The Hump of the Camel

One good place to start, but by no means to finish, when looking at creation christologically is St John’s concept of Logos. We must avoid the trap of buzzword “Logos Theology”, because apart from its use in John’s gospel prologue, there are only two rather equivocal references to the term, both of them in the Johannine corpus. But it is true that the meaning of Logos permeates his whole gospel, and maybe provides an understanding of how other NT writers came to give Christ exactly the same divine role in creation (Paul, Peter and the writer to the Hebrews). At the very least it gives a dramatic expression to that role. Continue reading →

In my last post and elsewhere I have attacked the root of the influental concept of creation understood as God’s self-emptying (in various forms) by showing the insupportability of such divine self-emptying from Scripture.

Ted Davis points out that at least kenosis focuses on Christ’s role in creation in a way that much Christian thought since the Enlightenment hasn’t. That seems a good enough reason, in the next few posts, to look at some biblical bases for a Christological approach to creation that are more in line, I hope, with theological orthodoxy. Maybe somebody will find some resources in these posts for thinking about the scientific questions. At least I think the exercise will provide a balance to methodologically naturalistic accounts of the world, and provide a corrective for some of the theological views that, perhaps, have arisen from such accounts, which in some ways run directly opposite to the flow of the biblical teaching. Continue reading →

In my last post I examined “the incarnational model of Scripture” as an example of doing theology by buzz-word. Another example is the “kenotic model of creation”, though “kenosis”, like “incarnation”, is a word that gets, like sand, into everything – there’s a kenotic model of Scripture too, just as there’s an incarnational model of creation. It seems as if you give a theologian a yellow crayon, and come home to find he’s scribbled over everything with it.  The Amazon blurb for a John Polkinghorne book says:

The development of kenotic ideas was one of the most important advances in theological thinking in the late twentieth century.

So one supposes it must be especially well-founded. Robert J Russell, in Cosmology from Alpha to Omega presupposes a kenotic creation (involving a kenotic theodicy) but wants to move beyond “mere kenosis” to eshatology with a kenotic flavour. Continue reading →

Alvin Plantinga has cited this quote from Langdon Gilkey more than once in connection with divine action:

… [C]ontemporary theology does not expect, nor does it speak of, wondrous divine events on the surface of natural and historical life. The causal nexus in space and time which the Enlightenment science and philosophy introduced into the Western mind … is also assumed by modern theologians and scholars; since they participate in the modern world of science both intellectually and existentially, they can scarcely do anything else. Now this assumption of a causal order among phenomenal events, and therefore of the authority of the scientific interpretation of observable events, makes a great difference to the validity one assigns to biblical narratives and so to the way one understands their meaning. Suddenly a vast panoply of divine deeds and events recorded in scripture are no longer regarded as having actually happened… Whatever the Hebrews believed, we believe that the biblical people lived in the same causal continuum of space and time in which we live, and so one in which no divine wonders transpired and no divine voices were heard. Continue reading →

Two episodes of an excellent audio presentation by John H Walton have been posted on BioLogos, laying out his position on the understanding of Genesis 1-3, to which I have frequently alluded before (search on “Walton”). He was particularly good in the first episode in showing how the Egyptian cosmogony, full of figures of gods and goddesses, did not lead them to expect that one could throw a stone at the earth god or see the figure of the sky goddess in the heavens. The ANE conception of reality was functional, not material. But I think it is time to develop some implications for the current agenda of theistic evolution, or since we are talking about the BioLogos “Evangelical” version, let’s use their term evolutionary creationism. Continue reading →

The comments I made on Biologos , which prompted my last post here, have aroused some largely hostile response (as I expected), mainly around my daring to restrict the word “creation” to God. Since the Renaissance, that indeed has been a red rag to society’s bull, just like any suggestion that “freedom” may be less of an absolute than moderns like to believe. The most interesting thing to see was the mystification that anyone might have a problem with a novel idea in theology, as if one weren’t free to create such things at will. Continue reading →