Retrieving Augustine's Doctrine of Creation

Ancient Wisdom for Current Controversy

Gavin Ortlund

• Editorial: IVP Academic
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780830853250
• Categoría: Théologie et religion
• Categoría: Théologie chrétienne

How might premodern exegesis of Genesis inform Christian debates about creation today?Imagine a table with three people in dialogue: a young-earth creationist, an old-earth creationist, and an evolutionary creationist. Into the room walks Augustine of Hippo, one of the most significant theologians in the history of the church. In what ways will his reading of Scripture and his doctrine of creation inform, deepen, and shape the conversation?Pastor and theologian Gavin Ortlund explores just such a scenario by retrieving Augustine's reading of Genesis 1-3 and considering how his premodern understanding of creation can help Christians today. Ortlund contends that while Augustine's hermeneutical approach and theological questions might differ from those of today, this church father's humility before Scripture and his theological conclusions can shed light on matters such as evolution, animal death, and the historical Adam and Eve.Have a seat. Join the conversation.

Chapter One

What We Forget About Creation

How Augustine Can Broaden our Horizon of Concerns

Let me hear and understand the meaning of the words: In the Beginning you made heaven and earth. Moses wrote these words. . . . If he were here, I would lay hold of him and in your name I would beg and beseech him to explain those words to me. I would be all ears to catch the sounds that fell from his lips.

CONFESSIONES 11.3

CREATION IS A FREQUENTLY UNDERDEVELOPED, atrophied doctrine. John Webster has spoken of the “cramping effects” that modernity imposes on theology, identifying two particular loci where the damage can be seen: the Trinity and the doctrine of creation.1 Often Christians treat the doctrine of creation as a kind of prolegomenon to theology rather than a theological topic in its own right. Creation is important, it is thought, primarily insofar as it sets the stage for the weightier matters of theology—those issues involved in the doctrine of redemption.

When we do engage the theology of creation more directly, interest is often narrowly focused on questions springing from science-faith dialogue: What is the nature of the days in Genesis 1? Are the Adam and Eve of Genesis 2–3 historical figures? Was there a historical fall, and how do we understand this event in relation to the claims of evolutionary science?2

These are obviously vital questions. However, if we engage Genesis 1–3 as more than a mere preamble or preface to the biblical story, we will find that the material contribution of these chapters to Christian theology is far from exhausted by such concerns. This portion of Scripture offers a holistic framework for how to live as God’s creatures in God’s world, helping us integrate every aspect of our existence—relationships, work, art, laughter, music, play—under our calling as God’s image-bearers.

In the church, we have often emphasized the Christian life without reference to life as a human being.3 But the categories of sin and salvation are only comprehensible in light of the prior category of creation—the assertion “I am a sinner” is a further specification from the assertion “I am a creature.” Furthermore, if redemption involves not a repudiation of our original creaturely mandate but rather a reorientation toward it (e.g., Col 3:10; Eph 4:24), then the doctrine of creation not only precedes and undergirds the doctrine of redemption, but informs it. We are not just saved from something (sin), but saved to something (imaging God).

In this chapter, we suggest that retrieving Augustine’s doctrine of creation is one way to broaden our horizon of concerns in this area. Now, there are many aspects of the doctrine of creation that could be happily welcomed into a more prominent position within evangelical consciousness and dialogue—say, providence, or angelology, or the contingency of creation, or the goodness of creation, or ecological concern, or trinitarian agency in creation. Some of these topics are engaged more by evangelical academics than evangelical laity (perhaps, e.g., contingency); some tend to be altogether underworked (perhaps, e.g., angels); in all of them, arguably, Augustine could be useful.

But here we will focus on one issue: the ontological shape of Augustine’s doctrine of creation and its implication for human happiness. Augustine’s treatment of creation emphasized a thick distinction between God and his creation (what we will call divine priority), with a consequent radical dependence of the world upon God (what we will call creaturely contingency), and there is a sense in which this ontological framework drives everything else in Augustine’s theology. Engaging this aspect of Augustine’s thought, even where we do not finally agree with him, may helpfully draw attention to the pervasive significance of the doctrine of creation throughout Christian theology. Here we will emphasize in particular how creation was, for Augustine, the clue to unraveling the deepest longings of the human heart.

We start in this way so that we will not immediately demand that Augustine give us answers, but first give him an opportunity to reshape and reformulate our questions, perhaps pulling us into new directions and broadening our horizon of interest. As an entry point, we can make the issue more pressing by drawing attention to the often-neglected significance of the doctrine of creation in Augustine’s most famous work, the Confessions.

CONFESSIONS OF HEART AND UNIVERSE

Interpreters of Augustine’s Confessions have often puzzled over the book’s ending. After nine chapters of intensely personal autobiography, why does Augustine then conclude with more abstract accounts of memory (book 10) and creation (books 11–13)? Or, more typically, how does Augustine move from himself (books 1–10) to Genesis (books 11–13)? The transition feels somewhat abrupt, both in tone and content. Indeed, according to Jared Ortiz, the scholarly “consensus” over the last century or so is that “the Confessions does not have a singular meaning and that it does not hold together.”4 Thus, John J. O’Meara claims that it is “a commonplace of Augustinian scholarship to say that Augustine was not able to plan a book.”5 Not surprisingly, this critical view of the Confessions’ literary and structural integrity often results in more scattered and piecemeal engagements with its content.6 A book so badly written, after all, need not be read too carefully.

But there are reasons to doubt that Augustine would have perceived such a tension between the abstract and emotional qualities of his book. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle has drawn attention to Cicero’s influence on Augustine’s style of rhetoric and argument, suggesting that the Confessions is “composed quite classically according to the ordinary Ciceronian rules for the invention of argument which Augustine habitually practiced as rhetor, then preacher.”7 With respect to the book’s development of thought, Robin Lane Fox argues that though these final chapters seem to be on a higher plane, they are not “additions to an ‘autobiographical’ work,” but rather “the culmination of the entire work,” since Augustine’s meditation on time and creation in books 10–13 represents the fulfillment of his longing for worship, the great pursuit of books 1–9.8

Similarly, Ortiz suggests that Augustine’s doctrine of creation is actually the key to the whole book by situating Augustine’s story in relation to his larger vision of reality. In ancient thought, with the exception of Christians and Platonists, God tended to be conceived as one part of the world, rather than transcendent over it.9 The Christian notion of creation ex nihilo signaled a fundamentally different structure to reality: it meant that “for anything to be, it has to be drawn back to God so it can share in his being in some way. Only by becoming like God can things be.”10 By its very nature, an ex nihilo, contingent creation can only be and become what it is through a continual turning to the One who made it and sustains it. This broader ontology helps illumine why Augustine had to “confess” his personal salvation and his view of the universe together. As Henry Chadwick puts it:

Augustine understood his own story as a microcosm of the entire story of creation, the fall into the abyss of chaos and formlessness, the “conversion” of the creaturely order to the love of God as it experiences griping pains of homesickness. What the first nine books [of the Confessions] illustrate in his personal exploration of the experience of the prodigal son is given its cosmic dimension in the concluding parts of the work.11

In this way of thinking, the Confessions has a profoundly coherent internal unity, from the initial famous declaration of its opening paragraph (“You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”12) to the concluding focus of book 13 on divine rest in Genesis 1 as the end of creaturely restlessness (“When our work in this life is done, we too shall rest in you in the Sabbath of eternal life”13).

But how do these personal and cosmic dimensions relate more precisely? What was the vision of creation that enabled Augustine to correlate his own soul’s “restlessness” with the creaturely tilt of the entire created order, from the plainest pebble to the brightest angel?

In what follows we will briefly trace this motif of creaturely happiness (“rest”), particularly as seen in his famous Confessions. We will then situate it in relation to Augustine’s broader ontological framework for creation, focusing on five principles: divine priority, creaturely contingency, trinitarian agency in creation, sin as privation, and redemption as deification. Finally, we derive three specific conclusions for how Augustine’s views in this area might help broaden evangelical reflection on the doctrine of creation today.

CREATURELY “RESTLESSNESS” THROUGHOUT THE CONFESSIONS

The motif of creaturely “rest” is not limited to Augustine’s Confessions. For instance, in his finished commentary of Genesis, Augustine describes creatures as good yet imperfect, in need of sharing in God’s “quiet rest.” He insists that the perfection of each created thing occurs not in the whole of which it is a part, but rather in him from whom it derives its being.14 He describes each created thing “finally coming to rest” in God as the attainment of “the goal of its own momentum.” The “momentum” he has in view here is generated by creatureliness—the inherent tilt of all creatures toward God. Thus, Augustine continues:

The whole universe of creation . . . has one terminus in its own nature, another in the goal which it has in God. . . . It can come to no stable and properly established rest, except in the quiet rest of the one who does not have to make any effort to get anything beyond himself to find rest in it. And for this reason, while God abides in himself, he swings everything whatever that comes from him back to himself, like a boomerang, so that every creature might find in him the final terminus and goal for its nature, not to be what he is, but to find in him the place of rest in which to preserve what by nature it is in itself.15

Here Augustine distinguishes between two different termini or goals of creatures: one in their own nature, and one that final state of entering God’s rest. He emphasizes the incompleteness of creatures’ own terminus, claiming they lack any “stable and properly established rest,” and contrasts this with God’s self-sufficiency as the one who has rest in himself, the one who does not need anything beyond himself in order to find rest. Moreover, strikingly, Augustine depicts God as continually at work in relation to this ontological divide, swinging everything he has created back to himself to find rest in himself. Although the translator, Edmund Hill, has added the boomerang imagery here, it captures something of Augustine’s meaning: God creates imperfect creatures with an inherent need for him, and subsequently “swings” them back to himself. Thus, creation must return to its source in order to find itself. Every creature must return to its Creator, like a boomerang, to preserve its own nature.

Now, when did this rest begin, and when does it conclude? Augustine does regard creation to have begun this activity of sharing the Creator’s rest after the evening of the sixth day, but he also holds that it will continue to develop until it finds a secure and final rest in him. In this final state, all of creation will abide forever, since anything that has existence only has it through participation in God: “Since what the whole created universe is going...