Читать книгу New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology - Donald W. Musser - Страница 48

The doctrine or symbol of creation—derived especially from Genesis 1–3, the Psalms, Second Isaiah, and John 1—is rich in religious and existential meaning. It has set the terms for most Christian (and Jewish) worldviews or metaphysics, and it has provided the essential presuppositions for every other important Christian doctrine or symbol: human dignity and freedom, sin, revelation, Incarnation, redemption, history, and eschatology. Without the assumption of creation, most of the other affirmations of Christian piety and loci of theology would make no sense. Second, creation has been the subject of great Christian controversies, especially in the early church and in the present era, when literal, biblical views of creation find themselves in opposition to most of modern science. Finally, this symbol, as much ignored as it was presupposed in most theology, has now come into sudden prominence because of the present crisis concerning the integrity, even the existence, of nature. In this short essay, each of these three aspects of creation is discussed in turn.

The Religious Meaning of Creation. Every fundamental religious symbol implies, even requires, a certain mode of existing in the world; this is its “religious” meaning. The “religious” meaning of creation refers to the attitude toward reality, life, and its meaning that the symbol expresses—in this case an attitude toward God, the world, and human life in space and time. Religious symbols also manifest metaphysical implications as an attitude toward the larger reality or universe in which we exist; they are thus in the broadest sense cognitive even though they are not “scientific.” The Christian view of creation provided important parts of the groundwork for the rise of modern empirical science, for the belief in creation implied a real and an orderly, although contingent, material world and therefore one open for empirical investigation into its pervasive and invariable features. In what follows, emphasis is on the religious rather than the metaphysical implications of creation; the former have been surprisingly consistent throughout Christian history while the latter, however important, have received differing philosophical explication in different epochs; for example, Platonistic, Aristotelian, rationalistic, idealistic, neoclassical, and so on.

To say, as the scriptures do, that God created all things meant to the tradition from the beginning that God is the sole source of all. Quite early, therefore, theology declared that God had not created “out of matter,” since then something—matter—would be co-eternal with God and not created by God. Nor was creation thought to be an emanation from God, a “fall” away from God, but the result of God’s deliberate and hence free action. Therefore, since God was known to be good, creation is good. To be finite, temporal, bodily, mortal, even dependent and vulnerable—as all creatures are—is therefore good and not evil. If God created all, then there is no essential, ineradicable evil; suffering is neither fated nor necessary, and redemption from it is possible. Similarly, the body, created by God as is mind or spirit, is good, not evil. Life, therefore, in its essential structure of finitude, spatiality, temporality, individuality, and sociality, is thus potentially creative and meaningful.

Creation implies the absoluteness and unconditionedness of God as the source or ground of all, and the relatedness of God as that on which the world is continually dependent. God is therefore transcendent to the world as well as immanent within it. Creation implies the eternity of God as the source of time and yet the temporality and changeability of God as related to a world in process. It even implies the passivity and suffering of God as experiencing, knowing, and caring for a vulnerable, mortal world. These paradoxes about God implied by the religious meaning of creation have puzzled and challenged Christian philosophy since the beginning; they represent a “sign” of the mystery of the divine as creator.

Creation thus both expressed and anchored firmly the monotheistic center of Christian (and Jewish) faith: As the source of all things there was God—alone, unconditioned, and eternal, and yet in continual and essential relation to a changing creation. Central to the implications of creation, therefore, was what it said about human existence, its possibilities, its dilemmas, and its destiny. One implication was that the Christian affirmation that men and women were created by God established the freedom and the dignity, the spiritual constitution, and the value of human life—all of which were represented by the crucial phrase in Genesis that humans had been created “in the image of God.” As a consequence of their creation, humans were free and responsible, that is, moral creatures, on the one hand subject to a moral law that obligated them to one another, and on the other hand capable of irresponsible and even evil action. The freedom, responsibility, and potential “fault” of human existence all appear with creation. A second implication of the symbol of creation was that God created all the essential conditions of human life: its bodily base, its material environment, its spatial and temporal parameters. In principle these parameters of finitude were also established as “good” if humans lived up to their image.

Third, since God created time, ruled the sequences of historical events, and “acted” purposefully in history, history was given a potentiality of meaning unknown in religious and cultural life before. Creation, in other words, established the basis for the glory and the personal intimacy of God, for the value and spiritual dignity of women and men, for the positive assessment of nature and life generally, and for the decisive and hopeful character of temporal existence. As is evident, not only was the religious meaning of the symbol creation central to the religious attitudes of Christians toward God, their world, and themselves in that world, but even more it provided the bases for assumptions about reality that have been central to Western consciousness generally and have continued to define that consciousness long after the latter has become “secular.” To many for whom no religious meanings at all are valid, these implications of creation remain nevertheless accurate assessments of reality and of life’s possibilities within reality.

Creation and Science. As the summary above shows, the religious meanings of creation are rich and important, even to a secular scientific and technological culture. Like all the other religious affirmations within the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, these attitudes were expressed with and communicated by narratives and images, the “stories” about God and God’s actions. With regard to creation, these stories center in the first chapters of Genesis where witness is reverently and poetically given to the great events through which God brought the universe into being and established its main features. Not surprisingly, the story recorded there reflects the understanding of the natural order characteristic of the Hebrews in the seventh or the fifth centuries B.C.E. of the heavens, of the earth, of the flora and fauna of the earth, and of human history. It is therefore a relatively “archaic” view of the origins and early history of the world, laced with and expressive of these religious meanings. One important task for the modern theologian—in fact, for any modern Christian—is to separate that archaic science and archaic history into these religious meanings and to re-express the latter in terms of the cosmology and the historical consciousness of the modern world. Like the symbol of original sin, therefore, the symbol of creation has represented a fascinating, unavoidable, and yet very difficult challenge to theology to be at once “biblical” and modern.

Most of the principal Christian traditions, Protestant and Catholic alike, have recognized the historical relativity of the literal story, have assented to the authority of science and historical inquiry, and have thus sought to translate the religious meanings of creation into the terms of modern cosmology. All present Christians, however, by no means see it this way. To many the scriptures have been verbally inspired, and hence every proposition is literally as well as religiously or symbolically valid. The “science” of Genesis is as true and as important for them as are the “religious” meanings of Genesis; in fact, for them these two cannot be separated. Thus arises the familiar “warfare” between religion and science over “creation science” or “God’s science” and what they term “evolutionary science.”

One of the most unexpected novelties of the present epoch has been the appearance of “creation science,” an alternative “biblical” cosmology of origins sharply contrasted with that of contemporary evolutionary science. On the one hand, creation science is deliberately modeled on aspects of the Genesis cosmology taken literally (e.g., separate creation of “kinds,” especially human beings, a miraculous worldwide Noachic flood, and “sudden creation from nothing” of the entire universe about 10,000 years ago). On the other hand, creation science also claims to represent a genuinely “scientific” model of origins, based, as its adherents put it, on “scientific data” and “inferences from those data.”

Although fundamentalism has not accommodated itself to the conclusions either of modern scientific or of modern historical inquiry, nevertheless, in promoting creation science it has sought to co-opt scientific procedure and authority as enthusiastically as it earlier used and in part transformed on its own terms the technological, commercial, capitalistic, and nationalistic culture of modernity. In fact, creation science as a body of theory was authored by Ph.D.s in natural science who are also fundamentalists. In the creationist-evolution controversy, fundamentalism has taken the literal form of the creation story and insisted on its unchanging authority and “scientific” validity. This strange fusion of fundamentalist content with an ersatz science into creation science has received important political and social help from the alliance of right wing evangelicalism with conservative Republicanism, the latter probably unconcerned with biblical literalism, but happy to cement their liaison with significant segments of the middle and lower middle classes. As a result, a number of states have proposed laws mandating the teaching of creation science, along with evolution, whenever the question of origins is raised in science classes. To date, the federal courts have struck down these laws as violating the Constitution.

Creation and Nature. In the nineteenth century, when science and religion seemed in temporary conflict, theological reflection concentrated on nature’s processes and devised a number of evolutionary theisms. Later, from 1914 through roughly 1960, when European society was in turmoil, theology concentrated its attention on the question of the meaning of history and tended to ignore the role and the relevance of nature. A number of theologies in fact were almost loathe to articulate systematically even the religious meanings outlined above (e.g., Gustav Aulen, The Christian Faith; Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology; and Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time). In the past two decades, however, the integrity and preservation of nature have posed an absolutely crucial problem for modern civilization. Almost every front—the air and the atmosphere, the seas and lakes, the forests, the waters under the earth, the species on the earth, even the temperature—has shown itself to be endangered by industrial civilization, already perhaps mortally wounded. As has always been known but hardly felt, history is utterly dependent upon nature; yet, as we now realize for the first time, history has the ability not only to exploit nature but also to destroy it—and with that, to destroy itself. A deep sense of the self-destructive possibilities of human creativity and freedom is genuinely “biblical,” as it is also Greek. Neither the Christian nor the Greek traditions, however, contemplated the immanent destruction of nature and life through the enlarged powers of high civilization, and yet that is just what is upon us today.

As a consequence, increasingly since the late-1960s theologies of nature have appeared. They represent efforts to articulate anew the meaning for Christian faith of the symbol of creation and, even more, to give that reinterpreted symbol a centrality in systematic theology unknown before. Earlier in the century the relation of theological reflection to philosophy and to the methods of history was predominant in theologies of revelation, Incarnation, and history; now the relations of theology to science, technology, and ecology are very much to the fore. This renewed interest in nature has rekindled Christian theologies of creation; and they have emphasized the goodness and value of nature, of the purposes of God for the natural order and not just for us, and even of the redemption of nature as well as the redemption of men and women. Thus many theologies (including my own) have emphasized that nature was made in God’s image as a material order of inherent value, not just for us, but for itself and for God, and hence is in its being and its value also a sign or symbol of God. Such a reappreciation of nature, as opposed to its traditional role as backdrop to history or stage for the human drama, sees nature as itself an object of the divine purpose. The divine care has transformed the theological and religious meaning of creation far from its traditional anthropological bias.

As the above indicates, one of the most important aspects of the ecological crisis is the attitude of men and women toward nature. Is nature there only for us, as the stage for our actions, as raw material for our consumption, as a vacation place? A “pragmatic” view of nature esteems the world only insofar as it is of use to us, as it resolves our problems and dilemmas, and as it adds to our well-being. Correspondingly, a scientific view of nature tends to reduce the richness, variety, and integrity of nature—its mystery—to what empirical science can uncover about our physical environment. Thus in modern culture the reality of nature as an objectified and determined system of “vacuous” entities (to use A. N. Whitehead’s phrase) corresponded to our assessment of nature as of value solely to us and so as subject entirely to our use. For this reason, as Herbert Marcuse has said, modern empirical science—if taken as an exhaustive description of the reality of nature—provides the ideological justification for the industrial exploitation of nature; it clears the way for the unimpeded greed of commercial culture. Clearly what is needed is to reawaken human beings to other ways of “knowing” nature’s reality than as the system of determined objects of scientific inquiry and as the usable raw material of industrial process.

The effort to reach beyond both scientific positivism and anthropocentric pragmatism is a multifaceted enterprise. Many scientists have initiated and organized this important work, and artists, writers, and responsible moralists have led the way with regard both to the reality and to the value of nature. There is little question, however, that among these healing forces religion is potentially of vast importance. Historically, it has been through religious institutions of nature and religious symbolism, ritual, and myths that the richness, independence, power, terror, and sublimity of nature have been “known” (these are cognitive relations to nature) and expressed—and that a creative, cooperative relation has been encouraged. These relations need to be reawakened. In the biblical tradition, the symbolism of creation is potentially the locus for a new set of cognitive, emotional, and moral relations to nature. Even the tradition of natural theology—the effort to find in natural experience “signs” of the divine presence—inescapably revives a deeper and richer “knowledge” of nature’s reality. In seeking to establish the reality of God through our experiences of nature as God’s creation, natural theology may effect as much of a change in our attitude toward nature as it does in our confidence in the divine presence. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, therefore, the symbol of creation, now in relation to our knowledge of and care for nature, has again moved into prominence. Now human well-being and the meaning of history are inextricably intertwined with the independence and integrity of nature. No longer is creation solely of anthropomorphic importance as merely a storehouse and a playground for human beings. Possibly with the ecology crisis there will be a new Copernican revolution with regard to the value of nature.

LANGDON GILKEY