Thinking through Creation

Genesis 1 and 2 as Tools of Cultural Critique

Christopher Watkin

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781629953021
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Comentario bíblico

Watkin reclaims the Trinity and creation from their cultural despisers and shows how these foundational doctrines speak into, question, and reorient some of the most important debates in today's society.

1

Introduction

And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” (Acts 17:19–20)

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.¹

All modern and contemporary thought is . . . positively and negatively determined by the relation with Christianity.²

THIS BOOK IS written for thinking Christians who want to see biblical truth shape all areas of their thought and life, and who want to understand, serve, and change our culture. It shows how deep biblical truths shape a distinctive way of thinking and living in the world, and it provides patterns and examples of how to bring the Bible to bear on some of the key assumptions, debates, and issues of our age, equipping the reader to apply these patterns to new questions and in new contexts. At its heart lies a central conviction: to explain the Bible to the culture in which we live is not enough; we must also explain the culture in which we live in terms of the Bible. With this aim, Thinking through Creation explores how to view our culture through the lens of the biblical account of the Trinitarian God and his creative act as recounted in Genesis chapters 1 and 2, using biblical ways of thinking to meet the challenge of engaging in authentic, positive, and constructive dialogue with the great ideas and values of our time.

In order to meet this challenge of bringing Genesis and contemporary culture into productive dialogue, two things are necessary: we must develop a nuanced grasp of the patterns of thought that emerge from the biblical account of the Trinity and of creation, and we must develop a penetrating appreciation of the concepts and stories that shape our contemporary culture. In other words, we must develop a capacity for what John Stott in The Contemporary Christian calls “double listening”:

We are called to double listening, listening to both the Word and the world. . . . We listen to the Word with humble reverence anxious to understand it, and resolved to believe and obey what we have come to understand. We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand it too, and resolved not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathize with it and to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it.³

Both modes of listening are indispensable for Christians who want to understand and help shape our culture. Neither mode of listening is straightforward, however, and both can be misunderstood, so a word of explanation on each is in order as we begin our journey of double listening.

Listening to the Word

Many people today think that when Christians speak of bringing the Bible to bear on public debate and intellectual endeavor, they are arguing for a podium-thumping, verse-toting, finger-wagging, nay-saying attitude that puts a reactionary hand brake on innovation and progress. But such pick-a-verse politics is a caricature of a full-orbed Christian intervention into the intellectual and social issues of our day. One thing that it fails to understand is that the Bible contains not only a set of truths, stories, and doctrines, but also what we might call recurring structures, patterns, or shapes of thought. These can include patterns of God’s behavior repeated in different contexts (for example: he recurrently mixes justice with mercy in a way that does not compromise either principle), recurring ways of thinking about the relation between God and the world (God is frequently described as being both high above his people and yet also near to them and with them), or repeated ways in which God’s plans surprise his people (messianic figures are consistently not the firstborn or strongest, and not those whom we would expect to deliver God’s people).

Thinking about the Bible; Thinking through the Bible

When we distill repeated patterns from the Bible, we are seeking to pay attention not only to what the Bible says in this passage or that, but to how it presents every passage from Genesis to Revelation. Put another way, we read the Bible not only as a set of ideas and stories to think about, but also as a set of patterns and dispositions through which we can think about everything and through which we live the whole of life. To think about the Bible is to take its unfolding events as an object of our contemplation; to think through the Bible is to take up the patterns and moves of that story and use them as an interpretive grid for all our understanding and living, finding in these patterns tools for shaping debates and solving problems far beyond their immediate concerns. When we start thinking and acting through the Bible in this way, we can provide genuinely fresh, distinctive, and constructive contributions to intellectual debate and social change.

Now, of course we cannot think through the Bible without also thinking about it. We cannot learn how to think biblically without seeking to discern the meaning of particular verses and passages, and much of this book is devoted to just that task. The choice between understanding biblical passages and thinking biblically is plainly a false dichotomy. Nevertheless, it is possible to understand many verses and many passages of the Bible without thinking biblically and without bringing biblical patterns to bear on the intellectual and social questions of our day. To do so is to jolt to a premature halt along the road of developing a Christian mind and voice, and this book has been written to provide roadside assistance to such cases of theological breakdown.

To advocate a sensitivity to biblical patterns and shapes of thought is by no means a plea for going behind the text of the Bible to find a secret or hidden code beyond its pages or written between its lines. Let us be clear: much damage has been done to the church and much dishonor brought to God by misguided claims to have found the “true” or “deep” meaning of the Scriptures beyond their manifest message. There is nothing esoteric in seeking to discern the patterns and structures of the Bible because they are not behind or above the text at all; quite to the contrary, they can be seen in chapter and verse and understood without any newfangled, extrabiblical interpretive key. Nor is there any claim in these pages to have discovered something new in the text of the Bible. In giving names to the biblical moves identified in this book (such as diagonalizing and u-shaped dynamic), I am only seeking to draw out with clarity the implications of a way of thinking that lies waiting for us in the Bible.

The kinds of full-orbed Christian interventions into intellectual and social issues outlined in these chapters follow, very imperfectly, in a long and venerable tradition of Christian thinkers and Reformers. The work and lives of Augustine and Calvin, to take but two of the best-known examples, show how an understanding of biblical moves, patterns, and shapes of thought can generate cutting-edge, incisive interventions into intellectual, social, and political issues.

We can begin to get a handle on what such an approach looks like by considering Alvin Plantinga’s four subcategories of what he calls an “Augustinian Christian philosophy”:⁴

1. Philosophical theology: “a matter of thinking about the central doctrines of the Christian faith from a philosophical perspective and employing the resources of philosophy.”⁵
2. Apologetics: a negative apologetics that defends Christianity from its detractors⁶ and a positive apologetics that gives theistic proofs or arguments for the existence of God.⁷
3. Christian philosophical criticism: a critique (in the sense of a fair and balanced appraisal, pointing out good points and bad) of the cultures and thought-forms that exist in society today, “discerning the spirits” and “testing the provenance of the bewildering variety of ideas and claims with which we are confronted”⁸ and passing this knowledge on to the rest of the Christian community.
4. Positive Christian philosophy: “thinking about the sorts of questions philosophers ask and answer from an explicitly Christian point of view,”⁹ questions such as the nature of duty or human flourishing, and the pursuit of love or beauty.

According to Plantinga, the Christian church is currently weaker in the areas of philosophical criticism and positive philosophy, and these are the areas that provide the focus of this book.

Biblical Theory

The combined tasks of a Christian philosophical criticism and a positive Christian philosophy can be thought of as a biblical theory, in the sense in which we might talk about feminist theory or eco-theory, a term to which we will have occasion to return below. A theory, in this context, is a way of addressing all the facets of contemporary culture and society with a particular set of convictions, concerns, values, questions, and ideals. For Carl Trueman, professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, if such a Christian theory is to be written today, then it must begin with Augustine’s City of God:¹⁰

The range of [Augustine’s] thought, from psychology to politics to grace, makes him a unique source for Christian thinking. A Marxist friend once commented to me that The City of God was the only book in Christianity that could function as Das Kapital does in Marxism—a touchstone tome for the development of critical thinking about the whole of life. . . . Written as Rome, the eternal city, burned at the hands of the Goths, The City of God is in places a superb reflection on the relationship between earthly and heavenly kingdoms . . . . If Christians really want to develop a critical theory that allows for engagement with contemporary culture, they would do better reading Augustine than Derrida.¹¹

Trueman is correct in highlighting The City of God as a singular and remarkable source of Christian reflection for critical thinking about the whole of life. In this classic of Western literature (written by a man of African origin, let us not forget), Augustine brings the whole of the Bible’s story line to bear on the whole of late antiquity, from its religion through its philosophy to its politics. Weaving together a deep understanding of the ideas and narratives of Roman culture with a grasp of the patterns of the Bible’s story line, Augustine shows how the Bible accounts for the culture of his day better than late Roman culture can account for itself. The City of God stands as perhaps the most impressive edifice in double listening to be produced in the two thousand years of church history. There is, however (as Trueman would heartily agree), a source deeper in richness and broader in scope than The City of God for shaping a Christian theory in the rapidly changing twenty-first-century Western world. We should not begin with Augustine; we should let Augustine lead us to where Augustine himself began: with one eye fixed on the Bible and the other scrutinizing our culture.

Trueman’s advice is a corrective to the widespread assumption that the best way to understand and shape contemporary culture is to read only contemporary authors. In fact, reading nothing but the latest books can be the very worst way to understand contemporary culture. As C. S. Lewis pointed out in his classic essay “On the Reading of Old Books,” every age has its blind spots and characteristic mistakes, and if we read only contemporary books, then “where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already” and “where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.” The remedy, for Lewis, is “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds” by the reading of old books.¹² It follows that one of the great advantages for the Christian seeking to understand and shape our culture in the light of biblical patterns of thought is that the Bible was not written in the last decade, and that it therefore does not share the blind spots of our particular culture. It was, in fact, written over a period of more than a millennium to and about communities that are by turns nomadic, agrarian, monarchical, exiled, and occupied. This cultural and historical diversity means that the Bible—in contrast to almost all current theoretical approaches or “theories”—is not hidebound by any single ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by John M. Frame
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Who Created? Thinking through the Trinity
• 3. Thinking through the Creation of the Universe
• 4. Thinking through the Creation of Humanity
• 5. Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index of Scripture
• Index of Subjects and Names