Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
ECPA Top Shelf Book Cover Award The Christian claim that the triune God is the creator of the universe is both exegetically grounded and theologically rich. Yet discussions about God's work of creation are often overwhelmed by questions such as the age of the earth and the relationship between divine creation and evolution. Without completely ignoring such issues, Peter Leithart offers a decidedly theological interpretation of the creation account from Genesis 1. By engaging with classic discussions of creation, including those of Plato and Aristotle, as well as Christian articulations as varied as those of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Sergius Bulgakov, Karl Barth and Robert Jenson, Leithart embraces the challenge of talking about God and God's first work. Here, readers will discover what it means to articulate a theology that is rigorously grounded in the first chapter of the Bible and the creedal affirmation of God the Father almighty, who is the creator of the heavens and earth.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 647
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
TO THE READER:
“I have a mind to fill this [book]with profitable wonders. . . .
I will fill it with those Truths
you love without knowing them;
and with those things which, if it be possible,
shall shew my Love to you,
in communicating most enriching Truths to Truth,
in exalting her beauties in such a soul.”
Thomas Traherne,Centuries of Meditation 1.1
Contents
Preface
Creator was conceived in a rare fit of self-assessment. I have neither the desire, patience, nor skill to write a systematic theology, but several years ago, musing over my published books, I realized I had inadvertently covered nearly every locus of systematic theology. A prolegomenon of sorts: Against Christianity. On hermeneutics: Deep Exegesis. On God: Traces of the Trinity and sections of Deep Comedy. On covenant: Commentaries on all the “First and Seconds” of the Old Testament. On Christology: A monograph on Athanasius, a student’s guide to the Gospels, and commentaries on Matthew and 1 John. On soteriology: Delivered from the Elements of the World. On ecclesiology and related topics: Nearly everything, specifically The End of Protestantism, Blessed Are the Hungry, three books on baptism, and the Theopolis Fundamentals series, published in omnibus form as On Earth as in Heaven. On Ethics: Gratitude and The Ten Commandments. On political theology: Defending Constantine and Between Babel and Beast. On Eschatology: Deep Comedy, God of Hope, and a two-volume commentary on Revelation.
The big lacuna was the doctrine of creation, including anthropology. It was a surprising discovery. I talk and write about creation all the time. I learned from Jim Jordan to trace every biblical theme and theological question back to Genesis 1–3. I criticize other theologians for their faulty views of creation. I have tossed around the insult “Gnostic” with abandon, though not, I think, unjustly. Critics of “pure nature” and the nature/supernature dualism—Henri de Lubac, Alexander Schmemann, and John Milbank especially—haunt everything I write.
Once I noticed the gap, I determined it was time to come clean and make explicit what I had been assuming about creation all along. I initially planned to write a medium-sized book on God, creation, and man. I intended to address controverted questions about the days of creation, the age of the earth, the whole tangled knot of creation-evolution, but only in passing. I hold “fundamentalist” views on all those questions, but I worry that theologians and biblical scholars expend so much energy on disputed points that we miss the theological grandeur of the biblical account of creation. I am interested in how long the days of creation are, but I am, for the purposes of this project, far more interested in what Genesis 1 tells us (if anything) about God’s relation to time. I believe God created light on the first day, but I am far more interested in meditating on the speaking God and exploring the ontological priority of light. Animal species did not emerge over millions of years but were, I believe, created on days five and six of the creation week; yet I am more interested in exploring what Scripture means when it calls them “living souls.” To put it simply: I intended to write a book of theology, not apologetics.
A few months into my research, I worked through Matthew Levering’s Reconceiving the Doctrine of Creation, which devotes several chapters to theology proper. I realized that working on creation gave me an opportunity to work on trinitarian theology in more depth (another long-standing obsession on which I have written comparatively little) and to decide once and for all (for now) what I think of “classical theism” (a phrase I avoid as much as possible in this book). After reading Levering, my sights simultaneously narrowed and expanded: Narrowed with respect to this book, which focuses on the doctrine of God the Creator; expanded, because this book got pretty big and also because I intend to write two further books on creation, one a “revisionary metaphysics” of created reality and the other a study of biblical anthropology. Ultimately, Lord willing, a trilogy: Creator, Creation, Man.
Acknowledgments
I owe debts to many people. First on the list are those friends who have diligently, doggedly attended my Sunday School class devoted to “An Excruciatingly Detailed Exposition of Genesis 1,” which has now produced an excess of excruciation by moving on to Genesis 2. I’m grateful to Pastor Rich Lusk and the elders of Trinity Presbyterian Church for giving me a venue to millimeter my way through the text.
I gave several lectures on “classical theism” at the 2019 Pastors Conference at Church of the Redeemer in Monroe, Louisiana, and I am thankful to our host, Pastor Steve Wilkins, and for discussions there with my Theopolis colleagues Alastair Robert and Jeff Meyers. During 2021–2022, I taught a Theopolis Regional Course on creation at Exodus Church, Wichita; All Saints Presbyterian Church, Fort Worth; Christ Covenant Church, Chicago; Trinity Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, Alabama; and Christ Church, Cary, North Carolina. I am grateful to the pastors of those churches—Kyle Lammott, Jeff Niell and Steve Jeffery, Jon Herr, Rich Lusk, and Duane Garner—for hosting our courses and hosting me. Thanks too to the Theopolis staff, especially Emma Leithart, for managing logistics. I presented some of the material in chapter five at the New Saint Andrews College Grad Forum in the fall of 2021; thanks to Timothy Edwards for the opportunity, and to Pastor Doug Wilson, Tim Harmon, and others for their questions and challenges.
David Sedley was kind enough to answer an out-of-the-blue email question about Aristotle, and Jonathan McIntosh gave feedback on an inchoate initial version of the argument of chapter four.
I am grateful for my long friendships and collaborations with the Biblical Horizons group, including Jim Jordan, Jeff Meyers, Rich Bledsoe, and others. Jim taught and wrote about Genesis with unprecedented insight, and I could not have written Creator without making his thoughts my own. Long ago, Jeff excited my interest in trinitarian theology with a series of lectures at a Biblical Horizons conference.
Thanks, finally, to Dan Reid of InterVarsity Press, who first accepted my proposal, and to David McNutt, who took up the project after Dan retired, gave me the green light when I changed the scope of the book midstream, and demonstrated preternatural patience when I missed my deadline by a year and a half.
Creator is dedicated to my wife, Noel Jordan Leithart. Her contributions to this and all my other writings are incalculable. They are all her books as much as mine. Through four decades and counting, she has taken up my slack in a thousand ways, attending to life’s practicalities and leaving me free to putter away at my books and peck away at my keyboard. She has never been overawed, not with me or anyone else, but she has been fiercely, relentlessly supportive, my loudest cheerleader and best friend. Because the Lord has blessed us beyond measure, we have been immeasurably fruitful. In every way, the fruitfulness is ours, neither mine nor hers alone. Together, always and in everything, together.
I love you.
You are my Queen.
Easter 2023
Beth-Elim
Gardendale, Alabama
1
Apophaticism, Accommodation, Anthropomorphism
Creator is largely a theological commentary on portions of Genesis 1:1–2:3, an attempt to articulate a fundamental theology explicitly and rigorously controlled by the Bible’s first chapter.
I would prefer to jump right in. You may do so by skipping to chapter two. Alas, I cannot. I must, reluctantly, begin before I begin, with a brief defense of my assumptions about the task of theology, which, for me, means assumptions about Scripture and how it is to be read. My reluctance rises from several sources. As Jeffrey Stout famously put it, methodological discussions are like a speaker’s throat-clearing before he begins to speak.1 One needs a clear throat, to be sure, but too much academic speech is swallowed up in throat-clearing, question clarifying, framing. It is easy to forget that frames exist not for themselves but for the sake of the painting; we clear our throats so our throats are clear to say stuff. Fortunately for you, this chapter is comparatively brief. I could not explain or defend all my assumptions without writing a complete prolegomenon, and I cannot in good conscience subject readers to more “ahems” than is strictly necessary.
I am also reluctant because method too often pre-determines the outcome of an investigation. As Jean-Luc Marion observes, meta-hodos implies we begin “at the end of the path . . . onto which [we] have just barely set forth.” Method allows us to “run ahead of the phenomenon, by fore-seeing it, pre-dicting it, and pro-ducing it.”2 Method immanentizes the eschaton and attempts to survey the territory to be explored from an impossible position outside, or on the far side of, the territory. Method bewitches us into thinking it guides us from the beginning toward a reliable end, but in fact method is discernible only in retrospect. We can only know the meta-hodos from the end of the hodos. Discovery occurs when we are confronted by an other, often a new acquaintance. Method saves time by netting and taming the other as soon as we meet him, without the fuss of listening to what he has to say, without considering whether or not he knows a better path toward our destination.3 This is bad form in general, fatal when the Other is the Creator.
Every way of proceeding is shaped by substantive convictions about the subject matter that is yet to be studied. Sometimes, the convictions arrive from outside the subject at hand. Even the “clean” methods of the physical sciences are never purely methodological,4 since they rest on metaphysical premises about causation, the law-like regularities of created phenomena, the irrelevance of supernatural factors—none of which have been or can be proven by the method they are used to support.5
There is no way round the knotted aporia at the origin of all human exploration: We must know what we are looking for before we begin, yet we cannot. We cannot immanentize the eschaton, and yet we must if we are going to move toward the end at all. Every human investigation requires contact with the already before we grope toward the not yet.
This aporia is perhaps most evident in theology. “He who is not with Me is against Me,” Jesus says, and we must know the Jesus we befriend in order to come to know him (Mt 12:30; Lk 11:23). Theology is for disciples. For theologians, the only meta-hodos that truly meets the requirement is the hodos who is also telos, who is also Truth and Life.
We must know God in order to know God more deeply. As Karl Barth insists, it will not do to begin by positing a generic divine being in order to work our way up to the true God. Christian theology seeks to know, praise, and proclaim the one living God, the Father who begets the eternal Son by his eternal Spirit, the God who is a communion of three equal divine persons. Any theology that seeks to know God while prescinding from incarnation and Pentecost is founded on idolatry, no matter that the living triune God is clumsily squeezed into the idolatrous frame. This gets very much to the problem I investigate and seek to correct in this book, for the heart of my critical argument is that Christian theology has been tainted by a failure to integrate creation fully into its doctrine of God. To put it provocatively, much Christian theology has unwittingly posited a nonexistent idol and attributed creation to that idol, rather than to the living God who is Father, Word, and Spirit.
One aspect of this aporia is directly pertinent to Creator: This book is an extended exercise in theological interpretation of the creation account, but any understanding of the truth value of Scripture depends on a prior understanding of creation. Our understanding of the function and force of the words of Genesis 1 depends on our understanding of the teaching and content of Genesis 1. This is an aporia indeed, for we cannot begin to grasp how we are to construe the words of Genesis without having already construed the words of Genesis 1 in some particular fashion. Without trying to relieve the tangled tension that meets us at the outset, I believe some pathways are more consistent with the content of Genesis 1 than others. I focus the discussion by posing this question: Are the words of Scripture adequate to convey the truth God intends to reveal? This, of course, is a species of a more general question about creation: Is creation capable of conveying the truth God intends to reveal?
The Christian tradition has answered yes, but the yes has quivered and wobbled. Below I seek to steady a few wobbles and worries—worries about babbling theologians, about the babbling God, about the words with which we babble.
BABBLING THEOLOGIANS
For many theologians, T. S. Eliot’s words about words, about their strain, slippage, and imprecision, apply most especially to words about God.6 Though revelation authorizes us to use the language of creation to speak of God, it must, it is said, be “hedged about with the cautionary reminder that the sense in which some words are used cannot be the primary and familiar one.”7 These qualifications on our language about God are rooted in the metaphysical conviction that God is so transcendent that our words are, at best, distant pointers to the one who is beyond speech and thought. Nothing we can say positively can capture “what it is ‘like’ to be God” because finite minds have no “adequate perspective on unlimited actuality as such.”8
The majority tradition of the church has oscillated between positive and negative theology, modulated between cataphatic and apophatic registers, often treating the apophatic as a moment in what is primarily a cataphatic quest.9 In one of his theological Orations, Gregory of Nazianzus insists that negative theology is not a stopping point for theology: “He who is eagerly pursuing the nature of the Self-existent will not stop at saying what He is not, but must go on beyond what He is not, and say what He is; inasmuch as it is easier to take in some single point than to go on disowning point after point in endless detail, in order, both by the elimination of negatives and the assertion of positives to arrive at a comprehension of this subject.”10
Gregory follows with an analogy:
A man who states what God is not without going on to say what He is, acts much in the same way as one would who when asked how many twice five make, should answer, not two, nor three, nor four, nor five, nor twenty, nor thirty, nor in short any number below ten, nor any multiple of ten, but would not answer ten nor settle the mind of his questioner upon the firm ground of the answer. For it is much easier, and more concise to show what a thing is not from what it is, than to demonstrate what it is by stripping it of what it is not. And this surely is evident to every one.11
Here, apophasis is the fruit of cataphasis, not the opposite.
Pseudo-Dionysius is a key figure here. He recognizes the interplay of apophatic and cataphatic discourses, and insists we name God only by names authorized by Scripture. In principle, everything in creation can name God since God is the cause of each thing. Dionysius encourages the multiplication of the names of God. Cataphatic theology does not say too little; it says more than it can possibly know, and, for that reason, should speak to excess.12 Excess saves us from the prim and frugal idolatry of using a few favored names for God, which can seduce us into thinking we have snagged God on a concept.
At the same time, multiplication of names creates a crisis for naming as such. At its height, when applied to God, language is destined to collapse into paradox. God is light, Dionysius says, following Scripture. But God is also darkness. Employing both names does not yet arrive at the pinnacle of learned ignorance. We attain that peak when we both affirm and deny all cataphatic descriptions, and then proceed to negate the contradiction between them. God is light and God is not light, but the paradox that surpasses mere contradiction is the confession of God as bright darkness, dark brilliance, a celestial darkness visible. This ultimate paradox violates the normal semantic rules and represents, according to Denys Turner, “the collapse of our affirmation and denials into disorder, which can only be expressed . . . in bits of collapsed, disordered language, like the babble of a Jeremiah.”13
The way of Dionysius is, without doubt, dizzying, delicious, yet Turner’s final comment gives pause. It marks one of the potholes along the apophatic way. It is not clear which portions of Jeremiah Turner considers “babbling.” Even if some passages of the prophet merit that label, surely babbling does not characterize the whole. Is Jeremiah “babbling” when he warns of impending disaster, when he rebukes Judah’s kings, when he instructs the exiles to settle down to seek the peace of Babylon, when he encourages the residents of Jerusalem to surrender to Nebuchadnezzar? Most of Jeremiah is perfectly lucid, and even when he speaks of Yahweh, he does not “babble.” Dionysian apophaticism threatens to nullify the possibility of sense in the biblical text, not only when it speaks about God but when it speaks about anything. “God said” does not mean God spoke, because God utterly transcends what we think of as “speech.” “God made” does not refer to a specific activity of God. “Day” does not mean a period of time. All these words mean something ineffably beyond words.14 We know them only in their erasure.15
This pothole is the product of more basic instabilities in apophatic theology. There is, for starters, a risk of misplaced mystery. Language, it seems, more or less transparently grasps creation and discloses finite realities. Language as such is univocal; only language about God is problematic. On these premises, if Scripture says, “Jeremiah said,” it means, straightforwardly, “Jeremiah said,” but if Scripture says, “God said,” it must be hedged with caution signs. But the world itself is full of mystery, for in its depth creation is nothing but the created effulgence of the glory of the Creator.16 Our capacity to name and shape the world through words at all is a continuous miracle, a daily aftershock of the Creator’s first magical fiat lux.17 Mystery does not suddenly confront us when we begin to speak about God. Mystery confronts us at every turn, in every encounter with anything at all, because every encounter is an encounter with the Creator in his creation. God is not a creature, yet if we must “babble” about God, then all speech is reduced to babbling. But then if babbling is all we do, perhaps we should conclude that, for creatures, babbling simply is the form that rational speech takes. We babble, but compared to what?
There is also a risk of a false transcendence, which leads immediately to a false immanence. Apophaticism can be formulated in a way that posits a zero-sum game between the transcendence and immanence: To the degree God is transcendent, to that degree he is not immanent. The more transcendent he is, the less he is thinkable, speakable, and knowable by creatures. In reality, true transcendence is not in opposition to immanence; on the contrary, they are mutually determinative. Because God is transcendent, unbounded by temporal and spatial limits, he is immanent, present, and active in every space and time. His immanence in every space and time implies, in turn, his transcendence of spatial and temporal limits. By the same token, the oddness of our talk about God, a marker of God’s transcendence, is not in opposition or tension to the ordinariness of our talk about God. God-talk is at once the oddest of human talk and the most ordinary. It is the most ordinary because it is the oddest.18
God is not hidden away at the inaccessible peak of an ontic hierarchy of being. He is the transcendent source of being; he is Creator. Because God is triune, further, there is a perfect convertibility between God and his manifestation as Word: “his hiddenness—his transcendence—is always already manifestation.”19 False transcendence is the transcendence of the non-Creator, a God who may or may not create, a God who may or may not be related to creatures.20 As I will argue at length in chapter four, no such non-Creator exists, for the living God has created. On trinitarian and creationist premises, every disclosure of God discloses the God who shows himself. Appeals to transcendence that render us mute implicitly deny God’s transcendence is the transcendence of the Trinity, the Father who manifests himself in the Word who, by the Spirit, is the manifestation of the Father. Apophatic appeals that negate the propriety of biblical language implicitly deny that God’s transcendence is the transcendence of the Creator, who is, for us, always already related to creation. False transcendence offers a grammar for theology that claims to contextualize the Bible, but in so doing often obliterates the Bible. False transcendence does not merely nullify this or that statement of Scripture, but erodes the very possibility of Scripture: For how can a God beyond manifestation manifest himself in the fixed and determinate words of a text?
We can cut through the fog more simply: we in fact do speak of God. We may speak of God badly, but the church has recognized such a thing as proper speech. If we do speak well of God, we must be capable of doing so. We use language—often quite ordinary, albeit modified, language—to speak of God. As Jonathan Tran points out, the fact that we fill in the concept “God” with terms like transcendence, eternity, simplicity, unity, triunity, reveals the abundance of language, not its poverty. Of course, we cannot encompass or fully comprehend God. We cannot subject him to our conceptual control. He is a living God, a God capable of surprise. But then we cannot encompass or comprehend anything in its fullness, for nothing is under our control—most especially nothing that is alive. Whatever we say about our God-talk, we must insist God’s purpose is “not to render us dumb.”21 God transcends language not because our words are nonsensical, or because they say nothing determinate about God. God created language; he has spoken, and his speech is recorded in Scripture; he can ensure that his speech communicates exactly what he wants it to communicate. He transcends language because there is always more to say of him, always forever more to say, even after he has spoken the “last word” of final judgment.
Apophatic cautions are sometimes brought forward as a reminder that our knowledge of God arises not in scientific scrutiny but in personal encounter. We cannot claim to know God when we know creed, confession, or even the contents of Scripture, but only when we know him. It is a salutary reminder. Yet, once again, it does not imply that our knowing of other things is otherwise. Despite its marketing to the contrary, scientific knowledge is not impersonal and objectivized but arises from deep communion with reality.22 Importantly, a personal encounter does not exclude, but requires, determinate knowledge. The ways I know my wife and children exceed words, but I would never have achieved that knowledge without words. Even when the Word becomes flesh to dwell among us, he talks and talks and talks. And even after the resurrection, he spends a fair proportion of his time leading Bible studies with his disciples (Lk 24).23 We commune with God in, with, under, and through his talk to us and our backtalk.
BABBLING GOD
Let us grant, as the church has done, that we can make positive claims about God. The question then is, Is Scripture up to the task? Is it adequate to reveal God? The church has answered yes, but with worries and a wobble.
Commenting on John 3:22-29, Augustine quotes Psalm 35:1, which describes God as light and fountain. Augustine wonders, How can he be both? He replies with this lovely passage:
On earth a fountain is one thing, light another. When you are thirsty you look for a fountain, and in order to get to the fountain you look for light; and if it is not daytime, you light a lamp in order to get to the fountain. Now that fountain itself is the light; for the thirsty it is a fountain, for the blind it is light. Let the eyes be opened to see the light, may the mouth of the heart be opened so as to drink from the fountain; what you drink, that is, what you see, what you hear. God becomes everything for you, because he is for you the fullness of the things that you love. If you are thinking of visible things, bread is not God, water is not God, this light is not God, a garment is not God, a house is not God. In fact, these things are visible and distinct from one another; bread is not water, and a garment is not a house; and these things are not God, for they are visible. For you God is everything; if you are hungry, he is bread for you; if you are thirsty he is water for you; if you are in the dark he is light for you, because he abides imperishable; if you are naked he is the garment of immortality for you when this perishable thing shall put on imperishability and this mortal thing shall put on immortality (I Cor 15:54). . . . What have lamb and lion got in common? Each name is applied to Christ: Look, there is the Lamb of God (Jn 1 :29). How about “lion”? Look, the Lion from the tribe of Judah has conquered (Rv 5:5).24
Augustine then sums up: “Everything can be said about God, and nothing that is said is worthy of God. Nothing is more extensive than this poverty of speech. You look for a suitable name, you cannot find one; you look for something to say in any way at all, and you find everything.”25 Augustine runs on and on about the glories of God, gives him name upon name upon name, and then pulls out the rug: “Of course, this is all inadequate. All that I have said is unworthy of God.” Why should it be unworthy? Inadequate to what purpose?
It is a common theological tick.26 Herman Bavinck, who quotes the passage, does the same. Because God reveals himself, we have “the right to name him on the basis of his self-revelation.” We can use human words because God does, and “manifests himself in human forms.” Scripture is not anthropomorphic here and there, but “anthropomorphic through and through,” culminating in God’s “self-humanization” in the incarnation. All biblical descriptions of God “are derived from earthly and human relations.” He has a soul and spirit; a face, eyes, eyelids, ears, nose, mouth, arms, legs, and, unlike idols, his organs are in working order; he rejoices, grieves, expresses anger and delight, hates and loves; he searches, knows, intends, forgets and remembers, speaks, calls, commands, sees, smells, hears, walks, meets, visits, writes, heals, kills and makes alive, washes and anoints and clothes; he is bridegroom, father, judge, king, warrior, architect, gardener, shepherd, physician; he has all the accoutrements of a king—throne, footstool, rod, scepter, sword, bow and arrow, shield, chariot. Scripture even describes him by reference to nonhuman creatures: he is lion, eagle, lamb, hen, sun, morning star, spring, food and drink, rock and refuge, stronghold, shadow, road, and temple.27
Then the tick: These names “present a peculiar intellectual difficulty.” Why? The knowledge these names offer is not “fully adequate to the subject.” There is no exhaustive “fit” between the names and the God to whom the names refer. How can God be both nameless and the bearer of infinite names?28 Bavinck resolves the difficulty with an appeal to accommodation: “We have the right to use anthropomorphic language because God himself came down to the level of his creatures and revealed his name in and through his creatures.”29
The obvious thing to say is what Thomas Aquinas says: Every created thing resembles God in some specific fashion simply because God created it that way. Its resemblance is its essence. In naming God from creation, we are naming him by the created resemblances he made, resemblances he presumably made just so we might speak of him. Conversely, God possesses every perfection of creation as Creator, in the way of eminence. God is not a rock—not because he bears no resemblance to a rock, but because his rockiness is so infinitely realized that no created rock or collection of rocks can fully express his eternal rockiness. He is not an idol, because he does not have malfunctioning eyes, ears, nose, hands, and feet (Ps 115:1-8). God has no physical hands as idols do, but he has infinite manuality. He has no physical eyes, but he has the eternal original power of which our capacity for sight is a shadow and symbol. The biblical logic is: He who created the eye, does he not see? He who created the ear, does he not hear? He who created the tongue, can he not speak? The one who created arms and hands acts with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm (Ps 94:9). The heavenly Father is the father by whom every earthly fatherhood (patria) is named (Eph 3:14-15). And then we can also say: The one who created passionate creatures, does he not love, have compassion, show wrath toward sin? If we can say this, why the wobble? Why the pseudohumble confession of inadequacy?
Anthropomorphism is not projection from finite to infinite. In the order of knowing, it seems so. In the order of being, it is the opposite: It is authorized from top down. Scripture uses anthropomorphic and cosmomorphic language of God because God created man in his image and the cosmos as a manifestation of his glory. It is not accommodation. The Bible uses anthropopathic language of God because our human capacity for emotion is a reflex of God’s emotional life. We can speak of God using the categories of creation because he created them to be used in our speaking of and to him.30
Bavinck says all this. So, why the tick? Having created a world that comprehensively speaks of God, why would God prohibit us to use the language he made? How could it possibly be inadequate or inappropriate?31 Why is it unworthy of God when we use created things as God intended them to be used? Where does the instinct to explain away the “crudeness” of Scripture come from?
The Bible is embarrassing. Even many who believe Scripture is inspired by God find much in it that is “unworthy of God.” Who can believe a book that describes God in such blatantly anthropomorphic terms? Who can believe early humans lived for centuries? Who can believe the world was created in six normal days? Accommodation is a method, or a trick, to relieve the shame of devoting a lifetime of study to a children’s picture book. It is a way of justifying the thoroughly anthropomorphic, pictographic Bible to its cultured despisers. Accommodation is the theologian’s wink that tells everyone he knows just how childish the Bible is. He knows, as Calvin does, it is as if God stoops to babble to us as a mother to her infant, since we are incapable of grasping whatever adult speech about God would be.32
Despite this suggestion, Calvin of course takes the specific words and sentences of the Bible with the utmost seriousness. Others, not so much. If the Bible is baby talk, then grownups are apt to search for more dignified ways to talk. Maimonides and his many heirs provide a pious rationale for exterminating the Bible’s accommodated anthropomorphism. He turns the iconoclastic impulse of Judaism against Judaism’s own text. Religious language must be purged of conceptual idols as much as worship has been purged of material idols. “God is our rock” forms an idolatrous image in the brain, which must be ground to powder like the golden calf. Unsurprisingly, pure, grown-up language about God turns out to be metaphysical language. Eventually the impulse turns against “God” as such, since the adults in the room eventually realize any determinate statement about God is an illegitimate attempt to fix and limit him.33
John Polkinghorne puts accommodation to a similar use when he writes that the “human writings [of Scripture] bear witness to timeless truths, but they do so in the thought forms and from the cultural milieu of their writers.” As a result, “we find attitudes expressed in the Bible that today we neither can nor should agree with.”34 Accommodation allows Polkinghorne to uphold a version of Scriptural authority, while overtly denying the truth value of what Scripture actually asserts. More fundamentally, his version of accommodation assumes the writers of Scripture intend to communicate timeless truths, rather than an account of history. In this form, accommodation does not lead to liberalism; it is liberalism.35
Even when accommodation is used within an orthodox context, it is a source of many confusions and is ultimately theologically insupportable. A first confusion: It is often assumed that abstract theological language eludes accommodation in a way that concrete, poetic language does not.36 If accommodation is right, though, it applies to all human speech about God; it is dumbed all the way down. To say “God is a rock” is no more accommodated than saying “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” “God is simple, eternal, impassible, immutable, actus purus” is no less accommodated than “God is my sun and shield.” The abstract metaphysical terminology feels more impressive, but, strictly speaking, it is just as childish.
The difference between “Yahweh is my shepherd” and “God is esse ipsum” is not the difference between accommodated and nonaccommodated. Rather, the first is more obviously metaphorical than the latter. Which leads to a second confusion: Metaphor and accommodation are not the same thing, though they are frequently conflated. The recourse to accommodation devalues the figurative language of Scripture in favor of a truth stripped of ornamentation and poetry. Scriptural language is implicitly cast as primitive, and this exerts pressure on theologians to transcend Scripture in search of a more sophisticated, more culturally acceptable, idiom, which often involves learning to speak with a Greek accent.
The attempt to transcend metaphor does not work, in any case. Another confusion: Even abstract language rests on metaphor that has concrete, physical roots.37 “God is simple” stands in contrast to multiparted composites, but still evokes a homogeneous physical entity or substance—perhaps especially a fluid. “In him we live” seems more ontologically substantive than “he sits on the circle of the heavens,” but the former is also a spatial metaphor, which portrays God as a container of our lives, movements, and existence. The prepositions “of him, through him, and to him” describe physical relations—of origin, instrumentality, and destination. When we attempt to ascend out of the this-worldly idioms of Scripture, we do not ascend into a higher reality. We remain within the creation, using created things to describe the Creator. There is no alternative for creatures. Happily, we need no alternative to speak God’s words after him and back to him.
Even in its best forms, accommodation is theologically insupportable.38 It suggests God must adjust to circumstances outside his control. Yahweh faces an ancient cultural context full of poetic myths and primitive beliefs, and he has to adjust his mode of communication to make himself heard. He brings Israel from Egypt into a world of suzerainty treaties, so he adopts and adapts the form in his rule over Israel. But where did these treaties come from? Yahweh is Lord of history, who orchestrates and arranges the world as he pleases. He is never faced with a world that is not of his own making, and so does not need to adjust to it. Rather, he arranges the world to be just the sort of world he wishes to speak into. If the suzerainty treaty form—if that is what the Sinai covenant is—is lying around for Yahweh to pick up, it is because he put it there.
Accommodation suggests God does not take full responsibility for his own speech. Why does God allow the biblical writers to attribute passions and actions to God that are manifestly “inappropriate” to deity? Why does his covenant with Israel take the form it does? Why does Genesis 1 recount the origins of the world as it does? God has to speak this way because he has to make himself understood to the primitive minds of ancient hearers. “Don’t blame me,” God might say. “Of course, I know Genesis 1 does not describe how it actually happened. Of course, I too am a theistic evolutionist. But this was all I could expect these ignorant ancient peoples to understand. Babbling to infants; it’s all babbling to infants.” If we cannot imagine a blame-shifting God, we should not imagine a God who fails to say what he wants to say because of outside pressures.
In the eternal life of the triune God, God responds to God. In the creation, God responds to God-as-God evaluates the words and works he speaks and does in the world (see chap. 7). Scripture is included within God’s address to God, embedded within the covenant God makes with his people, which he enables his people to keep. Yahweh commissions Moses to write the covenant documents and deposit them in the ark of the covenant. The covenant is two sided, as God the covenant Lord and Father binds himself to his people, and the covenant document is likewise two-sided. Scripture is God’s word to himself as well as to Israel. In committing himself to Israel, the covenant God commits himself to himself, to be God-for-Israel. As Vern Poythress points out, Scripture’s intratrinitarian location comes to unique expression in Jesus’ prayer in John 17. There, as in all Scripture, “God addresses us, but he also addresses himself as the second party.” When we receive Scripture, “the Holy Spirit stands with us, indwelling us” as the hearer of the Word of the Father. The Son speaks and the Spirit hears, but the receptive Spirit is the Spirit who indwells us to enable our reception. In our hearing the Word of the Son, the Spirit also hears. Scripture’s language is not accommodated language suitable to children. It is the way God talks to God about God.39
To close the circle: Accommodation often betrays a faulty theology of creation. By some definitions, accommodation is the claim that God speaks in a form suited to our capacity as hearers. God speaks in human language because he speaks to humans. He refers to created things to reveal his character, because he speaks to creatures surrounded by created things. If that is what accommodation means, it is true and important. It is also just another way of talking of creation as such. God creates by Word; creation is his speech to us. By virtue of creation, we are surrounded by the inescapable speech of God (Rom 1:18-20). That is accommodation enough.
Typically, though, accommodation is a second condescension, over and above creation itself. This is the Augustinian tick we noticed above. Scripture speaks with creation in all kinds of ways, Bavinck says, but then adds, “Of course, this is because God stooped down from his proper height.” Why do we need this second stoop? Was the condescension of creation itself not adequate?
Behind these ticks and tricks is the unacknowledged assumption that creation as such is not capable of conveying God’s self-revelation. In the view of many theologians, the concrete stuff of the world—light, rocks, stars, the sun, shields and bucklers—is not an adequate vehicle for informing us truly about God. In order to know God as he really is, we need him to descend. Or, we need to ascend from “God is a rock” and “our God is a consuming fire” to “God is immutable” or “God is morally perfect.”40 Once again, the move does not work. Whether the words are Hebrew or Hellenistic, some medium separates the Creator’s voice from the creature’s ear, producing inescapable static and distortion. This second accommodation betrays a desire to bypass history, bodies, words, Scripture in pursuit of a contact with God that does not have to deal with the crudities of creation. There is a gnostic impulse here: Something stands in God’s way—recalcitrant matter, evanescent time, chaos—and makes it impossible for God to speak clearly. This second condescension suggests creation is not entirely good, not entirely God speaking “to the creature through the creature.”41
I leave it to Robert Jenson, on whom I will rely periodically throughout this book, to put my point with blunt clarity: “The Bible’s language about God is drastically personal: he changes his mind and reacts to external events, he makes threats and repents of them, he makes promises and tricks us by how he fulfills them. If we understand this language as fundamentally inappropriate, as ‘anthropomorphic,’ we do not know the biblical God.”42 And that means we simply do not know God at all because the biblical God is the only available option.
Put it positively: Creation is a suitable vehicle for speaking of God because creation is itself an image of the glory of God. It is the created effulgence of the uncreated glory of the Trinity.43 When Scripture says, “God is a sun” or “God is a rock,” it is not imposing a theological meaning on atheological material reality. The innermost being of all things is its revelation of the glory of the Creator. Of course, Scripture speaks of God by speaking of the creation. What other language does he need? What other language do we need? What other language could there possibly be?
IN ALL THE SCRIPTURES
Ahem . . . ahem . . . ahem. I am almost finished, about ready to begin speaking. My throat is so clear that I may break out in song.
Before I do, let me make a few more commitments explicit. First, let me state a fundamentalist presupposition that has been implicit throughout this chapter. I believe God speaks in the normal sense of the word speak. He appeared in Eden to utter audible words to Adam, then to Adam and Eve. He confronted Cain, instructed Noah, called Abram and promised him land and seed, consoled Hagar in the wilderness, thundered from Sinai, spoke to Solomon in a dream, came as Word of Yahweh to prophets. After speaking in many portions and in many ways, he spoke in the last days through his Son (Heb 1:1-3).
Scripture is God’s Word in written form. It contains nothing unworthy of its divine Author. What Scripture teaches, God teaches. It is our final rule for all theology and Christian practice. Through Scripture, the Spirit tests, judges, and corrects every creed and theological claim, and the Bible also has the theological, and therefore the philosophical, resources we need to formulate a positive theology and biblical metaphysics.44 Scripture does not need to be “translated” into metaphysical terms to provide the “grammar” of divinity. Of late, “classical theism,” with its emphasis on metaphysical perfections such as simplicity, immutability, eternity, and impassibility, has been put forward as that grammar. I propose the Bible and the creed (“I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth”) as a more suitable and stable grammar, to which all other conceptualities must be drastically subordinated.
Second, Creator is a theological reading of Genesis 1, but Genesis 1 does not stand alone. There is heuristic value in isolating a single chapter and asking what it can tell us on its own. We should make our initial approach to understanding the meaning of the phrase “image of God” (Gen 1:26-27), for instance, by asking what kind of God has been introduced in the first twenty-five verses of the chapter. In its immediate context, we learn that man is the image of a God who creates, speaks, makes, has a Spirit, and so on. That is where we should begin our theological anthropology, but it is not where we end our theological anthropology. Genesis 1 is only the first chapter of a very long book, and, besides, many passages of Scripture refer to and illuminate the creation account. Though I offer a close reading of the Hebrew text of Genesis 1, my theological interpretation will range across the canon.
There are two justifications for pursuing a sensus plenior. First, later writers of Scripture not only allude to earlier sections of Scripture but comment on those earlier Scriptures. John employs terminology from Genesis 1 to make his own theological claims. With “in the beginning” and his references to the Word, “coming into being,” light and darkness, and his enumeration of a sequence of days, John signals that his account of the life of Jesus marks a new genesis for the world. Redemption is new creation, as the God who spoke the worlds into being speaks again, as the God who spoke creation unveils himself in his Word, now tabernacled among us in our flesh.
Yet John 1 is not simply a new covenant rewriting of Genesis 1. It is also a commentary on the original account.45 We can infer from Genesis 1 that the Word was “in the beginning with God,” that “all things came into being” by the Word, and that the Word is the source of both light and life. We might even be able to infer that the Word of creation “enlightens every man.” What is revealed in the incarnation is the divinity of the Word, the fact that the Word who is in the beginning, by whom God made all things, who is light and life, is God and God-toward-God (pros ton theon, Jn 1:1). What is revealed in the incarnation is also the personhood of the Word, the fact that he is not only a divine utterance but a divine he, who bears the glory of his Father as the only begotten of the Father. This is not merely, I suggest, a new covenant insertion into John’s riff on Genesis. John interprets Genesis 1 in the light of the gospel, justifying a fresh reading of the creation account. Though not explicit, this is the logic of Augustine’s trinitarian reading of Genesis 1,46 and it will be the logic behind my trinitarian reading as well. We do not know the Trinity from the opening chapter of the Bible, but in the light of the remainder of the Bible, we find the hints of Trinity inescapable.
We reach the same conclusion through a different route. Jesus said the substance of Scripture is the suffering and glory of the Christ (Lk 24). Every page of Scripture speaks of Jesus the Christ. And if all Scripture is about Jesus, then it is also about the Father of the incarnate Son and the Spirit by whose anointing Jesus is the Christ. Just as we search for Jesus on every page of Scripture, so we expect to find the other divine persons on every page. Even without the direct commentary of John 1 and other passages, a christological—that is, a true—reading of the creation account would necessarily yield a trinitarian reading.
Finally, and briefly: I say plenior; I actually mean plenissimus. I am after the fullest sense I can discover. I will squeeze everything I can out of textual features large and small. Thus I will suggest a radical reorientation of theology proper by emphasizing the theological, as well as textual, primacy of Genesis 1:1 (chap. 4), draw theological conclusions from the literary texture and the divine plurals of Genesis 1 (chap. 5), indulge in an extended numerological speculation to lay foundations for a “metaphysics of Genesis” (chap. 6), and meditate on the echoes and re-echoes across the creation days to formulate an understanding of the Creator’s relationship to created time (chap. 7). My sources are eclectic, and I will frequently, tastelessly, mix theological genres and styles, shifting from tedious exegesis to flights of mystical speculation with little warning and no hesitation. It may appear that I believe I can find a fully developed trinitarian theology in Genesis 1. I do not. But I do believe the Bible is a single book and that we can only plumb the depths of its first chapter if we see it through the prism of every other chapter. And I believe the church’s creedal and theological tradition provides further resources to illumine the creation account.
Call it maximalism if you like. Call it a “kitchen sink” hermeneutic because I do not intend to leave out that crucial piece of kitchen gadgetry. For this reason, I do not offer a completed system with tidy, totalized, smoothed edges. The coherence I aim for is biblical, and I pick up whatever is at hand to illumine and fill out a scriptural metaphysics. Creator is more suggestive than systematic; it is a form of bricolage, though the bits and pieces form a whole, something akin to Irenaeus’s mosaic portrait of a beautiful prince.
I am prepared to have much of Creator dismissed as childish mythology. I relish the dismissal, for being childish puts me in the best theological company. All theologians should be, and the best theologians are, companions of the divine Child who calls us to follow him as little children. That is not a call to naiveté or innocence. It is a call to play at the edges of viper’s dens, heedless to our safety.47 The methodological principle that has most consistently guided me over the decades is encapsulated in a little poem by G. K. Chesterton:
Stand fast! And keep your childishness.
Read all the pendant’s creeds and strictures,
But don’t believe in anything
That can’t be told in colored pictures.48
2
Logos, Mythos, Creation
Some readers will have heard haunting echoes of the dreaded, discredited “Hellenization thesis” reverberating in the background of chapter one. My criticism of translating biblical into philosophical idiom and my criticisms of accommodation seem perilously close to the claim that the early church was corrupted by her subjection to the abstractions of Hellenistic philosophy. This historical thesis is often allied with a theological program of de-Hellenization, an effort to purge Greek thought from theology and to replace it with Hebraic thought forms.
I do believe Christian theology has been adversely affected by Greek thought forms, and this entire book is an exercise in scriptural purification. Yet Creator is not grounded on the Hellenization thesis. The shape of my argument is more of the pox-on-every-house variety.
On the one hand, the anti-Hellenization-thesis position sometimes fails to recognize the thoroughly religious character of the Greek philosophical heritage. Ancient metaphysics was not an academic discipline but a way of life that included a way with the gods or, in some cases, with “God.”1 The fundamental categories of Greek philosophy and science were transformations of mythic tropes and patterns, and the religious dimensions were never set aside. The clash between the church and Greek philosophy was a clash between rival theologies.
Yet, on the other hand, the clash did not end in Christianity’s thoroughgoing subjection to metaphysics, nor an apostasy from the gospel or biblical teaching. The story of early Christian theology is much rather the story of a complex series of battles, triumphs, and truces between Greek and biblical conceptualities. The result was, in general, a deep transformation of Hellenic thought by the Bible, especially by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the dogmas of the Trinity and, especially, the incarnation.2 These doctrinal claims stretched prior Greek conceptualities all out of recognizable shape, in order to put them to use in speaking of, praying to, and worshiping the God and Father of Jesus Christ. We can see it happening already in the New Testament, which uses the Greek language and, to some degree, Greek intellectual categories to proclaim and elaborate a gospel for both Jews and Gentiles. The result, in Robert Jenson’s words, is neither the triumph nor the renunciation of metaphysics but its revision and transformation.3 By and large, the church won the battle.
Yet, finally, I do not believe the gospel entirely vanquished her enemies. Theologians have taught distorted, unbiblical notions about God, sometimes under the influence of one or another form of Greek metaphysics. Modern theology has, in turn, taught distorted, unbiblical notions about God under the influence of Kant, Heidegger, or Derrida. Identifying and purging those false teachings is one of the perpetual tasks of theology. Theology will remain, among other things, revisionary metaphysics until kingdom come.
This chapter and the next expand on the last two paragraphs. In this chapter, I show the continuity between Greek religion and Greek philosophy, mythos and logos, poetry and philosophy, between, in Marcus Terentius Varro’s terms, fabulous and natural theology.4 I attempt to escape the risks of offering a potted history by focusing primarily on a single text, Plato’s Timaeus. In the next chapter, I examine the Christianization of Greek metaphysics, once again avoiding potted-history-ness by examining Thomas Aquinas’s modifications of divine simplicity in some depth. From the beginning, I have selected evidence to highlight the fact that biblical teaching about creation is a, perhaps the, crucial site of conflict between the rival theologies.
QUEST FOR THE ARCHĒ
What is the source of everything that is? Where does it all come from?
In the beginning, Greek poets, especially Hesiod and Homer, answered by composing myths that told of Gaia and Chasm and Eros, a succession of gods, and a series of dynastic conflicts between fathers and sons that culminated in the triumph of Zeus and the Olympians.5 The divine beings of these myths are supersized human beings, with supersized passions and (literally) titanic battles, their primary difference from humans being their immortality, which is to say, their immunity to the devastations of time and death.
According to the standard account, Greek philosophy originates with the Presocratics, who are said to have embarked on a novel form of human inquiry.6 Between Homer and Plato, mythos shifted in meaning, as logos occupied a larger role in Greek talk about talk. Though, at one level, logos encompasses both epos and mythos, Plato attaches values to logos that generate a set of oppositions between logos and mythos. Logos is verifiable speech;7mythos is unverifiable discourse because it refers to persons and events of ancient times or because it refers to a world of gods and demons beyond the sensible world. Myths are the province of diviners, initiators, and poets, whose logoi cannot be proven; the philosopher, by contrast, subjects all discourse to the interrogation of reason, and thus can escape the prison-cave of opinion and arrive at truth. Logos progresses by argument; mythos, like history, is nonargumentative. Philosophia has the dialectical tools to verify or falsify statements.8
The earliest philosophers deploy the resources of logos in a quest for the archē, the source, principle, or cause of all things.9 Beginning from the belief that the world is a kosmos, an ordered and unified system intelligible to the mind, they ask: What explains cosmic unity and order? Whatever it is, it must have a causal relationship with the cosmos. The quest for an archē is a quest for an origin, whether something resembling a creator or a metaphysical principle in which things cohere.10
In the nature of the case, the quest for an archē introduces a distinction between sense and intellect. We can discern cosmic order, but the explanation of the order lies beyond the world of sense. The sun rises and sets with great regularity, but the sun itself cannot explain why the sun rises and sets with great regularity. The archē is the “nonevident” explanation for the sensible phenomena of experience. To find this archē, one must be able to ascend from phenomena to source, from effect to cause. If there is an unbridgeable chasm between appearance and reality, the search for an archē fails. In that case, the kosmos then has no explanation, and we are forever confined to the phenomena. We may be tempted toward skepticism: Perhaps what we perceive as order is not order at all; perhaps we are deluded. Yet the order of the world seems undeniable, and philosophers embark on their quest in hope that there is a discoverable, articulable logos at the end.11
Physical explanations (if such they were) are bound to fail. If water is (as Thales said) the principle of reality, cosmic order is explained by something within the cosmos.12 But if the archē is among sensible phenomena, then it needs to be explained, and we face an infinite regression of archai.
Greek philosophers begin from the observation that the sensible world has two features, plurality and mobility, a process of coming to be and passing away. The sensible world is full of distinct things (trees and mailboxes, finches and Fabergé eggs), and these things are in constant motion (trees grow, mailboxes open and close, finches fly, Fabergé eggs tragically break). Reflection on these features of the sensible world generates, by way of negation, a rough sketch of the archē. Within the swirl of plural and changing phenomena, we discern elements of unity and fixity. The world of things sometimes verges toward the “confusion of a welter,”13 yet somehow it all holds together. How? There must, it seems, be a source prior to the multiplicity, a one that embraces and holds together the many. Ergo: The archē must be One.
Despite their teeming multiplicity, things do have one sameness: their very existence. And that suggests the existence of a source of their miraculous common existence. Despite their mobility and mutability, further, things are continuous with themselves. Trees grow yet remain trees; when a Fabergé egg (tragically) breaks, the pieces are identifiably pieces of a Fabergé egg. A thread of immobility runs through the turning world; there is sameness in the midst of difference, and it must come from something other than the world. Ergo: The archē must be self-same, immobile.
Coming to be and passing away are forms of becoming. Sensible things come to be when they are generated by some other sensible thing—children from parents, mailboxes from the postal service, Fabergé eggs—real ones—from a Russian craftsman. But an archē is not the product of becoming of any kind; it is underived, because a derived archē would itself have an archē: a daft idea.14 Ergo: A genuine archē must be purely originary, an ungenerated starting point.
The “attributes” of the archē are teased out from observation determined by the archē’s function as a cornerstone, lynchpin, or capstone of the cosmos. To serve as archē, the archē
