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The End Is in the Beginning: Creation and Apocalyptic

Why No Method Is a Method

When I began to think about what I should say about creation, the title “The End Is in the Beginning” immediately came to mind. That it did so I suspect is due to my long-­held conviction that creation, at least creation as understood by Christians, must be understood from an eschatological perspective. We only know there was a beginning because we have seen the end in Christ. Indeed, as I argued in the Brazos Commentary on Matthew, I think Matthew wrote his Gospel with the conviction that the story he has to tell is a story of a new creation. Thus Matthew begins the Gospel with the declaration that this is “the book of the genesis of Jesus Christ.”1

I confess I was pleased with the title “The End Is in the Beginning.” But I also thought, given that I originally wrote this for the Wilken Lecture, I should see if Robert Wilken might have said something I could use in support of my argument that creation must be rendered through the eschatological imagination shaped by the gospel. You can imagine my chagrin as well as my joy to discover Robert’s chapter in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God on Basil and Gregory of Nyssa entitled “The End Given in the Beginning.”2 I had, as so often is the case, forgotten where I had learned that the end is in the beginning. As Robert puts it, commenting on Gregory’s development of Basil’s thought: “Creation is promise as well as gift, and it is only in seeing Christ that we know what was made in the first creation.”3

Calling attention to Robert’s great book, moreover, allows me to make some comments to clarify my “method,” or what many think to be my lack of method, for doing theology. I am rightly well known for disavowing any attempt to do theology as a system.4 My work is occasional if not haphazard. I admire and learn from Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology, but I do not have Jenson’s erudition or metaphysical imagination to do theology as “system.”5 Perhaps another way to put the matter is that I should like to think my work is closer in style and substance to the second volume of Jenson’s Systematic Theology, which deals with “The Works of God” and, in particular, creation.6 There, for example, Jenson asserts that “the story told in the Gospels states the meaning of creation.”7

That “the story told in the Gospels states the meaning of creation” is, of course, a systematic remark, but it is also a remark that begs for practical display. My worry about theology done as “system” is how that way of doing theology may give the impression that, as I observe in Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified, “Christianity is a set of ideas that need to be made consistent with one another.”8 I go on to argue in Sanctify Them in the Truth (yet another of my books that, as far as I can tell, fell stillborn from the press) that theology is an intricate web of loci that requires ongoing exploration and repair. Exploration and repair are required because we are tempted to overemphasize one “doctrine” or locus in a manner that distorts what we believe and how we live.9 All of which is to say that the occasional character of my work is at least partly due to my conviction that theology is best understood as an exercise in practical reason.

I should like to think this way of understanding the theological task to be consistent with the way Wilken tells the story of the development of early Christian thought. He observes that the early Christian thinkers were not in the business of “establishing something.” Rather, they understood their task to plumb “the facts of revelation” by employing “the language and imagery of the Bible, and how the life and worship of the Christian community gave Christian thinking a social dimension that was absent from ancient philosophy.”10 Accordingly, Wilken observes by way of commentary on Justin’s conversion that in contrast to the philosophers, who rely on demonstrations, “the Word of God makes its way not by argument but as men and women bear witness to what has happened.”11

Of course, Wilken would be quick to deny that argument is not an essential aspect of Christian witness. Rather, I take his point to be that argument without witness is empty. Even worse, argument without witness threatens to become a coercive ideology. Put even more strongly, witness is a form of argument if we remember — as Wilken, drawing on Origen, argues — that in the Scriptures seeing is never simply a beholding something that makes no difference for how we live, but rather seeing is a “discernment and identification with what is known. What one sees reflects back on the one who sees and transforms the beholder. As Gregory the Great will put it centuries later, ‘We are changed into the one we see.’ ”12

I hope my “method” has been an attempt to display the difference Christian convictions make for how we see the world, and how we see the world shapes how we rightly live. Some may well suspect that makes me a pragmatist. I have no objections to being so labeled as long as pragmatism is properly understood to be an attempt to show the differences necessary for what we claim to be true.13 Interestingly enough, I find myself in deep agreement with Austin Farrer’s way of putting the matter, that is, the necessity of theologians to do their work in such a manner that “the inseparability of real knowledge from activity” is maintained. Farrer elaborates this claim by observing “that to know real beings we must exercise our actual relation with them. No physical science without physical interference; no personal knowledge without personal intercourse; no thought about any reality about which we can do nothing but think.”14

You may well begin to wonder if I have forgotten this is supposed to be an essay on creation. I have not forgotten. Before I am through I hope to make clear how these remarks about method are interrelated with an understanding of creation as an eschatological reality. The methodological remarks, moreover, I hope also help explain why I have seldom written about creation as a topic in and of itself. Rather, I have tried to find contexts to illumine the work an account of creation can and should do to help us understand the way things are.15 For example, I wrote, with Jeff Powell, an article on William Stringfellow’s use of the Book of Revelation to illumine the role of the principalities and powers as perversions of their role in creation.16 I was attracted to Stringfellow because I thought he helps us see how creation understood apocalyptically helps us read our world in a manner not unlike how John of Patmos read his.17

My most extended account of creation, however, was in an article on Iris Murdoch’s work. As someone who had learned much from Ms. Murdoch, I was taken aback by her defense of Plato’s myth of the Demiurge in her book Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. She defended Plato’s understanding of the Demiurge because she thought it a perfect metaphor for how she would have us understand the moral life, that is, as the art of making necessity beautiful. I thought her position to be profoundly wrong in a manner that makes clear why Christians have rightly thought that our understanding of creation necessarily has at its center creation ex nihilo. For if God did not create from nothing, Murdoch is right to suggest that our existence is pointless; but because Christians believe all that is exists by the grace of God, we can have hope that life is not without purpose. This summary does not do justice to Murdoch’s position, but I hope it is sufficient to show how I try to display the work an account of creation does for how we understand the moral life.18

I call attention to how I have tried to position how I think about creation in the past to prepare you for the argument I now want to make. The claim that creation is an eschatological doctrine may seem to have little practical import, but by juxtaposing Barth’s account of the doctrine of creation with Jean Porter’s use of creation to sustain a natural law ethic I hope to show why these matters matter for how we understand how Christians should live and, in particular, how we reason morally. Porter argues with great clarity that the scholastic understanding of natural law is misunderstood if it is divorced, as it often is, from the theological context that makes natural law intelligible. That theological context she identifies with the doctrine of creation. I will argue, however, that her account of creation is insufficiently eschatological, which results in a deficient account of practical reason. Before engaging Porter, I need first to outline Barth’s account of the doctrine of creation.

Barth on Creation

Barth’s most developed account of creation is to be found in volume III of the Church Dogmatics.19 I obviously cannot provide an overview of the thick account of creation in the four volumes. What I can do, however, is direct our attention to his concentrated discussion of creation in Dogmatics in Outline. In Dogmatics in Outline Barth begins to develop his account of creation as the external basis for covenant and the covenant as the internal basis of creation.20 I hope to show how creation so understood requires an eschatological account of creation that makes unavoidable an account of the contingent, that is, the historical character of existence.

In Dogmatics in Outline Barth begins his account of creation, noting that when Christians confess that God is creator they do so only on the basis of God’s revelation. So creation is not a speculative judgment about “the beginning.”21 According to Barth, we are not asked by the Confession, the Apostles’ Creed, to believe in the created world, nor even the work of creation, but we are asked to believe in God the creator. Creation, therefore, is no less a matter of faith than is our belief in the redemption of the world in Christ — a claim that obviously reflects Barth’s fundamental theological method, but that does not mean that the faith necessary to acknowledge God’s creation has no purchase in the world as we know it. We are, after all, creatures bound in space and time. Barth, with characteristic dramatic prose, puts it this way:

What the meaning of God the Creator is and what is involved in the work of creation, is in itself not less hidden from us men than everything else that is contained in the Confession. We are not nearer to believing in God the Creator, than we are to believing that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. It is not the case that the truth about God the Creator is directly accessible to us and that only the truth of the second article needs a revelation. Both in the same sense in both cases we are faced with the mystery of God and His work, and the approach to it can only be one and the same. (p. 50)

Accordingly, Barth argues that it is impossible to separate knowledge of God as Creator from God’s work of redemption. “Only when we keep before us what the triune God has done for us as men in Jesus Christ can we realize what is involved in God the creator and his work” (p. 52). Therefore Barth argues that what God does as the Creator can only be understood as a reflection of the inner life of the Trinity. That is why the work of creation is ascribed to the Father: because there is an intrinsic relation between the work of creation and the relation of the Father to the Son. That relation makes clear that God does not exist for himself; rather, through the love that the persons of the Trinity share is willed a reality distinct from God. God, who has no need for us, no need for heaven and earth, who is sufficient to himself, has willed that the created order exist (pp. 53-54).22

Creation is, therefore, grace. That there is a world is a miracle. The question, therefore, is never, “Does God exist?” Rather, what should astonish us is that we exist. That we exist, according to Barth, implies the good news that all that exists cannot be confused with God’s existence. Any attempt to understand creation as an emanation from God, a view that threatens pantheism, cannot express what Christians mean by creation. For Christians creation is a creaturely reality that cannot be understood as a manifestation of God; rather, as God’s creature the world exists to glorify God.

Creation so understood is an expression of divine grace. Creatio ex nihilo rightly indicates that all that is was created out of nothing, but because “there is now something, since we exist by divine grace, we must never forget that, as the basis of our existence and of the existence of the whole world, there is in the background that divine — not just facere, but — creation. Everything outside God is held constant by God over nothingness” (p. 55). That such is the case means that all the things we call evil — death, sin, the Devil, and hell — are, therefore, not God’s creation. They in fact are nothing (p. 57).

That we exist means we do so as creatures of time and space. Once we were not and soon we will no longer be, which means that there was a once and that there is a now. God is eternal, but we exist in time. That does not mean that there is no time in God, but it is a different time from ours. “God’s time and space are free from the limitations in which alone time and space are thinkable for us. God is Lord of time and the Lord of space. As He is the origin of these forms too, nothing in Him has any limitations or imperfections, such as pertain to creaturely existence” (p. 56).23

Yet we have agency befitting our status as creatures. We have the freedom to decide and act one way rather than another. Our freedom is, however, the freedom appropriate to our creaturely existence in time and space. We are subject to law as well as our fellow creatures. “For if we are free, it is only because our Creator is infinitely free. All human freedom is but an imperfect mirroring of divine freedom” (p. 56).

Barth concludes his exposition of the first article of the Confession with the affirmation that “what exists exists, because it exists not of itself, but by God’s Word, for His Word’s sake, in the sense and in the purpose of His Word. . . . The whole was made by Him for its own sake. The Word which is attested for us in Holy Scripture, the story of Israel, of Jesus Christ and His Church, is the first thing, and the whole world with its light and shadow, its depths and its heights is the second. By the Word the world exists. A marvelous reversal of our whole thinking!” (p. 57).

In Church Dogmatics III/1, Barth makes explicit the eschatological character of creation by asserting that “the aim of creation is history.”24 God has willed and created the creature for the sake of the Son and for the glorification of the Son by the Holy Spirit. The very meaning of history is to be found in this covenant between God and us, known through the events that constitute a narrative in which God’s patience with the creature is manifest by his willingness to give creation time — “time which acquires content through these events and which is finally to be ‘fulfilled’ and made ripe for its end by their conclusion.”25

Creation is therefore not a timeless truth, but rather we know there was a beginning because we have seen the end. The end we have seen in Christ was in the beginning, and the beginning Christ has inaugurated is the end of the beginning. Real time, eschatological time, is the life-­time of Jesus Christ. His life is “the turning point, the transition, the decision which was accomplished in His death and resurrection; together with the time preceding and following this event in the history of Israel and the existence of the Christian Church.”26 The very existence of the church, therefore, is a witness to the created character of our existence.

Such an understanding of creation obviously has profound implications for how ethics is understood and done. Barth develops his account of the ethics of creation in Church Dogmatics III/4. There he seeks to show how the command of the one God who is gracious to us in Jesus Christ is also the command of the Creator.27 He therefore insists that “the God who meets man as Creator in His commandment is the God ‘who is gracious to him in Jesus Christ.’ He is not, then, a new and strange God who could require of man as his Commander something new and strange.”28 Rather, he is the same God who is gracious to us in Christ, being no different from the Creator by whom all things were made and who is Lord over all. The significance of Barth’s understanding of these matters I think will be readily apparent in contrast to Porter’s use of creation to sustain a natural law ethic.

Porter on Creation and Natural Law

Jean Porter’s argument that natural law is inadequately understood if it is divorced from the doctrine of creation might seem to make her an ally of Barth. But she explicitly distinguishes her understanding of the relation of creation to natural law from Barth. She notes that Barth rejects all versions of natural law theory because he does not think we can draw ethical conclusions from our flawed knowledge of creation; but even more significant, Barth argues that we can know creation and the demands of God as Creator only through our knowledge of Christ.29

Porter responds to Barth’s objections by observing that Barth’s critique of natural law must be seen as but a subtheme of his wider critique of moral philosophy as a self-­contained enterprise. According to Porter, Barth’s rejection of natural law is due to his confusion of a natural law ethic with the general conception of ethics, a conception based on the alleged autonomy of reason, which Barth identifies with our sinful attempt to be our own creator. Porter, however, finds Barth’s position problematic because Barth fails to appreciate the fact that we are heirs to a very different understanding of morality, that is, an understanding of morality that is “intrinsically transcendent and a locus of human contact with the divine.”30 In contrast to Barth’s critique of autonomous ethics, Porter argues that the scholastic concept of natural law was not the deliverance of pure reason, but rather itself a theological concept grounded in Scripture.31

Porter argues that Barth’s theological worries about natural law can be met by recognizing that the scholastic concept of natural law in fact is a theological construal of the moral significance of human nature based on the doctrine of creation. She recognizes, however, that this is only a partial response to Barth’s worries, because his concern is not that an account of natural law might not need a theological basis; instead, the issue is what kind of theological basis it would need. She acknowledges that for Barth the question is not only theological but Christological.32

Porter observes that the scholastics did situate natural theology in an overall theology in which the person and work of Christ were central; but they did not think, as Barth does, that Christology is directly relevant for shaping a natural law ethic. Porter, moreover, thinks it a very good thing that the scholastics thought the claim that the world is the good creation of God, without referencing Christ, is theologically appropriate.33 She does so because she thinks it important to recognize that Christians are not alone in affirming the doctrine of creation. According to Porter, the belief in creation may be a central belief for Christians, but that does not mean the Christian understanding of creation is unique.34

Porter’s way of putting this matter reflects her concern that Christian ethics not be thought to be distinctive or unique given the reality of, as well as need for, a common morality. She thinks it quite likely that our common secular morality is in fact more Christian than its critics suggest. Such critics confuse the question of a distinctive Christian account of morality with the question of what constitutes an adequate account of morality. Those, like Barth, who refuse to acknowledge an overlap between Christian morality and different forms of secular morality cannot help but fall into the theological error of “failing to take the doctrine of the creation with full seriousness and truncating the scriptural witness to God as the one who creates and sustains the natural world.”35

Accordingly, Porter challenges Barth to think what it would mean to have a Christology without a doctrine of creation. “Taken to its extreme, an emphasis on Christ without some reference to the doctrine of creation risks a view according to which Christ is a wholly unexpected emissary from an utterly unknowable God — in other words, risks becoming a version of Catharism.”36 That is why Christian theology stands in need of the category of natural goodness: because without such a category it is impossible to preserve the doctrine of creation, making it impossible to hold on to the idea of Christ as Redeemer.37

Porter returns to these themes in her later book, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law, in which she worries about how the tendencies in Christianity associated with asceticism and perfectionism can too easily develop into some forms of dualism that imply a denial of the fundamental doctrine that God is the Creator of the world. As a result, the continuity between God’s goodness and wisdom and the goodness and intelligibility of the world “as we experience it” can be lost.38

I should be candid and acknowledge that Porter’s critique of Barth is also a critique directed at me and, in particular, my pacifism. According to Porter, it is a mistake to think the difference between the scholastics and pacifists is that the former derive their ethics from reason and the latter derive their ethics from the Bible. Rather, what is at stake is two ways of interpreting the moral significance of Scripture. The scholastics interpret Scripture on the basis of natural law, but the concept of natural law is grounded in scripturally informed texts of creation.

So the fundamental difference is not scriptural but doctrinal. Pacifists can base Christian ethics only on Jesus Christ, whether Jesus is seen in more or less orthodox terms or considered as a central figure in the foundational narratives of the Gospels. Pacifists, therefore, reflect the influence of Karl Barth, even though they break with Barth in terms of the ethics of pacifism. “In contrast,” according to Porter, “the scholastics give priority to preserving the integrity of Christian doctrine taken as a whole, and given the context within which they wrote, they give particular weight to the doctrine of creation. As a consequence, they have no theological stake in the uniqueness or distinctiveness of Christian morality.”39

Porter acknowledges that positions such as Barth’s rightly caution against too easy accommodations with secular orders; yet the witness comes at too high a price just to the extent that whatever does not fit neatly into a Christian framework must be rejected as alien or evil. Porter is not suggesting that Christians are called to embrace uncritically every aspect of secular culture, but her position does mean that there should be a willingness by Christians to accept the ambiguities that are present in every society. The scholastics’ willingness to acknowledge such ambiguities, Porter suggests, makes them surprisingly similar to Reinhold Niebuhr’s understanding of Christian realism.40

Porter justifies her appeal to Niebuhr as an ally of the scholastic understanding of natural law by calling attention to William of Auxerre’s argument, an argument based on natural law, for the legitimacy of resisting force by force. According to Porter, William acknowledges that this is in tension with the Lord’s command to turn the other cheek, but to turn the other cheek, according to William, is not always possible. To turn the other cheek in certain circumstances may be a way to draw men and women to God by unaccustomed mildness, but such a stance cannot always be required. Retaliation and vindication, reactions that draw on our naturally given anger and self-­protective instincts, when subject to rational reflection, serve to sustain the purposes of the preservation of just societies.41

Porter concludes this line of reflection by observing that “our inclinations toward self-­defense and retaliation can be understood in terms of human goods they serve. Given the scholastic concept of the natural law, this implies that they reflect the goodness of human nature and the wisdom and love of its Creator.”42 God as Creator and our status as creatures are therefore used by Porter to underwrite knowledge of moral norms that seem to be in some tension with the demands of discipleship.

Though I have reservations about Porter’s account of natural law in scholastic theology, my concerns in this essay are not historical but theological. In spite of Porter’s claim that her account of natural law presupposes a doctrine of creation, I do not see the difference an appeal to creation makes for how natural law is understood. I may have missed it, but I have been unable to discover in what Porter has written how her claims about creation as a necessary presumption for sustaining natural-­law reasoning might result in judgments that are at odds with those who do not share her views about creation.43

With admirable candor, in Ministers of the Law Porter acknowledges that her defense of natural rights as an expression of her account of natural law has a great deal in common with leading secular theories such as those represented by Ronald Dworkin, Neil MacCormick, John Rawls, and Martha Nussbaum. Indeed, she suggests that the convergence is sufficient for some to suspect that her account of natural law and rights is “essentially a baptized version of secular liberalism.” She acknowledges that there is some truth to that charge, but she defends the result, noting that she is “a twenty-­first-­century woman with strong liberal sensibilities, and it would be very strange if her theology were not shaped by this context to some degree.”44

Yet the question must then be asked, What difference does her appeal to creation as a necessary theological presumption to sustain natural-­law reasoning make for moral reflection? As far as I can see, in spite of her strong claims concerning the necessity of creation to justify a natural law ethic, her theological convictions do no work for her.

I can illustrate what it means for the appeal to creation to do work by calling attention to Barth’s way of introducing his account of ethics in Church Dogmatics III/4. Barth begins his ethics with the Sabbath command. He does so by observing that the command to keep the Sabbath makes clear that we are creatures of time.45 The command to observe the Sabbath therefore expresses the eschatological character of creation, indicating “the special history of the covenant and salvation in some sense embedded in the course of the general history of nature and the world, hidden but revealed in it, decisively determining its basis and its goal and secretly its way also. The omnipotent grace of God rules all world-­occurrence as providence. But it does so from this starting point. It is at work here, in this particular, central sphere of history.”46

Accordingly, Barth argues that the command to keep the Sabbath is the command that explains all the other commandments. It does so because the command to observe the Sabbath is the telos for all God’s commands. For the purpose of all we do is nothing less than the glorification of God. Such an understanding of the commandment to observe the Sabbath might be understood as an expression of natural law, but one must remember that the Sabbath has been reconstituted by the resurrection.47

Given the identification of the Decalogue with natural law in many of the scholastic theologians Porter admires, one might have thought she might have developed an account of our obligation to worship God.48 That no such account is forthcoming I think reflects what I take to be the formal character of her understanding of natural law. Ironically, Porter’s account of creation and correlative understanding of natural law in comparison to Barth is surprisingly a-­historical. Porter insists that creation is a theological necessity for the intelligibility of a natural law ethic, but I remain unconvinced that she has shown that to be the case. I take that, moreover, to be the result of a deficient account of creation.

One Last Attempt to Say What Is at Stake

As a way to make as concrete as I can the significance of the eschatological account of creation, I think it is useful to call attention to the other Niebuhr, and in particular his influential book Christ and Culture. H. Richard Niebuhr argued in Christ and Culture that the great problem with the “Christ against culture” type was how advocates of that type understood the “relation of Jesus Christ to the Creator of nature and Governor of history as well as to the Spirit immanent in creation and in the Christian community.”49 According to Niebuhr, the over-­concentration of radical Christians (Tolstoy is his primary example) on the lordship of Christ results in an ontological bifurcation of reality. Their rejection of culture is joined to a suspicion of nature and nature’s God in a manner that obscures the goodness of God’s creation.

Niebuhr observes that, for Tolstoy, the Trinity had no ethical meaning, with the result that the God who creates cannot be identified with the God who redeems. Niebuhr’s appeal to the Trinity, however, as John Howard Yoder points out, is odd, because Niebuhr’s understanding of the Trinity is arguably modalist. In particular, Niebuhr used an appeal to the Trinity to underwrite an affirmative attitude toward nature and culture as manifestations of God the Father. Yoder argues that this emphasis results in creating a tension between God the Father and God the Son just to the extent that the former is used to underwrite moral knowledge that may contradict that determined by the teaching and example of Christ.50

Yet, according to Yoder, the intention of the post-­Nicene doctrine of the Trinity was to deny that different revelations come to us through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “The entire point of the debate around the nature of the Trinity was the concern of the church to say just the opposite, namely that in the Incarnation and in the continuing life of the church under the Spirit there is but one God.”51 Niebuhr’s very presumption that a balance must be maintained between the doctrines of creation and redemption reflects an understanding of creation not unlike that of Porter.

I have introduced Niebuhr into this discussion not only because his habits of thought are replicated in how many today think about these matters but also because an engagement with his position helps us see the interrelation of the doctrine of the Trinity and an eschatological understanding of creation.52 I may not do systematic theology, but I do understand that, theologically, everything we believe is interconnected with everything we believe. That is why theology can never be finished, requiring as it does constant reconnections.

I want to end, therefore, by making candid one agenda I hope this essay serves. I hope many of those who read this essay will be in sympathy with the emphasis on the eschatological character of the doctrine of creation. They will not, I suspect, be sympathetic with the kind of Christological pacifism I represent. An eschatological account of creation does not necessarily commit one to nonviolence, but it at least puts one in that ballpark. It does so because creation was, after all, God’s determinative act of peace.53 If, therefore, the end is in the beginning, at the very least Christians who justify the Christian participation in war bear the burden of proof.

1. Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006), pp. 23-25.

2. Robert Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 136-61.

3. Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, p. 155.

4. John Webster suggests systematic theology names the attempt “to present Christian teaching as a unified whole; even though particular exercises in the genre may restrict themselves to only one or other element of Christian doctrine, they have their place in the entire corpus.” “Introduction: Systematic Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, ed. John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 2. I, of course, have no reason to call into question systematic theology so understood, though I worry that theology so understood tempts theologians to present what Webster identifies as “Christian reality claims” as “symbolic” representations of some anterior experience. Webster is, of course, a representative of the alternative view, that is, that Christian reality claims are irreducible, which means they cannot be translated into other conceptual schemes without loss. Webster provides an exceptionally clear account of these alternatives on pp. 10-11.

5. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1: The Triune God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

6. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2: The Works of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

7. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, p. 27.

8. Stanley Hauerwas, Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), p. 2.

9. For example, the stress on so-­called doctrines of atonement in some Protestant traditions often betrays an attenuated Christology and an ecclesiology in which the church is but a collection of individuals. As a result “the politics of Jesus” is lost.

10. Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, p. 3.

11. Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, p. 6. Wilken makes clear, however, that the contrast between philosophy and theology in the ancient world is not as clear as the current divisions suggest because to become a philosopher in the ancient world entailed becoming an apprentice to a master.

12. Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, p. 21.

13. Charles Sanders Peirce may well exemplify this understanding of pragmatism better than William James, though I continue to find, as I tried to suggest in With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001), that James’s “empiricism” is best understood as an attempt to help us see the “differences.” I do not think it accidental that James was one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s favorite authors.

14. Austin Farrer, Faith and Speculation (New York: New York University Press, 1967), p. 22. I am indebted to Professor Robert MacSwain for his work on Farrer. It is far too easy to forget those who have shaped how one has come to think. See also Jeffrey Vogel, “A Little While in the Son of God: Austin Farrer on the Trinitarian Nature of Prayer,” Scottish Journal of Theology 64, no. 4 (2011): 410-24. Vogel quotes Farrer’s wonderful claim that “Prayer and dogma are inseparable. They alone can explain each other. Either without the other is meaningless and dead. If he hears a dogma of faith discussed as a cool speculation, about which theories can be held and arguments propounded, the Christian cannot escape disquiet. ‘What are these people doing?’ he will ask. ‘Do not they know what they are discussing? How can they make it an open question what the country is like, which they enter when they pray?’ ” (p. 413).

15. I should like to think this puts me in deep agreement with David Kelsey’s great book Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, vols. 1 and 2 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009). Kelsey observes that in modern systematic theology “ ‘doctrines of creation’ do remarkably little work.” He suggests that this is due partly to the abstract character of talk about creation, which results in creation making little difference in the broader project of Christian theology. His project is to clarify not only what it means to say we are creatures of God but also what theological and practical difference it makes to say so (vol. 1, p. 160).

16. See “Creation as Apocalyptic: A Tribute to William Stringfellow,” in my Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 107-15.

17. Not only does Joe Mangina use Stringfellow’s work to great effect in his commentary on the Book of Revelation, but he also carries through more consistently than Stringfellow the idea that, although the church can and must rely on God, such a reliance “does not exclude the possibility of its receiving all manner of help from creaturely sources, providing it does not confuse the latter with the help it receives from the Creator himself.” Revelation, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010), p. 157.

18. My chapter on Murdoch entitled “Murdochian Muddles: Can We Get through Them If God Does Not Exist?” is in my book Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-­Century Theology and Philosophy (Boulder: Westview, 1997), pp. 155-70. For Murdoch’s reflections on the Demiurge see Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin, 1992), pp. 477-78.

19. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/1: Doctrine of Creation, trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957; repr. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004).

20. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1959). In the foreword to the Torchbook edition of Dogmatics in Outline Barth comments on the term “systematic theology,” suggesting it to be equivalent to “wooden iron.” Accordingly he confesses he could never, as Tillich has done, write a book entitled “systematic theology.” He could not write a book under that title because a “system” is an edifice of thought constructed on fundamental conceptions selected on the basis of a philosophy by methods that correspond to those conceptions (p. 5). Page references to Dogmatics in Outline will appear in parentheses in the text.

21. David Fergusson in his article in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology puts the matter in a straightforward way when he says, “The account of creation is not primarily hypothesis about how the world got started” (p. 77). He is, moreover, certainly right to suggest that the theological and scientific accounts of the origin of the universe are different “levels” of explanation (p. 74). According to Fergusson, the former is an account of “why” and the latter asks “how.” I am not as convinced as Fergusson that the difference is so easily characterized. For theological reasons I suspect it is important to hold out the possibility that it is at least possible in principle for the “levels” to be in conflict.

22. Interestingly enough, Barth’s understanding of the relation of Trinity and creation is quite similar to Thomas’s argument that “knowledge of the divine persons” is necessary “for the right idea of creation. The fact of saying that God made all things by His Word excludes the error of those who say that God produced things by necessity. When we say that in Him there is a procession of love, we show that God produced creatures not because he needed them, not because of any other extrinsic reason, but on account of the love of His own goodness. So Moses, when he said, ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth,’ subjoined, God said, ‘Let there be light,’ to manifest the divine Word; and then said, ‘God saw the light that it was good,’ to show the proof of the divine love. The same is also found in the other works of creation. In another way, and chiefly, that we may think rightly concerning salvation of the human race, accomplished by the Incarnate Son, and by the gift of the Holy Ghost.” Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1948), I, 32, 1, 3. I am indebted to Matthew Whelan for directing me to this text.

23. Barth puts this extremely important point this way in Church Dogmatics, III/1: “As in Jesus Christ God and man, eternity and time, converge and overlap in a temporal and time-­transcending perfect willed and achieved by God, so it is in the act of creation. As God has accepted man in His Son, He has created him once and for all with heaven and earth. The fact and the way that God has acted historically cannot be mistaken in creation when we have learned to know it, as we must, in the light of the atonement, and therefore of the person and work of Jesus Christ” (p. 27).

24. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/1, p. 59.

25. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/1, p. 59.

26. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/1, p. 76.

27. Gerald McKenny observes that Barth struggled in his ethical thought leading up to the Church Dogmatics to find a place for substantive moral guidance while preserving the critical eschatological thrust of his ethics. I am sure McKenny would not suggest that Barth ever resolved that tension, but I suspect it is a tension not peculiar to Barth but to Christian theological ethics. McKenny, The Analogy of Grace: Karl Barth’s Moral Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 252. McKenny’s book is the best account of Barth’s ethics we have.

28. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4, trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), p. 35.

29. Jean Porter, Natural and Divine Law: Reclaiming the Tradition for Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 169.

30. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, p. 169. Porter uses the phrase “to us” to indicate who represents the different idea of morality, but she does not tell us who the “us” is that will find Barth’s view so problematic. The same problem is indicated by her use of “we.”

31. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, p. 170.

32. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, p. 171. I confess I find this way of putting the matter confusing — that is, to suggest that the question is “not only theological but Christological.” What could Christology be if it is not theological?

33. In her recent book, Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), Porter references Oliver O’Donovan’s claim that the creation of the world and the redemption in Jesus Christ are poles in relation to which Christians narrate the moral history of the world. Accordingly, Porter affirms O’Donovan’s presumption that the God who creates and the God who elects are one and the same God, but she insists that we experience the one God in diverse ways. So it is appropriate to develop an account of God from creation, that is, from “the natural forces which both sustain us and bear down and ultimately destroy us” (p. 57). The last phrase Porter explicitly borrows from Jim Gustafson. How she can at once express agreement with O’Donovan and Gustafson is not clear to me. Moreover, the appeal to “experience” to sustain a sense of creation begs for further elaboration and defense.

34. I find it odd that Porter does not engage David Burrell’s comparison of creation in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Burrell helps us see that creation is understood in each of those traditions as the free origination of all from the one God and that this means creation so understood is not unique to Christianity. Burrell notes, however, that this common conviction does not mean that there are no differences among these traditions about creation. See David Burrell, C.S.C., Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pp. 7-26. Burrell, moreover, argues that Barth makes explicit what Aquinas presumes, that is, that “the scriptures supply a personal language with which to speak of God the creator, and this reinforces the point that the covenant is the inherent goal of the creative activity of God. What the biblical accounts presume (and the Qur’an makes explicit) is that the goal of bringing the universe into being is to relate that world, via its human microcosm, to the One who creates it. So those narratives are not concerned to detail a natural level of divine activity and human response accessible to philosophy, but rather to offer an account of the origin of all which makes covenantal relationships possible” (pp. 21-22).

35. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, p. 166.

36. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, pp. 171-72.

37. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, p. 177.

38. Porter, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 137.

39. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, p. 287.

40. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, pp. 289-90. In Ministers of the Law Porter argues against Niebuhr’s defense of the nation-­state as a manifestation of human sinfulness. She argues that the state, while often corrupted by sin, is nonetheless part of God’s good creation and ordained to enable human cooperative life. Interestingly enough, I think she is right to so criticize Niebuhr.

41. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, pp. 291-92.

42. Porter, Natural and Divine Law, p. 293.

43. In her most recent book, Ministers of the Law, there are few references to creation as necessary for understanding how natural law is necessary to establish the authority of the law. I find myself, however, in agreement with her defense of how authority can and should be grounded in the political process. In particular, I am in sympathy with her contention that social life is not the result of sin but rather constitutive of what it means to be human.

44. Porter, Ministers of the Law, pp. 337-38. She argues, however, that such a judgment reflects the result of Christian ideals and practices that have shaped Western liberal ideals of equality and rights.

45. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4, p. 55.

46. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4, p. 55.

47. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4, p. 53. For my account of the Decalogue see Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), pp. 37-60, and The Truth about God: The Ten Commandments in the Christian Life, with William Willimon (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999).

48. Porter discusses the Decalogue in Nature as Reason (pp. 268-78), but there she is primarily concerned to show how the analysis of the precepts of the Decalogue by Aquinas clarifies the fundamental ideal of justice, which is to render each his due. She also briefly refers to the Decalogue in Ministers of the Law, noting that the scholastics did not think the precepts of the Decalogue to be, as much of the law in the Old Testament was regarded, provisional; but neither did they think the Decalogue to be a fully articulated moral code (p. 67).

49. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 80.

50. Glen H. Stassen, D. M. Yeager, and John Howard Yoder, Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), p. 61.

51. Yoder, in Authentic Transformation, p. 62.

52. In what may seem counterintuitive to some, David Kelsey draws on Wisdom literature to illumine the relation between an eschatological understanding of creation and a trinitarian understanding of God. He notes that how Wisdom’s creation theology bears on a trinitarian understanding of the Creator’s relation to creation can be displayed in the following fashion: “The Father creates. This phrase gets its force entirely from its Trinitarian context and is not open to any direct nuancing by Wisdom’s creation theology. Classically, the Trinitarian formula tells of the triune God’s creating in a certain pattern: It is not the ‘Father’ who creates as YHWH, or instead of or on behalf of the triune God. Rather, it is the triune God who creates. However, God creates by actively relating in a certain way that is told most aptly in a particular quasi-­narrative pattern: the Father creates through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit” (Eccentric Existence, vol. 1, p. 167).

53. John Milbank famously argues that “Christianity recognizes no original violence. It construes the infinite not as chaos, but as a harmonic peace which is yet beyond the circumscribing power of any totalizing reason. Peace no longer depends upon the reduction to the self-­identical, but the sociality of harmonious difference. Violence, by contrast, is always a secondary willed intrusion upon this possible infinite order (which is actual for God).” Accordingly, Milbank argues that Christianity exposes the postmodern understanding of difference as violence as a false “encoding” of reality. In contrast, Christianity is the “coding of transcendental difference as peace.” Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 5-6.