Doctrine of creation Archives

Cover image of "Shalom and the Community of Creation" by Randy S. Woodley

Shalom and the Community of Creation (Prophetic Christianity) Randy S. Woodley. Wm. B. Eerdmans (ISBN: 9780802866783) 2012.

Summary: The “Harmony Way” of the indigenous and biblical shalom between peoples, with creation, and the Creator.

Shalom is one of the most beautiful of Hebrew words. Often translated as “peace,” it signifies far more. Shalom exists where there is health, wholeness, and flourishing in human relationships and communities, with the rest of the creation, and with the Creator. Randy Woodley, whose Ph.D dissertation is on the indigenous idea of “the Harmony Way,” explores how the indigenous vision may enrich and flesh out the idea of shalom.

Woodley begins with our alienation from God, others, and the rest of the creation, so characteristic of modern experience. As a Christian theologian, he recognizes how the expansive, universal vision of the wholeness and peace of shalom addresses this deep human emptiness. Among Native Americans, the ideas of balance and harmony, often including peacemaking ceremonies illuminates shalom. He then discusses how shalom centers in Jesus, who inaugurates a kingdom that is a community of shalom, a community of creation.

Turning to creation, Woodley explores Jesus’ intimate connection to the good creation. Drawing on indigenous ideas of the sacredness of creation, he proposes that Jesus restores the sense of creation as something holy, and not just something to be used, and of our inextricable and reciprocal relationship to the rest of creation. Furthermore, the harmony way challenges the dualism of modern life. For example, this speaks to the dualism of oppressed and oppressors. Instead, harmony understands that we are all related. Harmony and the wholeness of shalom also transcend the thinking/doing divide. Not unlike the Hebrew idea, harmony focuses on experiential learning. One knows something when one has experienced it.

One of the most challenging chapters in the book dealt with the conflict between indigenous and western ideas of time and place. For Westerners, place is often transient and the time orientation is event and future oriented. By contrast the indigenous idea values place and a community’s past and present in that place. This is why things begin when everyone is present. Woodley explores how such a place-orientation is closer to biblical shalom in emphasizing wholistic relationships between Creator, people, and land. Storytelling is also a shalom practice, emphasizing heart to heart and not just head to head communication. Finally, shalom and the harmony way is about generous community, the extravagant pursuit of the lost and the celebration that follows. It’s about justice that restores what has been stolen. Then alienated relationships can be restored.

Woodley’s book is yet another reminder of how much we have to learn from believers who aren’t like us. The Harmony Way of Native Americans turns the concept of shalom into a rich way of life. It illuminates the shalom in scripture that our own cultural blinders have prevented us from seeing. In a country so much at war with itself as well as the land, might God use the wisdom of Indigenous Christians to bring shalom? Might it even mean the healing of our national sins against indigenous people and their treasured lands? That’s a big ask, but not too great for the Prince of Shalom.

Science and the Doctrine of Creation, Edited by Geoffrey H. Fulkerson and Joel Thomas Chopp, afterword by Alister E. McGrath. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021.

Summary: A study of ten modern theologians and how each engaged science in light of the doctrine of creation.

Creation and science. These are often viewed in conflict and the discussion of how these relate is often a contentious space. This work takes a more constructive approach based on the idea that the doctrine of creation consists of far more than how humans came to exist. We fail to consider the God who has created, what is entailed in the act of creating, and what the nature and end of what is created.

Rather than seeking to articulate the doctrine of creation, this work considers ten theologians from the last two centuries, how they engaged the science of their day, and brought their particular grasp of the doctrine of creation to bear on this engagement. There are both recurring themes and divergences among these ten voices. Each chapter begins with a brief biography of the theologian, a discussion averaging about twenty pages, with resources for further reading at the conclusion of the chapter.

The theologians discussed and authors of the chapters are:

William Burt Pope (Fred Sanders). Pope distinguished between primary creation, in which God calls all things into existence, and secondary creation, the formation of an ordered universe, which both scripture and science may inform.

Abraham Kuyper (Craig Bartholomew). Kuyper both affirms creation, common grace and the image of God that grounds the scientific enterprise, and how nonregenerate thought in all dimensions of thought is flawed. For Kuyper, this meant neither unqualified endorsement of evolution nor uncritical opposition.

B. B. Warfield (Bradley J. Gundlach). Warfield hosted Kuyper’s Princeton Stone Lectures. Many have claimed Warfield for eolution. Gundlach offers a more nuanced picture, emphasizing both Warfield’s humble and open approach to the science of his day while focusing on creation (including the idea of mediate creation), providence and supernaturalism.

Rudolf Bultmann (Joshua W. Jipp). This chapter looks at how Bultmann’s demythologization project applied to creation, with the conclusion that scripture doesn’t give us an objective view of the world or ontology. It is rather “faith in man’s present determination by God.” Jipp prefers the concord Alvin Plantinga sees between science and faith to the bifurcated view of Bultmann.

Karl Barth (Katherine Sonderegger). Barth had little to say about theology and natural science. Sonderegger contrasts Barth and Schleiermacher, emphasizing Barth’s doctrine of creation as one that “lays claim to the whole of reality.”

T. F. Torrance (Kevin J. Vanhoozer). Torrance propounded a “kataphysical” theology that brought together ontology and epistemology, denying a divergence between the way things appear and the way they are. Central to all of this Christ, the God-man, who is homoousios, of the same substance with the Father and the Spirit.

Jürgen Moltmann (Stephen N. Williams). Williams explores Moltmann’s “open system” doctrine of God and his vision of a common environment of science and theology.

Wolfhart Pannenberg (Christoph Schwöbel). Drawing on Faraday’s “field of force,” Pannenberg developed a theology of nature that is neither mechanistic nor a “God of the gaps” but rooted in the unity of all reality.

Robert Jenson (Stephen John Wright). Drawing on narrative and history, ideas of time and eternity, and Christology, Jenson contended both science and theology focused on the same reality, the world of creation.

Colin E. Gunton (Murray A. Rae). Gunton’s theological career focused on a reinvigorated understanding of the Trinity. Rae focused on how Gunton’s understanding of the Triune creator affirms creation ex nihilo, a contingent creation, and science as an extension of the human cultural mandate.

One of the themes running through a number of these chapters was the importance of understanding the nature of God to understand the nature of creation. Also, a number of the chapters countered the “non-overlapping magisteria” idea with a unitive vision of theology and science grounded God’s being and activity. One consequence is the intelligibility of the world, both through revelation and science.

This is a valuable resource for the science-theology conversation that moves beyond evolution debates. Both the theologians featured and those who write of them model humble appreciation of both the creative work of God and scientific inquiry. Not only do these contributions underscore, as Alister McGrath notes in the afterword, the coherence of Christian faith, but they highlight the glory of the Creator in the creation.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.