List of Reasons for an Old Earth

Here we go and in no particular order.

1. Evidences of natural time esp. geological and astronomical
2. Fitness of natural selection to explain and predict biological changes
3. Evidence of ancient life / fossil evidence
4. Paucity of the challenges
5. The false-friend of ID (really an attempt to resurrect the Argument from Deisgn or the Teleological Argument. These are not explanatory; we see what we want to see. 
6. The "brain weight" including contemporaries like Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne as well as ancients like Augustine
7. Hermeneutics properly practiced: thinking correctly about how to read ancient documents especially according to time and genre
8. The "very good" of God / God as trustworthy
9. The goodness of matter / natural law and its necessity for confessing the incarnation, the benefit of Jesus's sacrifice, and obtaining a real hope for eschatological deliverance
10. The danger of replacing the theology of the cross with a theology of glory
11. The importance of the Book of Nature
12. Animals need to hope as well
13. The danger that bad thinking poses for the health and growth of the church.

Objections that a friend of mine raised: Radiometric dating -- when does it start? Tampering. Mt. St. Helen's rocks. Slow formation of sediment trees. Logs in Mt St. Helens. Ken Ham and his group-basis for evaluations.

Highlightegen Geist

The most important thing about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is recognizing its pattern.

So, let's think of preparing a recipe. You know what you want to make, say, chicken with creamy spinach. Some people don't, but I always follow a recipe. I assemble the ingredients, in this case chicken, garlic, baby spinach, wine, Djon mustard, heavy cream. Where necessary, I cut and prepare the ingredients ahead of time, following mise in place. Then the cooking and the tasty result. I have, if you will, created (in a derivative way) chicken with creamy spinach.

We see the same thing in Genesis at the creation. God the Father has decided the dish. The ingredients are God the Son. And the cooking--the bringing the ingredients to the desired result--is God the Spirit.

The Spirit is the energetic mover that uses the Son to bring the Father's desire to its realization.

That is the pattern of the Holy Spirit, his dynamic motif. His work always conforms to this shape. And anything that says it is him but that does not conform to this pattern is not him at all.

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Above, I talked about the fundamental pattern of the Holy Spirit: that he perfects or completes or brings into being the will of the Father enacted by means of the Son. I want to develop this insight. In this email, I want to make one point of clarification:

Good, orthodox trinitarian theology does not separate the persons.

Let's hear from a foundational theologian on this point.

Gregory of Nyssa is an important theologian of the ancient church. He lived from 335-395 AD. And he wrote a letter about the Trinity that has been read ever since. The letter is called "On not three gods." Let's read what he says about not separating the persons.

"In the case of the Divine nature we do not similarly learn that the Father does anything by Himself in which the Son does not work conjointly, or again that the Son has any special operation apart from the Holy Spirit; but every operation which extends from God to the Creation, and is named according to our variable conceptions of it, has its origin from the Father, and proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit. . . . the operation is not divided with regard to the number of those who fulfil it, because the action of each concerning anything is not separate and peculiar, but whatever comes to pass, in reference either to the acts of His providence for us, or to the government and constitution of the universe, comes to pass by the action of the Three, yet what does come to pass is not three things."

Gregory says that we cannot pull the act of one person of the Trinity, such as the Holy Spirit, apart from the rest. They always work together. Opera trinitaris ad extra indivisa sunt; all acts or operations of the trinity are indivisible.

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We talked about food earlier. Let's think about a picnic basket. L and I still own a picnic basket. Kara was seven when we last used it. The idea, of course, is that you pack a meal into the basket. Then, when you get to some green destination, an entire spread of food and drink comes out of it. The feast spreads out much larger than the basket. The basket held the meal in miniature. And if you'd looked inside, you'd known what was coming. That is why I'm beginning with the Trinity. When we ask about the Holy Spirit, we must begin with the triune God.

In this email, I want to say that God is love. Not that he acts lovingly--of course he does--but that God IS love.

When I wrote in parts one and two, I wrote about the pattern the persons assume when they act and how they all act together. I talked about the Trinity at work (ad extra). I want to look quickly at the Godhead as it is in itself (ad intra).

Theology describes the forever life of the triune persons as an unbreakable, ever-flowing, giving and receiving, absolute reciprocating, captivating, totally transparent, intimate, and interpersonal fellowship or community (koinonia) of love (agape). The persons interpenetrate each other without losing their own distinctiveness, called, in Greek, perichoresis, in Latin, circumincession. The word is derived from the preposition peri, meaning around, and chorea which refers to a dance, such as a round dance with its music. That is why some call the divine life the perichoretic dance. It is my favorite bit of theology.

So, God IS love. And this love is the reason why, as I wrote last, one never acts without the others. The persons are always in unity. But, as I said, in their actions, they assume an identifiable pattern: the Father the creator, the Son, redeemer, the Spirit glorifier.

The Godhead of itself is ineffable. We know only what we've been told, and that is not much. How three can be one and one three is a great mystery. In our day, unlike in the past, it is not so hard. We have quantum physics as well as the nature of light to thank for allowing us to see that truth can be paradoxically complicated.

Now, then, we will discuss the Holy Spirit as he works with the Godhead in the world.

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Yes, I said that we'd move on to talking about the work of God in creation (called the sending or the mission or, in Latin, the missio Dei). But I can't help myself. There is a little more I must say about the Trinity, including the matter of origin.

We can tell the persons of the Trinity apart by how they act (the pattern), of course. They have different ways of operating in the world. But what about in the inner life of the Godhead?

The persons are distinguished in the triune life by their origin. The Father is unbegotten. The Son is begotten from the Father. And the Spirit proceeds (or is aspirated -- traditions use one or the other term) from the Father.[1] Now, this begotten or proceeding is not in time. We are just making a logical differentiation, not a temporal one. There was never a time when the Son or the Spirit were not. The Godhead is from eternity and to eternity, without beginning or end. And the Godhead, rather than being a simple, undifferentiated monad, is absolutely personal and relational.

Thus, theology has always seen in the relationship of the three persons the very definition of love and the very source of ever-flowing life. They each gaze upon each other as a beloved like themselves. And they make the other: the Father cannot be the Father save the Son, and the Son cannot be the Son without the Father. Similarly, the Spirit cannot be the Gift of the each to the other save there is reciprocity.

As St. Augustine (354-430 AD) said, "Now when I, who am asking about this, love anything, there are three things present: I myself, what I love, and love itself. For I cannot love love unless I love a lover; for there is no love where nothing is loved. So there are three things: the lover, the loved and the love." Augustine and many theologians in the West surmised that so great is the love between the Father and the Son that it becomes a third Person all of itself.

Another theologian in the twelfth century in Paris, France, named Richard of St. Victor, had another way of thinking about the love between the triune persons. He wrote:

"That love must be mutual is required by the fact that supreme happiness cannot exist without the mutuality of love... the nature of true charity reveals that three persons, not two, are necessary. For charity to be excellent, as well as perfect, it must desire that the love it experiences be a love shared with another. Thus charity is not only mutual love between two; it is fully shared love among three."

And, quoting Richard a little more:

"When one person gives love to another and he alone loves only the other, there certainly is love (dilectio) but it is not a shared love (condilectio). When two love each other mutually and give to each other the affection of supreme longing; when the affection of the first goes out to the second and the affection of the second goes out to the first and tends as it were in diverse ways-- in this case there certainly is love (dilectio) on both sides, but it is not shared love (condilectio). Shared love (condilectio) is properly said to exist when a third person is loved by two persons harmoniously and in community, and the affection of the two persons is fused into one affection by the flame of love for a third. From these things it is evident that shared love (condilectio) would have no place in Divinity itself if a third person were lacking to the other two persons."

From the beginning, Christians have been gazing at this ever-flowing dynamic relationship of absolute love and thinking about ways we could understand what is going on. Either way, it is vital when we talk about a doctrine of God to understand the kind of God we are talking about. And I hope you find this as interesting as I do.

A century or so after Richard of St. Victor, in Italy, St. Catherine of Siena prayed: "O eternal Trinity! O Godhead! That Godhead, your divine nature, gave the price of your son's blood its value. You, eternal Trinity, are a deep sea: the more I enter you, the more I discover, and the more I discover, the more I seek you."

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Creation. I have been so nervous about writing this one. How to keep from jumping into a theology of creation and, instead, to keep to our thread: the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. I am going to try. There is a lot here.

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Not from necessity, but from love's overflow the world was created. "By wisdom the Lord laid the earth's foundations" (Prov 3.19 NRSV) The Greeks, after Pythagoras, saw a wise order embedded in the universe. They called this order the logos. John's Gospel picks this up and begins, "The logos became flesh and tabernacled among us." The dark water-chaos of Genesis is made logos-orderly by the activity (in Greek, the dunamis) of the Spirit.

The Spirit always works to the pattern of the Son. The Spirit is never the point. The exaltation of the Son is the will of the Father, who has put everything under his Son's feet. (The Scriptures about the exaltation of the Son are innumerable. The New Testament often quotes, for example, Psalm 2.6: "I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain.") And the Son, obedient to the will of the Father, glorifies him. In creation, the mutual adoration of the persons is pressed into the wet clay of mud and history.

Couple of things.

1. Matter is good; bodies are good; time is good, as in fit for the divine purpose.
2. The Spirit works not just upon but with things. Aristotle would say that God uses not just primary but secondary actions in accomplishing his will.
3. The kind of work: a place is made for a thing: the expanse for the sun and moon, the sky for the birds, etc. The creative work is orderly. Please remember that this is not a scientific text. It is a theological one. Though, per #1, normal means of making things (geology, natural selection) don't discount the Spirit's guidance.
4. Human beings are made as a community. The Godhead does not work in solitaries but in communities. Recall that the first pair are a married pair (Adam's covenant oath "bone of my bone"), and the command to human beings is to make larger and richer communities and to garden the world--bringing order to chaos and reflecting what the Spirit did bringing order from watery chaos. Human beings are made male + female = the imago Dei, the image of God. Like priests, they should reflect to all creation the character of their maker.
5. God enters history and the world of things and knowledge. God chooses to reveal himself. No one else can make him or can use some reason or mathematics or philosophy to reason him out. The revealer is the Spirit. The revealed is the Son.
6. The Bible says there were heavenly hosts rejoicing in and perhaps helping with creation (cf. Job 38:4-7). God's overflowing love means he likes communities. Think of Job's heavenly court. It shouldn't surprise us to discover communities other than our own. Christianity says there is plenty of life out there. Christians are supernaturalists, quite literally, there is more out there than matter. Lest you wonder if that has any bearing on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, it will.
7. The triune persons move through creation toward rest, which is theological shorthand for the experience of the divine life (Heb. 4). This rest is promised to all creation, not just to human beings (Rom. 8:22).
8. Colossians 1:15-20 shouldn't be missed. In the Son, all things hold together. And recall that the persons work as one for they are one.
9. When we think of creation and the Spirit, we should read Psalm 104. And we should understand that this, combined with God's mandate to human beings and Colossians 1, form the basis of a Christian doctrine of creation care.

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That last bit on creation was not small. So, I thought I'd do a few follow-up paragraphs that each focus on one element.

The Ghent Altarpiece is a large complex of many connected paintings that make up, well, an altarpiece. It is located in St. Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium. Fully opened, it measures eleven feet wide and fifteen feet high. It depicts all sorts of peoples and animals and instruments--all creation--gathered around a central figure: the living lamb who was slain. The Father and the Spirit are also present, but they are part of the circle around the lamb. The point is obvious: it is all about Jesus.

So, as we think about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, we must keep this in mind. The Holy Spirit affects the will of the Father to give to the Son "a name which is above every name." The way this happens develops as the story of God's people in history develops. In Exodus, he is hardening the heart of Pharaoh. In Judges, he is strengthening the arm of Samson. He is anointing David in 1 Samuel. And in Luke's gospel, he is resurrecting the dead Jesus. "The wind blows where it wills," Jesus said of the Spirit. But his will is not capricious. The Trinity wills together. And that will is the unquestioned peaceful rule of the God-man, Jesus, over creation.

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"The Spirit of the Lord renews the face of the earth. Come, let us adore him!" (a call to worship, Book of Common Prayer)

"[All creatures] look to you
to give them their food in due season;
when you give to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath, they die
and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit, they are created;
and you renew the face of the ground." (Ps 104.27-30 NRSV)

Here is the second of my mini-explorations underneath the category of creation, which occurs in the process of our exploration of the person and work of the Holy Spirit. And this one could fill a hundred books. So, let me sum it up: God is separate from the world; God respects the things he makes.

The Spirit, with the Son, both shapes and holds the cosmos together. Speaking of the work of the Son, Paul in Colossians writes: "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together."

The Spirit is the energy of this creation and this holding together, though always working to the blueprint of wisdom, the logos, and toward the supremacy of the Son.

So, the living world is living because its source is life itself. BUT the world is not God. We do not and should not worship creation or any creature. Pantheists say the cosmos == godself. But this is not so. "You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below." (Ex. 20.4a NRSV)

God is different from the creation. And, the things he makes, he respects. He governs the world through various laws, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He says that matter is good--at least good enough for his purpose in creating it. And now I want to jump into science and such. The method science, called methodological naturalism, doesn't have to bracket God, but, instead, presupposes his governance, called his general providence. As I read somewhere: "God’s general providence results in a creation that is extraordinarily consistent (i.e., God is not capricious) and this enables science to work." This is an important clarification because a purely philosophical naturalism has no way of explaining why the material world is subject to discovery. As Einstein said, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." This door I'm drawing here is an important one for those who are afraid that following Jesus means lobotomizing their minds. Not so. And it is important for those who are troubled with how evil rages in this world God made. But we do not have time to go into any of that. I simply point it out.

So, more directly to our aim: why is God's relationship with matter important for understanding the work of the Holy Spirit? Simply put, the Spirit works not only like some kind of magic, such as in the healing of a blind man or in the raising of the dead. But, perhaps most often, the Spirit works through the ordinary stuff of men and things.

So often in the Bible, people are drawn to fireworks when what they should be after is in the ordinary. Naaman's reluctance to baptize himself in the Jordan River. Jesus's irritation with the crowds who crave the miracles but ignore his teachings and, ultimately, himself. People say that the world we are in is a disenchanted world, but that is only because they misunderstand what enchantment is. They tell fairy stories and think the absence of fairies proves something. All they did was expose the silly nature of idolatry and miss the real nature of God's authority and responsibility as creator of this vast-beyond-vast cosmos he has made.

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In one of the letters that Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, the letter we call 1 Corinthians, Paul talks about knowledge. Corinth was a rich city. Everyone was sophisticated and educated. The schools were full of young men studying how to speak well and with authority in their future careers in government or law. But Paul had none of that polish. Instead, he talked about the cross. "I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God (τὸ μυστήριον τοῦ θεοῦ) to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (1 Cor. 2.1-2 NRSV). Wisdom comes from the crucified Jesus and not philosophical or rhetorical sophistication. And he goes on to say:

"[God has revealed his wisdom (σοφίας)] to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God" (v 10-11).

The Spirit reveals Jesus to us. Here is the now-familiar pattern: the Spirit points to Jesus as the Father wills. The Spirit does this revealing in three ways.

First, the Spirit affects the creation of reasonable human beings in a reasonable world out of the love of a reasonable God.[2]

Second, the Spirit reveals God. We could and would not know him but for his loving desire to be in dialogue and community with us. The Spirit makes this happen. He inspires chosen individuals (prophets and apostles) to use their reason to speak and write his words to his people--scripture. "No prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." (2 Peter 1.21a)

Third, he illuminates sin-darkened humans to recognize the truth with their hearts and to understand it with their minds. Through the scriptural preaching of God's people, human beings all over the world, sophisticated and smooth-talking people, see wisdom where it really is revealed: in the crucified Jesus.

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Let's look sideways. Following along in the footsteps of pneumatology, we are almost at the Jordan on a very special day. But, let's pause a moment and look quickly at a neighboring line of thought. Let's look at theological anthropology, or the way the Bible thinks about human beings. And especially what the Spirit does to human beings in the OT.

I'm going to give you a couple of scriptures here, but let me just lead with the punchline. Human beings were created to image God. Unpacked a bit, this means human beings are meant to be priests. If we think about how ancient people defined priests, they would say that priests represent the character and will of a deity to the world. Priests rule, in a way, because they make judgments based on the wisdom and will of the god. Priests build and serve in a temple where a deity meets and rules his people. And priests represent the needs and desires of the outside world to the deity. Obviously, human beings fell from their priestly calling. But the Spirit who made order from chaos begins to restore human beings to their high calling.

In Exodus 31, Bezalel is given the Spirit so that Bezelel can build and adorn the tabernacle.

In many cases, judges and then kings received the Spirit so they could properly judge the people. Deuteronomy 17 makes the kingship in Israel a priestly office. The king served under and as an extension of God's word.

Actual priests (Levites) performed an office to which they were divinely separated (sanctified) and anointed.

And, finally, prophets received the Spirit so that they could speak to the people.

Put these together and we see that the Spirit's work bends toward restoring human beings (and it is always "them," the individual is not in view) to their created office.

"You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own, so that you may proclaim the virtues of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light" (1 Peter 2.9 NET).

"Then he said to me, 'These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple . . . '" (Rev. 7.14b-15a NRSV).

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We have finally arrived at the coming and work of Jesus himself. Looking out from the high point of things, the coming and work of Jesus is the visible part of the missio Dei--the Trinity's action to redeem the cosmos. The Philippian hymn takes it from this point of view:

"[Jesus], though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross."

Or John 5: 19, 22, 23b:

"Jesus said to them, 'Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. . . . Anyone who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.'"

This is how a theologian might talk about Jesus's work looking from above, so to speak. But Mark's Gospel has a different approach. It begins on the ground from below. In the first fifteen verses of chapter 1, Mark tells us exactly who Jesus is and what he is up to. He is the coming one (Deut 18:15; Daniel 7:13) who is greater than the final prophet, John. His coming begins the last days. He is coming in the power of the Spirit to announce his kingship, to overthrow all hostile powers, spiritual and earthly, and to forgive the sins of the faithful and give them the Holy Spirit.

In the center of Mark's outline is the baptism of Jesus. There are a lot of references to creation. The persons of the Trinity are all there: God is declaring. Jesus is obeying. The Spirit is anointing him to do what he is there to do.

So, here is our principle. As we ask, What does this tell us about the person and work of the Holy Spirit? So, we answer: the giving of the Spirit in Jesus's baptism tells us the Spirit's missio work is to do the will of the Father through the instrument of the Son for the glory of God. No less. No more.

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Our goal in this series is to follow the threads of a Biblical theology of the Holy Spirit. Last time, we arrived at the person and ministry of Jesus. As you can guess, Jesus being the very center of the entire Bible, there is a lot more to be said about him and his ministry than about the work of the Spirit, and I was quite nervous about being sucked into Christology. Therefore, I tried to keep my comments trimmed to only what was absolutely necessary. I focused on only one text: Mark's introduction to Jesus and his ministry in chapter one of his Gospel. And of that, I focused on his Baptism because the Trinity is so visible there--and so the Spirit is--and Jesus is anointed so obviously there with the Spirit for his work. I mentioned that there is a lot of creation language. The subtext in mentioning that is that what God did -- creation -- he is doing again: so the actors in one event act their roles again in the next. The ending of all of that was a principle: that "the giving of the Spirit in Jesus's baptism tells us the Spirit's missio work is to do the will of the Father through the instrument of the Son for the glory of God. No less. No more."

This bit adds a little about Jesus. Jesus is God incarnate. He is the divine Son made real man from a real woman in a real place at a real time: Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary and adopted son of Joseph, who was probably born around 3 BC in Bethlehem, a town we can still visit today. So, in his first advent, his life, death in Jerusalem, resurrection, and ascension from the Mount of Olives, in all the things he knew and all the miracles he did--was that just the Son manifesting his godself as the second person of the Trinity or was it the Holy Spirit?

We have spoken about how you cannot legitimately pull the Trinity apart. They are tightly intertwined and unified in everything that they do. Nevertheless, theology, following scripture, does see one or another figure prominently in this or that activity. At Jesus's baptism (as at creation) it is the Father who pronounces, it is the Son who, like the orderly creation, comes out of watery chaos, it is the Spirit over the waters that affects the divine will. Therefore, it is not complete speculation to ask this question about the origin of Jesus's miraculous power and insight. And, actually, I say that it is very important that we do so.

Recall that at the beginning of the last email, I posted a bit of the Christ hymn of Philippians 2. The Son emptied himself of his divine splendor and became a real human being. His glory is in his obedience. In his love, he identifies with his people "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." Indeed, he becomes the new human being, the new Adam. Speaking of the saving work of Jesus, an early theologian said, "That which is not assumed [by Jesus] is not atoned for." So, he took all of what we are and gives us all of what is his. This is the gospel: that in him our sins are killed and with him we, his people, have joy together and life eternal. (One might say the church is invited by grace--not by nature--into the triune fellowship.)

Because this is the gospel, I am inclined to agree with theologians who say that Jesus, in his humility, depended upon the Spirit and communed with the Father as a human being. He did not use his power (Jn 10:18), but walked in obedience, following the Spirit. After his baptism in Mark's Gospel, Jesus is compelled by the Spirit to do what Adam failed to do, confront Satan in the wilderness (not in his own power but in his obedient dependence upon the word of God) and call people back into fellowship with God and with one another: "The Kingdom of God has come near! Come, follow me!" We--the church--walk in the footsteps he made. And, therefore, we should expect the Spirit to be with us as it was with him. It may be more, for Jesus said, "you will do greater works than these," but it will certainly not be less.

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69. On Sunday

O God our King, by the resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ on the first day of the week, you conquered sin, put death to flight, and gave us the hope of everlasting life: Redeem all our days by this victory; forgive our sins, banish our fears, make us bold to praise you and to do your will; and steel us to wait for the consummation of your kingdom on the last great Day; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Continuing our review of pneumatology, we had arrived at the work of Jesus. I wrote, "The giving of the Spirit in Jesus's baptism tells us the Spirit's missio work is to do the will of the Father through the instrument of the Son for the glory of God. No less. No more." And I also said that the danger we face here is to drown in the orchestral swell of the work of Jesus and miss our humble and careful trace after the Holy Spirit. Yet, we should say at least what that work is, and prayer 69 "On Sunday" from the Book of Common Prayer is a beautiful confession of part of that--keeping in mind that it is the whole church that is praying and we individuals pray it as we are in that company.

I say part of that, because it remembers the existential situation of salvation, but ignores the sociological or political nature of it. For that, we go to that Old Testament teaching of God gathering his people back from all the nations so that he can be forever good to them. Here is Jeremiah 32:37-41:

"I am going to gather them from all the lands to which I drove them in my anger and my wrath and in great indignation; I will bring them back to this place, and I will settle them in safety. They shall be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me for all time, for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make an everlasting covenant with them, never to draw back from doing good to them; and I will put the fear of me in their hearts, so that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing good to them, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul."

Isaiah -- Isaiah and Jeremiah are active under the shadow and reality of the destruction and exile of the northern and southern kingdoms, Israel and Judah -- devotes chapter 35 and many other places to this return from exile:

"the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away."

Jesus's victory makes this possible--to share by grace the community of his very self with his beloved people, his bride. The valley of the shadow of death is done. Now there is the city of God.

"Look on Zion, the city of our appointed festivals!
Your eyes will see Jerusalem,
a quiet habitation, an immovable tent (Isa. 33.20)."

"And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,“See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes." (Rev. 21.2-3 NRSV)

With Jesus's enthronment upon his ascension, the way is open to anyone who will RSVP his divine invitation. And, as the Son was willingly sent and the Spirit with him, so the church will be sent to inform the Powers that they can no longer hold his people captive--they rule no more--and to publish the divine welcome. And they will do this as the new humanity. The image of God is restored in them. They are restored to their intended priesthood. And they are empowered by the same Spirit to announce his reign and welcome.

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.”
And let everyone who hears say, “Come.”
And let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. (Rev. 22.17 NRSV)

Now we know the purpose of the work of the Son. And now we are ready to talk about the Spirit's work in and through the church--us.

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Last time, we talked about the resurrection of Jesus and a bit about the ascension. As we turn to consider Pentecost, I want to say just a little more about the latter.

After being with his people for forty days after his resurrection, Jesus ascends into glory. The clouds mentioned in Acts are a theological not an aesthetic detail. They refer to Daniel 7:13ff. Jesus is the Son of Man coming in the clouds. He receives dominion from the Father. He is enthroned at the Father's right hand.

I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
and was presented before him.
To him was given dominion
and glory and kingship,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one
that shall never be destroyed.

Daniel is picking up some of that covenant with David language. Jesus told his people to wait for the Spirit to come at Pentecost, a harvest festival. The Spirit comes on his people because Jesus has begun to reign. As Hebrews 10:12-13 says:

But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, “he sat down at the right hand of God,” and since then has been waiting “until his enemies would be made a footstool for his feet.”

Previously, we noted how the Spirit is always working through the Son to accomplish the will of the Father. But now, by grace, the Spirit is going to work through the church, this kingdom of priests that Jesus has redeemed, his body, the elect, the co-heirs. Through them by grace the Spirit is going to accomplish the will of the Father, which, in this case, is to extend and complete the reign of Jesus, the Son of David, the Son of God as it says in Psalm 2 and many other places. Don't mistake the shock: the church is acting--not according to being but according to gracious inclusion--as a fourth member of the Trinity. It has been welcomed into the perichoretic dance in a way that truly boggles the mind.

The announcement that Jesus is king (and no one else) is going to require a clear commission, an equipping for that mission, and an expectation of deadly conflict both spiritual and material. I have brought up Jesus's baptism in Mark. We see those same things there which we will see in Pentecost: Jesus is clearly commissioned by the Father's public voice from heaven and John's witness. Jesus is equipped by his education in the Tanakh (the Old Testament) and the giving of the Spirit. And the Spirit thrusts Jesus immediately into the wilderness where he, in obedience and suffering, begins his cosmic conflict with Satan. Pentecost is going to replicate Jesus's pattern in the lives of his people. (I can't help but interject here that Jesus's life replicated the history of Israel. The Bible is cool like that.) Next time we finally get into the church and, therefore, us.

Now, let me say a quick word about a long-standing division in the church called the Great Schism. Back in 1054 CE, differences came to a head that were long-brewing between the Latin-speaking West and the Greek-speaking East. As is typical with human beings, there were a lot of reasons for this split. But the biggest symbolic reason was the Latin insistence that the Roman Pope was supreme. The Easterners disagreed. But the Latins were undeterred, and in their "supremecy," they insisted that a clause be inserted into the Nicene Creed (shorthand for the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed adopted by the whole church in 325 AD). This clause is called the filioque /fill-ee-OH-quay/ because those are the words that were added: "and the son." The amended text says that the Spirit proceeds "from the father and the son." I realize that this seems quite trivial, but it wasn't. The Latin church was being innovative with the most ancient of creeds without even running it by the East. The Western church had the pope after all, and the Eastern church said, yeah, there's the real problem.

Anyway, people throughout the church have been burdened about it ever since. Jesus prayed to the father that his church would be one, and untold numbers have prayed ever since for healing. The twentieth century saw a theological warming occur, and, just a few years ago, a new statement came out published by the Anglican Oriental-Orthodox International Commission (AOOIC). The statement said--and I don't have it with me so I'm just paraphrasing--that the original wording of the creed should stand as a statement of the origin of the Spirit. The Spirit proceeds from the Father alone; we discussed this some months ago. Nevertheless, following language in the Book of Acts and other places in the New Testament, when it comes to the mission of the Spirit in the church, it is fine to say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. So, then, if you open up a Book of Common Prayer or just pull it up on the internet and say the Nicene Creed and say that line "He proceeds from the Father and the Son," you are talking about the Spirit's missio work right now, not his existence in the triune life. His everlasting origin is the Father alone, but he is sent missionally by the Father and the Son.

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Dr. Gordon Huegenberger, my Old Testament professor back in the day, used to say about the structure of Genesis that every time the reader expects God's judgment, mercy is displayed, some new beginning, a promise, hope.

The disciples asked Jesus on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem, "Are you going to restore the Kingdom now?" In other words, is this the last day? Is this the day of judgment? As the prophet Joel said:

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sound the alarm on my holy mountain!
Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,
for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near—
a day of darkness and gloom,
a day of clouds and thick darkness! (Joel 2.1-2a NRSV)

They expected that once the Messiah was enthroned, he would do justice on the earth.

The Lord utters his voice
at the head of his army;
how vast is his host!
Numberless are those who obey his command.
Truly the day of the Lord is great;
terrible indeed—who can endure it? (v.11)

And the falling of the Spirit upon the assembled on the day of Pentecost was no less than one of those moments in which the reader expects God's judgment. The reader is not wrong (see Luke 12.49-53), but with judgment also comes mercy. God comes in wind and fire upon Israel people, like at Sinai. The prophetic word of the Messiah's rule is announced to Jews from all over the world attending the feast in Jerusalem. And Peter quotes from Joel: the day of the Lord--the last day has arrived. Judgment has come upon the world." But, there is also mercy: "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the Lord has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls." Mercy. Promise. Hope. "The promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him" (Acts 2.38-39 NRSV).

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[1] Here, following the 2018 ecumenical statement on the filoque published by the Anglican Oriental-Orthodox International Commission (AOOIC), The Procession and Work of the Holy Spirit, I consider the filioque a historical assertion, agree that the Spirit aspirates eternally from the Father alone, and is only poured out through the Son in the pursuit of the redemption of God's world and people following Jesus's assumption on Pentecost. In this, I haven't deviated from the points made in Why I Like the Filioque, but I have qualified them. The title of that post was meant to be cheeky in a kind of friendly way. The truth is, my trinitarianism, like the AOOIC, follow the Orthodox.

[2] Pope Benedict XVI gave a lecture in 2006 in which he made a point worth footnoting. “The fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.” So that “not to act 'with logos' is contrary to God’s nature." For Christians, reasonable action is godly action. Christian theology does not threaten the dialogue necessary to a free society of mutual respect and responsible political action. Instead, such dialogue is part-and-parcel of its deepest theological confession.

Noodling around in 1 John 1

In preparation for teaching basic Greek in January, I am working through 1 John chapter 1 and saw a few things. A friend encouraged me to write them down. Beginning, then, at the beginning--

1 John 1.1

"That which was from the beginning.
That which we have heard;
That which we have seen with our eyes;
That which we marveled at
and we handled with our hands
-- concerning the word (logos) of life:"

 ὃ  ἦν         ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς,

 ὃ  ἀκηκόαμεν,

 ὃ  ἑωράκαμεν  τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν,

 ὃ  ἐθεασάμεθα

     καὶ

[ὃ] αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν

περὶ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς--

I made a rough translation of verse one and laid the Greek out in order to highlight the structure. Pronoun and verbs build in a series, stairstepping one to the next, trumpet blasts announcing their object: the word of life. The parallels between this and Genesis 1.1-3 in the LXX are hard to miss, beginning at the beginning itself--

1 John	Parallel
ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς	᾿Εν ἀρχῇ (LXX)
"we heard" (ἀκηκόαμεν)	Genesis's "God said" (καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός)
we see with our eyes (ἑωράκαμεν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν)	God said "let there be light" (Γενηθήτω φῶς)
"we marveled at" ἐθεασάμεθα	Job 38:7
τοῦ λόγου	the wisdom which orders creation in Prov 6
τῆς ζωῆς	Genesis 3:20 LXX: καὶ ἐκάλεσεν Αδαμ τὸ ὄνομα τῆς γυναικὸς αὐτοῦ Ζωή, ὅτι αὕτη μήτηρ πάντων τῶν ζώντων.

Couple of thoughts on these parallels. On the Job 38 reference, I suspect that the creation side alludes to the sons of God, the heavenly council, rejoicing at creation. Now, however, 1 John includes a we, meaning the church. As for logos, John's Gospel equates the word, logos, with the wisdom or reason which gives order to creation in Proverbs 6. Stoic philosophers and gnostic mystics of the first century would agree. But 1 John blows it up. We "handled with our hands" is a body blow. Until then, the entire progression of 1 John's opening prologue is a kind of mystical contemplation on creation. But, instead of arriving at gnosis, "we handled with our hands" takes a baseball bat to the face--very hard, very painful, definitely solid.

Moving on: the verb "we marveled" (ἐθεασάμεθα) occurs in structural progression with the verbs before it. But it has something they do not. It is joined with the conjunction "and" to the verb "we handled" (ἐψηλάφησαν). As above, Job's elohim, the sons of God, the heavenly council rejoiced at creation. But we who marvel with them go one better. We handle it with our hands. The allusion to the incarnation is inescapable.

Finally, it would be erroneous to miss the name of Eve here, Zoe (Ζωή) in the LXX. Eve, of course, wanted wisdom but on human initiative. Now the τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς, the wisdom of Eve, has come, but this time at the initiative of the Creator. There is an entire theology, almost a mystagogy, that wants to spill out here. And, somewhere, I hope someone has done work on the New Testament's literary rehabilitation of Eve. I suspect something profoundly eschatological is going on here. Perhaps it is my protestantism bumping up against Mariology. I have nothing to say about this more than to point it out. And also to say that the narrative is holding its Adam very close to the chest and will do so until verse three.

1 John 1.2

The parallels between creation's development in Genesis 1 and the verbal series of 1 John 1 makes verse 2 a puzzle. It doesn't follow the parallel. "This life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us." I wish it followed Genesis on into the days of creation, but it does not. I'm not sure what it does. So, here is a guess. The following verse almost picks up where verse one left off. It uses the same verbs--we have seen" "we have heard." So, perhaps 1 John 1.2 is a sort of confession sandwiched between verses 1 and 3. In Genesis, God parts things: light from dark, the waters above from the waters below. Perhaps verse 2 exists in a space made by the parting of verses 1 and 3. Verse two deserves a closer look.

Verse 2 displays a beautiful layout of verb tenses. It says "The life was revealed (the past tense verb is passive) AND we have seen it (perfect tense: something happened, the affect of which is influencing the writer) AND we are bearing witness (now present tense and ongoing) AND we are announcing (again, present tense and ongoing) it to you all."

1 John 1.3

Well, that is just the way it works, right? God reveals himself, we see it, own it for ourselves, and announce it. Perhaps this evangelism does occur in a kind of parting, like a new day of creation is being hollowed out now for it to happen.

New thing I'm noticing in 1 John: the fundamental nature of communal belonging (koinonia). "We write this so that you will have koinonia with us / our community is with the Father and the Son [the eternal divine community] . . . anyone who habitually sins is not in community with us."

This picks up, of course, on the sweep of scripture: God makes the world in order to be in community w human beings and to enjoy a community of priests mediating his wise rule to our world of things.

1 John 1.5

The parallels between it and Genesis 1 keep going. Life comes before light. The reader is a few verses in before light is mentioned (though "seeing" is in verse 1), but life is in verse 1. Note also the emphasis placed on verbs of speech: we confess, we announce, we say, we claim to. In Genesis, God speaks. Here, the emphasis is on our speaking.

Imagine how this places preaching at the bow of the new creation: the proclamation of the word is analogous to God's Genesis-speech. The fellowship made by preaching is analogous to the human family made by God. And now I have this weird thought going on: if preaching is the analog to God's speaking in Genesis, creating the context for the new community, is baptism the victory over death and the sacraments the offering up in thanks of the fruit of the promised land?

Finally, there are a number of if/then (conditional) statements in this first chapter. I want to dig into them. And I also want to count them to see if these verbs of speaking might not mirror in some way the spoken days of creation.

on panentheism

Christian metaphysics, or perhaps generally just philosophy of religion, is concerned with questions of whether god exists, of how god exists in such-and-such a way should there be a god, and about how such a god might be related to the world. Panentheism falls into this last question, as does pantheism and theism. Panentheism is a compromise between the other two. That is clear. And do any reading in contemporary theology. In Pannenberg. In Moltmann. In Polkinghorn. In Tanner. One runs into the term. It seems contemporary and trendy. But what is it?

Panentheism, a word derived from the Greek πᾶν ἐν θεῷ, begins in Ancient Neoplatonism (from Heraclitus to Plotinus) and comes up through Spinoza's Deus siva Natura to arrive in contemporary western theology in the process theologies of A. N. Whitehead Process and Reality and Charles Hartshorne The Divine Relativity. (The term was coined by Prussian philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause in 1832 to distinguish between the cosmologies of Hegel, Schelling, and Spinoza.) Panentheism posits that all that exists is in God and is part of God without ontological distinction, and yet, God has a unity and identity of his own distinct from that of his finite parts. It reminds me of emergence. There is a connection, but not an identity. God lives his own life, yet he lives it in and through the cosmos. The world is God’s body, and we ourselves are parts of God. Our experiences are God’s experiences. God is, to quote Whitehead, “the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.”

Panentheism retains many of the religious resources of theism even as it criticizes theism’s separation between God and the world. William Hasker says, “Panentheism acknowledges that certain aspects of God’s being are unchangeable, but it stresses God’s involvement in temporal processes in a way that is meant to correct what is felt to be classical theism’s overemphasis on the immutability of God.” Where theism stresses the self-sufficiency of God from creation and characterizes their relationship as totally one-sided, panentheism says God and the world are interdependent. The god of panentheism is deeply involved in the world.

So, why choose panentheism? I can see two reasons. First, panentheism is friendly to scientific materialism and philosophies of science. But, at the same time, it can raid the cookie jar of theism. The second reason is existential: what is good for you is good for god. You can be a panentheist and follow New Thought, management-positive-thinking-optimism books at the office. There is a deep optimism in panentheism. Panentheists aren't judging anyone. And a panentheist can affirm wildly different expressions of religions with no problem.

For the Christian theologian, though, there are problems. Consider panentheism’s identification of godself with the world. If God came to earth to save sinners, then was God’s being damned? And is God quite literally saving himself? If we "fall short of the glory of God," then hasn't God's glory fallen short of itself? Furthermore, aside from dogma, only considering scientific cosmology, this unity creats a problem. Panentheism states that God needs the cosmos in order to live his life in a manner analogous to how human beings need their bodies. But consider this against our scientific understanding of the origin of our universe. God did not begin alongside the universe. That would be absurd! Yet panentheism requires an infinitely regressing series of universes.

There are difficulties that arise from distinction as well as unity. The Judeo-Christian intellectual tradition has always understood a distinction between the world and God. In the doctrine of creation, panentheism understands a creation ex deo, out of God’s own nature for creation is a necessity for the divine existence. Theism teaches creation ex nihilo, from nothing, and it specifically characterizes this as an act of grace from God to the world. The doctrine of creation and of soteriology relate closely together; if creation isn’t an act of grace, then what happens to salvation by grace? In addition, there is the matter of God as the Absolute Good. God is, in the classical categories, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful — originally, perfectly, and normatively. God is the ultimate standard against which any other good is judged. The universe is merely good in part, true in part, and beautiful in part. Panentheism ignores this. And, in doing so, it swallows evil. For if the universe is a mixture of good and evil, then so is god. God cannot then be the Absolute God, yet panentheism has no replacement. Such a standard would be independent of God. But, of course, there can't be anything independent of God. By confusing, as some have called it, the norm and the normed, panentheism drains its universe of good and evil. Sure, God cannot judge anyone, but there is also no judgment. Any act toward judgment, no matter how wise, is an expression of power, but no one can say whether it is done well or poorly or generates good or evil ends. God may be a fellow sufferer with the suffering, but he simultaneously exults with the tyrant.

To conclude, though panentheism in the form of process theology seems to bring the goods, there are deep cracks in the dogmatic engine. Redefining the classical categories, removing the ontological distinction between creature and creator, and remaking grace over in a new image--all of these are serious problems. I like the way Hasker ends his discussion, “Panentheism," he says,

"seems to the theist to be nothing more than a disguised naturalism overlaid with a veneer of religious language. . . . The theist may even find naturalism preferable to panentheism. A naturalist, at least, rejects religion and religious values in a forthright and direct manner. A panentheist, in contrast, makes what seem to be substantive religious assertions, but when closely examined the substance tends to disappear, leaving behind only a vague aura of pious emotion.” (114)

Pattern Language: Opening a Closed Circle

Pattern: Opening a Closed Circle: 83

We are confronted by a closed circle, with the hidden city, with the high garden wall, and with coldness of heart. What is on the other side? And how can we ask? As Socrates says in the Meno, "A man cannot inquire either about that which he knows or about that which he does not know. For if he knows, he has no need to enquire, and if not, he cannot, for he does not know the very subject about which he is to inquire." Plato's puzzle is about knowledge, but the circle is wider still. For example,

"Only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes," said Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Nachfolge).

"A Christian is an utterly free man, lord of all, subject to none; A Christian is an utterly dutiful man, servant of all, subject to all," said Martin Luther (De Libertate Christiana).

"Which comes first," asked the young Augustine, "to call upon you or to praise you? To know you or to call upon you? Must we know you before we can call upon you? Anyone who invokes what is still unknown may be making a mistake" (Confessiones 1.1).

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Working Notes

I'm still working hard on completing even the first draft of this card. The circle problem is a problem of discipleship, of how one becomes another thing. It is a kind of miracle. It is ontological. It is election. What is the difference between it and creation? Is this card soteriology? Note the quote from Emerson's "Circles": "Everything looks permanent until its secret is known." And Dave Eggers has an essay called "The Circle" about corporate totalitarianism. Note also C. S. Lewis's lecture "The Inner Ring" and its implications for judgment. cf. my response.

I was reading an excerpt from Francis Schaeffer's He is There and He Is Not Silent:

"Let us return again to the personal-infinite. On the side of God’s infinity, there is a complete chasm between God on one side and man, the animal, the flower, and the machine on the other. On the side of God’s infinity, He stands alone. He is the absolute other. He is, in His infinity, contrary to all else. He is differentiated from all else because only He is infinite. He is the Creator; all else was created. He is infinite; all else is finite. All else is brought forth by creation; so all else is dependent and only He is independent. This is absolute on the side of His infinity. Therefore, concerning God’s infinity, man is as separated from God as is the atom or any other machine-portion of the universe.

"But on the side of God being personal, the chasm is between man and the animal, the plant, and the machine. Why? Because man was made in the image of God. This is not just 'doctrine.' It is not dogma that needs just to be repeated as a proper doctrinal statement. This is really down in the warp and woof of the whole problem. Man is made in the image of God; therefore, on the side of the fact that God is a personal God the chasm stands not between God and man, but between man and all else. But on the side of God’s infinity, man is as separated from God as the atom or any other finite of the universe. So we have the answer to man’s being finite and yet personal."

Reading this, I saw that creation also falls under the question raised by this card. This card does represent a fundamental theological problem: the problem of how something comes from nothing. It is the crossing of the infinite qualitative distinction between not being and being, between Godself and the world of matter, between being a man born blind and receiving one's sight, between being dead and alive.

Pattern Language: God leads out

PATTERN: God leads out (81)

God leads out. All else is response. From the creatio ex nihilo of the cosmos to the covenant with Abraham to the redeeming of the cosmos to the gift of the Spirit to the coming judgment, all of it would not and cannot be apart from God's beginning of it. This leading out is metaphysical (God as the Unmoved Mover), ethical (God's logos defining the basic categories of good and evil), soteriological (the missio Dei acts according to the agreed desire of the triune persons), and practical (the Christian lives upon the path of God's promises; the Christian prays the Lord's prayer and so asks that God affect his divine will).

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Creation (31) * Grace (26) * Mission (34) * Law (37) * The Spiral/Recapitulation (42) * Election (43) * Promise (51) * Revelation (52) * Covenant (60) * Adoption (70) * Judgment (50) * Freedom (53) * Incarnation (81) * Faith (76) * Blessing (2) * Love (56)

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Karl Barth: [God] wills and posits the creature neither out of caprice nor necessity, but because he has loved it from eternity, because he wills to demonstrate his love for it, and because he wills, not to limit his glory by its existence and being, but to reveal and manifest it in his own co-existence with it. . . . there cannot follow from the creature's own existence and being an immanent determination of its goal or purpose, or a claim to any right, meaning or dignity of its existence and nature accruing to it except as a gift" (CD: III/1.95).

A Note From Class: We Are Made in the Image of the God Who Speaks

Dear friends,

Thinking about language has left us in quite the pickle.

We know that language is messy. It struggles to describe human experiences and ideas. It is unfit to describe God. How, then can we talk about or to God? Can we trust anyone who says that they speak for God? And does using language about God make us idolators?

It seems like we've tied ourselves up in a Gordian knot. We are locked in a large and lonely room. (Or a very small and private room if we think of the room of our minds, the movie between our ears.)

Let me pause here for a moment.

I can't exaggerate how true it is that this large and lonely room is the situation of our world. Western civilization, our civilization, has been locked inside for hundreds of years. I'm not exaggerating or being dramatic.

You see, it denies everything that cannot be measured. With a ruler in one hand and a calculator in the other, it judges everything. And so, after judging so much for so long, it is now unwilling to know anything. Our best scientists are on record today admitting that we could be living in computer simulation for all we know. We may not even exist! How depressing. How meaningless. And it affects everything. As scripture says

"For although [human beings] knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles." (Romans 1:21-23 NIV)

In case you missed it, that last part means that human beings traded knowing God for the worship of idols that they make.

But, I am not here to write about that. I'm here to write about our rescue. Because, you see, God does not leave us in the lonely room.

You see, our God is our creator. God made everything. What this means is that he made the universe and its laws and its times. He also made human beings. He made them to live in it, to govern it, and to worship him as his representatives to everything else it.

And how did he make it all? The scriptures tell us that God spoke it into being. Now don't think of God using a human language, like Hebrew or French or Spanish. The language is poetic. What it is getting at is that there is a deep reason, a wisdom, underneath everything, and that human beings are made as part of that wisdom and made to know that wisdom.

Isn't it weird that two-legged mammals on a little, blue planet developed mathematics and logic that allows them to understand how atoms and subatomic particles, black holes and distant galaxies work? We don't just wander confused around our neighborhoods. Instead, we developed a fantastic tool to study our universe. It is called science. And it really works!

How do we do that? How can our brain make sense of distant planets and galaxies?

It can because we are made in the image of God, in Latin the imago Dei /ee-MAH-go DAY-ee/. And so the reason and logic and wisdom of the creator that knits our universe together is something we can understand because we're part of it all--and that includes language. Our God is a speaking God. And so, human beings, made in his image, may speak with confidence. God put language into the world and called it good (Gen 2:20).

So using language about God or with God does not make us idolators: that is what language is for! Indeed, using language to pray and worship God is its highest and truest use. When we do that, we're doing what we, of all that is made, are created to do (Psalm 150). Not only can we use language, we are made and commanded to do so. Human beings were made to be priests of creation speaking praise on behalf of all things--from stars to mollusks to amoeba to rocks and trees and vines--and displaying to all as well what our God is like, calling all creation to its proper worship.

There's more to say here, but until next time: "Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!"

Creation, soteriology, and the "problem" of the two Adams

I am not concerned with the problem of a first Adam. The fact is, we have no idea what creatio ex nihilo is (see also Karl Jaspers on Creation). We, as the created, only know creatio ex materia. Resurrection is the same way. We think we know what it is, but we really have no more idea than we do about creation. We only know the result, the what, but not the how. We know that resurrection is not reanimation and creation is not reworking some pliable, neutral, and everlasting material. God is not a thing among things, but we are.

Similarly, why does evolution present a problem? God creates from nothing, an act that does not preclude an infinity of changing somethings. The universe may stretch back into the forever, expanding and changing, hissing and sparking out world after world like a firecracker held in the dark. This is not a problem: an infinity of changing somethings is not a from nothing. Evolution is just a closer view of some long length of something. Flesh may change, but it does not create flesh from nothing at all.

I tend to think that evolution is soteriological gift. It tells us that human beings are a piece with all of creation--that we are of the same stuff as everthing else. It tells us that the human being, the imago Dei, Jesus, assumed all flesh and so redeemed all flesh: soteriology is ecology; ecology, soteriology. In the resurrected flesh of Jesus all creation hopes. The us among whom God tabernacled includes the rocks that cry out and the trees that clap their hands.

Finally, for the sake of further thinking (and this is very speculative now), I would like to consider the existence of Adam and Even in parallel with the election of God.[1] Even as Jesus set himself apart, so his people are set apart in him. The imago Dei becomes, then, something graciously received from and through and because of Jesus. Adam and Eve become the beginning of those people in time, the first of the elect and also representatives of elect humanity to come. Therefore, perhaps the language of "fall" is unhelpful. Humanity is made good, but still vulnerable. (I'm thinking of the language of Augustine and human creation in a state of innocence.) Elected humanity can then be made perfect in him ("Be perfect because he is perfect."), though as gold is purified through fire.

Note also the interesting, tri-fold distinction of God's creating activity outlined in Mark Harris's The Nature of Creation. Harris understands the creation texts in scripture to describe the relationship of God with the world. Creation out of nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is “best expressed as a statement of God’s transcendence.” Continuous creation, creatio continua, “is most clearly an expression of God’s immanence.” God is in intimate relationship with humans and the rest of creation. Creation from the old, creatio ex vetere, (Harris's innovative addition) “is fundamentally a descriptive term for God’s redemptive activity in creation (186). Creation from the old is clearly connected with the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrected body is in a discernible continuity with the pre-death body plus something new as well: “more than the resuscitation of a corpse.” Still, Harris sees examples of creation from the old in other texts and situations also.

These three aspects of creation are simplifications and should not be separated rigorously.

God’s work of creation ex nihilo, continua, and ex vetere are not three different actions, but one creative action, while at the same time they point to the diversity of the unitary God. It is no accident that this is reminiscent of Trinitarian language of God – three in one and one in three – for it was through observations such as these, of God’s diverse work in the theatres of creation and redemption, that the three persons of the Trinity came to be recognized and distinguished as such. But the three categories of creative work are not to be identified with the three persons of the Trinity; rather it is distinctions such as these that have been important in the development of Trinitarian thinking. (187)

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[1] Note this abstract of Joshua M. Mortiz "Are Hominins Special? Human Origins as the Image and Likeness of God" Theology and Science (19: 2020), 537-551. "The recent discovery of a number of non-human hominin species who, as language, technology, and culture-bearing beings, lived both before and as contemporaries with early anatomically modern humans, has raised a number of problems with the notion of humans as evolutionarily unique. These discoveries have also raised issues regarding the concept of human uniqueness that has long played a central role within key interpretations of the hominin fossil record and has also provided the key lens through which many theologians have interpreted the meaning of humans as the “image and likeness of God” (imago Dei). I suggest that the best way to understand the imago Dei in light of human origins and hominid diversity is the early Jewish and early Christian concept of historical or biblical election."

Karl Jaspers on creation

Reading through a collection of essays by the mid-twentieth-century existential philosopher Karl Jaspers, I happened upon one entitled, "The Creation of the World." And though Jaspers was not a Christian, and certainly not a biblical theologian or historian, there is a great deal to be admired in it.

Like his contemporary, Martin Heidegger, Jaspers affirms that human knowledge can be nothing but subjective. "The world in its entirety cannot become an object," because we aren't outside of it, but in it. "Fundamental, objectless cognition not only transcends all definite knowledge but defies knowledge." And because we arrive fully submerged in its current and remain so, objective knowledge is ontologically beyond us--even where mathematics is concerned: "Wherever deductions exceed the realm of possible experience and the results will not be subject to experience, either, we are about to delude ourselves. Constructions of mathematical possibilities are as speculative and deceptive as the old, conceptual ones of metaphysics, and equally tempting." But here is where Jasper's discussion of creation gets interesting.

Real knowledge, that is objective knowledge, of what exactly we mean by the word "creation" is impossible to us, he says. If we cannot achieve objectivity about the world we live in, how then can we expect to swallow the origin of this world? So, then, creation "is unimaginable, not to be visualized by any analogy in the world. It is not even a temporal process any more, since time itself has only been created along with everything else. The creation of the world is exempted from temporality, which is part of the world." [1]

And what if we could swallow it? Then, he says, we would cease to be human beings, for "we would no longer be living in the possibilities of our situation; we would command a view of it, would have control over it, and would thus have terminated it. Everything would be manifest. Knowing our beginnings, we would be at the end of our humanity." In fully grasping it, we would step outside of creation into--what? And even if we could fully grasp it, would we grasp an answer to how we come to think and to know? Scientific knowledge--that is an arrived knowledge of the world through testable method--doesn't tell us that.

At this, Jaspers zeroes in on freedom, because freedom is the human way of being in the world. Human beings are fundamentally "en route to realization." We are explorers, forever pushing at the boundaries and possibilites built--thank God--into the very framework of our limited ontologies. "In the awareness of our freedom, which is incomprehensible in terms of the world, we transcend the incomplete world we can know." That is humanity. "As animated bodies we are part of Creation, but our freedom comes directly from God. Thus, while being in the world, we are also from elsewhere. We find ourselves in the world, and yet we are not of this world alone." That is humanity. "We live in time--that is to say, we are never finished; we are only searching and striving. We never know what eternity is, nor what is eternal in us and in our doings, but it comes to be present in ciphers, in parables, in reflections--for example, in the cipher of the idea of Creation." Yes, that is it exactly.

Creation is both beyond us and alien to us, and yet for us, for it insures our very being toward the future. Theologically, we read that creation insures our very being toward God's eschatological culmination of all things.

The idea of God's creation of the world will be a symbol, then, not a matter of knowledge. It is in the abyss revealed by the idea of Creation that we, along with all our mundane knowledge and activities, are engulfed and sheltered at the same time. . . . The idea of Creation stirs us by the very fact that it does not permit us to know. It points to depths in which, at the same time, it hides our origin. [And so] in all our human possibilities it remains essential to illuminate, not to conceal, the mystery that a world exists, and that we are in it. [And] if we are in the world from elsewhere, our mission in the world transcends the world.

So, finally, Jaspers leaves this challenge to those who would disagree with him. "Thinking through it," he says, "will serve to illuminate the absence of knowledge from it." And so he writes:

The symbol [creation] serves to support and to reassure us by the very fact of consciously uttering paradoxes. We say, "God created time"--but the word "created" describes a temporal process, contradicting the meaning of the sentence. We say, "God made the world out of nothing"--and we operate with the word "nothing" as if it were something, again contradicting the meaning of the sentence. What is conceived in the symbolic idea of Creation is not a process we might observe, not even as a figment of our imagination. What it means cannot be adequately meant by us, for it transcends our faculties of imagining and thinking. . . . Its unveiling would either be the delusion of a pseudo-knowledge, causing us to neglect what we can do, or it would be truth--and then it would mean our transformation into other beings that we humans are.

In the reorganization of my own understanding of creation and in the beginnings of an exploration of the disparate worlds of religion and science, I find Jaspers' ideas penetrating and reasonable. And though I am not yet sure what to do with the book of Genesis, nor how the fact of its deeply theological and symbolic nature overturns (or, what is more likely, deepens and expands) safe hermeneutical categories of genre, I believe it is not altogether stupid to propose a hypothesis.

It is my feeling that placing the cosmogenic sections in the early chapters of Genesis more firmly into their Ancient Near Eastern setting will reveal them to be not a "scientific" explanation, but a thorough going theological critique of the cosmogenic cosmologies and mythologies of the nations by firm assertion of the first commandment, and by critique I mean the simultaneously dual nature of judgment, which is to damn and to save.

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[1] This principle also applies to eschatology. "Since there was no human observer at creation and since the eschaton is still future, biblical language describing the beginning and end must be largely figurative; these descriptions inevitably transcended human experience. Therefore, just as it would be inappropriate to read eschatological imagery in the book of Revelation as a journalistic account of what a movie camera might record, it would likewise be a misreading of Genesis to treat the six days of creation as a scientific account of origins." Richard Middleton. cf. A. Berkely Mickelson, Interpreting the Bible, chap. 14: “Descriptive Language of Creation and Climax” (306–322).

Integrating Davies and Weinberger

I found two interviews on Salon today that really got my brain going. Unfortunately, I can only post the chunks that inspired me. Over time I'll whittle them away so I'm not participating in copyright infringement and begin to add my own thoughts. Anyway, here are the two interviews:

Steve Paulson “We are Meant to Be Here” Salon July 3, 2007. Interview with physicist Paul Davies.

There are some obvious questions about the big bang. Can we really talk about it coming out of nothing? Don't we have to ask, wasn't there something that caused the big bang?

Many people fall into that trap. But Augustine, in the fifth century, pointed out that the world was made with time, not in time. I think he got this exactly right. Of course, most people think that there must have been a previous event that caused whatever event we're talking about. But this is simply not the case. We now know that time itself is part of the physical universe. And when we talk about the big bang in a simplified model, then we're talking about not only matter and energy coming into being, but space and time as well. So there was no time before the big bang. The big bang was the origin of time.

People want to ask, what happened before the big bang, or what caused the big bang? But in a simple picture where there's just one universe, the big bang can be the ultimate origin of space and time as well as matter and energy. So unless the universe has always existed, you're faced with the problem that time itself comes into existence. And any attempt to talk about causation has to be couched in terms of something that comes after the beginning and not before the beginning ... because there was no before.

There are some obvious religious implications to all of this. My sense is that a lot of Jews and Christians are actually quite delighted with the big bang -- the idea that the universe was created out of nothing. It seems to correspond to the story of creation in Genesis.

I think there's a misunderstanding by religious people if they think that creation ex nihilo is anything like the big bang. People misunderstand what creation ex nihilo is about. It's not that there existed a God within time who was there for all eternity and then at some particular moment, on a whim, decided, "I'm going to make a universe" and then pressed a button that made the big bang. That raises exactly the objection that Augustine was addressing: What was God doing before making the universe? If the universe was a good idea, why wasn't it made an infinite time ago?

I might also say that it's always a bad idea for people to decide what to believe on religious grounds and then to cherry-pick the scientific facts to fit, because these facts are likely to change. And we may find that the big-bang theory goes out of favor at some point in the future. And then what? Religious people will have backed the wrong horse. So it's fraught with danger to seize on these cosmological ideas. But I personally think we can draw the conclusion that we live in a universe that's deeply imbued with meaning and purpose.

You want to stay away from God.

I want to stay away from a pre-existing cosmic magician who is there within time, for all eternity, and then brings the universe into being as part of a preconceived plan. I think that's just a naive, silly idea that doesn't fit the leanings of most theologians these days and doesn't fit the scientific facts. I don't want that. That's a horrible idea. But I see no reason why there can't be a teleological component in the evolution of the universe, which includes things like meaning and purpose. So instead of appealing to something outside the universe -- a completely unexplained being -- I'm talking about something that emerges within the universe. It's a more natural view. We're trying to construct a picture of the universe which is based thoroughly on science but where there is still room for something like meaning and purpose. So people can see their own individual lives as part of a grand cosmic scheme that has some meaning to it. We're not just, as Steven Weinberg would say, pointless accidents in a universe that has no meaning or purpose. I think we can do better than that.

Do you think one reason the multiverse theory has become so popular in recent years is to keep the whole idea of God at bay?

Yes.

Because a lot of physicists seem to be at a loss for how to explain this cosmic fine-tuning. But with the multiverse, you can say there are an infinite number of universes and we just happen to be lucky to live in one that supports life.

There's no doubt that the popularity of the multiverse is due to the fact that it superficially gives a ready explanation for why the universe is bio-friendly. Twenty years ago, people didn't want to talk about this fine-tuning because they were embarrassed. It looked like the hand of a creator. Then along came the possibility of a multiverse, and suddenly they're happy to talk about it because it looks like there's a ready explanation. Only those universes in which there can be life get observed, and all the rest go unobserved. Notice, however, that it's far from a complete explanation of existence. You still have to make a huge number of assumptions. You need a universe-generating mechanism to give you all these universes. You need a set of laws that can be scattered across these universes, distributed in some way, according to some algorithm. You're no better off than saying there is an unexplained God.

Even the scientific explanations for the universe are rooted in a particular type of theological thinking. They're trying to explain the world by appealing to something outside of it. And I think the time has come to move beyond that. We can -- if we try hard enough -- come up with a complete explanation of existence from within the universe, without appealing to something mystical or magical lying beyond it. I think the scientists who are anti-God but appeal to unexplained sets of laws or an unexplained multiverse are just as much at fault as a naive theist who says there's a mysterious, unexplained God.

You say in your book that there's another explanation for how the universe is structured. You suggest we may actually live in a fake universe. We could be part of an "ingeniously contrived virtual reality show," as in the "Matrix" movies. Do you really think that's a possibility?

Clearly, it's a logical possibility that this entire universe could be a simulation, if we imagine that in a hundred or a thousand years we'd be able to make computers that are sufficiently powerful to simulate consciousness. You need only to believe that consciousness is ultimately a physical process, which in principle we can mimic. Then we clearly have the possibility of building a machine and feeding in electrical impulses to produce this or that sensation. So this raises the obvious question, is there a real world out there? And how do I know that it's not all a gigantic virtual reality show, with my own mental experiences being created by some super-duper computer, so that I'm just living inside this machine? Now, there are a number of philosophers who are enamored of this idea. How would we know from within the simulation that it is a simulation and not the reality? If it's a good simulation, we couldn't know. So we must be open to the possibility that this whole world is in fact a gigantic simulation.

Near the end of "The Cosmic Jackpot," you say that all these explanations about the universe are probably wrong, and "Perhaps we have reached a fundamental impasse dictated by the limits of the human intellect." Do you think future scientists will ever resolve these questions?

If future scientists are human beings, they may be stuck with the same problems that we have. The way we think, the way we like to analyze problems, the categories that we define -- like cause and effect, space-time and matter, meaning and purpose -- are really human categories that cannot be separated from our evolutionary heritage. We have to face up to the fact that there may be fundamental limitations just from the way our brains have been put together. So we could have reached our own human limits.

Scott Rosenberg, “Delight in disorder” Salon May 23, 2007. Interview with David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous.

You've described your book as an "argument with Aristotle." Here you are, it's a book about "the new digital disorder," and we're arguing with the ancients. How did that happen?

Our culture's been arguing with him for a long time. The argument is, whether there is a right order of the universe -- one right order. Aristotle didn't come up with the idea, but he was the person who articulated it so forcefully that for 2,000 years he was simply believed. This is an order in which everything has a place, and to know what something is is to know that place, and in knowing it you're seeing what makes it what it is. That's why it can't be in two places on the chart, on the diagram -- because then it's two things, and that's chaos.

You also need to know within a category, things are different from the other things in that category -- this is the genus/species idea. It's a deep and fascinating notion -- that to be something is to both be like something else and be unlike it. And it works really well -- it allows you to construct a universe. And it allows you to keep some things implicit. We know this is a bird without also having to think, oh, bird, that's a type of animal, oh, and animal therefore is a type of thing, and things all have these properties. That's one of the mysteries of knowing -- that we don't know everything simultaneously all the time.

So we have this definition, and it's clear and it's precise. The entire system is beautiful and balanced and harmonious. And this is the vision that we carried with us for a long, long time. But we've been shaking it off for generations now -- it's not like, the Web came along and suddenly we were free of Aristotle.

Multiculturalism, relativism, postmodernism -- all these things are disputing the notion of a single order. The Web just slaps us in the face with the fact that there's lots and lots of ways of slicing up the world.

But how we slice it up, how we cluster it, how things connect, depends on what we're trying to do. It's an amazing tool for consciousness to have, to be able to see the world according to the relevant attributes based upon a project -- that's what lets us survive, and do more. But that places the clustering of the universe, to some large degree, on our interests and our cares. Which is, from the Aristotelian point of view, to put it in the realm of whim and madness.

This is also why it seems to me so important that we're doing this socially. One of the mistakes that we've made in our history is to think that if there isn't a single order that's right, then it's up to every person to make it up for herself. And that's what we call madness.


Paul Davies; Steve Paulson; David Weinberger; Scott Rosenberg; cosmology; creation; Augustine; the Big Bang; Aristotle; ontology; taxonomy; the Great Chain of Being; networks; duality; mind/body problem; science; Genesis.

Benedict XVI praises logos

September 12, 2006 lecture at a meeting with representatives of the sciences at Regensburg University said three interesting things. First, he makes the argument that the “profound harmony” of Jewish and Greek elements summed up in John’s doctrine of the logos is a good thing. Christian thinking (based on the LXX and expressed in the Greek language) did not side with Hellenism in general but with the best portions of it. The Jewish shema-confession of a monotheistic, transcendent, creator-God cuts away the idolatry from Greek metaphysics in a manner reminiscent of Socrates’s iconoclasm. John’s logos, which is “reason” at its fundamentum, “reason” which ties together God’s transcendence, God’s revelation (Deus dixit), and humanity’s ability to understand, represents a “mutual enrichment.” It is the basis by which Benedict can say,

The faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason, there exists a real analogy in which unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language (cf. Lateran IV).

This in hand, Pope Benedict takes to task those who have desired to strip out every Hellenistic element from Christian theology, which includes (though gently) the Reformers, Duns Scotus (who receives no applause), and Adolf von Harnack (who receives even less). Discretion should be exercised, he says, because, with John and the Church Fathers, “the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.” So that “not to act 'with logos' is contrary to God’s nature."

Second, then, this logos-harmony defrocks any confession of a capricious God. Dun Scotus’s voluntarism, where our knowledge of God is simply what he wishes us to know (voluntas ordinata), and beyond that he is free to be or do whatever he wants, is simply not reasonable. Such a god does not act reasonably, and so he cannot be the seat of logos itself. And here Benedict does something interesting. He links Scotus’s theology with the Islamic understanding of Allah codified by eastern theologians such as Ibn Hazn who “went as far as to state that God is not bound by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.” Benedict uncovers, then, a subtle apologetic in the gospel link between the revealing, tabernacling logos of John 1.1 and the creating and creative Word of Genesis 1.3. And, if you follow it out, there is an argument here for why Christianity, and even Christian fundamentalism, should not be treated or feared in the same way as sects or religions which derive from unreasonable foundations. For Christians, reasonable action is godly action. Christian theology does not threaten the dialogue necessary to a free society of mutual respect and responsible political action. Such dialogue is part-and-parcel of its deepest theological confession.

Third and finally, Benedict XVI uncovers an element in our modern, scientific notion of knowledge that I’d never thought of before. Scientific reason, he says, has a platonic core. Scientific reason assumes something about the material world that is immaterial, namely, “the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently.” The core simply goes without saying, perhaps pointing to the success of the technologies which it has produced, or the boon to human life and livelihood which have followed. It is true, human beings and cultures have thrived underneath this assumption, and so much so that “the West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality.” The West doesn’t want to ask why our capacities to understand and the ability to understand correspond so well together. Frankly, I’d never thought of this assumption as a latent Platonism, though I’d well-enough identified it as “the modern victory of Aristotle.” Now, the best portions of postmodernity do ask this question. They do seek and discover epistemological room to include much larger portions of human knowing than simply the empirical. But, as above, some kind of nihilistic extreme is avoided in Christian thought because it is unreasonable in the context of the logos.