmogonies viewed the world, but the way of Moses’ confession ‘In the Beginning’ will be the way we make real progress in our futures. The Self-Revelation of the Self-Naming and Self-Defining Lord God who spoke with Moses as the Great I-AM in the Burning Bush, with us now as the Incarnate Lord God, is still as vital to our civilization as ever.[44] The fulfillment of the purpose of this Great I-AM in the ‘fullness of times’ needs more than ever no symbolic or subjective appreciation today. We need to be able to teach the confession with that power and authority that drove it into existence in the Beginning. We need to be in touch with the Hand and Spirit and Word whose logic would deliver us from our idols and free us for our destinies with Him. If we are to read Moses’ confession as the priestly-prophecy it is in Israel’s history among the nations within the real history of the space/time of the real heavens and the real earth in this way, we will certainly do well. I believe that it is Philoponus’ theory of the dynamical nature of ‘created’ time in correspondence with ‘uncreated’ time, categories such as these, that will help us throw more light upon the order of light and time in our times. His dynamic and kinetic contemplations of both the transcendent and empirical dimensions of the Creation, invisible and visible, with his ‘thought-experiments’ disciplined by the reality of the Redeemer-Creator relationship with His Creation can help us, even as it helped the Grammarian to become what we now recognize as the forerunner in the ancient world to the science of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein, to find that new window onto the world we need to discover in our times. This ‘Lover of Work’ liked to reflect upon created things (time and light) as possessing both invisible and visible dimensions of realities, the invisibility of which reached into the power of the Word of God Himself and His Divine Freedom to be who He is for us, in us, and with us. In this way, he could conceive of the dynamic participation of the wholeness of things interacting with the particularities of the same, where both, ultimately dependent upon the wholeness of the Divine One for being what they were, defined what actually is against any and all illusions about them. The whole existed in the parts and the parts existed in the whole, each in their own ways, yet all of which are bound up through the power of God as His Word with us. This is the One who is free to relate Himself to what has been given existence and what subsists in existence, without confusing the truly transcendent with the empirical or created experience with the transcendent power of the Almighty. In this way, the Alexandrian thought of created and uncreated realities as ‘composite things’, in analogy with the way we are taught to think about the Word of God become the flesh, the man that Jesus Christ is as God in space and time.[45] When read with real resonance 1:1 and 1:3–5, Genesis 1:2 is heard as affirmed by both the transcendent and phenomenal dimensions of the work of God in the Beginning of His Creation, when creation out of nothing and out of chaos and so forth as the place where the Creator spoke light into existence and gave the orders of time that make up what we mean when we read ‘Day One’ of the Creation Week. Rooted ‘in the Beginning’ of this Redeemer-Creator, the Whole that is finished on Day Seven of this Week, we are given to believe that the Redeemer-Creator of Israel is the One whose power and authority is, against all the idols and mythologies in the world, what even the angels have seen and what mankind experiences as the lights of the heavens, the sun, the moon, and the stars, world that comes from the Hand and Mouth of only Wise God with His intention and purpose for it. [46]

Much of Philoponus’ commentary on v.2 argues against any astrological speculations about super-natural creatures that might be thought to govern the created realities that Mankind experiences under the heavens and on the earth.[47] Genesis 1:2 ought to be read in relationships with both 1:1 and 1:3–5 in the light of the freedom and authority that is possessed alone by the Redeemer-Creator and His Freedom to act as the God He is with His Providence, His Presence, and His Prophecy in the relationship.[48] We cannot understand the text without grasping its connection with ‘the Beginning’ of which we read in 1:1 and the Speaking of God of which we read in 1:3, when the light is named day and the darkness named night and we experience the establishment of the ‘evening’ and ‘morning’ (a 24 hour period of time) as Day One of the Creator’s Creation. Obviously, the dynamical nature of such resonance demands both concrete differentiation of things, in the naming of them, as well as a profound integration at their boundaries for them, so that the wholeness of their existence is rightly grasped in all of their depths as the mystery of the Creation the world is. It is this resonant action, seeing ‘In the Beginning’ of the work of Creation, the naming of things in the Creation, that knows the whole of Day One as ‘good’ (1:4–5). On this Day, Day One, there exists no evil. It is impossible to oppose God at this level of reality.

It is true that Genesis 1:1 may be read as a subordinate clause: ‘When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was formless and emptiness and darkness was upon the faces of the deep and the Spirit of God brooded over the faces of the waters, then God said…’ Vs. 1 and 2 are both governed then by v. 3, the first independent clause of the confession (And God said, Let there be light!), so that the Beginning possesses a first act that is the speaking of ‘light’ into the existence of the Creation, where the ‘nothingness’ or the ‘chaos and so forth’ of v.2 is in subordinate relationship with ‘And God said’.[49] I do not think it matters much whether we read v.1 ‘In the Beginning’ in the absolute or the conjunctive sense, the sympathy of the action with its acts goes on either way. If v.1 is read as the first independent clause, however, it seems to me that the punctiliar and continuous nature of the acts in the better entail the implication and explication of the meaning of the texts, when the Transcendence and the Sabbath Blessing of God are given their due in our understanding of them. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ entails a view of the whole of the Creation whose horizon is the ‘finished’ work and blessed activity of the creating of God, both the point of it and the continuity of it as One Creation. No grammar or syntax or morphology thus determines for the reader then what is to be heard ‘In the Beginning’. We find ourselves free to choose the way we shall interpret even these very first words of Bible, a very significant freedom indeed.[50]

I do not like to translate the Hebrew bara’ (ברא) with English ‘create’ (The Alexndrian Jews of the Greek Septuagint did no better with the Greek’s έποίησεν!). Among English speaking peoples the verb ‘create’ can have as its subject all kinds of persons, places, and things. I teach among Koreans, and I understand from them that the Korean Bible translates with a term that has for its subject only ever God, like the Hebrew texts. Only God acts in order to cause the existence of the heavens and the earth and so forth. In this way, we understand that they are established as a reality that is not Himself, a reality whose nature is quite independent of His Being and Nature. We understand that, established in its independence of Him, it is yet as absolutely dependent upon Him for being what it is in its existence. The real objective intelligibility of the rationality of the world is what it is not in dependence upon itself for its being but in its dependence upon its Creator. It is bound up in its independence with the Hand and Spirit and Word and so forth of God from the Beginning that is this Beginning and not another one. With His Divine Freedom and Sovereign Will this God has chosen to become the Creator and to bara’ the Creation into its existence and being. The significance of the term bara’ must be able to bear the transcendent in its significance as well as the empirical dimension that are given meaning as the evenings and mornings of the ‘Day One’ of the Creation Week. The phenomena of the 24 hour periods experienced by Mankind under the heavens and upon the earth are understood as bound up ‘freely’ with the ‘acts’ of this ‘action’ of God, the Creator, in the Beginning. The verb ברא as a ‘telic’ action with His acts in the formation of ‘Day One’ this signifies in freedom and dependence a point that is sustained continually according to the Nature and Being of the Great I-AM He actually is, and not any other. Only God can be this God and act in this way to cause out of nothing the something that is the order of light in a world that is His Creation.

Thus, His ‘cherishing’ in this Beginning, His ‘speaking’ with this Beginning, His ‘seeing’ and ‘differentiating’ and ‘naming’ of this Beginning are modes or acts of one action, with both instance and continuity of freedom and order that shapes the confession of the Creation Week against all the idols of the peoples of the ANE. This is a point whose subsistence is vital to grasp both on its empirical and transcendental levels of reality, both on the observable and non-observable levels of its reality. When we fail to understand this, the symphony becomes lost upon us and we are left like orphans without the Father, Almighty Maker, of the heavens and the earth. The whole in which ‘Day One’ is a part is lost upon us. Abstraction and reductionism sets into our conclusions. We lose the ontology of the Revelation in the Creation. The unique and the general become confused among us. The real meaning of the act that is the bara’ that only the Creator can do is never grasped, and the consequences of this fall from grace is felt quite commonly in our times even down to our own days. However difficult it is for us, we need to recover are ability to grasp the contingent nature of the world as its come from God for us in a freedom that is definitely bound up with who He truly is.

God’s Creation is thus His Unique Universal Creation. Out of all that might have been and could have been, out of the nothingness of the something-ness of the world the Creator has chosen with His Freedom to act with Himself and to make in this ‘Beginning’. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, as it is known in Latin, is to be understood as rooted in a created and creative ground that is the Lord God and Great I-AM of Moses’ confession and no other. The Great I-AM speaking with Moses from the Burning Bush is the Creator speaking for him with His Creation. The purpose of Israel’s Exodus from the Egyptian and its pantheon of gods intends that Israel shall know Him as this One and not anothyer. Because only He ‘creates’, bara’, we may understand the teaching of creatio ex nihilo as fundamentally in resonance with the theology and the experience of the world inherent in Moses’ confession of the Redeemer-Creator. The Deliverer is the Creator. The Creator is the Deliverer. The priestly-prophetic power of the Servant of God as Israel’s great leader would ever cause His People to throw away their idols and to embrace Him as the One He truly is, the Creation of the Creation Week. Redemption brings understanding of the Creation. The Redeemer brings understanding of the Creator. Genesis 1 is thus a confession to be read as Israel’s witness in the world, times past, times present, times future, as experience of freedom and order that is bound up with His Beginning. The first verse of the first chapter of Moses’ confession of Israel’s primordial and primeval and ancestral generations belongs to the Lord who is the God of the whole of Creation, even as all time and times are bound up with His Eternal Time for Mankind and His Creation. God did not create (bara’) nothing and something out of Himself, but as a particular and universal created thing out of nothing so that the whole of it existence and being, outside and independent of Him, would know Him in it as the One He is. Only this Lord as this God and only this God as the Lord can bara’ the Beginning of the heavens and the earth, according to Moses’ confession, when all other gods and all other myths about the world shall not obtain. Other than this ‘Beginning’ there are only myths about time and time’s Eternity.[51]

Common to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the doctrine of creation out of nothing and the rational unity of the order and freedom of the contingency of the world would assert that human freedom with the Divine Freedom of the Almighty is fundamental to the Revelation of the Great I-AM the Lord and God is with Moses’ confession.[52] This concept of the contingency of the world has not enjoyed easy going in the Western world across the centuries of the development of its thought, theologically or scientifically.[53] Against all necessity and any arbitrariness, the world’s unity and rationality as contingent reality rests upon this Revelation. In the light of its revealing, we may hear His Word as belonging inherently to the Acts of His Being the One He is. The Freedom of God thus creates creatively the ground upon which all human freedom stand and understand what it is and is meant to be in the space/time of the world. For this reason, and for no other, the Judeo-Christian tradition has had to seek to struggle to distinguish its way of carving up the reality of the world from any and all dualistic manners of relating the One God is to the one the Creation is. The tradition would remain faithful to the Uniqueness of this One as the Universal Father of the All that is Creation. Attempts to marry this One with other ‘one’s result inevitably in a reduction of the significance of Moses’ confession. The One that the Lord God is in His Unique Universality not the ‘one’ we read in the doctrines of Plato or Aristotle or any of the Neo-platonic efforts that came after the confession. With the Incarnation of the Word, Being, and Act of this One as the Person of Jesus Christ, the Christian tradition would understand the nature of the world and its relationship with God in a wholeness that belongs to the Wholeness of God with His Revelation. The integration of the transcendent and the immortal with the immanence and the phenomenal of mortal experience of the human race upon the earth and under the heavens belongs to a unity and rationality that is God’s Creation and to no other.[54] Stanley Jaki, thus, has written: “The contingency of the universe obviates any a priori discourse about it, while its rationality makes it accessible to the mind through only an a posteriori manner”.[55] Even the laws of the nature of the Universe belong to this kind of dynamical nature. By implication and explication, the concept of creatio ex nihilo and its affirmation with the Incarnation of the Lord God ‘in the Beginning’ affirms a freedom with which the human imagination is redeemed from its idols and myths, an imagination that must have to do with the real space and time and places of matter and motion that John Philoponus was able to turn into his physics of a Cosmos that is God’s Creation.[56] We do not have room here for a more thorough discussion of Philoponus’ concepts here. But we would claim that his arguments against Aristotle’s ‘Eternity of the World’ and for the impetus and light given the Beginning as implicated with what Genesis 1:1 makes explicit as the creatio ex nihilo doctrine is cogent even for our own times.[57] The particular beginning that is the Beginning needs to be heard daily and nightly now just as it was needed with Moses and the Exodus of Israel from Egypt.

We want to argue, then, that the relationship of Genesis 1:2 to 1:1 possesses a conjunctive and appositive connection, the assertion of which compels our understanding of ‘the heavens and the earth’ as a whole the parts of which is the object, in differentiation and integration, who has for cause God and His Freedom to ‘create’ without contradiction what the world is with its Mankind. The Divine Freedom and Sovereign Power of the Great I-AM the Lord God is, according to ‘the Beginning’ of Moses’ priestly and prophetic confession of Israel among the nations in the Creation, the origin of all things created, great and small. It is this freedom with its wisdom and power that gives the confession the authority and order over and against all the mythologies of the ancient peoples of the nations. In becoming this Creator and in revealing this Redeemer, this I-AM that sent Moses and sends as Lord and God even the People of God today, His Revelation will not be denied. It is His Self-Revelation and He gives in this freedom and wisdom and power the knowledge of His Being as this Creator in interaction upon the earth and under the heavens with Mankind. The emphatic use of the verb ‘to be’ in 1:2 means to signify that, as a part of the whole of this Creation, the earth as ‘formless and void’ (ובהו תהו) when it was ‘darkness over the depths (תהום על פני חשך) and with the primordial waters (מים), was being cherished (מרחפת ) by the Spirit of God,[58] like an eagle with her eaglets in their nest (Deuteronomy 32: 11). The whole of this created nature is subject to the Will and Freedom and Authority of this Creator. The primeval condition from ‘the Beginning’, established out of nothing, exist in accordance with the transcendent Wisdom of the Uncreated Nature of His Will of this Creator as a reflection of who He truly is with the heavens and the earth. This is the Creator who is the One that revealed Himself to Moses and gave Israel among the nations in His Creation the knowledge that He is who He is. The formlessness and emptiness, along with the darkness of the depths of these primeval waters, are that which the Spirit of God cherishes from ‘the Beginning’ with divine intent and purpose, where and when as such they form the created times before the Speaking of the Word of God in interaction with the world. They participate in the ‘Very Good’ Creation of the Beginning. The bara’ and the amar of this God as this Redeemer-Creator calls things what they really are, in belonging to what ‘Day One’ is in His Creation Week. Genesis 1:2 signifies what the created reality of the earth under the heavens was life before the time when light had been spoken by God into existence. Thus, God filled the primordial chaos and emptiness with the times of the orders of created ‘light’, when they became the way to the future of the ‘Very Good’ Creation from the Beginning to the Sabbath Blessing. The time and space of the Creation before light filled its place and moment in the world’s times is as such as real as any other created time the world is. Genesis 1:2 cannot be divorced from the time and times of the orders of light that marks the heavens and the earth with the Will and Wisdom of the Redeemer-Creator God is in the Beginning.[59] Time and time past of this Creation are thus real for Moses in the Revelation, in whose light all time and times are made to resonate together with one another in the light of this Lord God who is the Great I-AM of Moses’ confession. It is the power this confession that stood and stands still today against all myth-making and idol-making to which the human imagination is prone. I am sure this is the reason that the man who walked on the moon in our time read from Moses and no other.

In this freedom, we understand that the action (bara’) the Creator takes to accomplish the Beginning of ‘the heavens and the earth’ (a merism) is sustained, cherished, (merechephat) to provide the space and time where and when light (אור). was spoken (אמר) into existence, so that what God sees (ראה) He differentiates (בדל) and names (קרא) as the reality of the objective intelligibility that ‘Day One’ is at the beginning of the Creation Week. We are to hear a created whole with its parts and created parts in the created whole the ‘Day’ is. I would suggest that exists a kind of hypostatic union of the whole and the parts that belong to a symphony of differentiation and integration we may learn to hear as the logic of the Wisdom, Hand, Spirit, and Word of God with Himself in His Beginning of His Creation. His Holy Love and Divine Wisdom, the Uncreated Light of His Being and Nature, are free to make ‘Day One’ what it is in this Blessed Week. It is the Nature of this Being that we should come to know the One who sustains what He has caused to exist out of nothing, out of chaos and emptiness, out of the darkness of the depths, out of the faces of the primordial waters, kept in being by His Spirit, for the intent and purpose of His Word in the Beginning. This is the ground that is intended as home for Mankind, created male and the female in His Image, after His Likeness, among all things great and small that abound in His Creation. Genesis 1:3 reads: ‘And God said, “Let there be light!” and there was light.’ Into the primordial stuff of the ‘nothingness’ of the world is established the orders of light and time in which we exist even today. Out of the formlessness and the emptiness and the darkness and the depths of these existences comes the light that makes the world a home of our being the men and women in time and space the world is meant to be. The ‘light’ of the Speaking God, who as the Uncreated Source of Light of the World has made created light to reflect who He is as this Creator has become, we believe, the ‘Light of the World’ in this symphony. The Redeemer has kept the faith as the Creator He is in the form of Jesus Christ. It is this Divine Freedom of the Great I-AM we come to know as the Voice that Moses experienced coming from the flames of the unconsumed Burning Bush and the events of the Exodus of Israel from Egypt and the Egyptian gods of the Pharaoh. It is this Divine Freedom we experience, out of nothing, out of chaos and emptiness, and so forth, that belongs to the Mighty Hand and the Cherishing Spirit who Speaks in time and times as the Holy One even today. This is the Voice that sustains His People and His Creation. This is the Voice Moses could not avoid and we may not avoid even today.[60] This the Voice of the laws and the freedom of the heavens and the earth in our time. This is the Voice of Mankind in our time. This is the Voice, among all the voices in all the rooms where we may exist, that matters most and seeks our attention even today. This is the Voice of the Great I-AM the Lord God is even as the Person of Jesus Christ in His Time for our time and times.

It is under the impact of the power of the Voice of this Word in His Divine Freedom and Sovereign Authority that we are to learn to read what the making of ‘Day One’ means: ‘And God differentiated between the light and the dark, and God called the light ‘day’ and the dark He called ‘night’ and there was evening and morning – Day One.’ The ‘calling’ of this Voice is the First Day of a Creation Week that Moses confesses under the compelling power of the Voice that commanded him at Sinai. The Providence, Presence, and Prophecy of the Voice of this Great I-AM as the Lord God of Israel’s witness among the nations never sounds with the vanity of man or world. It is the Voice of Truth against all the idols of the human race.

Colin Gunton is worth quoting here: ‘The latter (Barth) tends to minimize the part played by the Holy Spirit in the act of creation, refusing an explicitly pneumatological reading of Genesis 1:2 because of his concern to see in the verse the promise of the eschatological defeat of das Nichtige (3/1, pp. 108–10). Surely we can agree with Barth’s Word of God as that Voice which will have nothing to do with sin and evil. Yes, He did not and does not and will not create sin and evil in His World. But surely we must agree with Gunton that the identity of sin and evil directly with the ‘chaos and emptiness’ and so forth of Genesis 1:2 is a mistake.[61] Evil and sin come into the ‘Very Good’ Creation out of nothing of God in Genesis 3, when the lie is given about God and His Creation to Adam. Surely, we must agree with Professor Torrance’s argument about the contingency of the creation, out of nothing, confirmed and affirmed with the Incarnation of the Word speaking in the ‘fullness of times’ as the Redeemer-Creator, the Lord God, who is the Great I-AM with Moses and Israel and as Christ with His Church, the One without sin and evil and the One who makes the ‘chaos and emptiness’ and so forth to serve the Creator He is as the Man He has become for us in His Creation, in whom we can hear and see what we need to see and hear about these things, about the foundation of the heavens and the earth and our mankind.[62] It is the I-AM that this One actually is, whose Spirit has been sent to work in our times for us, in us, and with us, that we need to hear in Genesis 1:2.

Perhaps we are not used to thinking the impossible with our thoughts. The One who in ‘the Beginning’ and in the New Beginning, who is both the Uncreated Light that God is and the created light the Lord is in the fullness of time and times and of space with us, would give us to hear with the symphony of His Word in the world the ‘beginningless-beginning’ of His Being and Nature which, according to Moses’ confession, would deliver us into the very Kingdom of God Himself. We are not used to thinking about the Transcendence of this One, who once gave Israel deliverance from Egypt and who gives the whole of the human race deliverance from sin and evil in our time and times, as this One He is as the Great I-AM of our redemption even from the times of chaos and emptiness into the time when light filled them with the orders that will justify the Beginning. In Him, we are given to hear His Sabbath Blessing of all time and times, times past, times present, times future, with the atoning work of the holy love of the Redeemer working as the Creator to give us knowledge of who He truly is for us, in us, and with us. It is with Moses’ Israel that we may learn to hear His Beginnings, His Apocalypse of time and times, and what created destiny is in the fullness of times. ‘Day One’ of Moses’ Creation Week is meant to serve the Day of the Lord, the King of the Universe, Israel’s Son of David, the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Sage even of the physical laws of the world. It is this Creator that we may know as the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God for all space and time, of whom Moses was the priestly-prophet and general of Israel road to the Promised Land.

We need to hear in Genesis 1:2 that time past that is ‘Very Good’ in the light of the ‘Light of the World.’ We need to untwist the lies about the Beginning that would not give us to hear the Redeemer-Creator in His Way and Truth with us in the world. We need to know the One who cherishes what we might think has vanished from us. We need to hear again as it was then that out of the nothingness the world is comes the light of His Speaking for us, making the world our home, giving us to know that we are loved and not alone, embraced by the freedom and power only the Great I-AM possesses in our times. This is what we mean when we would name Him the Almighty Maker of the heavens and the earth. It may not be the common hearing of common sense among many in our time, but even so it is no myth.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III.1, p. 102. By 1946 in American scholarship, Jack Finnegan could compare Genesis 1 to Babylon’s Enumah Elish and refer the terms of Genesis 1:2 to the Tiamat of that mythology, while recognizing that differences ought to be considered more important than similarities (Light From The Ancient Past, Princeton University Press, p. 53.) Thus, the difficulties are introduced into the interpretation of the verse. An opposite interpretation is proposed by Paul L. Seely in his article ‘The First Days of Genesis in Concordist Theory and in Biblical Context’, PSCF, Vol. 49, Num. 2, June 1997, pp. 85–95. My article in the same publication on ‘Natural Theology’, pp. 96–104, represents my earlier understanding of Barth and the relationship of science to Genesis One.

[2] CD, pp. 102–110. Along with most modern critical Old Testament scholars, Barth comes to believe that the ‘rudimentary’ conditions laid down in v.2 posit that which the will of the Creator opposes. He must contradict its contradiction of Him.

[3] The great Swiss theologian in his exegesis of Genesis 1 took seriously in his time the supposition that it was in the light of the Incarnation we might read rightly the Creation Week. With it, he could then argue that the ‘Nothingness’ of the Creation could be identified with the evil that opposed the created orders of the Creator, without attempting to relate his findings to the scientific developments of Special and General Relativity Theories and the cosmologies come out of Einstein’s great legacy.

[4] See, for instance, John Goldingay’s Genesis for Everyone (John Knox Press, 2010), pp. 5–9. The author claims there is no ‘absolute beginning’ in mind, no philosophy in mind, and that the author is interested in the ‘transformation’ of ‘empty wastes’ into ‘formed cosmos’, creation out of chaos, than in the doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ a doctrine, that was common in interpretation of the early Church. It is my observation that the significance of this doctrine is quite lost upon us today.

[5] There is a long tradition among the fathers of the early Church, but I have in mind the way the doctrine can be understood in its fullest form with the work of John Philoponus, who attempts to take the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo most seriously even for the physics of the cosmos in his time. Professor Torrance has written of the Grammarian: “Never in all the history of science has Christian theology had such a transforming impact on science as through John Philoponus of Alexandria in the sixth century. His was a bibilical and Christocentric theology in which he sought to give an adequate account of its contingent rational order.” (in Theology and Natural Science, Wipf & Stock, 2002, p. 107). Philoponus thus became in the ancient world with his ‘impetus theory’ and a ‘light theory’ forerunner to the developments we experienced through Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, and even down to the Einstein and our modern theories for the cosmology of the world.

[6] I have attempted to argue for this exegesis of the Five Books of Moses in my book, The Great Amen of the Great I-AM (Wipf & Stock, Eugene, Oregon, 2008). See especially chapters 2 and 3. The wholeness of the Pentateuch’s argument is polemical from beginning to end. The reality of the relationship between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 as Creation and Redemption of the Creator-Redeemer needs to be evaluated in this light.

[7] B.W. Anderson, Creation in the Old Testament (Fortress Press and SPCK, 1984). He is aware of the chasm created between science and theology in our times created by these Biblical scholars.

[8] Ibid, pp. 26–52.

[9] G. von Rad, Genesis, Westminster Press, 1972, pp. 46–52. The critical assumptions lead the great scholar to read v. 2 as a contradiction to the creatio ex nihilo of v. 1, but a necessary one and to an understanding P’s theology of ‘Day One’ as the unit Genesis 1:1–5. Thus, creation out of nothing, creation out of chaos, and creation of the light of the Word of God is discussed. But P’s theology is not Moses’ I-AM.

[10] Ibid, pp. 62–63, when Yahweh as the Creator absorbs Egypt’s ancient mythologies and enters in this way into the confession of the Elohim of Genesis 1.

[11] Ibid, p.75

[12] Ibid, pp. 90–101.

[13] Ibid, pp. 102–117.

[14] Ibid, p.130. ‘The world well ordered, chaos excluded, the world therefore comprehensible within limits: this fits in very well with the concept of wisdom.’ Thus, he exegetes the text with Barth.

[15] Ibid, p.18.

[16] Ibid, pp. 65–73. But with no comment on v.2.

[17] Ibid, pp.135–151, where Landes rightly connects the whole movement up with freedom.

[18] Ibid, p. 138

[19] R.C. Clements, Abraham and David (Studies in Biblical Theology: SCM Press,1967.)

[20] See the account of T.F. Torrance’s meeting with Barth over this point in his Space, Time, and Resurrection, (Eerdmans, 1976), pp. ix–xiii. Torrance would argue that it is ‘a sovereign freedom and lordly authority’ that judges all the beginnings made by the Lord God with His Self-Revelation in the space and time a world that is indeed His Creation.

[21] Ibid p. 103–4. “The decisive objection against this exposition (Luther’s contention that the verse explained the primal condition of God’s Creation in the Beginning before its light was spoken into existence), which Zimmerli rightly calls a ‘desperate expedient,’ is as follows.” Barth goes on to explain that, with the connection between v.1 and v.2 as inadmissible, we must face the fact that God did not will the ‘things’ of v.2. He quotes Isaiah 45:14 as evidence the world was meant to be inhabited right from the beginning and never meant to be chaos and void, dark and deep, with waters the Spirit of God must control against the will of the Creator to create a heavens and an earth of light.

[22] CD, Ibid, p.108. The Silence of God is not necessarily the Time of Judgment.

[23] CD, Ibid, p. 110. As if the future will possess no chaos and so forth.

[24] Perhaps Barth is not able to shake himself free from Greek ‘essentialism’ and ‘perfection’ and ‘order’, after all.

[25] B.S. Childs, Myth and Reality in the Old Testament (SCM Press, London, 1960), pp. 30–42. “It will be the purpose of this chapter to show the problem which was caused within the Biblical tradition when mythical material entered.” He focuses his argument on the relationship between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. He suggests three choices for interpretive speculation: 1) There was a time when ‘chaos and emptiness’ and so forth was the heavens and the earth. 2) Darkness exposits death and the deep belongs to that over which the Spirit broods for life. 3) There is a real resonance between this ‘rudimentary’ stuff that transforms any use of the terms found in the ancient mythologies into service of Moses confession, or P’s, of ‘the Beginning’. Thus, we need to come to a new understanding of their meaning in real time and not in mythical time.

[26] I believe that the Beginning of Genesis 1:1 is to be thought out as rooted in the ground of the ‘beginningless-beginning’ of the Living Being of God who transcendently holds the whole of the Beginning in all of particulars in real relationship with Himself. Created realities, though independent of the Nature of God, are dependent upon Him for their nature and being and existence. The hypostatic union of these cannot be reduced up or down into any philosophical sense away from His Freedom and Transcendence and Will for ‘order’ and ‘goodness’. Neither necessary nor arbitrary connections may grasp the real relations between the Creator and His Creation as the Lord of all space and time and so forth.

[27] B.S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Fortress Press, 1993), p. 107. It seems evident to me that these scholars are more at home with the evolution of things more than they are with things as created out of nothing, creatio ex nihilo, when the chord between transcendence and the phenomenal in our experience of the world is cut in two. The implicit and explicit dynamics of the orders in the nature of the Creation become lost upon us, when even subsistence and processes are not understood in relationship with the uncreated Eternity of the Lord God.

[28] See A.J. Bellinzoni, The Old Testament (Prometheus Books, 2009) for a recent, decent, presentation of the so-called scientific historical-critical analysis of the formation of the Biblical texts. The critics have become quite sure that the Creation accounts are myths redacted together by post-Exilic Israel. If the Bible is composed by men, it cannot be the Revelation of God, only the stories told by Man in the Universe.

[29] B.K. Waltke, Genesis (Zondervan, 2001), p.p. 58–60. He simply refers to ברא (create) as a ‘telic verb’, encompassing the ‘All’ that is the Creation, without further explanation. The implication is, of course, that time possesses times as times are possessed of time even before the time of light.

[30] See C.F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament, Volume I, The Pentateuch (Eerdmans, 1973 reprint), pp. 46–52. The verb ‘create’ signifies that which is ‘divine creation’. The terms of v.2 mean the condition of the creation before the time ‘light’ was spoken into existence. The author is aware that others seek to rid interpretation of the doctrine of ‘creation out of nothing’ (p. 46).

[31] John Calvin, Genesis (The Banner of Truth Trust, 1554, 1975), pp. 69–78. Calvin is the only theologian I have found willing to understand the ‘brooding’ of the Spirit of God as that ‘cherishing’ necessary to ‘sustain’ the world before ‘light’ was given existence in it (p. 74). The ‘confusion’ here is not evil.

[32] I am grateful to Leslie S.B. MacCoull for providing me with her translation of De Opificio Mundi, and the comments of John Philoponus on Moses’ Genesis. See F. Christiani, JOHANNES PHILOPONOS, DE OPIFICIO MUNDI, Herder, 1887, for its translation into German.

[33] I have in mind an exegetical line of thought that we may trace from Athanasius (in works from AD 325–381), through Basil of Caesarea (in works from AD 329–379), and others to the works of John Philoponus in Alexandria (AD 517–560), with whom the doctrine of ‘creation out of nothing’ is steadily championed. It is through the actuality of the Incarnate Word that we are given to understand the Word or Speaking of God in the Beginning and His relationship to ‘light’ in the Creation. Thus, the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Spirit throws light upon the I-AM the Lord God is as God, the Spirit of God, and Speaking of God for the formation of the First Day of the Creation Week and the Sabbath Blessing.

[34] See T.F. Torrance’s ‘The Transfinite Significance of Beauty in Science and Theology’ in L’Art, La Science et la Metaphysique, Studies offered to Andre Mercier, Peter Lang, 1993, pp. 393–418, for a wonderful account of what beauty is in the creatio ex nihilo of Genesis 1.

[35] Torrance would turn our attention to Barth’s appreciation of Mozart’s music to speak of this symphonic significance between Redemption and Creation in theology and science, Ibid, pp. 407–418.

[36] See R. Sorabji, ed., Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science (Cornell University Press, 1987), followed by a number of translations of Philoponus’ works by a team of translators under Sorabji’s supervision.

[37] See my The Setting in Life of ‘The Arbiter’ by John Philoponus (Wipf and Stock, 1999), where I argued that his Anathema was a mistake of tragic proportions and consequences for the history of the relationship between Christian Theology and the development of our scientific culture. S.L. Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God, (University of Chicago, 1978) p. 39, reminds us that Aquinas knew Philoponus only for his heretical monophysitism and not for his critic of Aristotle and his contributions to Western science

[38] Among his many references in his books to Philoponus, see especially T.F. Torrance, Theological and Natural Science (Wipf & Stock, 2002), especially chapters 4–7. Torrance echoes Shmuel Sambursky’s, The Physical World of Late Antiquity (Basic Books, 1962, p. 158) with the contention that Philoponus possessed ‘…the reasoning of a man carried away by his revolutionary zeal and the momentum of a new and irresistible conception.’ The fecundity of this revolution is still to be appreciated.

[39] See Shmuel Sambursky, PHYSICAL THOUGHT From the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists (Pica Press, NY; 1974) pp. 115–119. The ‘lover of labor’ established doctrines on 1) the Dynamical Nature of the Relationship between the Whole and the Parts in science 2) an impetus theory for the Beginning and for the light of the cosmos 3) a theory of the motion of the elements in vacuum 4) the unity of the heavens and the earth according to nature and the 3–dimensional extension with matter/motions 5) the role of Infinity in our knowing of the nature of the world 6) the Generations of God and the power of the really Infinite.

[40] The phrase belongs to Kip Thorne, Black Hoes & Time Warps, W.W. Norton, 1995, p. 19.

[41] In Transformations & Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge, Eerdmans: 1984, p. 79, T.F. Torrance argues with Einstein that such categories belong to ‘freely invented’ concepts bound up with the actual nature of the world.

[42] Philoponus inherited from his successors in Alexandria, Athanasius and Cyril, the struggle of the fathers against both Gnostic and Ebionite views of Man in God’s World, the Person of Christ as Redeemer-Creator of the All.

[43]As a contemporary of Philoponus, a man called Simplicius could consider the Grammarian as doing less than his duty in the common effort made to harmonize Plato and Aristotle as the Masters in the field of human thought. Simplicius wrote: ‘But one of our contemporaries, i.e. the Grammarian, a hunter of fame, as it seems, who has passed off some of Xenarchus’ objections as his own and collected other, similar ones, has sprung up to criticize Aristotle, aiming at the objective, as he says, of proving the whole world perishable, as if he would receive a big reward from the Creator if he proved him <to be> a creator of perishable things only, but not of imperishable.’ See C. Wildberg, Philoponus, Against Aristotle on the Eternity of the World, (Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 39. The whole of the debate was about the nature of the Beginning and the matter and motion of time filled with the light that had been confessed by Moses.

[44] Henry Chadwick records as editor of Alexandrian Christianity (Westminster Press, 1954), pp. 17–24) that it was often claimed that the Greeks had stolen from Moses what they thought they knew about the Cosmos.

[45] I owe this insight to L.S. B. MacCoull, who in her translation of De Opificia Mundi by John Philoponus, understands that Christology informed the cosmological considerations of the Grammarian. The ‘hypostasis’ of created time existed as a whole entailing the ‘hypostases’ of times past, present, and future, all of which belonged as one created reality to the power of the freedom of God to be the Redeemer-Creator He actually is with us. Thus, the empirical and the theoretical are integrated substantially in all of his speculations about the physics and cosmology of the Creation (private correspondence).

[46] I believe that Professor T.F. Torrance’s assessment of Barth’s opposition to ‘natural theology’ as an antecedent conceptual system of thought and argument for a concept of ‘nature’ as a contingent reality belonging to the actual relationship establishe by the Revelation between God and the world is vitally important here. See, Transformation & Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge, Christian Journals, 1984, pp. 285–301 for full discussion of the problem and the power of the argument for a ‘natural theology’ that is inherent or co-inherent in the nature of the Revelation in history.

[47] Philoponus has a long section on angels with reference then to Genesis 1:2, yet for the sake of making the point that the ‘hypostases’ with which we have to do in the physical world are contingently related to the power of the free God whose wisdom only is the source of their existence. It is in this discussion that the Grammarian can refer to other views of the Creation read in the Scriptures, Job, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and so forth.

[48] I like to think of this kind of reading as an affirmation of the ‘primordial healing’ that is restorative of our race after the Fall and from the Beginning.

[49] von Rad has shown that this reading does not obtain with the intent of the author, op. cit. p. 49.

[50] It is good to remember that freedom without order and order without freedom is impossible in the way of God with His the contingent rationality and unity of His Creation. The nature of the world is such that both freedom and order of a contingent kind as bound up with non-contingent Being of God in His Freedom and Wisdom, however difficult for us to hear, must be heard. I like to think that the Revelation of the Great I-AM is ultimately to be followed in Christ then.

[51] I like to think that, even though the contemplation of the Big Bang Beginning of modern cosmologies may be more friendly to Moses’ confession that cosmologies of the past, we remain able to distinguish the nihilo of Christian Doctrine from the Quantum Vacuum contemplated by modern scientists.

[52] See T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith (T&T Clark, 1988), pp. 98–109, for a succinct account of the vital character of freedom, contingent and divine, for understanding the God, Man, and the World of the confession.

[53] See T.F. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order (Oxford University Press, 1981) for a fully developed argument on the cogency and fecundity of the concept in both science and theology.

[54] See S.L. Jaki, Genesis 1 (Thomas More Press, 1992)) for an account that argues for the reality of this chapter in time and times across the centuries, against all the mythologies posited from time to times and so forth. Moses is successful with his confession against the idols of the nations among the peoples of God’s Creation because of its veracity with space and time.

[55] Again S.L. Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God, Ibid, p. 39. An historian of science, the Benedictine scholar knows, for instance, the concept of the contingency of the creation may become lost upon Aquinas and the Middles Ages and the arguments for the existence of God mere sophistry.

[56] See my The Setting in Life of ‘The Arbiter’ by John Philoponus (Wipf & Stock, 1999), especially chapter three, for my account of the contingent rationality, unity, and freedom of the Creation against Aristotle’s physics and cosmology in the science of the Alexandrian. See, C. Wildberg, Philoponus, Against Aristotle on the Eternity of the World, Cornell University Press, 1987, pp. 81–91, for the Grammarian on the ‘nothingness’ and the ‘perishable nature’ of the Creation and the freedom of God to interact with them.

[57] Ibid, pp. 143–146, for a few cogent remarks about motion in the Ptolemaic Cosmos of the Grammarian’s times.

[58] I have found the translation of merachephat (‘brooding’) read by Syriac speaking Christians, found still today in Iran and Iraq, rendered as ‘cherished’, even as a wave offering (P. Smith, Syriac English Dictionary, Oxford, 1902) p. 538) Evidently, the power of the Spirit of God in the Beginning embraced with Love and Wisdom and Divine Freedom what had been the object of His action (bara’) in His Beginning, not out of Himself but out of nothing with a will He alone can exercise.

[59] The Grammarian assumed the ‘hypostasis’ and ‘hypostases’ of time and times as the uncreated time that belongs creatively to God’s Eternity. It was this kind of relational thinking that we read everywhere with the development of the thought of John Philoponus.

[60] Philoponus believed that, whatever Plato or Aristotle got right about God and the Cosmos, they got it from Moses. The Grammarian wrote at the beginning of his treatise on the Creation of the World: ‘That Plato too, in his treatise on the coming into being of the cosmos, imitated Moses.’ This Moses wanted to implant knowledge of God with his confession of the Great I-AM the Lord God is with Israel, a confession not about science but about the world the race experiences as a phenomenal reality whose explanation must be found with its Creator. It was this Judeo-Christian tradition that laid down the foundation for the empirical science we exercise today, and not Greek philosophy.

[61] C.E. Gunton, The Triune Creator (Eerdmans, 1998), p. 160. Again, see T.F. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order for the challenge this argument is for both scientist and theologian in our times.

[62] For a recent discussion of the problem modern scientific ‘chaos theory’ and its relationship to our theology of Creation Out of Nothing, see John Jefferson Davis, ‘Theological Reflections on Chaos Theory’, PSCF, Vol. 49, Num. 2, June 1997, pp. 75–84. I like to think we will take seriously the need for ‘free invention’, ‘intuition’, and ‘creativity’ in both science and theology not in necessary of arbitrary relational logic but in atoning relations of real redemptive work of the Holy One in the history of the world.

Some recent romps around blogdom …

Kim Fabricius on Death in the 21st century and Ten propositions on the God hypothesis
Ben Myers on Remembrance Day
Scott Hamilton on The ‘First White Marxists’ reach Tuhoe Country
Gordon Campbell on Closing The Books on Libraries;
Byron Smith on Climate change and political stability
Cynthia R. Nielsen on Foucault and Augustine (Parts I, II, III, IV, V)
Dan Oudshoorn on Textual Criticisms and the Meaning of Life
Jim Gordon on The Love that doesn’t depend on me believing in it all the time and Nihilism, alienation, the church’s mission and the Christian as upstart!
Rick Floyd on ‘Justification and Justice: Good News and Good Works’
Paul Fromont on Leaving Church (Parts I, II, III, IV)
The latest edition of the Journal of Reformed Theology (4/1, 2010) is out, with articles on Zizioulas and Barth.
Gareth Jones on the ethics of the recent creation of a synthetic chromosome
Jason Byassee on the mourner as leader
Rowan Williams opens ‘The Holy Spirit in the World Today Conference’ with a homily
Kent Eilers reviews Billings’ The Word of God for the People of God

Theology in Aotearoa: Two Conferences

1. The Systematic Theology Association of Aotearoa New Zealand is holding its Annual Conference in Dunedin on 11-12 November 2010.

The principal theme of the conference will be ‘Ecclesiology’. Those interested in presenting papers should send an abstract of 200-300 words addressing the theme to Murray Rae by 30 June. Papers to be presented at the conference should be no longer than 45 minutes in duration.

In addition to the principal theme of the conference there will also be opportunity for postgraduate students working in other areas of Systematic Theology to present shorter papers on the theme of their postgraduate research. Such papers will be of 30 minutes duration and an abstract of 200-300 words should likewise be submitted to Murray Rae by 30 June.

Submissions from postgraduate students on the principal theme of the conference will also be welcome.

2. The Laidlaw-Carey Graduate School is sponsoring a colloquium on the theme The Theology and Practice of Lament. The colloquium will explore cultural and theological implications of texts and practices of lament and/or complaint. Potential papers, should address complaint/lament with a focus on spiritual/theological dimensions so might include:

readings of biblical or other complaint or lament literature (Psalms, Job, Lamentations etc)
studies of historical or contemporary lament songs
pastoral perspectives on the contemporary practice of lament
theological reflections
cross cultural perspectives on lament practices
post Holocaust reflections
contemporary political reflections

The colloquium will take place in Auckland on 10-11 February 2011, with a view to publishing a book with the same title in 2011. Enquiries and abstracts (before 31 July 2010) should be addressed to Miriam Bier or Tim Bulkeley.

God on Trial: The Verdict

Recently, I mentioned that I am preparing some lectures on Theodicy, Suffering and Faith. I then posted a bibliography, one reference in which was to Frank Cottrell Boyce’s and Andy DeEmmony’s film God on Trial. I watched this film for the first time a few weeks back. Here’s the most memorable part:

Public conversations with Paul Oestreicher

The Centre for Theology and Public Issues and the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (both of the University of Otago) are hosting a public conversation with Canon Paul Oestreicher.

Paul Oestreicher has had an extremely interesting career – from being a refugee in Dunedin from Germany in 1939 and a student at Otago, to co-founding and chairing Amnesty International, to pioneering the Centre for International Reconciliation at Coventry Cathedral, to being both an Anglican priest and a Quaker chaplain – and this will be a rare opportunity to hear, not just about his current research, but about his past work and what has driven him to devote his whole life to the cause of peace-making, East-West reconciliation, human rights and disarmament. Paul was last year awarded a Doctorate of Divinity by Otago University where he is currently a Visiting Fellow at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies.

This public conversation will take place in the Allen Hall (corner of Union and Leith Streets, near the Clocktower on campus) on Thursday 6 May from 5.30-6.45pm. Contact: Ann Hassan.

The other public conversation that Canon Oestreicher will engage in has been organised by the Otago University Amnesty International Group. It will take place in Archway Lecture Theatre 2, at 6pm on Monday 10th May. At this event, Paul will be speaking about his own experiences as a refugee from Germany to Dunedin in 1939, his work with Amnesty and why we should all care, and take action, on human rights abuses around the world. Enquiries for this event can be directed to Stefan Fairweather.

Two items of note …

Two items of note:

1. Some historians of the Presbyerian tribe will be keen to know that the latest issue of The Historical Journal includes an article by Alasdair Raffe on ‘Presbyterianism, Secularization, and Scottish Politics after the Revolution of 1688–1690’ (Volume 53, Issue 02, June 2010, pp. 317–337). Here’s the abstract:

‘This article assesses the significance of Presbyterian ideas of church government in Scottish politics after the revolution of 1688 intrinsic right of the church: its claim to independent authority in spiritual matters and ecclesiastical administration. The religious settlement of 1690 gave control of the kirk to clergy who endorsed divine right Presbyterianism, believed in the binding force of the National Covenant (1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), and sought to uphold the intrinsic right. An ambiguous legal situation, the criticisms of episcopalian clergy and politicians, and the crown’s religious policies helped to make the Presbyterians’ ecclesiological claims a source of instability in Scottish politics. Meetings of the general assembly and, after 1707, the appointment of national fast and thanksgiving days were particularly likely to spark controversy. More broadly, the article questions two narratives of secularization assumed by many previous scholars. It argues that Scottish politics was not differentiated from religious controversy in this period, and that historians have exaggerated the pace of liberalization in Scottish Presbyterian thought’.

2. The other breaking story is that N.T. Wright has been appointed to a Chair in New Testament and Early Christianity at St Andrews.

Who said it?

It’s time again for another ‘Who said it?’ competition. From whose mouth/pen did the following words come:

‘Aristotle claimed superiority for the poet over against the historian on the ground that the latter was only concerned with the detail of what Alcibiades did and suffered; while the former probed the universal import of Oedipus’ suffering. The Gospel writers (Mark and Luke as well as John) are in this respect nearer to Aristotle’s poets than to his historians; they guess and hint a universal import in those events whose detail they chronicle, constrained to this effort by the mystery of the resurrection to which their often stumbling and contradictory conclusions bear witness. The authentic Anselmian theology of the atonement is ultimately continuous with the Evangelists’ interpretation of the details they record … This interpretation of Christ’s passion is grounded in the manner of its presentation in the Gospels, where … the universal is manifested through the particular – the judgement of God through the particularities of human envy, and cruelty, through the grim actualities of Judas’ greed, of Caiaphas’ cold raison d’état, of Pilate’s self-regarding capitulation. It is Jesus who tears away the masks from their faces, his witness to the truth the ordeal imposed upon him by his fidelity. Even the women of Jerusalem who lament his fate, are warned in almost harsh tones, of the disaster that awaits their city, oblivious of the summons to a new way offered them by Jesus. Human pretension is stripped bare, and the judgement of God accepted in an action profoundly tragic in its cost’.

Closing on Friday. No cheating.

Some recent wanderings

Japanese pastor dismissed for giving communion to unbaptised.
A really cool video: ‘Who wrote the Bible?’
Byron Smith shares a quote from Barth on the ‘free theologian’ and the profanity of theological adversary. Byron’s follow up comments are excellent too.
Todd Walatka has posted a synopsis of Kathryn Tanner’s Christ the Key, – Part 1, Part 2.
Aaron Fudge (Edward Fudge’s nephew) reviews Edward Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Punishment. He concludes with this quote: ‘[The traditional view of hell] must be loyally proclaimed or else denounced. If believed, it should be preached from the house-tops; if not believed, it should be opposed to the very end. If this dogma be false, it is a calumny against God and a stumbling-block in the way of humanity’ (Fudge, 434–5, citation from Emmanuel Petavel, The Problem of Immortality, 267).
A free audio of Bonhoeffer’s ‘The Cost of Discipleship’.
Jim Gordon attempts a justification of his book-buying habits.
Leonard Sweet is on the way to developing Twitter Theology: 5 Ways Twitter Has Changed My Life and helped me be a better Disciple of Jesus.
The Presbyterian Church in Canada has pulled together a 194-page booklet called ‘Equipping Elders’ which is available as either a free download or, if you’re after a ‘real’ copy’, from the PCC Book Room for about CAN$20.
Bruce Hamill is thinking out loud on the gift of life.
Ben Myers seeks suggestions of a title for a new book.
Cynthia Nielsen posts on Foucault and power (I, II, III).
Father Robert shares some James Stewart.
Steve Holmes emerges from a wee blogging exile to share some thoughts on the problems of preaching.
Finally, Pete Enns on Adam is Israel, i.e. Adam (as opposed to ‘adam’) is “proto-Israel.”

Jimmy Dunn on theology

‘Theology begins with an unwillingness to believe that the reality of human beings and human society can be fully explained solely in material terms. Its agenda and subject matter is the exploration of how an openness to a different or fuller explanation of those realities is best articulated and an exploration of how the consequences of such openness bear upon individuals and society, their beliefs, the axioms and principles of social conduct and responsibility. Theology in the specific sense of God-talk is a particular subset of that exploration — the theistic premise regarded as the most appropriate starting point to construct a positive alternative to the purely materialistic explanation of what is — though the openness in many cases will include an openness to the possibility that the theistic premise is itself wrong or misleading’. – ‘An Interview with James Dunn’.

BTW: Fortress Press, from whom this interview comes, has also posted interviews with the following scholars:

Andrew Root on (youth) ministry

Andrew Root is the Assistant Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is also the author of Relationships Unfiltered: Help for Youth Workers, Volunteers, and Parents on Creating Authentic Relationships, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation, Children of Divorce, The: The Loss of Family as the Loss of Being, and The Promise of Despair: The Way of the Cross as the Way of the Church.

In this 31 minute video, Andrew explains the difference between influence and place-sharing in youth ministry. What he says pertains to all ministry, not just that related to young people. You can also listen to the talk here.

Want more? You can find more of Andrew here and here. Also