The Hump of the Camel

I never thought I’d write a blog about angels! Like many contemporary Christians I don’t give angels a thought from one year’s end to the other, though accepting their existence. After all, Jesus and the New Testament took a definite stance on them, together with  resurrection, against one of the influential Jewish parties (Acts 23.8). The reasons for ignoring them are probably similar to those poor ones I suggested in relation to forgetting Christ when discussing creation. Nevertheless, I don’t want to engage in angelology, but simply to mention three things that we might learn by considering them in relation to creation. Continue reading →

I want to spend a couple of posts looking at what the Bible teaches about the purpose of creation. This is multifaceted, so bear with me for building the picture gradually and, perhaps, appearing to ignore or downplay certain aspects as I do so. There is method…

My first task is to point out that in the Bible God’s will and purpose in creation predominate over all other aspects of creation itself, especially the material, which of course is the opposite of the scientific approach, in which teleology is absolutely excluded. There’s maybe room for a separate post on just how this, and other key aspects of creation teaching, are absent from the usual science-faith discussions: “evolution as God’s means of creation” is a pretty inadequate concept if it omits much of the creation and all of the reasons for it. Continue reading →

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 →