God's Good World

Reclaiming the Doctrine of Creation

Jonathan R. Wilson

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780801038815
• eBook ISBN: 9781441240934
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The doctrine of creation has often been neglected in Christian theology. Distinguished evangelical theologian Jonathan Wilson exposes what has been missing in current theological discourse and offers an original, constructive work on this doctrine.

The book unites creation and redemption, showing the significance of God's work of creation for understanding the good news of redemption in Jesus Christ. Wilson develops a trinitarian account of the life of the world and sets forth how to live wisely, hopefully, peaceably, joyfully, and generously in that world. He also shows how a mature doctrine of creation can help the church think practically about contemporary issues, including creation care, sexuality, technology, food and water, and more.

Part 1

Imagine a group of adventurers who have decided to abandon their experienced guide and find their own way through territory unknown to them. They are so confident and occupied with their journey that they do not realize that they are lost and doomed. Some of them, however, begin to suspect that something is not right. Their guide does not abandon them but continues to plead with them to listen to her instruction and follow her path. The first thing that this group of believers must do is learn from their guide where they are and what dangers they are facing because they have strayed from the path that has already been marked for them and for which the guide has all resources that are necessary.

“Waiting”

1
Missing Creation in the Church

If people are missing an essential ingredient in their diet, we see signs of that deficiency in their bodies.[7] A deficiency of vitamin C results in scurvy; a deficiency of protein may result in kwashiorkor; a deficiency of iron results in anemia. People suffering from one of these deficiencies and consequent conditions may even appear to be generally healthy for a while. But there may be times when physical stress brings on subtle indications of underlying poor health, which may also make them susceptible to other diseases that affect their health and lead to death, not from the underlying condition, but from another medical problem to which their poor health makes them unusually vulnerable. In every case, the underlying deficiency and consequent condition prevents flourishing and shortens lives.

What diseases can we identify in the church that result from a theological deficiency in the doctrine of creation? The remainder of this chapter is devoted to answering that question. If you are still not persuaded by my brief argument in the previous chapter that theology has neglected the doctrine of creation, the present chapter is further indirect evidence in support of that claim. I aim to increase the credibility of my claim by an account of the weaknesses and diseases that the church suffers as a result of this deficiency.

Note that from this point onward, I refer more simply to “creation” rather than the “doctrine of creation.” This abbreviated terminology may cause some momentary confusion because “creation” may be used to refer both to the created order and also to the doctrine.

Church Pathologies

Gnosticism

The most common way of identifying the pathology that results from this neglect of creation is to use the term “gnosticism,” which describes an ancient way of thinking and living that the church has identified as heresy. In recent years, this term has entered into the public stream and muddied the waters considerably. To discuss gnosticism in relation to creation, I must first clear up some of those muddy waters.

Gnosticism refers to an ancient school of thought that seems to have had a significant presence among some communities that claimed to be followers of Jesus Christ. These gnostic communities were sufficiently developed to produce their own accounts of who Jesus is and what he taught in such documents as the Gospel of Thomas. These texts have become well known through the work of the Jesus Seminar and Elaine Pagels, among others. These scholars often portray the gnostics as an oppressed minority in the church who were the victims of party politics and the orthodox corruption of Scripture, to use Bart Ehrman’s deliriously market-driven title.[8]

But the vision of the world and life that undergirds gnosticism is seldom addressed in the media coverage of these scholars and their texts. In gnosticism the world is divided into good and evil. Spirit is good; matter is evil. Matter is not fallen from a good state and therefore capable of redemption. Matter is evil from the beginning; it always has been and always will be. Redemption is not possible for matter because matter never was and never can be good. You and I suffer as we do because we are good spirits trapped in evil matter. Our salvation depends on the escape of our spirits from the trap of matter. (This belief is quite different from “materialism,” which values matter and the material world above “spirit.”) Gnosticism denigrates the material creation and exalts the eternal “spirit.”[9]

Disembodiment

In neglecting the doctrine of creation, theology has contributed to the church’s development of a low-grade gnostic infection that weakens many parts of the church’s life. One of the first areas of weakness that I discovered is our theology of the body: not our theology of the church as the body of Christ, but our theology of the human body. My undergraduate students at Westmont College taught me this. As I tried to help them through extremely difficult questions of body image often manifested in anorexia, bulimia, steroid use, obsessive exercising, immodest dress, sexual promiscuity, self-mutilation, and more, I realized that they had no way of connecting their bodies to their faith.

I at least grew up with rules about my body. I knew not to drink, smoke, or have intercourse before marriage. But even my tradition had no theology that explained or made sense of these rules. It was simply a matter of identity. If I was a Christian, I didn’t do these things. Why not? Because I was a Christian. Why doesn’t a Christian do these things? If the conversation got this far, the answer was, “Because your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.” So even here, there is no theology of the body. That is, the rules aren’t really about my body and its worth; rather, the rules are about the presence of the Holy Spirit in my body. It is not that these things are bad for my body, but that they are offensive to the Holy Spirit. If the Holy Spirit did not reside in my body, I would have no reason to avoid these “pleasures.” The primary function of the Holy Spirit, it appeared, was to narrow the list of pleasures that I was allowed.[10]

We need more. Without a theology of the body, my students—and the rest of us—are weakened and vulnerable to anyone who has a corrupt theology of the body. Those who want to sell us all manner of things to improve our bodies are teaching us a theology of the body; those who tell us that our bodies are beyond improvement are teaching us a theology of the body; those who tell us that extending our bodily lives is the priority for personal and social planning have a theology of the body; those who ask us to use our bodies to serve the corporation, the state, or the cause of democracy have a theology of the body.[11]

The Christian church desperately needs a robust theology of the body. God made our bodies and declared them good. God created them for sexual reproduction and for work. The pain and toil that we experience today, the burden of Brother Ass in the colorful phrase of Saint Francis, is not original or essential to our bodies; it is the consequence of our fall. Our bodies are being redeemed by the power of the incarnation—God in the flesh. And one day we will have imperishable, sinless bodies in a new creation. This is the merest sketch of an outline of a theology of the body.[12]

Ironically, the church’s neglect to develop a theology of the body has led not to a neglect of our bodies but to an almost obsessive concern for them. Much more needs to be done—both constructively, in articulating a theology of the body, and polemically, in attacking the devastating errors in the church and society. The absence of a theology of the body indicates an area of dis-ease in the church resulting from the neglect of the doctrine of creation and cries out for nourishment.

Truncated Salvation

Closely related to this pathological condition of the church’s theology of the body is the church’s doctrine of salvation. Do we need to be saved? Absolutely. Is God in Christ our only hope of salvation? Yes, without qualification. But in our time, two further questions press hard upon us. One is most pertinent to my theme—what is salvation? As I noted earlier, gnostics believe that salvation is the release of our spirits from their imprisonment in these evil bodies. That belief is very close and often identical to the doctrine of salvation taught in churches that would otherwise abjure heresy in themselves and abhor it in others. In other words, in many of our churches we have become functionally and practically gnostic.

With the glamorization of gnosticism, some traditions toward the liberal end of the theological spectrum have begun to drift toward this heresy. But historically, traditions toward the conservative end of the spectrum have inadvertently taught a doctrine of salvation that promises freedom from our bodies and escape from the world. There is biblical precedent for this language, but in the Scripture this language comes within the context of a larger celebration of the goodness of God’s creative work. So at the same time that Paul warns about “sins of the flesh” (Col. 2:11 KJV), he also celebrates the goodness of all food and the freedom of marital sex. At the same time that John warns us to “love not the world, neither the things that are in the world” (1 John 2:15 KJV), he expects us to do good with the worldly goods that we have. Since we lack a robust doctrine of creation, we have fallen into error by interpreting “flesh” in Paul to refer simply to our bodies. We have also missed the nuances of John’s references to the world.

Sarx

To make clear Paul’s use of the word “flesh” in a number of troubling passages, it is helpful to return to the Greek word sarx, which is usually translated “flesh.”[13] In many passages in Paul’s letters, sarx is not the body but a power that stands over against God’s work for the flourishing of creation to which we mistakenly submit our bodies and other aspects of our humanity.[14] Sarx is the anti-God, anti-human power that distorts our body image, seduces us with counterfeit pleasures, promises us life, and then crushes us in death. When we understand “flesh” as sarx, then we can see that “the flesh” is not our bodily life from which we need to break free into a contrasting “spiritual” life. Rather “the spiritual life” is our bodily life now under the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit rather than under the guidance of sarx.

With this understanding, we can now locate properly the language of salvation, especially its propositions. It is proper to say that we are saved from sin and death and Satan. It is also proper to say that we are saved from sarx. But it is a grave theological error to equate any of these with creation or our bodies. Sin, death, Satan, and sarx corrupt creation—including our bodies and our spirits—but they are not necessary, essential, eternal characteristics of creation. So salvation is salvation from—salvation from sin, death, and Satan. God in Christ has taken our very bodies back from sin, death, and Satan.[15]

Salvation is also salvation for—salvation for life. And the form of life for us is creation. Therefore, to have a real doctrine of salvation we need a real doctrine of creation and vice versa. Julian Hartt, from whom I have learned so much, calls this necessity the dialectic of the kingdom: the doctrines of creation and redemption in mutual illumination, correction, and witness. Without this (non-Hegelian!) dialectic, he says, these two realms dissolve into unreality in our understanding.[16]

Alternative Creation Stories

At this point, I must bring into focus a very different consequence of the theological neglect of creation on our doctrine of salvation. For some parts of the church, the absence of a robust doctrine of creation results in a doctrine of the redemption of creation that draws its meaning and sensibilities from accounts of creation outside the Christian tradition. In these parts of the church, there is a profoundly appropriate sense that this world is the realm of salvation. But because theology does not provide a doctrine of creation dialectically related to redemption, these parts of the church turn elsewhere for a doctrine of the redemption of creation. They find it variously in particular accounts of evolution, in techne (supposed human mastery of the world), in Gaia, and in other doctrines of salvation.

There is another layer to this corruption of the doctrine of salvation as a consequence of the neglect of creation. This layer is manifested in the seemingly endless debate over evangelism and social action. In some parts of the church, this debate has been decided, and energy has been directed toward one of the options. In other parts, the debate and tension can be debilitating. In still others, there is a balance in practice that lacks a foundation in vision. In very few is there a robust vision and practice guided and energized by a cogent dialectic of creation and redemption.

Church Health

Integral Mission

Such a dialectic is immediately before us. If God’s work in Christ is the salvation of this creation, then the church’s witness to this work in Christ must be whole. It is not a matter of evangelism as saving people for eternity and social action as caring for their bodies until they die. It is rather a matter of witnessing to God’s whole work in Christ for the salvation of the cosmos. So caring for the whole person is the work of the church in witness to Christ.[17]

Justice and Care for Creation

If we locate our understanding of the church’s witness in a robust doctrine of creation, then we will find inescapable the conviction that the church’s mission is to work for justice as our witness to and participation in God’s redemption of creation. When people are oppressed, marginalized, impoverished, mocked, treated unjustly, or debilitated by illness or injury, creation is not right. We must avoid “justice without eschatology”—that is, the belief that we can achieve God’s justice apart from God’s acting to consummate creation in redemption. But at the same time, we must bear witness to and participate in that coming work of God as people called to bring this good news to all creation. To bear witness and participate faithfully, we must abandon the dichotomy between so-called evangelism and so-called social action. We must instead bear witness to God’s redemption of creation in word and deed—by caring for all creation, the whole person and the whole world.

This leads us naturally to the church’s care for creation. One of the greatest tragedies of theology’s neglect of creation has been the church’s complicity in the destruction of the natural world and thus also of conditions that contribute to the flourishing of life. An even greater tragedy—let’s use the church’s language—an even greater sin has been the voices in the church that have resisted and mocked the passion for life that leads to care for creation. How far have we, the church, moved from the biblical prophets and the Christian tradition, that many of our leaders could mock God, who creates and who redeems that creation? Nostra culpa.

There have been voices crying out on behalf of creation along the way. And today more voices have joined them. But the need for repentance—a change of mind and life—is still great among us. Often Christians seem to be committed to good environmental practices for pragmatic or self-serving reasons. We may cautiously support this commitment if it brings people into right practices that may lead them into more mature convictions and character and deeper practices. A more robust doctrine of creation may provide just such a maturing and deepening influence.

With a more robust doctrine of creation as the ground of our care for creation, we will learn first to recognize that we do not have “an environment”; rather we are a part of creation. When we recognize that we are part of creation, we will also be carried beyond our relationship to the rest of creation. To be “creation” is to be related to the Creator. Care for creation, then, is an act of obedience and praise for our Creator God—Father, Son, and Spirit—in relation to whom we have life. We may be tempted to say that it is more terrifying to think of answering to the Creator for what we have done with creation than it is to face the natural consequences of what we have done and persist in doing. But it would be a mistake to make that distinction. In the prophetic tradition of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Bibliography
• Notes on the Artwork
• Endnotes
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Back Cover