Christian Faith

Dogmatics in Outline

B. A. Gerrish

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780664256982
• eBook ISBN:
  9781611646047
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

At the beginning of Christian Faith, B. A. Gerrish reminds us that dogmatics involves critical transmission of the Christian heritage. The dogmatic theologian must interpret and assess the traditional beliefs of the church while also considering the new and changing conditions in which that tradition is being embodied.

With that, Gerrish goes on to outline the various presuppositions and affirmations of the Christian faith before ultimately offering a powerful and compelling restatement of Christian faith for the twenty-first century. As part of his framework, Gerrish includes a critical comparison of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion and Schleiermacher's Christian Faith while still paying close attention to the great cloud of theological witnesses from across the spectrum of Christian traditions. Gerrish's book provides a robust and penetrating revisioning of Christian theology, one that is thoroughly grounded in the classical traditions of the church.

PART I: CREATION

Theism as the Presupposition of Christian Faith

4. The World as Creation

Faith in God “the Father of Jesus Christ” presupposes that the world is neither an accident nor a mechanism, but a moral order experienced as both support and demand; and this is what is meant by representing the world as “creation.”

Creation, as popularly understood, is the act or series of acts by which God brought the universe into being. Most Christians assume that the first two chapters of the Old Testament are about creation in this sense. But many have assumed further that the two creation narratives in Genesis (Gen. 1:1–2:4a; 2:4b–25) are not to be understood literally even if they represent actual events. Until early modern times, it was common for theologians to think that the seven “days” of the first narrative, and the single day of the second, should not be taken for twenty-four-hour time spans and that the task of exegesis was to look through created things to the symbolic meanings the Creator assigned to them. Some have argued, however, that Protestant insistence on the literal sense of Scripture had two unintended consequences: it nurtured scientific inquiry into nature for its own sake, but it also “opened up for the first time in the history of biblical interpretation the real possibility that parts of the Bible could be false” (Harrison 1998: 268).

In our own day, the possibility of conflict between scientific and religious accounts of the way the world began is seen most obviously in the controversy over creationism. Advocates of creationism maintain that the earth is about six thousand years old, or no more than ten thousand years, and that the appearance of different species of animal life must be attributed to direct divine intervention, not to evolution through natural selection. They commend their views not as religious beliefs but as scientific conclusions; hence, in their opinion, their “creation science” has every right to be taught in schools as an alternative to Darwinism. In the main, the scientific arguments for creationism have consisted simply in exposing the alleged shortcomings of evolutionary theory. More recently, the proponents of intelligent design set aside creationist dating of the creation, and they do not deny the evidence that evolution has occurred. But they focus on the “irreducible complexity” of many living organisms, which, they argue, defies explanation of the origin of species by blind law alone.

My own agenda will not center on the creationism debate, though I do not entirely neglect it. I take the dogmatic locus of “creation” to refer not to the beginning of the world but (1) to the kind of world presupposed by Christian faith (the theme of the present chapter) and (2) to the distinctively theistic understanding of the relationship between the continuing course of the world and the creative activity of God (the theme of the following chapter). Chapter 6 then turns to the place of humanity in creation: to women and men as made in the image and likeness of the Creator.

I. Creation as the Establishing of Order

Creation is the first theme in our Bibles, and Christian theologies of creation are expected to include interpretation of the first two chapters of Genesis, understood as narratives—whether literal or symbolic—of events in the primeval past. But the Hebrew word for “create” (bārā') is not used in the Old Testament exclusively of the original creation; it is also applied to God's creative activity in history and in the future (e.g., Isa. 43:1, 15; 65:17–18). Old Testament scholars have argued that although the creation stories in Genesis come first in our Bibles, the theme of God's action in the beginning is a relatively late feature of Hebrew religious thought, an inference from Israel's encounter with God in history. Creation in Genesis is about the dependence of the whole world on the God of the covenant: it exhibits the way the world is, or is perceived to be by faith, in the form of a story about how it began; and this is what is intended by calling the two creation stories myths. In our popular usage, “myth” has come to mean a falsehood, especially a deliberate falsehood. But that is not the way the historians of religion use it. Taken as primitive science, the creation stories are false; taken as myth, they may very well be true. The truth, or truth claim, of the creation myths lies in their reference to the way the world always is, in every moment.¹

Dogmatic theology does not need to look behind the Hebrew creation stories for the Near Eastern mythologies they drew from. Our interest is in the function of the stories in the faith of Israel, insofar as that tells us something about the presuppositions of faith in Christ. Together with the Psalms and the Wisdom literature, the Genesis accounts testify that belief in creation is belief in a divine order, of which humanity is a part. It does not follow, however, that disorder is taken lightly or disposed of once and for all. The Old Testament gives evidence of the belief that the victory of order over chaos at the creation of the world was not total or final: chaos remains a continual threat (e.g., Job 3:8; 7:12).

Genesis 1 has been intractable to Christian theology not because of the distribution of God's labor over six “days”—since even before the rise of modern science the days were not always taken literally—but because creation is represented as the imposition of order on chaos. For this invites the question, Where did the chaos come from? The question is especially pointed if the opening verses are translated, as many scholars contend they should be (and as a note in the NRSV points out): “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the spirit of God swept over the face of the waters.” Chaos appears as a second principle alongside the creative Spirit of God, though by no means its equal. To rule out gnostic dualism and the philosophical concept of an eternal matter, Christian theologians formulated the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (“creation from nothing”), and they have sometimes justified it from the Apocrypha: “look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed” (2 Macc. 7:28; cf. Rom. 4:17). But whether or not the author (or redactor) of Genesis 1 understood the formless void to have been created by God, he clearly took creation to be the establishment of order.

II. Creation Faith

Faith, Calvin says, “has its own peculiar way of assigning the whole credit for Creation to God. . . . For unless we pass on to his providence . . . we do not yet properly grasp what it means to say: ‘God is Creator’” (Institutes, 1:197). Not that he questions the reference of Genesis 1 to an original creation. But, as always, his concern is for piety, and this means that it is essential not to make God a momentary Creator who finished his work once and for all. The accent shifts from what God once did to what God does always—a creatio continua (“continuous creation”), though Calvin does not use the term. A similar understanding of what we are calling “creation faith” appears in the Heidelberg Catechism, and Schleiermacher ‘s thoughts incline him in the same direction.

1. Calvin

Calvin's remarks on creation in book 1 of the Institutes (chap. 14) seem, at first glance, to be wholly conventional. He assumes that the world is not yet six thousand years old, and he values the biblical story of creation because it excludes pagan errors on the subject: Moses gave the true account of the way the world began to prevent believers from being led astray by heathen fabrications. However, it is quickly apparent that Calvin is less interested in the story of beginnings as such than in its usefulness to present piety. He states expressly: “it is not my purpose to recount the creation of the universe” (Institutes, 1:180). We are not to take the Mosaic narrative as a scientific account of how things began. For Calvin, it is a mirror in which the living likeness of God shines and moves us to pious gratitude. Like spectacles, it enables us to discern the true God. The distribution of the work of creation over six days is intended to aid our contemplation of God's goodness; and in the very sequence of events we ought to recognize God's fatherly love to humankind, since he did not create Adam until he had first made the earth ready for him, filling it with good things. We should respond with thankfulness.

In his commentary on Genesis, Calvin points out that the creation story is aimed at the limited capacities of the uneducated, so that anyone who wants to learn astronomy, or any other abstruse discipline, must go elsewhere (Comm. Gen. 1:6). By the two “great lights” in Genesis 1:16, for example, Moses meant the sun and the moon, whereas the astronomers prove that Saturn is in fact greater than the moon. To be sure, astronomy is both enjoyable and useful: it unfolds the marvelous wisdom of God. But Moses wrote for ordinary folk, and to them the moon is bigger because it looks bigger. We are not to worry about an apparent discrepancy with science, but rather should be aroused to gratitude for the light. “For since the Lord stretches forth, as it were, his hand to us in causing us to enjoy the brightness of the sun and moon, how great would be our ingratitude were we to close our eyes against our own experience?” (on Gen. 1:16).

Calvin does not doubt that the first chapter of Genesis (“The First Book of Moses”) is about the actual beginning of the universe. But in the Institutes, as in his commentary on Genesis, he points the readers' attention away from past history to present experience: “Moses, accommodating himself to the rudeness of the common folk, mentions in the history of the Creation no other works of God than those which show themselves to our own eyes” (Institutes, 1:162). Calvin would not have approved of the attempts made by later Calvinists to override the principle of accommodation and deduce a “Christian physics” from the Bible. He acknowledged the authority of the scientists in their own domain. There is, of course, the much-quoted rhetorical question that used to be attributed to him concerning Psalm 93:1: “The LORD . . . has established the world; it shall never be moved” (cf. Ps. 96:10). Calvin supposedly asked: “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?” Though dutifully transmitted by historians of science, no exact reference for the question is ever provided, and the Calvin scholars have searched for it in the Opera omnia without success. It seems that the “quotation” is spurious, and in any case it is out of keeping with Calvin's express intention to distinguish between theological and scientific discourse.² Creation faith is one thing; natural science is something else.

2. The Heidelberg Catechism

Reformed theology after Calvin did not always follow his tendency to elide the distinction between creation and providence. Johannes Wollebius (1586–1629), for example, wrote in his widely used Compendium of Christian Theology (1618): “Creation is the act by which God made the world and all that is in it. . . . The record of creation is in Genesis 1 and 2.” But a different approach to the doctrine of creation appears in one of the classical Reformed confessions. In the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the first article of the Apostles' Creed is interpreted “existentially” (as we would say), that is, as a statement about the believer ‘s self-understanding. The answer to the question (q. 26), “What do you believe when you say, ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth’?” affirms: “I trust in him so completely that I have no doubt that he will provide me with all things necessary for body and soul.” Creation and providence here run together, and the profit of acknowledging them is that we may have patience in adversity, gratitude in prosperity, and confidence for the future (q. 28, apparently echoing Calvin, Institutes, 1:219).

3. Schleiermacher

Schleiermacher takes the reflections of Calvin and the Heidelberg Catechism a step further. By his time, it had become a commonplace to classify as “mythology” prescientific accounts of the beginning of spatial and temporal existence. In The Christian Faith he turns away from creation in the beginning to what we may call the creature-consciousness of Christians in every time: the consciousness of being absolutely dependent on a source outside themselves. Hence there can be, for Schleiermacher, no real distinction between “creation” and “preservation” (Erhaltung, his preferred term for “providence”). He retains the traditional distinction because he finds it convenient to deal separately with what absolute dependence excludes (under “creation”) and what is its positive content (under “preservation”). In his view, the problem with the idea of creation as an event lying in the remote past is that it cannot possibly represent anything given in the religious consciousness of the present. If we reply that it is after all an item of faith, that could only mean “faith” in the improper sense of assent to revealed information about things that lie outside our experience. This is not to say that the question of origins is uninteresting, but simply that it arises out of curiosity, not piety, and can be turned over to the cosmological speculations of the natural scientists. But if that disposes of the imagined conflict between science and the traditional doctrine of creation, there remains the supposed conflict between science and the doctrine of providence or preservation.

The first part of Schleiermacher ‘s The Christian Faith contains a pioneering venture into theological naturalism. He admits that the common tendency of believers is to picture God's universal sustaining activity as interrupted from time to time by a supernatural act of divine intervention, that is, by a miracle. They fear that natural science, by reducing the entire course of nature to regular, undeviating patterns (“laws”), constitutes a threat to the devout expectation that an omnipotent God can and does interrupt the course of nature when and where he chooses. Indeed, it is chiefly to just such extraordinary acts of divine interference that they look for evidence of God's providence. Piety thus seems to have a vested interest in opposing the advance of scientific research; and the better the scientists understand the working of the natural order, the less devout they are likely to be.

Schleiermacher contends for the exact opposite: the interests of piety coincide with the interests of science. The intrusion of an element of unpredictable irregularity into the course of events would undermine not only scientific research but piety as well. A divine intervention in the created order would be needed only if the order were defective to begin with. “If such an interference be postulated as one of the privileges of the Supreme Being, it would first have to be assumed that there is something not ordained by Him which could offer Him resistance and thus invade Him and His work” (CF 179). And for piety that is unthinkable. Rightly interpreted, the heart of piety, according to Schleiermacher, is the feeling of absolute dependence that the regularity of nature actually arouses in us. The conviction that everything is grounded in nature's causal nexus coincides completely with devout confidence in the absolute dependence of all finite being on God.

For Schleiermacher, then, it is the regular course of nature that fits it to be the theater of redemption (CF 735). “[B]y creation all things are disposed with a view to the revelation of God in the flesh. . . ....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: CREATION
• PART II: REDEMPTION
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Dogmatic Theses
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Scripture Citations
• Index of Subjects and Persons