Science and the Doctrine of Creation

The Approaches of Ten Modern Theologians

Geoffrey H. Fulkerson, Joel Thomas Chopp, Geoffrey H. Fulkerson, Joel Thomas Chopp

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780830826759
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

Can Christians take seriously the claims of modern science without compromising their theological integrity? Can theology contribute to our understanding of the natural world without reducing the doctrine of creation to a few flashpoint issues? While there is no shortage of works that treat the intersection between science and religion, little attention has been paid to the theological reception of developments of modern science. Yet a deeper look at the history of Christian thought offers a wealth of insight from theological giants for navigating this complex terrain.Science and the Doctrine of Creation examines how influential modern theologians—from the turn of the nineteenth century through the present—have engaged the scientific developments of their times in light of the doctrine of creation. In each chapter a leading Christian thinker introduces readers to the unique contributions of a key theologian in responding to the assumptions, claims, and methods of science. Chapters include- Kevin J. Vanhoozer on T. F. Torrance- Katherine Sonderegger on Karl Barth- Craig G. Bartholomew on Abraham Kuyper- Christoph Schwöbel on Wolfhart PannenbergEdited by Geoffrey Fulkerson and Joel Chopp of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding, this book grows out of the Henry Center's Creation Project, which promotes biblically faithful and scientifically engaged dialogue around the doctrine of creation. From Warfield's critical appraisal of Darwinian evolution to Pannenberg's pneumatological reflections on field theory, these studies explore how Christians can think more carefully about the issues at stake using the theological resources of their traditions.

1

WILLIAM BURT POPE (1822–1903)

Primary and Secondary Creation

FRED SANDERS

William Burt Pope was born to devout Methodists who had recently emigrated to Nova Scotia. The family returned to England in 1826, and in 1840 William entered the Wesleyan Theological Institute at Hoxton. After twenty-five years of active ministry, in 1867 Pope took up the position of tutor in systematic theology at Didsbury College, Manchester, which he retained until his retirement in 1886. Pope’s three-volume Compendium of Christian Theology remains one of the most comprehensive articulations of Christian doctrine in the Wesleyan tradition.

William Burt Pope was rightly described by a mid-twentieth-century commentator as “pre-eminently the Methodist theologian of the nineteenth century.”1 In 1985 Alan P. F. Sell added that “even today the last four words could be omitted without injustice to anyone else”; that is, Pope continues to stand as the preeminent theologian in the entire Methodist tradition. Sell goes on to characterize Pope as “the warmly devotional exegete, who brings from the store of scripture things new and old, and builds them into an impressive system.”2 Indeed, Pope was not only the greatest doctrinal theologian ever to take up the task of teaching Christian theology from the point of view of the Wesleyan revival movement’s spiritual core, but he ranks among the finest practitioners of Christian theology from any confessional group in modern times. To explore his three-volume Compendium is to engage in serious, high-level theology with one of the master practitioners.3

Pope excelled at stating the large, main ideas of the Christian faith, which makes it difficult to summarize what is distinctive about his theology. Thomas Langford hazarded this characterization: “The central idea in Pope’s thought was that of divine grace as effected in human life by the Holy Spirit.”4 If that just sounds like “mere Christianity” rather than an identifiable school of thought, Pope would not be upset by that characterization. He was trying to fill the office of a theological teacher, passing on what the church has always taught, and he wanted his work to be judged with questions like, Is it clear and memorable? Does it lead readers into a deeper understanding of Scripture? Is it a faithful restatement of the great tradition of Christian thought? Does it spend the right amount of time or the right number of pages on the most important things, putting less important items in subordinate places?

Starting on the first page of his Compendium, Pope admonishes his readers of the dignity and sanctity of the study of theology: “It is A DEO, DE DEO, IN DEUM: from God in its origin, concerning God in its substance, and it leads to God in all its issues.” With a meaning far more than just etymological, Pope declares of theology, “His NAME is in it.”5

Hence every branch of this science is sacred. It is a temple which is filled with the presence of God. From its hidden sanctuary, into which no high priest taken from among men can enter, issues a light which leaves no part dark save where it is dark with excess of glory. Therefore all fit students are worshippers as well as students. . . . The remembrance of this must exert its influence upon our spirit and temper in all our studies. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart.6

The tone is obviously homiletic, but the work throughout is conceptually rigorous, which delivers it from being naively devotional. It does not degenerate into a weakly expressed series of merely edifying thoughts. Rather, those who have immersed themselves at length in the Compendium can testify that Pope’s integration of theology and spirituality is more nearly patristic than pietistic. Pope breathes the exalted air of the great theological tradition.

Langford says there was very little in Pope’s theology that could not already be found in Wesley or the Methodist theologians Clarke and Watson. “The distinctive quality of Pope’s writing lay in his style of expression, his lucidity, and his completeness.”7 Alan Sell adds that Pope “was ever the constructive systematiser”8 who found a place for everything that had been scattered here and there in the Methodist tradition, and he gave great attention to the grand lines of the doctrinal system.

Why, if Pope is such a virtuoso of the grand tradition of Christian theology, has his fame declined so precipitously? Why is he neglected and left unread? It is tempting to say that he was too good a theologian for the time he was born in, and perhaps too good for the people he sought to serve. He produced a serious Methodist Christian theology at a point in history when the Methodist movement was tending in some quarters toward a less serious, and in all quarters toward a less doctrinal, profile. He also produced an irenic synthesis marked by balance and proportion at a time when there was felt need for short, sharp polemics on the frontier with Calvinism. Pope was calmly and coolly anti-Calvinist, eager to show that the main lines of the Christian tradition were on the side of the Methodists (or, to put it the other way around, that the Methodist movement was well aligned with the great Christian tradition). He took the long view and wrote with the goal of forming the overall theological understanding of students. Even his own students, though, were unlikely to reach for their class notes when preparing for a theological conflict.

Langford hypothesizes that one of the reasons for the eclipse of Pope’s work is that Pope found his voice in the mid-nineteenth century but published later in the century. Things had changed already in his lifetime: Darwinism had emerged in that time, and many theologians became convinced that Christianity had to be restated within a thoroughly evolutionary framework. The tide of historical criticism of the Bible was rising rapidly during these decades, and again the younger generation was certain that responsible theology had to take the assured results of the latest critics into account. Pope, for whatever reasons, serenely declined the invitation to take part in the panics and scrambles that animated so much Victorian intellectual life. Langford points out that in his vocation as a teacher, Pope focused on communicating what he had already learned, but he was “isolated from the newer currents in British intellectual life—Darwinism and idealistic philosophy.”9 On this view,

Pope was not engaged in the swirl of Victorian struggles with religious doubt, the new dynamic of biblical criticism, the changing philosophical scene with the rise of idealism, or the transforming power of evolutionary ideas. His position was formed prior to the 1860s, the critical period for many of the issues, and although the Compendium was published in 1875–76, he was not responsive to these new currents. Catholic in his range of sensitivity to traditional Christian positions, Pope was uncongenial toward contemporary developments, although a slight familiarity with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theology is evident.10

It may well be that Pope was simply out of touch with the recent developments. But it may also be that while he was adequately informed about them and had taken their measure, he had decided that they simply did not force themselves on the consideration of a theologian in the same way that the large, central doctrines did: Trinity, incarnation, atonement. Langford acknowledges that Pope’s lack of engagement with contemporary controversies was his “conservative disposition and his tight focus on biblical truth.”11 Other commentators have assumed that Pope was “keenly aware of the contemporary challenges to the Christian faith” and even “often concerned with these apologetic themes.” Nevertheless, his impact was blunted and “his stature as an apologist . . . reduced by his tendency to brush aside extreme atheist arguments without much consideration. When the materialists and positivists say that God is imaginary, this is too much for Pope, who ‘has nothing to say to such impiety and skepticism.’”12 Of course, to say aloud that one has nothing to say to impiety is itself to say something to impiety by adopting a definite rhetorical strategy. Principled disengagement is still disengagement.

As a British Methodist, Pope’s church connection was numbered among the dissenting bodies. Perhaps it was in compensation for this that his overriding concern as a leader was to keep the Methodist theological tradition solidly connected to, and in conspicuous continuity with, the main stock of historic, traditional Christian doctrine. For various reasons, some Wesleyans and Arminians have interpreted their origins in the great revivals as warrant for interpreting their distinctive theology as the documentation of something brand new that God is doing in the world; at its worst, the tradition seems to presuppose that theology needs to start more or less from scratch now that the Methodists have arrived. Sometimes that attitude is expressed simply as anti-Calvinism, reacting against the five-point synthesis of Dordt and its attendant emphases. But under certain conditions, the Wesleyan theological impulse can interpret Calvinism as the nearest edge of a vast, Augustinian complex of errors. What follows from this is usually a kind of intellectual sectarianism, as Methodist theology sets itself up as a protest movement against Augustinianism. Down this road lies an antipathy to the theology of the great central tradition of Western Christian thought. We need not accept Augustine uncritically in order to acknowledge his importance, and it is easy to see how a commitment to working around his theological legacy could become an impulse toward marginalization. This impulse has not been good for Wesleyan theology. Pope’s Compendium is especially designed to show how Methodist theology is one of the voices that sounds out alongside the others in the same Christian family of doctrine. He is sometimes harder to read than Watson and Miley, two other accomplished and nonsectarian theologians of the Wesleyan tradition. Pope writes more artfully, with greater allusiveness. For constructive, doctrinal purposes, Pope’s commitment is to the grand vision of the unity and continuity of Christian doctrine.

Pope was once commissioned to write an essay explaining the distinctiveness and peculiarity of Methodist doctrine, a task he was glad to undertake but that he necessarily shaped to his own ends. “We have to say a few words upon certain peculiarities in the doctrinal position of Methodism,” he begins. But he immediately changes the subject: “But it is a pleasant preface to dwell for a moment on the broad expanse of catholic evangelical truth, concerning which it has no peculiarities, or no peculiarities that affect Christian doctrine.”13 In his next sentence he launches into a summary of the shared creation theology of the Christian church: “To begin where all things have their beginning, with the being, triune essence, and attributes of God; his relation to the universe as its Creator and providential Governor; his revelation of himself in nature: this supreme truth it holds against all atheism, antitheism, pantheism, and materialism.”14

It is here, with the shared Christian doctrine of creation and its antithesis to other cosmological theories, that we turn from introducing our neglected theologian to taking up his most significant proposal for a Christian doctrine of creation.

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY CREATION IN POPE’S THEOLOGY

One of the characteristic features of Pope’s doctrine of creation is a programmatic distinction he offers between the divine act of primary creation (God calling all things into existence) and the divine work of secondary creation (the formation of an ordered universe). The former is the realm of metaphysical inquiry and apologetic argumentation; Scripture chooses to say little about it, and science can say nothing in principle. The latter, secondary creation, is the domain of both the biblical account and of scientific investigation, and it also stretches forward into the doctrine of providence. The distinction between primary and secondary creation had been broadly shared among the theologians of Protestant orthodoxy in the centuries before Pope and has roots in medieval and patristic thought. Characteristically, Pope was not attempting originality in his use of the distinction, but he did carry it through his entire account of creation with special consistency.

Early in his discussion, Pope says of the doctrine of creation that “the revelations of Scripture on this subject may be distributed under the two heads of the Creator in regard to the act of creation and the several orders of the creatures as the result of His creating act.”15 What Pope emphasizes even here is the singleness of God’s one creative act, on the one hand, and the multiplicity of ordered, layered, sequenced creatures that result, on the other. That is, he contrasts the unity of the creative act with the multiplicity of created entities. Both are true and posited by Scripture. But they demand distinct treatment, and it is this distinct treatment that orders Pope’s account of creation.

With reference to the doctrine of God, primary and secondary creation display the leading divine attributes differently. “The creating act displays the glory of [all]...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction by Geoffrey H. Fulkerson and Joel Thomas Chopp
• 1 William Burt Pope (1822–1903): Primary and Secondary Creation by Fred Sanders
• 2 Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920): Enlightenment, Science, Worldview, and the Christian Mind by Craig Bartholomew
• 3 B. B. Warfield (1851–1921): Evolution, Human Origins, and the Development of Theology by Bradley J. Gundlach
• 4 Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976): Myth, Science, and Hermeneutics by Joshua W. Jipp
• 5 Karl Barth (1886–1968): The Doctrine of Creation and the World of Science by Katherine Sonderegger
• 6 T. F. Torrance (1913–2007): Christ the Key to Creation and Theological Science by Kevin J. Vanhoozer
• 7 Jürgen Moltmann (1926–): The Environment of Science and Theology by Stephen N. Williams
• 8 Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014): Nature, Contingency, and the Spirit by Christoph Schwöbel
• 9 Robert Jenson (1930–2017): History’s God by Stephen John Wright
• 10 Colin E. Gunton (1941–2003): The Triune God, Scientific Endeavor, and God’s Creation Project by Murray A. Rae
• Afterword by Alister E. McGrath
• Contributors
• Notes
• General Index
• Scripture Index
• Praise for Science and the Doctrine of Creation
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright