Science and Origins - Jubilee Issue 23

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Editor

RYAN ERAS EICC Founder

JOSEPH BOOT

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Ryan Eras 4

The Historical Adam Willem Ouweneel

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The Philosophy of Science P. Andrew Sandlin

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Natural History to the Glory of God Gordon Wilson

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The Marvel and Mystery of Man Joe Boot

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Resource Corner

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JUBILEE EDITORIAL: ISSUE 23

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RYAN ERAS RYAN ERAS is Director of Content and Publishing at the Ezra Institute, responsible for developing and producing the EICC’s print and web content, and serves as managing editor for Ezra Press and its imprints, and editor for the Ezra Institute’s journal, Jubilee. He holds a BA in History from Tyndale University, and an MI in Library and Information Science from the University of Toronto, with a focus on bibliographic control and the history of censorship. Ryan has served in several educational and support roles, providing bibliographic research and critical editorial assistance for several popular and academic publications. Ryan and his wife Rachel have four children.

QUESTIONS SURROUNDING THE ORIGINS of life and the universe have fasci-

nated people and cultures throughout history.

From Hesiod’s Theogony in ancient Greece, the Babylonian Enuma Elish, variations on the Cosmic Egg motif from Egypt to China, or Aslan singing Narnia into existence, every civilization has developed a cosmogony, often called a creation myth – an account of how the cosmos and everything in it came to be here. The Big Bang theory, for all of its credentialed supporters, is no less a creation myth. In fact, Georges LeMaitre, the Catholic priest and astronomer who first advanced what was later called the Big Bang theory, originally termed it the “hypothesis of the primordial atom, or the Cosmic Egg.”1 Both in its structure and in some of its particulars, the early chapters of Genesis have elements in common with many of these creation myths: a watery chaos, a process of separating land, air and water from each other, a “tree of life,” a global flood, and more. Some have pointed out these similarities to argue that the biblical creation account is just one more myth among many.

Indeed, the similarities are striking, but we should also be mindful of the differences. The Genesis account is written in the style of some other early creation myths, but deliberately turns them on their head, distinguishing itself by a claim to historicity. This historicity is taken for granted throughout both the Old and New Testaments; Jesus himself traces his lineage back (through Joseph) to Adam’s son Seth (Luke 3:23–38).

But there is another key difference between Genesis and the other creation myths: according to Scripture, God is both involved in creation, and at the same time utterly transcendent in his nature from the created order. Unlike Hesiod’s account or the Big Bang, the world is not made out of bits of God or of prime matter; unlike the Egyptian or Babylonian cosmogonies, the world is not a corruption or incidental by-product of a higher, earlier world.

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As Peter Jones is fond of observing, there are only two religions. We all have a god-concept, something in which we vest ultimate authority.

Biblical Christianity roots this authority in the transcendent God who created the world in history, and who by his Word gives each of us every heartbeat and breath we take. If there is no distinct, transcendent God responsible for creating and sustaining our universe, then our god concept will inevitably be rooted in some aspect of the natural world. The throne of the human heart will never be vacant; man, animals, trees, the sun, or some other part of the world will be set in that place of absolute authority.

As we’ll see in this issue, our understanding of the first chapters of Genesis has implications for the way we understand the rest of Scripture. Beyond that, there are very real, practical matters that are caught up in how we answer this question. What is a human being? What is God? How should we think about caring for the natural world? How should we treat our neighbour? How should we treat our dinner? Our starting point has a great deal to say about where we end up.

IN THIS ISSUE

Willem Ouweneel addresses the controversy over the historicity of Adam and Eve, and the growing support for aeh – the view that Adam was a human-like hominid, chosen by God from among an earlier race of hominids to bear the image of God. He demonstrates that this compromise position, intended to reconcile the clear record of Scripture with prevailing scientism, is thoroughly incompatible not only with the early chapters of Genesis, but the rest of the Bible, as well as foundational Christian doctrines of original sin and of Christ’s redemption.

Andrew Sandlin traces the history of scientific inquiry and progress, demonstrating that the scientific method could only have come about as a result of a Christian worldview – as in fact it did. Modern science is possible only because of a prior belief in a predictable and knowable world, a doctrine of God as distinct from his creation, Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

Editorial: Issue 23

and an understanding of the cultural mandate given to man to tend, care for, and develop the natural resources of creation.

Gordon Wilson encourages each of us to consider the “magnificence of the mundane” – the artistry and ingenuity of God as revealed in creation. The world is fallen, groaning under the curse of sin, but it is full of beauty and wonder, from houseflies to the behemoth and leviathan of Job. He lists some astonishing examples that many of us can observe without leaving our yards.

Joe Boot considers the pinnacle of creation: man, created in the image of God male and female.

He demonstrates the meaning-filled character of the created order and shows how man occupies a unique position as ruler of creation. Contrary to a perennial heresy, the created world and our created bodies are a good and necessary part of what it means to be human.

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“Big Bang Theory is Introduced, 1927,” PBS, last modified 2018, https://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dp27bi.html.

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WILLEM OUWENEEL WILLEM J. OUWENEEL is Fellow for Systematic Theology with the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity. Willem was one of the founders of the Evangelical College (Evangelische Hogeschool) at Amersfoort, the Netherlands, where he taught until his retirement in 2009. From 1990 to 1997, he served as professor in the philosophy of the natural sciences at the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education (South Africa). From 1995 to 2014, he was a professor on the Evangelical Theological Faculty in Leuven (Belgium). From 1996 until 2001, he taught philosophy, theology, and psychology at the State-Independent Theological Seminary in Basel, Switzerland.

Prior to his work in theology and philosophy, Willem taught biology and engaged in research on genetics and embryology, and served as chief editor of the scholarly journal Bible and Science (Bijbel en Wetenschap) until 2001.

His latest book, The World is Christ’s: A Critique of Two Kingdoms Theology, published by Ezra Press, is a thorough review of the historical, logical, and exegetical considerations surrounding the Two Kingdoms controversy.

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The

HISTORICAL

ADAM

THERE IS A POSITION shared by many

theologians today that seeks to reconcile biblical faith and evolutionary thought.1 Throughout this work, I will repeatedly refer to this view as aeh, short for “the view that Adam was an Evolved Hominid,”2 a humanlike being produced by evolutionary biological processes. aeh advocates wish to leave room for human evolution, while simultaneously somehow retaining the notions of a historical Adam and a historical Fall.

from Genesis 12 onward, the text is clearly dealing with history.4 But where is the caesura? The section of Genesis 6–11 is written in largely the same style as the subsequent chapters; who would dare suggest that the latter chapters are less historical, except on the basis of evolutionary biases? And if Genesis 6–11 are historical, why not Genesis 1–5? Where are the basic differences in style, in literary genre?

Historicity in the Bible is of enormous importance, certainly in cases where this historicity is under heavy attack, as is the situation with regard to the historical Adam. I am inspired here by some of the arguments of Joel Beeke,3 but I will develop them in my own way.

In Genesis 13:10 we read, “And Lot lifted up his eyes and saw that the Jordan Valley was well watered everywhere like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt, in the direction of Zoar.” Here in this part of Genesis, we find a cross-reference to the first part of the book, whose historicity is seemingly being taken seriously. What Lot saw looked like the Garden of Eden, about which people in those days apparently still had some memory. It is like seeing something that reminds us of a thing or event from our early youth. Here in Genesis, people could have been looking at a wonderful valley and have been reminded of that other beautiful place from the early youth of humanity. Evidently, Adam and Eve had told their children about the wonders of Eden. In the future, God’s people would be reminded once again of Eden: “For the Lord comforts Zion; he comforts all her waste places and makes her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song” (Isa. 51:3).5

(a) Genesis 1–3 is just as historical as Genesis 4–50. Every unbiased reader, reading through these chapters, would be unable to notice any caesura, break, or transition, as if signalling a move from the figurative (if you like, even the mythical) to real history. Some expositors have viewed the story of the patriarchs as largely or entirely legendary, but many have opined that

(b) Adam was the historical (fore)father of historical descendants. We cannot argue that everything in Genesis except the story of Adam is basically historical, for all the subsequent chapters deal with his very physical offspring. Without Adam, there was no Seth; without Seth, no Enoch (to make a little jump; Gen. 5:1–24). Jude 14 tells us about “Enoch, the seventh of Adam” (cf. Heb. 11:5–6).

Many well-meaning Christians have tried to articulate the significance of Genesis 2-3 – and counter aeh – by insisting that we should read these chapters literally, as opposed to the claims of many aeh advocates that these texts should be read figuratively. But this is a category mistake; we will not get very far using terms like “literal” and “figurative.” The real question at issue in these chapters is not how much is literal, but how much is historical. Did the events described really happen in time and space? It is the testimony of both the Old and the New Testaments that these events really happened, no matter how much figurative language was used to describe them.

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The Historical Adam

There are no gaps in the genealogy of Genesis 5: it is Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, and Enoch, for a total of seven historical men; compare Luke 3:37–38, Jesus was “. . . the son of Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalaleel, the son of Cainan, the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.” Once again, the total is seven. The texts are precise. Jesus had a real historical pedigree, going back beyond his legal father Joseph, all the way to Adam.

And we notice that, just as truly as Seth was the son of Adam, Adam was the son of God, and not the son of some unknown hominid. His father was none other than God himself.

Similarly, from the opening verses of 1 Chronicles, we are on solid historical ground. We are told matter-of-factly: “Adam, Seth, Enosh; Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared; Enoch,” and so on—of course, beginning with enumerating seven historical men. If Abraham existed, then so did his forefather Noah. If Noah existed, then so did his forefather Enoch. If Enoch existed, then so did his forefather Adam. We cannot play around with these things. Genealogies were important in ancient times and had real implications for one’s own life. After the Babylonian exile, some men of the priestly family wished to function as priests: “These sought their registration among those enrolled in the genealogies, but they were not found there, and so they were excluded from the priesthood as unclean” (Ezra 2:62). In the same way, the chronicler told the post-exilic Jews, “You are God’s people because you can trace your pedigree back all the way to the patriarchs.” That would have served his purpose, you would think (as does a similar genealogy in Matt. 1:1–17). But no, says the chronicler, we can go all the way back to the very beginning, to Adam. There, at the beginning of humanity, lie your earliest origins.6 (c) Jesus spoke of Adam and other early humans as historical figures. Let us revisit the point that Jesus spoke of the first husband and wife, and of Abel and Noah, as historical figures. How could he have warned people against God’s imminent judgment (Matt. 24:37–38; Luke 17:26–27), which he compared to the Flood, if neither Noah nor the Flood were historical?

How could he warn about the “blood of Abel” Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

if Abel were not historical and had never really become the first martyr in human history? And how could Abel have been historical if his supposed parents, Adam and Eve, had never existed as genuine historical persons?

A “VERY GOOD” BEGINNING

If we make a case for the historical Adam, the question may arise: Why does it matter? Why make a fuss about a tiny part of the Bible? The answer is that this tiny part turns out to be the very opening chapters of the Bible, and the “...just as truly as rest of the Bible, especially the New TestaSeth was the son ment, attaches great value to these opening chapters. They are the pivot around which of Adam, Adam the rest of redemptive history is turning. was the son of God, (d) Without the historical Adam there was no originally “very good” humanity. If we do not begin with the designation “very good” from Genesis 1:317 and consider the Fall as a subsequent event, we lose the foundation of Christian soteriology, which involves the restoration of fallen humanity. On the aeh standpoint, we begin with hominids that8 were already killing, stealing, lying, and promiscuously mating before any individuals existed that aeh advocates might identify as “Adam and Eve.” For aeh, there never was a time when beings who were fully humans were “very good,” who subsequently fell to become very bad. For aeh, a time never existed when death had not entered the human world, after which came the Fall, which introduced human death. Gijsbert van den Brink, too, has to admit that bullying, deceit, infanticide, and cannibalism had occurred among earlier hominids—and today among chimpanzees and bonobos—and that, therefore, a paradisal time when humans adhered to a morally high standard is very unlikely.9

and not the son of some unknown hominid.”

The Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd, like others before him, summarized Christian truth in these three keywords: creation – Fall – redemption, which he called the Christian “ground motive.”10 Often the word “restoration” is added as a fourth element.11 This paradigm was not the invention simply of Dooyeweerd or his direct predecessors; it has always been a basic motif of FALL 2018

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(Western) theology.12 The four elements must be understood in such a way that restoration presupposes redemption, redemption presupposes the Fall, and the Fall presupposes the originally good creation. It is one of the claims of this study that the aeh model cannot maintain this threeor fourfold representation of spiritual reality, and thus necessarily deals a heavy blow to Christian soteriology. Without the originally good creation, we lose the biblical view of the Fall, and without the Fall (in the strictly biblical sense, not in the imaginary sense defended by aeh advocates), we lose the biblical view of redemption.

PROGENITOR OF ALL HUMANITY

(e) The fact that Adam was the progenitor of the entire human race is quite evident in Scripture. The apostle Paul called Adam “Without the originally the “first man” (1 Cor. 15:45–49). good creation, we lose Elsewhere he referred to Adam as the “one blood” from whom all huthe biblical view of mans descended (Acts 17:26),13 and the Fall, and without his wife became the “mother of all the Fall... we lose living” (Gen. 3:20). Adam’s sin had the biblical view of consequences for all his progeny, and redemption.” because he was the progenitor of all humanity, his sin had consequences for all humanity. This is an important element of Paul’s argument in Romans 5:12–21.

It is rather embarrassing to encounter the facile suggestion by aeh advocates that there were many other people alive on earth during the time of “Adam” and “Eve” (regardless how the latter are understood).14 Just as facile is their suggestion that the Fall of Adam and Eve also had consequences for the other people supposedly alive at the time.15 This is totally against the central line in Scripture, as elucidated especially by Paul in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. He taught us that “in” (not just “through”) Adam all fell because he was the ancestor of them all. All people were “in Adam’s loins,” so to speak, when he fell, to use the imagery of Hebrews 7:10 (Levi was in the loins of his forefather Abr[ah]am when the latter encountered Melchizedek).16 Human evolution, as aeh advocates defend it (or at least allow for it), presupposes a world that in FALL 2018

many ways was not “very good” at all. As we saw, physical death had supposedly entered the hominid world long before the time that “Adam and Eve” (however they are understood) “fell” (however this is understood). Back then females had difficulties giving birth, males dominated females, through painful labor hominids/humans obtained their food, and thorns and thistles were growing on the earth. In Genesis 3:16–19 these things are described as consequences of the fall, but in aeh these phenomena existed long before the Fall (however this Fall is understood). As Joel Beeke observes, If death and disaster did not arise from the curse and judgment of God upon Adam’s sin, then how did it come into God’s creation? Did God create a world of evil? Is God perhaps not the all-powerful Creator of all things, but only one limited influence among others? The fall of Adam is the hinge upon which our doctrines of creation and God turn. If we break the hinge, the whole system of biblical doctrine collapses.17 FOUNDATION OF GENDER RELATIONSHIPS

(f ) Jesus makes clear that, if we wish to understand God’s mind concerning gender relationships, specifically human marriage and sexuality, we must look at the first humans on earth, at the beginning of creation: Because of your hardness of heart he [i.e., Moses] wrote you this commandment [i.e., “When you send your wife away, give her a certificate of divorce”].

But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female” [Gen. 1:27]. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” [Gen. 2:24]. So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate (Mark 10:5–9; cf. Matt. 19:4–6).18

What would have been the use of establishing God’s basic rule for marriage if this were based on a myth? Paul does something similar to what Jesus did: when he writes about the creation Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

The Historical Adam

order for men and women, he goes back to the first humans because God’s mind becomes manifest in their creation: [A] man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels.

Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God (1 Cor. 11:7–12).

And: Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control (1 Tim. 2:11–15).

For expositors, these passages contain numerous difficulties (Why a head covering?

In what sense is the woman the “glory of man”? Why may women not teach or exercise authority? In what sense was Eve deceived, and Adam was not? How are women “saved through childbearing”?). These problems do not concern us now. My point here is this: when Paul explained gender relationships, he did not invoke abstract principles (“creation ordinances,” if you like19), and certainly not some primeval myth, but he appealed to God’s order as it was concretely manifested in the first pair of humans who lived at the beginning of humanity’s history, created directly

by God (cf. 1 Cor. 11:8 nkjv, “man is not from woman,” i.e., the first man, Adam, was not born of a woman).

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ADAM AS TYPE OF CHRIST20

(g) As surely as Jesus is a historical figure, so too was his “type” (Rom. 5:14), Adam, a historical figure. The first Adam “prefigured” the last Adam (cjb); “Adam became a pattern of the one to come” (niv). For the term “type” see also 1 Corinthians 10:6, 11, “Now these things [i.e., the events during Israel’s wilderness journey] became types of us . . . all these things happened unto them as types . . .” (jub). Not in literary theory, but apparently in the Bible, an “allegory” has more or less the same meaning as a “type”: “Now this may be interpreted allegorically [one Gk. word: allēgoroumena]: these women [Sarah and Hagar] are [i.e., represent, depict] two covenants” (Gal. 4:24). Similarly, Adam and Christ are two covenant heads, in such a way that the former is a “type” of the latter.

Look at the first one, Adam, to get an idea of the last One (or to get an idea of how the last One is the counterpart of the first one). Paul works this out in 1 Corinthians 15:45–49: • The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.

• The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.

• As was the man of dust, so also are those

who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.

What are the value and validity of this “As surely as Jesus comparison between Adam and Christ if is a historical a historical Adam never existed in the first place? I do not mean the supposed hisfigure, so too was torical Adam posited by some aeh advohis “type” (Rom. cates; I mean the Adam who was literally 5:14), Adam, a the “first man,” created directly by God. historical figure.”

Paul believed in this historical Adam, as did all believing Jews, including Jesus. Just for a change, let me quote some of the deuterocanonical books (gnt): “You created Adam and gave him his wife Eve to be his helper and support.

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The Historical Adam

alone. I will make a suitable helper for him’” (Tobit 8:6). “Wisdom protected the father of the world, the first man that was ever formed, when he alone had been created” (Wisdom 10:1). Apparently, this represented the current Jewish view of Genesis 1–3.

There are other passages in the New Testament that presuppose Adam to be a type of Christ.

When Luke calls Adam “son of God” (3:38), this ties in with God calling Jesus his “Son” “Adam was image in verse 22. Notice the flow of Luke’s of God as the first argument: Jesus, the beloved Son of the human, created Father, was (as it was believed) a son of directly by God— Joseph, his legal father, and through a long line of ancestors, he was the son Christ was, and is, of Adam, the son of God. Immediately image of God as the after this, Jesus, the Son of God, goes One in, through, and into the wilderness and is tempted by for whom God created Satan, just as Adam, the son of God, all things.” was tempted by Satan (Luke 4:1–13).

Another example of Adam as a type of Christ is encountered in the use of the expression “image of God.” Adam was created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27), but through the Fall this image was marred. It is significant that, when Adam fathered his son Seth, it is said that he did so “in his own likeness, in his image” (5:3).21 However, Paul described the appearance of Jesus in this world as “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4).

And elsewhere he says that Christ “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

For by [more correctly, in] him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:15–17).

Incidentally, we notice here how Adam is implicitly both type and antitype (as in 1 Cor. 15:45, “The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit”). That is, he prefigures Christ, but also forms a contrast to him: Adam was image of God as the first human, created directly by God—Christ was, and is, image of God as the One in, through, and for whom God created all things. Christ is the image of God as FALL 2018

Man—but this Man was and is in his person identical to the eternal Son of the Father, in, through, and for whom God created the universe.

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2 3 4 5

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9 10 11 12 13

See, as just a representative sample of some of the contemporary ‘heroes’ of evangelicalism, Stott, J. R. W. (1972) 1999. Understanding the Bible. Expanded ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. (1999, 54–56); https://www. bethinking.org/christian-beliefs/the-universeis-not-an-accident; Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues.

New York: HarperOne. (2014, 37).

The term “hominid” refers to a family of primates that includes both humans and apes.

J. Beeke in Phillips (2015, 19–26).

On this point, I recommend Kitchen (1995; 2006).

For a discussion of that other remarkable reference to “Eden, the garden of God” (Ezek.

28:12–19), see Ouweneel (2018a, Appendix 10).

Peter Enns (2012, 141) suggests that the chronicler wished to present Adam as the “first Israelite.” Literally, Israel is Jacob, a distant descendant of Adam; Israelites are descendants of Jacob, not his ancestors. I do understand Enns’ intention, though: in 1 Chron. 1:1 Adam is, figuratively speaking, the “first Israelite,” Israel’s first ancestor. Yet, he was also the “first man” here; cf. Isa. 43:27, “your first father,” who according to David Kimchi was Adam; see Slotki (1983, 211).

J. H. Walton tried to reduce this evaluation of humanity as being “very good” to being functionally, not morally good, but J. C. Collins rightly rejected this view; see Barrett and Caneday (2013, 115, 130).

Is this “which” or “who”? When did hominids switch from the “which” to the “who,” from animals to persons? See extensively chapter 6 below on this vital anthropological question.

Van den Brink (2017, 211).

See Dooyeweerd (2003, chapter 1, §§8 and 10); cf. Ouweneel (2014a).

Cf. the model defended by Wax (2011).

Cf. extensively, Ouweneel (2018e).

But cf. chapter 1, note 9 above.

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The Historical Adam

14 Van den Brink (2017, 226).

15 Haarsma and Haarsma (2011, 256), although they do not necessarily condone this view.

16 Cf. Ouweneel (1982, ad loc.).

17 J. Beeke in Phillips (2015, 33).

18 Cf. VanDoodewaard (2016, chapter 3).

19 This is an important Reformed/Presbyterian notion; see Murray (1957), especially chapter 2 on “Creation Ordinances.”

20 Cf. J. Beeke in Phillips (2015, chapter 8).

21 Mathews (1996, 310): “Adam has endowed his image to Seth, including human sinfulness and its consequences.”

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P. ANDREW SANDLIN P. ANDREW SANDLIN is Fellow for Public Theology and Cultural Philosophy with the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

Andrew is an ordained minister in and Executive Director of the Fellowship of Mere Christianity, Faculty of Blackstone Legal Fellowship of the Alliance Defending Freedom, and De Jong Distinguished Visiting Professor of Culture and Theology, Edinburg Theological Seminary, a member of the Evangelical Theological Society, and is President of the Center for Cultural Leadership.

He founded CCL in 2001 with the conviction that only eminently-equipped cultural leaders will actually create a new Christian culture — and that only transformed Christians can transform the present anti-Christian culture of the West.

Andrew was born into a devout Christian home.

He has been preaching and teaching and lecturing for 30 years. A consummate eclectic, Andrew has been a pastor, assistant pastor, youth pastor, Sunday school superintendent, Christian day school administrator, home school father, foundation’s executive vice president, journal editor, scholar, author and itinerant speaker. Andrew is married to Sharon and has five adult children and three grandchildren.

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The

PHILOSOPHY

of Science

When people argue about Christianity and science, they often home in on specific areas of alleged conflict. Important as those areas are, they are not my concern here. I’m not addressing the age of the earth (it’s not millions of years), the length of creation days (I believe in six-day creation); whether Adam and Eve were actual historical figures (they were); or whether Darwinism can be reconciled with the Bible (it can’t); or whether the Noahic flood was universal (it was). Behind these topics stands one fundamental question: how is science possible in the first place? Very few people, even scientists, talk about that. Science is here, it’s a part of all our lives, and we simply accept it as given. But why should it be a given? Why should there even be such a thing as science? That’s what I want to address, and in so doing vindicate the Triune God and the Bible and the Christian faith.

Skeptical hostility to Christianity in our time usually comes in one of two forms. First is the problem of evil in the world. If God is such a good God, why is there so much evil? Second is the spectacular success of science. If science is right, and science conflicts with Christianity, then doesn’t this prove Christianity wrong? The questions are valid. Evil is real and pervasive in the world, and it’s important that Christians be able to respond to this concern. However, this is not the focus of the present article, though I commend several resources on this problem of evil.1 But it is necessary here to spend some time considering the objection that Christianity is antiscience. To begin with, this is simply not the case.

In fact, anybody that would level such a charge is demonstrating a remarkable ignorance. I want to make two important points, one historical and one theological: (1) Modern science was launched by Christians and within Christianity;

(2) Modern science could have been launched only by Christians and within Christianity. As strange as it might seem to the ears of modern secularists and even some Christians, science rests on the presupposition of the God of the Bible. If we don’t start with God, we’ll get science wrong.

Science is possible only on Christian presuppositions.

To prove this, let’s go back to the Greco-Roman world within which Christianity arose.2 What we today call empirical science was then unknown.

The Greek Roman philosophers were deductive, rational thinkers. Their way of arriving at a conclusion was to begin with axioms they were already committed to and from those axioms arrive at their conclusions. Nobody employed what we today call the scientific method. Nobody put theories to the test by conducting experiments in the physical world. This is because most of the ancient Greeks were philosophical idealists.

The real world was the world of the ideals, the “forms,” branded by nature on the human mind.3 The actual, physical world was simply a pale reflection of these forms. Why would anyone study the inferior physical world when you could study the superior ideals? This worldview meant that any scientific advancement came by accident.

THE CHRISTIAN ORIGINS OF MODERN SCIENCE

But in the medieval era (often wrongly called “the Dark Ages”), this way of thinking began to change. Franciscan monks like Richard Bacon and William of Ockham began to understand that since God the Creator is a God of order, the physical universe reflects that order and can be studied in an orderly fashion. Three hundred years afterward, another Bacon, Francis, developed the inductive method: we look first at what Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

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we find in the world and draw conclusions from this observation. We don’t first begin with assumptions about what the world is supposed to be like. What Christian thinkers began to realize, in addition to the divinely ordered universe, is that since the Creator is separate from creation, we can and should study creation in its own right.

The Greeks and Romans were usually pantheists, who thought of the entire universe as an extension of deity itself.

By contrast, Biblical Christians knew that while creation testifies to God, it’s not a part of God’s being. They revived the cultural mandate as it pertains to the physical universe. A key to this revival was an understanding that since God is orderly, he created laws that govern the universe.

These laws are orderly, methodical, discoverable, and unbreakable (except in the rare case of miracles). To uncover those laws is to uncover how God made the physical universe to work. Modern science could never have materialized within the presuppositions of the Greco-Roman world.

It took Christianity to wipe away their mistaken presuppositions and launch modern science. It is no coincidence that nearly all the early modern scientists were Christians. This was true in astronomy, physics, genetics, and medicine.

Astronomy Copernicus [1473-1543] was a canon in the church in East Prussia. Most people at that time believed that sun and planets revolve around the earth (geocentricity).4 Copernicus worked out the details of heliocentricity: the earth and all other planets in our solar system revolve around the sun. His empirical astronomical studies led him to this conclusion. Two of his biggest promoters were Lutherans. He waited almost until he died in order to publish his heliocentric book, not because he was afraid of the church. Rather, he was afraid of fellow scientists, who would have ridiculed him.

We all know the story of Galileo [1564-1642].

At least we think we do. His empirical discoveries on the heavenly bodies were indeed opposed by his Roman Catholic superiors. The part of the story we don’t often hear is that many CalEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

vinists and Lutherans were committed to the empirical investigation of God’s universe, and championed Galileo’s discoveries about motion and the heavenly bodies.

Johannes Kepler [1571-1630] prepared for the Lutheran ministry, but shifted to astronomy. He discovered the three laws of planetary mo“A key to this tion: that planets revolve around the sun revival was an in elliptical orbits, not perfect circles; that understanding they don’t orbit at uniform speeds; and that since God is that the speed of their orbit is mathematically related to their distance from the sun. orderly, he created These laws have sometimes been termed laws that govern the first laws of natural science.

the universe.”

Physics The history of early physics is a who’s who of Christian scientists. Isaac Newton [1642-1726], a professed Christian, made discoveries about gravity that revolutionized science. It’s sometimes held he was a deist, but if so, he was a deist like no other. He embraced the Apostles’ Creed and believed in our Lord’s post-resurrection appearances. As a Christian, he knew that God is a God of order, and that He created the universe not as chaos but as a cosmos, whose laws could be discovered.

And then there’s the devout Christian author Blaise Pascal, who also invented the adding machine, the hypodermic syringe, and the hydraulic press. And then there are the Christians Alessandro Volta, Georg Simon Ohm, and André Ampere. If you’ve heard of electrical volts, ohms, and amps, you now know of the scientific importance of these Christian physicists.

Genetics You’ve probably also heard of the name Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, who was also an Augustinian monk who examined and rejected Darwinism.

Medicine The ancients knew about and worked at healing the human body, but modern medicine began with Benedictine monks in ad 528. It was slow FALL 2018

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going because early development required the study of human cadavers, and many Christians opposed dissecting human bodies. In time, this reluctance faded. Paracelsus, a Roman Catholic with a sympathy for Luther, made great strides by rejecting the traditional idea that diseases result from internal imbalances in the human body. He fore“No weapon in the shadowed germ studies, which recognize that agents external to the body produce arsenal of atheism, diseases. William Harvey, baptized in the agnosticism, and Folkestone parish in England, made great secularism has discoveries about the human circulatory been wielded as system. And then there was Louis Pasfrequently against teur, who discovered bacteria and refuted Christianity in the the old idea of spontaneous generation.

He discovered the law of biogenesis: only last century than this: life can produce other life. It’s because of Christianity is at war Pasteur that we use antiseptic and paswith science.” teurization. He was a faithful Christian his entire life.

There are scores of other scientists we could recount. But here is the chief point to consider: [V]irtually all scientists from the Middle Ages to the mid-eighteenth century — many of whom were seminal thinkers — not only were sincere Christians but were often inspired by biblical postulates and premises in their theories that sought to explain and predict natural phenomena.5

They weren’t scientists who incidentally were Christians; rather their Christianity shaped their scientific investigation and success.

Despite these facts, no weapon in the arsenal of atheism, agnosticism, and secularism has been wielded as frequently against Christianity in the last century than this: Christianity is at war with science. There’s only one way honestly to answer this charge: It’s flatly false. Modern science could never have materialized apart from Christianity.

But what is it about Christianity — and in particular biblical faith — that generated modern science? What are the biblical teachings that made science not only possible, but necessary and inevitable? We’ve touched on some, but let’s delve more deeply.

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First, however, it’s necessary to define science more carefully. We can’t assume everybody means the same thing when they use the word. Science means “knowledge,” from the Latin word Scientia, but when we speak of modern science we usually have in mind a particular kind of knowledge. It’s knowledge of the physical world that’s been repeatedly tested in experience. Science is concerned with the physical universe, with testable, physical reality. It’s empirical, meaning verified by our senses, not by pure logic or theory.

At the heart of science is the scientific method, the process of developing a hypothesis about the physical world, testing that hypothesis, and revising it in light of additional testing. There are many branches of science from astronomy to zoology, but they all are trying to arrive at knowledge of the physical world by testing and refining specific empirical hypotheses. For example, it was once thought that certain diseases could be countered by bleeding a patient. That hypothesis was thoroughly disproved when the theory was tested and found to be wrong. And painful and fatal.

Science, in summary, is the getting rid of false theories and replacing them with more accurate ones.6 This entire approach to the physical world could have developed only on the basis of Christianity. Enumerating the biblical presuppositions of modern science will tell you why.7 THE BIBLICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS OF MODERN SCIENCE

The Creator-Creation Distinction The first presupposition is found at the beginning of the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). God stands above and apart from his creation. He created ex nihilo (out of nothing). Matter is not eternal; God created it. Before creation, there was nothing but God. He’s not a part of creation. He enters and interacts with it, and in this way is immanent, most graphically in the incarnation of his Son Jesus. But God doesn’t develop along with his creation.8 He’s not simply the biggest and most important part of a larger “system.” He created Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

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all things from nothing. He’s the Almighty God, and His word is law. He’s not conditioned by the cosmos; rather, He conditions the cosmos.

This notion introduces the great hierarchy of the cosmos: God stands above and is distinct from all creation below him. This distinction is a creational norm. It’s a fundamental characteristic of the universe. It’s ontological, meaning it’s part of the existence of the creation. There is no creation without this Creator-creature distinction.

Christianity is not pantheistic or panentheistic.

Nature is not deity or deified. This is in sharp contradistinction to prominent expressions of ancient paganism. Take animism, for example, the belief that plants and animals and inanimate objects contained a soul or, panentheistically, contain God. They were held to be sacred. You can imagine how such a view would discourage science. If the oak tree or a wild pony contains deity or spirit, you wouldn’t wish to experiment with or harness it for fear of offending the gods or interfering with the spirit world.

Hinduism is a different but similar case. Hindus believe in reincarnation, that when we die, our spirit often goes into another living being, usually another human or an animal. If you live the good life, you would perhaps be reincarnated as a holy person. If you were bad, you would be reincarnated as maybe a bug or an insect. Cows are considered especially sacred since the female, milk-giving cow is considered the mother of life. Obviously, modern science could never have developed in a profoundly Hindu culture, and in fact, it didn’t.

If we can’t study and manipulate animals, because it’s possible they’re reincarnations of our ancestors, science is simply impossible.

In the words of Vern Poythress, “The doctrine of creation ‘desacralizes’ the creature.”9 This doesn’t mean that man can treat creation any way that he wants. Man is God’s representative, and his authority over creation is delegated by God. However, creation is not God. Therefore, man isn’t harming God by thoughtfully and compassionately examining and experimenting with creation. Man encounters God everywhere in creation because creation reveals God. But scientists don’t interfere with God’s being when Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

they manipulate creation. The Creator-creation distinction opens the way for experiments within the physical universe. The scientific method is simply not possible apart from that distinction.

The Orderliness and Stability of the Cosmos Consider, as the second presupposition, the orderliness and stability of the cosmos. In Hebrews 1:2–3 (nkjv), we read of God the Father, [He] has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of [the Father’s] glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power when He had by Himself purged our sins, “God doesn’t sat down at the right hand of the develop along Majesty on high….

Then read what Paul wrote in Colossians 1:16–17: For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.

with his creation. He’s not simply the biggest and most important part of a larger ‘system’.”

We learn two vital truths relevant to science from these statements: first, God used his Son to create the cosmos; and second, the Son now continually sustains the cosmos. When Paul says that in Jesus, all created things consist, he means that Jesus holds all things together.10 Creation can’t go haywire because Jesus holds it together. His continual power sustains everything in creation: man and animals, plant life, the laws of gravity and thermodynamics, the self-healing of the human body, planetary motion, the fiery sun and the reflecting moon, and the galaxies beyond our own.

Science depends on this constancy and stability.

We take it for granted. Think about astronomy.

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morrow, and even if there’re clouds, we’ll see light from the sun. It’s ridiculous to worry that the sun won’t rise tomorrow, but why? It’s only ridiculous because we’ve become accustomed to the stability and regularity of creation. But why should creation be stable and regular? Only because Jesus Christ created it and sustains it. The same is true with matter on earth. When scientists perform experiments with antibiotics, or mice, or helium, they expect that the results they get today are the same ones they’ll get tomorrow and that their colleagues in China, Ghana or Norway also will get the same results. Why? Because they assume the stability and regularity that Jesus “The universe doesn’t Christ continuously provides. If scientists didn’t believe that experiments operate according are dependable, that nature is regular to impersonal laws. and stable, there could simply be no Laws are highly science. God promised Noah (Gen. personal. People make 8:22): “While the earth remains, seedthem. God makes the time and harvest, cold and heat, winter ultimate laws that and summer, and day and night shall not cease.” operate the universe.”

We can rest easy about the future of creation because Jesus Christ continually sustains it. All scientists assume this truth, whether they assert it or not. They may say that they don’t believe in God, but they must assume God in order to practice science.11 And not the god of eighteenth-century Deism.

This false god created the universe like a watchmaker would create a watch: wind it up, and then step aside and let it tick. This is the absentee landlord God, the God on vacation. But this isn’t the God of the Bible. The universe doesn’t operate according to impersonal laws. Laws are highly personal. People make them. God makes the ultimate laws that operate the universe. And his Son sustains these laws, moment by moment, second by second.

Jesus Christ is continuously providing oxygen to each and every one of us at this very moment. He’s moving the winds across oceans and continents. He’s sustaining the planets in their orbits. This is how stable the universe is. Jesus Christ is its stability. If scientists couldn’t rely on that stability, there could be no science. This FALL 2018

is why, as Stanley Jaki declares, Jesus Christ is the Saviour of science.

THE GOODNESS OF THE MATERIAL WORLD

Now think about a third theological presupposition that makes modern science possible: the goodness of creation. At the end of each creation day, God pronounced His work “good.” And then at the end of the sixth day “God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).

This was far from the universally held view. For instance, the earliest and most dangerous heresy to arise in the Christian church was Gnosticism.12 Every religion and philosophy must account for evil in the world. For Christianity, that evil is a result of man’s fall at creation. The Gnostics, on the other hand, believed that there is a good, though impersonal, God, and from him emanated an inferior God. Eventually, through ignorance, that inferior, rebellious god, called a Demiurge, created matter. This matter is evil. Only that which is not material can be virtuous, or good. Therefore, salvation is not from sin, but from matter.

Jesus came to save us from the material world, including our bodies. The Gnostics didn’t believe Jesus possessed an actual physical body, or actually died on the cross and rose again. What’s the point of resurrection? The entire goal of life is to get rid of the body, the material world.

Obviously, science couldn’t have arisen within this worldview. If matter is evil, if the goal of life is escape from the material world, then harnessing the material world and learning its laws in order to improve man’s material life is useless. In fact, it’s likely an act of evil, or at least a step backwards.

But the Bible teaches that creation is very good.

Therefore, there’s nothing wrong with using it to benefit man. The Bible says that God has given us all things (not just “spiritual” things) richly to enjoy (1 Tim. 6:17). Majestic mountains and apple trees and fleshy cattle and fresh-water rivers are good. So too are snakes and bats. They were cursed because of man’s sin, but this doesn’t mean Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

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that they’re inherently evil. They’re here for man to enjoy under God’s authority.

Science is designed partly to harness this good creation so man can use it more effectively for man’s greater enjoyment. For one, science helps create antibiotics to fight bacterial infections.

Also, physics allows us to build spectacularly tall and yet stable buildings. Even more impressive is how complex sequences of zeros and ones allow the dramatic technological development of computers and smartphones. It’s true that all of these can be used for evil purposes. Beautifully designed mosques can house radical terrorists. An iPhone can receive and transmit pornography.

Opiates can be used not simply for healing but they can also be abused and foster dangerous addiction. But the problem with these begins in the human heart, not in creation.

If man doesn’t recognize creation as inherently good, he’ll have no incentive to interact with it to create a better culture. If humanity sees this created world as evil, escape is the only desire. Science is the antithesis of the desire for escape. It’s based on the longing to harness the world for the betterment of man and, properly understood, for the glory of God. Science is possible because of the truth expressed in Genesis 1: creation is very good.

THE SCIENTIST’S DOMINION CALLING

This leads to the fourth theological presupposition of modern science: the dominion calling, or, as we also called it earlier, the cultural mandate (Gen. 1:18–20). Man’s chief calling in the earth is to exercise responsible dominion over the rest of creation. We are God’s deputies in the earth. We are earthly kings and queens under our LORD’s heavenly kingship. Recall that man’s first specific task of cultural dominion was naming the animals. He couldn’t do that without fulfilling some aspects of what we today call science. By observation, Adam had to know what they looked like.

He had to see how they acted. He had to classify them. Horses resemble dogs much more than they do worms. I’m sure his naming wasn’t arbitrary. He likely gave them names suitable to their appearance and character. This required observing, weighing evidence, and arriving at concluEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

sions. It was a basic form of science.

And then, after the Fall, we read of Cain and Abel. Cain tilled the ground, and Abel tended sheep. Both required basic science. When should seeds be planted? When will the harvest come?

Cain had to learn not to plant in harvest time and not expect harvest during planting time.

Abel needed to understand the care that sheep required. All of this required observation and testing basic hypotheses.

Later (Gen. 4–11) we read of Cain’s descendants who developed dominion in architecture, animal husbandry, music and musical instruments, manufacturing, tools, and metallurgy.13 These activities all laid the groundwork for the science of our time. Despite their sinfulness, these early humans exercised their dominion impulse.

“If man doesn’t recognize creation as inherently good, he’ll have no incentive to interact with it to create a better culture... Science is possible because of the truth expressed in Genesis 1: creation is very good.”

In fact, the Bible demands science. It’s simply impossible for man to fulfill the cultural mandate without practicing science. To exercise dominion over the rest of creation requires the scientific method: carefully observing, developing hypotheses, testing those hypotheses empirically, revising the hypotheses, and acting on those hypotheses for the improvement of humanity. If you refuse to examine the physical world closely; refuse to make deductions about what you see; refuse to test those deductions in the physical world; and refuse to take action on the basis of those deductions, you simply can’t exercise dominion. You can’t create a cotton gin, or an automobile, or an airplane, or an iPhone. You can’t devise aspirin or heart surgery or antibiotics. You can’t understand the earth’s spin on its axis or revolution around the sun, or ocean tides, or weather or climatology.

The dominion impulse is inherent in man. Humanity will exercise dominion either in a godly way or an ungodly way. The impulse to dominion is natural, and stifling that impulse is unnatural.

Modern science is simply a refinement of a critical aspect of the cultural mandate.

It’s only as humanity acts on this dominion impulse that modern science is possible.

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THE POSSIBILITY OF PROGRESS

Finally, let’s ponder the possibility of progress.

The idea of historical progress was rare in the ancient world. Aside from the Jews, it was almost unheard of. Ancient pagans saw civilization as cyclical: birth, rise, ascendency, prominence, decline, fall, and death.14 This view led to pessimism and despair. Christianity inherited from the Jewish faith the belief in incremental progress toward a glorious age to come, ushered in by Messiah, whom they knew to be Jesus of Nazareth. True progress is the fruit of godly faith and obedience.

As it relates to the material world, the cyclical pagan view of history meant that humanity could not expect what we today understand as scientific advancement. The ancient Egyptians might develop pyramids — and then the invention stops.

It doesn’t really benefit anyone’s daily life.

For thousands of years people lived comparatively short lives because they didn’t understand the human body and disease. Modern science studied human anatomy and how to harness it, and how diseases can be combated.

In short, biblical Christianity understood that things can be better, much better than they currently are. It was this form of biblical progressivism that was secularized by the Enlightenment. Today, the progressives are almost always humanistic liberals. The problem isn’t progressivism, but the kind of progressivism.

Modern science has bequeathed to us spectacular progress. Why? Because history has a goal; it’s going somewhere. We can create “Christianity inherited things today, and we will likely create better things 1000 years from now. from the Jewish Our knowledge can increase. We’re faith the belief in not destined to perpetually rise and incremental progress fall in our knowledge.

toward a glorious age to come, ushered in by Messiah, whom they knew to be Jesus of Nazareth.”

Today software architects in Silicon Valley are working on uses of digital computing that will leave our present knowledge in the dust. One day soon we’ll probably watch movies as holograms displayed all around us. This is possible because God allows humanity to engage in actual technological progress.

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Modern science rests partly on the supposition that knowledge and manipulation of the material world can progress. This is a biblical idea, and it was not common in the ancient world. Biblical faith makes scientific progress possible.

CONCLUSION

To review, modern science originated with Christians and Christianity. Theological presuppositions of modern science include the Creator-creation distinction, the orderliness and stability of the cosmos, the goodness of the material world, the scientist’s dominion calling, and the possibility of progress.

It’s no wonder that modern science is, well, modern, and not ancient. Why didn’t science emerge earlier? The Hebrew faith and Christianity were minorities during much of the ancient era, and in the medieval era, the church was still tied too closely to antiscientific Greek philosophy. When Christianity overwhelmed culture and when Christians broke away from Greek philosophy, modern science was born.

The Greeks tried to “reach truth by introspective meditation.”15 They didn’t recognize that observation of the material world by the senses, and reason interacting with those observations, was no less a road to truth than non-empirical means. But if you don’t recognize that God’s laws are stable, if you believe that God is arbitrary, you won’t have a great incentive to practice science, which requires repeatable stability.

And the same is true of the other non-Hebraic and non-Christian civilizations. Because they didn’t operate according to creational norms, they couldn’t develop what we call modern science.

This deficiency doesn’t mean that they couldn’t accomplish great things or even invent remarkable things, such as Egyptian pyramids or Chinese fireworks. But these weren’t science. They didn’t enhance man’s life. They didn’t operate according to the scientific method. That method is possible only on biblical presuppositions.

Everything good that we see in the world today, scientific or otherwise, is the result of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

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Triune God, and man acting according to the truth revealed by God. Everything evil and destructive that we see is a result of human sin, not creation. There’s no area of human delight, comfort, progress, or blessing apart from God. God contributes the good things, and we, as sinners, contribute the bad.

Modern science is a striking example of this truth: if we do things God’s way, we will prosper.

If we go our own way, we will suffer regression, backwardness, heartache, and death.

1

2

3 4 5 6

7

8

9 10

11 12

13 14 15

cal Dictionary of the New Testament, Gerhard Friedrich, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 19641976), 7:896–898.

RS, 13.

Stuart Holroyd, The Elements of Gnosticism (Rockport, Massachusetts: Element Books, 1994), 3.

RS, 152.

John Baillie, The Belief in Progress (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1951), 42–87.

SS, 42.

See, for example, John Frame, “The Bible On the Problem of Evil,” Frame-Poythress, last modified May 8, 2012, https:// frame-poythress.org/the-bible-on-the-problem-of-evil/; Gordon H. Clark, God and Evil: The Problem Solved (The Trinity Foundation, 1996).

For this entire section I am greatly indebted to Alvin J. Schmidt, Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001). I could have added copious footnotes to specific assertions that are entirely reliant on Schmidt’s extensive research, but there are so many it that would have unnecessarily cluttered the text.

See especially Plato’s Meno, and Republic, books III, V-VII. Though some people hundreds of years before had suggested otherwise.

Alvin J. Schmidt, Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization, 244.

John Herman Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1940), 219–225.

Two works have been especially helpful to me in drafting the following section: Stanley L. Jaki, The Savior of Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), hereafter, SS; and Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Science, A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2006), hereafter, RS. As process theology teaches: see Ronald H. Nash, ed., Process Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987).

RS, 76.

Kasch, “συνίστημι, συνίστάνω,” in Theologi-

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18 PAGE NO.

GORDON WILSON Dr. Gordon Wilson is Senior Fellow of Natural History, at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho.

He received his Ph.D. from George Mason University in Environmental Science and Public Policy in 2003. He holds a Master of Science degree in Entomology and a Bachelor’s degree in Education (Secondary Education-Biology) from the University of Idaho.

Dr. Wilson’s research focuses on the reproductive ecology of the Eastern Box Turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina).

He has published his research, field notes, and abstracts in Southeastern Naturalist, Herpetological Review, Catesbeiana, and the Virginia Journal of Science.

He is the host and narrator of the nature documentary The Riot and the Dance (2018), and author of the textbook of the same name, The Riot and the Dance: Foundational Biology (2014); he is a regular contributor to Answers in Genesis.

Dr. Wilson and wife Meredith have four children and growing collection of grandchildren.

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Natural History to the

Glory of God THROUGHOUT WORLD HISTORY MANKIND has mastered just about every pursuit

whether it is practical, artistic or both. As a result, man has, as a rule, become highly specialized. If you pursue anything that’s worth knowing or doing, it is also very likely that someone else knows it and does it better than you. This is a design feature that allows poorly-organized small societies to develop into highly-organized large civilizations. Division of labor naturally happens because people tend to specialize at what they are good at, and as specialists multiply, all the moving parts of civilization become more fine-tuned. A beneficial outgrowth of all this is that subsistence living is no longer the status quo. Most citizens now have more leisure time to pursue things that don’t pertain to survival. Leisure time can be spent in countless ways, some of which are more edifying than others. Philippians 4:8 “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” Pursuing the life of the mind in the liberal arts in a God-fearing way is obedient to this command.

Thanks be to God for the fruits of civilization; we now have spare time and energy to think about these things.

One wonderful fruit of the Reformation was a clear understanding that every lawful (specialized) vocation could be exercised to the glory of God. Thankfully we don’t need to become a monk or a nun to engage in the academic pursuit of the liberal arts. Our pitfall today is to fritter away our spare time and energy with excess recreation, more fine-tuning in our professional or technical vocation, or nothing. This paper is an invitation to all of us to wander outside our own

personal cubicle of knowledge and skill and begin to release our minds somewhere in the wilderness of the liberal arts.

As working adults, we know it is practically impossible to pursue all the liberal arts: literature, philosophy, mathematics, and physical sciences. The world’s treasures of the liberal arts are too vast. To think about those things worth knowing would require thousands of lifetimes of full-time learning. We might as well drink the Pacific (assuming it was freshwater). If we decide to climb out of our specialist groove, we can only pick and choose, dip and dabble according to our proclivities in the limitless smorgasbord out there. Nevertheless, as a biologist, teacher, and writer, I freely acknowledge my bias. I am seeking to promote natural history to those so inclined. This is one of the liberal arts that has proved to stretch and enrich the hearts and minds of many thousands of non-biologists throughout the centuries. My specific goal here is to magnify God’s glory by unveiling the magnificence of the mundane, the natural history of our neighborhoods.

But before I go further, I will define natural history. It is the study of plants and animals, with an emphasis on careful observation rather than experimentation. This requires no special technical training, just simple curiosity and a desire to hone our observational skills beyond impressionism: to see and enjoy living things as they really are. This observational endeavor is not only a pursuit of the liberal arts; it is also lay-friendly. For Christians, it leads to knowing God better as a painter, sculptor, architect, and engineer, and cultivates an appreciation for His wisdom, creativity, and glory. Being only a specialist is too confining for the Imago Dei in each of us. Although each of us can honor God by being a well-crafted cog Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

Natural History to the Glory of God

in a fine-tuned machine, we are meant to be more than that. There is a rich world that God has created, particularly the living world, and many non-scientific Christians have an innate interest in some aspect of it (birds, wildflowers, trees, seashells, etc.). I’m not advocating scientific goals like cancer research or personal pragmatic goals like hunting or fishing to put food on the table, or entrepreneurial goals so that we can turn a profit. Having plants and animals meet these kinds of needs is legitimate, but it truncates our perspective so that we see living things only in scientific, survivalist, or economic terms; not in terms of curiosity, wonder, and delight. Animals can use other animal and plant life to satisfy certain basic needs. They can quench their thirst, enjoy food, exercise, and play, but we as image bearers can and are invited to take it a step further by delighting in God’s creation in ways that the beasts cannot. A cow can discern an edible flower as a tasty mouthful. A praying mantis can discern a grasshopper as a potential meal; but neither animal beholds its subject to study its symmetry and architecture, or how it lives, how it eats, how it reproduces, or how it survives the winter. All these things constitute ‘natural history’ and can be apprehended by non-biologists and biologists alike to satisfy a gnawing curiosity or a desire to simply learn. There need not be a practical goal.

This is something we can do that animals cannot. It’s not built into an animal’s constitution.

One aspect of Imago Dei is to simply delight in discovering and knowing.

We know that man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. As Christians we must keep this goal in mind lest we be puffed up in our acquired knowledge. We are to glorify God as Job did, saying “…the hand of the Lord has done this…” (12:9). Of course we can’t deny or forego the practical uses of living creatures, for we need them in order to stay alive and healthy. However, here I want to emphasize the study of plants and animals in another way that God intended: that is simply because we have pleasure in them. Our eyes have grown dull. We see a rich world of bounty to fill our bellies and our billfolds, but we fail to see a rich world filled with beauty, wonder, and mystery because we are too preoccupied with the pragmatic (livestock, fish, and game). From a Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

negative standpoint, we can be also preoccupied with how some (pests) interfere with our commercial interests or comfort. I suggest we push beyond pragmatism regarding the living creation and be blessed by all the other ways it can enrich our lives. Let’s enjoy our Imago Dei (even if that means making our food beautiful).

Theology is the study of God. When we pursue the knowledge of God, we usually limit “When they have ourselves to special revelation, i.e. his Tricompletely factored une character, his omniscience, omnipoGod out of the tence, and omnipresence. We study the deity, humanity, and redemptive work of equation, how can Jesus Christ in the Scriptures. Of course all we expect them of this should be central. But if we were to arrive at any doing our dissertation on Michelangelo, ultimate truth?” we would not just study what he wrote. We would study his paintings, sculptures, frescoes, and his writings. This would give us a more thorough understanding of who he was as a man and as an artist. In the same way, if we want to get to know God, we should study everything that he wrote and made. The created order is a direct outflow of his character. As we study nature (as liberal art), whether it is biology, chemistry, geology, astronomy, physics, etc. (guided by his inspired Word) we gain a deeper understanding of God’s creative character. He is a sculptor, painter, engineer, and architect using a biological medium that he spoke from absolutely nothing. He has worked in all genres, from the diminutive and delicate to the massive and majestic, spanning a huge disparity of life forms: plants, animals, bacteria, fungi and protists. Are we content to designate the study of this artwork of God to a bunch of secular scientists? When they have completely factored God out of the equation, how can we expect them to arrive at any ultimate truth? Yes, they accumulated a massive amount of practical information that has served modern civilization well in countless sub-disciplines of agriculture and medicine. Even with biology’s amazing resumé, most biologists have refused to see the most important take-home message, which is, “…the hand of the Lord has done this….” This oversight is tantamount to blasphemy and is no trifling matter. It is time that many Christians begin cultivating a love of natural history so that glory is given to whom glory is due.

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DOES THE BIBLE GIVE US PRECEDENT FOR THESE BIOLOGICAL PURSUITS?

Yes, it does. The first command to Adam had to do with the biological creation. He was told to, “…rule over the fish of “Wisdom is not just the sea and the birds of the air, over the the ability to make livestock, over all the earth, and over correct moral every living creature that moves on the judgments given a ground” (Gen. 1:28). This is wildlife complicated set of management and livestock husbandry facts. It also includes at a global scale and is a very big respona knowledge of sibility. The second command also had to do with the biological creation, that natural history.” is what was on (and off) the menu (Gen. 2:16-17). The third command had to do with a portion of the biological creation. This was the task of naming, “…the beasts of the field and the birds of the air….” “So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field” (Gen. 2:20). I assume there was some kind of implicit or explicit taxonomy, but we have no record. The dietary laws of Leviticus also had to do with the biological creation, i.e. clean and unclean distinctions among the animals.

I realize the above tasks were primarily of a practical nature. All of this undertaking required observing and making distinctions regarding the living world, and served useful purposes like taking dominion (management), knowing what could be consumed, and systematizing and naming the diversity. Initially Adam’s tasks needed to be practical in order to survive in an untamed world. However, study of the biological world in the Bible reveals that this biblical world wasn’t all utilitarian in its goals. There are several scripturally-grounded nonutilitarian purposes of the biological world.

1.

To display the wisdom and glory of God

2.

To display his care for his creatures

3.

To provide a model for certain desired behaviors

4.

To humble us by showcasing extraordinary animals

1. In I Kings 4:33-34 King Solomon’s wisdom is described: “He spoke of trees, from the cedar FALL 2018

that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish. And people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and from all the kings of the earth, who had heard of his wisdom.” What is curious about this verse is that wisdom is not just the ability to make correct moral judgments given a complicated set of facts.

It also includes a knowledge of natural history.

We may think that Solomon’s plant and animal teachings were merely moral lessons (see point 3) that we can glean from simple facts about plants and animals. But it’s much more than that. Solomon taught natural history about animals and plants. What I find notable in this passage is that it was considered part of Solomon’s wisdom. In light of the fact that God’s wisdom is revealed in creation in the same way that an engineer’s wisdom is revealed in his engineering, then to study it should make one wiser.

O Lord, how manifold are your works!

In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.

- Psalm 104:24

2. In addition to declaring the glory and wisdom of God, King David also expounds on how God cares for man and wild beasts. Reading in Psalm 104 of God’s bountiful provision of water, food, and habitat for man is glorious.

It is not just presented as a cold, biological fact.

In verse 24, King David (a man with plenty of experience tending his flocks in the wilderness) is overflowing with praise and adoration to God because of his manifold works.

Clearly, David has a deep appreciation not just for domesticated animals, but also for the beauty and glory of wild animals in their natural habitat.

His gratitude and praise to God for creating and sustaining it is a wonderful example for us. Read all of Psalm 104, but here I will highlight those particulars dealing with living things to remind us who is the Creator and Sustainer of life. As moderns, we can easily lapse into the mindset that the world is a huge network of physical cause-effect relationships. As Christians we may acknowledge that God is in control, but too often we tend to think it’s in some abstract theological sense. But Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

Natural History to the Glory of God

no, He is the source of all water to quench the thirst of all the beasts (vv. 10, 11, 13) and trees (v. 16). And with those trees He provides birds with good places to nest and sing (vv. 12, 17).

He feeds and provides habitat for the wild beasts too (vv. 18, 21, 22, 25-28). God provides grass for the cattle and crops for us to cultivate (v. 14).

Also, He is the source of wine and bread to gladden and sustain our hearts and oil to make our faces shine (v. 15). It’s also important to consider that God doesn’t obligate himself to sustain all things. When He takes away their breath (and He does), they die and return to dust (v. 29). And lastly, God’s Spirit is what creates them all (v. 30).

3. God uses examples from the biological world of how to and how not to behave. Here is one of the former: “Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise (Prov. 6:6).” Ants are obviously industrious and the Word of God points to them as an example of how lazy people can learn a thing or two about hard work. Here is one of the latter: “Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you (Ps. 32:9).” Here the lesson is to avoid stubbornness.

4. God humbles us by showcasing some of his extraordinary creatures as he did with Job. In answer to all of Job’s complaints, God does not respond with some heady philosophical justification for allowing Satan to afflict Job with intense, prolonged, and excruciating emotional and physical hardship, pain, and disease. Instead he simply gives Job a powerful natural history lesson including who created, controls, and sustains the earth, the sea, the water cycle, the heavens, and the animals. He also reminds Job of Job’s inability to control the constellations and his lack of knowledge and control of the mountain goats (including their gestational periods), the wild donkey, the wild ox, the ostrich, the horse, the hawk, and the eagle. His grand finale is in chapters 40 and 41 where he showcases a couple of his most awesome and mighty creatures – the Behemoth and Leviathan. Why does God do this? He is showing Job, in no uncertain terms, that He is Almighty God, the Creator, Controller, and Sustainer of all things. And that is the ultimate reason why He can allow bad things to happen to good people.

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In light of all of this truth, we should never conclude that studying the beauty, complexity, and diversity of nature in order to reveal God’s glory is just reserved for Bible characters. The clergy of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries took up the task with verve. Jonathan Edwards, the great eighteenth century Puritan of New England, described ballooning behavior of spiders.1 In 1717 John Ray wrote The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation.2 This is an early apologetic book, the title of which needs no explanation. Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist and the father of modern taxonomy, wrote two great works of classification in the eighteenth century: Systema Naturae3 and Species Plantarum4. The former work is more general in scope; the latter is devoted to plants.

On the title page in Systema Naturae, he quotes Psalm 104:24 to highlight his primary motivation. Gilbert White, an Anglican parson “ It’s also important of the eighteenth century, first published to consider that the famous work The Natural History of 5 God doesn’t Selborne in 1789, which is reputed to be the fourth most-published book in the obligate himself to English language. In it he writes about his sustain all things. observations of nature in his beloved vilWhen He takes lage of Selborne in the county of Hampaway their breath shire in southern England. Though he was (and He does), they the most well-known, it was often the case die and return to that parsons made an avocation of some facet of natural history. I would be remiss dust.” if I didn’t mention William Paley’s Natural Theology6 published in 1802. In this early apologetic work, he wonderfully articulates the intelligent design of biological organ function using the analogy of a watch and watchmaker.

Likewise, if we are to follow in the footsteps of King David, King Solomon, and these other God-fearing men, then it’s admirable to fan into flame any dormant interests we may have in living things. It is something that lay people, if the seed is there, should water and cultivate. If it draws us and others to seeing the handiwork of God, it should not to be considered a useless hobby. I have no desire to bind anyone’s conscience here.

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the living creatures they encounter. This is one enjoyable way get to know the creativity of our Heavenly Father. Even if something is already known, we shouldn’t let that discourage us. We should discover things firsthand. Even though theologians have written commentaries on every book of the Bible, it does not keep us from studying the Bible firsthand. Each of us should pursue some facet of the living world toward which we are already inclined. We need not go to some exotic destination. We can explore, observe, and discover the world outside our door.

their heart starts beating again. They emerge from their burrow in the spring apparently no worse for the wear. Other common species of amphibians and reptiles of the higher latitudes, including common garter snakes, wood frogs, and painted turtles, also have this amazing ability.

THE MAGNIFICENCE OF THE MUNDANE

With this in mind, I would like to conduct a brief tour among a few seemingly ordinary living things that many of us have encountered. Each has extraordinary features that continue to astonish biologists. My goal is to suggest a new perspective so we can see the creation again…for the first time.

“Even though This is not an admonition to discover theologians have these particular things for ourselves (they might not live in our vicinity). It written commentaries is rather an encouragement to ponder on every book of the more deeply the things right outside Bible, it does not keep our door so that the mundane becomes us from studying the magnificent.

Bible firsthand.”

BOX TURTLE ANTIFREEZE

I did my dissertation research on eastern box turtle reproduction. This woodland denizen of the eastern half of the U.S. is quite familiar to those who live there. Although my field research did not involve over-wintering physiology, my general reading on this humble reptile revealed an extraordinary survival feature for those box turtles that have to survive frigid winters. They are designed to endure freezing and yet remain alive. During the autumn, their cells begin to produce biological antifreeze that prevents cellular freezing. Between the cells and in body cavities, however, ice formation occurs. Up to 58% of the body water can be frozen. Their heart stops! But when the spring thaw occurs, their internal ice melts and FALL 2018

JELLYFISH STINGERS

When swimming in the ocean, we are likely to encounter jellyfish. If we set aside for just a moment the unpleasantness of their stings, we can ponder the amazing intricacies of their wee weapons. Sprinkled over the surface of their dangling tentacles, which fringe the rim of their bellshaped body, are dense clusters of stinging cells called cnidocytes. Within these cells are exquisite organelles called nematocysts. Within each there is a microscopic, flexible hypodermic harpoon.

This harpoon is an extremely tiny thread neatly coiled up within the nematocyst, like the insideout finger of a rubber glove. Given the appropriate stimulus, like a fish blundering into the tentacles, each cnidocyte discharges. Like a jack-in-thebox, the nematocysts explosively turn inside out due to a sudden increase in water pressure. As they do so, spines and stylets snap out like sideopening switchblades, cutting a microscopic hole in the prey (or swimmer). Right after the spines and stylets cut a hole, and also due to the water pressure increase, the thread is violently everted in exactly the same way we pop out the insideout fingers of a rubber glove by blowing into the hand of the glove. The difference is water pressure rather than air pressure. Also, in the case of the nematocyst thread, it is just one relatively long Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

Natural History to the Glory of God

“finger” with an open end. As the thread turns right side-out and plunges into the prey, neurotoxins stored within each nematocyst are injected through the thread and into the tissues of the prey. These are designed to quiet the prey enough so that the jellyfish can ingest it without much resistance. One prey capture may cause discharges of hundreds to thousands of nematocysts. There isn’t just one kind of nematocyst. Biologists have discovered more than 20 kinds of these among the Cnidarians (jellyfish, coral, sea anemones, etc.) that function in defense, prey quieting, prey adhering, and prey entangling. Some are even involved in locomotion. These are truly amazing arsenals but are just one complexity among many intricate anatomical and physiological features of Cnidarians.

like the arm of the catapult being cocked. This tears open the sporangium which functions like the bucket of the catapult. The spores are the payload. At a certain point the annulus snaps forward, violently flinging the spores to the four winds. If the spores land on a suitable surface (moist soil), the next generation of ferns is begotten. This fantastical spore-flinging apparatus is extremely common wherever ferns grow, but few of us have actually seen this magnificent display of God’s Lilliputian handiwork.

HOUSEFLY HEAD RUSH

FERN CATAPULTS

Some of us may not have firsthand knowledge of jellyfish, but we have probably seen many ferns in our outdoor wanderings. Most ferns reproduce by spores rather than by seeds. If we observe the underside of a fern frond (leaf ) in the right season, we may see spots arranged in various patterns. This is where spores are produced. Each spot is called a sorus and is actually a cluster of stalked spore-containers (sporangia).

If we zoom down and observe one sporangium, we’ll find it looks like a tiny sphere perched on a stalk. A thick-walled band of cells called an annulus encompasses this packet of spores.

When the spores are ready, and as the sporangium dries, the annulus begins to bend back Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

“This fantastical spore-flinging apparatus is extremely common wherever ferns grow, but few of us have actually seen this magnificent display of God’s Lilliputian handiwork.”

Generally, we all look at houseflies with considerable disgust. This is largely due to their ill-mannered habit of landing on various forms of filth for dinner and then not having the good sense to sanitize their feet before they land on ours. But despite their unhygienic habits, they are yet another commonplace marvel of divine engineering. Houseflies belong to a group of flies called the Schizophora. This includes the flesh flies, Tsetse flies, stable flies, botflies, and blowflies (blue and green bottles). They all share an anatomical feature of a seam arching between their two large compound eyes (on their forehead). This crack marks the spot where the door of their face once closed. We all know that houseflies begin life with more revolting looks and habits than when they grow up. They don’t just visit squalor; they’re immersed in it. During these juvenile and adolescent weeks, we called them maggots, a disgusting name to match their nursery. These pallid, writhing worms consume

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their share of the earth’s refuse. As they do, they grow and go through several molts and finally begin metamorphosis. During metamorphosis “There are many the fly is within a little brown sausagebiological marvels shaped container. This container is dry both discovered and and parchment-like and is formed from undiscovered under the skin of the fully grown maggot when it shed to become the pupa. This cocoonour nose; within arm’s like bag, called the puparium, now houses reach, outside our the pupa. Another transformation occurs. door, or even on our The innards of the pupa liquefy and an house plants.” adult body forms within the pupal skin (This is starting to look like Russian dolls). There is an adult body inside the pupal skin which is inside the maggot skin. Now the fun begins. When the adult is ready to immerge, it easily slips out of the pupal skin but it requires a lot more oomph to break out of the more protective puparium. The maggot skin (puparium) has a circular seam forming a pop-off lid at the end where the adult is to emerge. It doesn’t actually say “tear here” because flies don’t need directions to open containers like we do. Even though it is pre-weakened, a nudge won’t budge it. For the fly to make its grand appearance, muscles in its abdomen contract, forcefully shoving blood to its head. This is a head rush of dramatic proportions. The trapdoor on the fly’s face pops open under the pressure and a balloon-like thing called a ptilinum inflates and billows out of its forehead. This blood bag pushes against the lid of the puparium, popping it open.

Like Houdini, the fly emerges triumphant from both its pupal and maggot skin. The bag deflates and is withdrawn into its head. Its face closes back up never to open again. The exoskeleton of the fly stiffens to the right firmness and then it flies away.

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There are many biological marvels both discovered and undiscovered under our nose; within arm’s reach, outside our door, or even on our house plants. They are waiting for us if we long to experience the creation outside the confines of our vocation. It helps immensely if we have an innate love of living things and a desire to see the creativity and wisdom of the living God in the form and function of biological life. Careful observational skills and patience are great assets, but they can be developed and honed. A pair of binoculars and a decent stereomicroscope are excellent tools to help us explore, discover, and enjoy. “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who have pleasure in them” (Psalm 111:2).

But if you’re drawn to pursue a vein in the liberal arts other than what I’m suggesting, say Trinitarian theology, church architecture, astronomy, American history, or English poetry, do it heartily unto the Lord, and I’ll try not to get in your way.

1 Jonathan Edwards, “Of Insects and Spiders: Scientific Writings by Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758),” A Puritan’s Mind, last modified October 10, 2018, http://www.apuritansmind. com/puritan-favorites/jonathan-edwards/scientific-writings/of-insects/.

2 John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation, (London: The Ray Society, 2005).

3 Carl von Linné, Carolus Linnaeus Systema Naturae: Facsimile of the First Edition, 1735. B. De Graaf, 1964.

4 Carolus Linnaeus, et al. Species Plantarum: a Facsimile of the First Edition 1753, (London: The Ray Society, 1957).

5 Gilbert White and Richard Mabey, The Natural History of Selborne, (New York: Penguin Books, 1987).

6 William Paley, et al., Natural Theology: or, Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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The

MARVELAND MYSTERY of Man

WONDERFUL WORLD

Looking out of my study window as I prepare to write, a beautiful clear blue sky bathes the afternoon in bright sunlight making the vivid colours of autumn leap out across the Niagara Escarpment. It is a tranquil scene, and as a brilliant yellow leaf flutters to the ground in the breeze, I am reminded of the inviolate order and structure of God’s creation; the glorious, unassuming regularity of it all. Everywhere one looks, in the shortening of the days, the colour transformation of the trees and the hurried activity of squirrels, creation reveals it is constantly subject to the Word of God. From the myriad of insects clearing up the debris on the forest floor, to the constant activity in every invisible cell of the body – enabling us to experience these marvels daily – all things move in cosmic time in terms of a pattern and purpose by God’s ordination.

There is an extreme cognitive dissonance going on with the person who can look out on a stunning fall day and say to himself that this world is nothing but happenstance, rationalizing creation away into emptiness as a chance occurrence.

Every day is a masterpiece and a miracle – most especially the life of human beings, God’s imagebearers and the pinnacle of creation. The brilliant and blind Italian opera singer, Andrea Bocelli, has said it beautifully: Every life is a work of art, and if it does not seem so, perhaps it is only necessary to illuminate the room that contains it.

The secret is never to lose faith, to have confidence in God’s plan for us, revealed in the signs with which he shows us the way…and never forget that there’s no such thing as happenstance. That’s an illusion Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

lawless and arrogant men invented so that they could sacrifice the truth of our world to the laws of reason.1

The Bible’s teaching concerning the true character of God’s cosmic work of art, particularly the special creation of humanity, is tragically neglected in much of the modern church. We hear the call from many pulpits for justice, compassion, and personal piety, but we have failed to answer the fundamental question of what a human being is. This inattention has contributed not only to a crisis in our understanding of human identity, but to the decay of the culture around us as the assault on man as God’s image-bearer in the name of autonomous reason has continued unabated and largely unchallenged.

What the Christian family, school and church believe and teach about creation is vital because it clearly determines both how we understand and live in the cosmos God has created. Compromise with the doctrine of creation has always led to an undermining of the church’s confidence both in the sovereign power of God, and a scriptural view of the human person. Both need to be recovered for the proclamation of the gospel in our time. There has never been a more important moment for God’s people to affirm and defend the marvel and mystery of creation with men and women as uniquely God’s imagebearers. In view of this it is vital to first turn attention to Scripture.

CREATION THROUGH CHRIST’S POWERFUL WORD

The unparalleled and singularly remarkable account of creation given in Genesis 1 and 2 sets out the power and wisdom of God in creating an awe-inspiring and intricately ordered

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JOSEPH BOOT JOSEPH BOOT is the founder of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and the founding pastor of Westminster Chapel in Toronto. Before this, he served with Ravi Zacharias as an apologist in the UK and Canada, working for five years as Canadian director of RZIM. Joe earned his Ph.D. in Christian Intellectual Thought from Whitefield Theological Seminary, Florida. His apologetic works have been published in Europe and in North America and include Searching for Truth, Why I Still Believe and How Then Shall We Answer. His most noted contribution to Christian thought, The Mission of God, is a systematic work of cultural theology exploring the biblical worldview as it relates to the Christian’s mission in the world. His latest volume, Gospel Witness, develops this theme and serves as a primer on Christian evangelism and apologetics. Joe serves as Senior Fellow for the cultural and apologetics think-tank truthXchange in Southern California, is Senior Fellow of cultural philosophy for the California based Centre for Cultural Leadership, and is director of the annual Wilberforce Academy training program in Cambridge U.K. Joe lives in Toronto with his wife, Jenny, and their three children, Naomi, Hannah, and Isaac.

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cosmos. There we read of the creation of all things from nothing, of clear distinctions placed by God within the created order, and of the unique creation of human beings different in kind from mineral, vegetable and animal life. Of course, it is not only Genesis that speaks about creation through the powerful Word of God. It is easy to see the Son of God personified as wisdom in the work of creation in Proverbs 8:22-31:

“Yet it is not simply that Christ is the one through whom all things were made; he is also the one to whom all things belong.”

“The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.

Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water.

Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth,

before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world.

When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,

when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.

Notice especially the delight of the personified word and wisdom of God in his creation, particularly in humanity.

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The word ‘possessed’ in verse 22 can be translated ‘begot.’ This is significant because in Colossians 1:15-20 the apostle Paul twice refers to Christ as the ‘firstborn.’ Firstly, over all creation as having absolute priority, being heir and inheritor of all things. Then also as the ‘firstborn from the dead,’ having priority in redemption.

This passage crucially links creation and redemption as a unified totality in Jesus Christ, pointing to the ultimate destiny of redeemed humanity in resurrection life. In fact, in Colossians, Paul affirms that all things in the entire cosmos, visible and invisible, including all powers and authorities, both heavenly and earthly, were created through and for Christ. The same thought is reiterated elsewhere by Paul (cf. Eph 1:7-23). In Romans 11:36 he writes, “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.

To Him be the glory forever. Amen.”

It is important to tease out the profundity of this biblical theme. It reveals that Christ is the mediator of the totality of everything that exists – all things were created through him. Yet it is not simply that Christ is the one through whom all things were made; he is also the one to whom all things belong – all things were made for him.

Consequently, amongst many other implications, it means all people, in everything they say and do, are accountable to Christ the creator. He is the reason and the end of all things, the essence of their meaning-fullness. Further still, the apostle Paul tells us Christ is the one in whom all things hold together, by which they are sustained moment by moment. If we pull these threads together, the scriptures teach us that creation is an instantiation or a concretization of the powerful Word of God. Moment by moment, day by day and year after year, creation is upheld, sustained, directed and subject to His word.

The well-known opening to John’s gospel, so reminiscent of Genesis 1, tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things we made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” In addition, consider Hebrews 1:1-3, which brings out the same thought as Colossians: Christ is the creator, heir and upholder of all things: Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

The Marvel and Mystery of Man

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.

All of this tells us that creation is literally unthinkable apart from the living Word of God, by whom all things are created, preserved and directed. In short, Jesus Christ is the key to the meaning of creation.

There is therefore no room in Scripture for us to begin our thinking about creation by synthesizing the biblical picture with elements of pagan thought. Stated in modern scientific jargon, the pagan view holds that at some infinite point of density (matter/energy being somehow eternal), via a quantum fluctuation of a vacuum, everything existing spontaneously evolved through innumerable stages of development over inconceivable aeons into their present form. A scenario in which, following abiogenesis2 (theistically conceived or not), after countless millennia of death, disease, chance mutation and suffering, a group of higher hominids finally appeared, developing self-consciousness and cultural awareness. In the theistic version they are subsequently ‘elected’ by God for the task of being our progenitors.

Are we really to believe that these ideas square with God’s wisdom and omnipotence, or that they can be reconciled with the special creation of man and woman as his image-bearers? How could such a chaotic and mindless process have been declared ‘very good’ as a manifestation of God’s power, will and goodness? How might such ideas be spun into a revelation of Christ, the creating and sustaining Word and anti-type of Adam? There is absolutely no submission to Scripture in such a fanciful and idolatrous scenario. Such a process is not the work of the eternal Son who by his powerful Word calmed storms, healed lepers, turned water to wine, raised Jairus’ daughter, or healed the centuriEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

on’s servant with a simple word. This is not the Christ who commanded a decaying Lazarus to come out of his grave restored to life, and who will raise us from the dust of the earth at the last day in the twinkling of an eye!

Many professing Christians have convinced themselves that some form of reconciliation of these antithetical religious premises must be accomplished, but such an impulse is doomed from the start. When we observe creation, we are not looking at a revelation of chance and chaos or some mysterious entelechy.3 Instead, when we reflect on any part of creation, including ourselves, we are contemplating an aspect of God’s Word-revelation through the Son. In creation we are actually able to discern God’s laws for creation and the norms of God’s creational Word for life as we are illuminated and directed

by Scripture. This law-word for creation through Christ is inaudible and invisible, yet clearly discernable in its effects (cf. Ps. 19:1-4).

CREATION IS MEANING

“...creation is literally unthinkable apart from the living Word of God, by whom all things are created, preserved and directed... Jesus Christ is the key to the meaning of creation.”

It is possible, of course, for this revelation to be supressed, perverted or ignored.

Expressing a distortion of God’s Wordrevelation in creation because of man’s fallen condition, many Greco-Roman philosophers taught that all things were held together by Zeus or by the logos (an abstract concept of divine reason) in order to try and find an adequate ground that might account for unity in diversity (i.e. meaning) in the cosmos. Ever since, unbelievers have sought an immanent solution to the meaning of all things, from the mythical gods (who are stationed inside the cosmos) to mind, reason, feeling, or just matter and energy.

Yet Scripture, and creation itself, make plain that no philosophy, theology or form of science can establish the meaning of things. This is because the meaning of all things is already given with creation – ours is a designed and predefined world so there are no brute, uninterpreted facts. We do not inhabit a chaotic, plastic world where man can re-define himself FALL 2018

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or anything else in terms of his own imagination. All true meaning is grounded in God’s order for creation. As Gordon Spykman has explained: All scientific endeavor…is therefore a discovery process. In acquiring knowledge, whether theoretical or practical, we are always and only responding creatures, set within ordered surroundings of a stable (but not static) and unfolding (but not evolving) cosmos. Scientific inquiry is therefore a limited, humble, subservient and tentative undertaking. It can only describe by empirical analysis the data and phenomena at hand. Its tools cannot penetrate to an original and fundamental explanation of the meaning of things. For this we are dependent on revelation, reflexively present in creation and noetically disclosed in Scripture…; creation does not merely have such “ Creation is meaning, meaning, which we are at liberty to reckon with or not. Nor does it await and our lives are full our attempts to lend it meaning. of meaning because of Creation is meaning. It is therefore Christ’s creating and meaningful or full of meaning.4

redeeming word.”

This is a critical insight. Creation is meaning, and our lives are full of meaning because of Christ’s creating and redeeming word. Christians should become more deliberate about reflecting on the meaning-fullness of creation and the laws and norms which can be discerned there in light of Scripture. In each area of life God has established his law-order, placing all things in relationship to everything else – from plant and insect life, to higher animals, human life, marriage and family, human society and culture. The reality of this intricate interdependence means that neither the cosmos as a whole, nor any particular part of it, is self-sufficient.

Nothing exists by itself or for itself – including man – but consists in an unbreakable coherence with all other things by virtue of creation.

Another way to express this thought is to say that each aspect of reality points beyond itself to all the other aspects of reality so that no part of creation contains a resting point in itself (i.e. is not FALL 2018

self-explanatory), but rather refers us back to the creator in whom all things hold together. To illustrate, the famous physicist Isaac Newton, when asked, “what is gravity”? replied “I don’t know.”

The American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Linus Pauling, said the same when he was asked what a chemical bond is. Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, a physicist noted for Coulomb’s law and ground-breaking work on electrostatic forces and friction, refused to try to define electricity. This is because all these concepts represent functions of material things, but have no ‘is,’ no independent existence.5 Because God has placed everything in all creation in relationship to all other things, most especially man in relation to others and with Himself, creation is meaning.

But the meaning is radically distorted when some aspect of creation is thought of as self-sufficient.

God alone is self-sufficient existing from and for himself in eternal relational community.

This meaning character of reality indicates that all creation is relative, whilst God alone is absolute; all things are relative to each other and as a whole are related back to and dependent upon Christ the creator, existing for his glory.

This includes man himself. All attempts to absolutize any aspect of creation as though a resting point, a point of final explanation, a totality of meaning, can be found within it – whether energy, matter, man’s thinking, feeling or cultural life – is idolatry.

None of these aspects of our human experience can be placed in isolation as self-sufficient (even thinking and feeling) without destroying their beautiful coherence. The fullness or totality of meaning is found in Christ alone, to whom all things in heaven and earth are related.

Consider the image of a prism. As a single shaft of light passes through a prism it is refracted into a diversity of rays made up of seven bands of color.

Each band is a dependent refraction of white light.

No one band of light can be thought of as the sum of the various colours and none of them exists without an unbreakable coherence with all the others. If white light is blocked before being refracted, all the colors vanish into nothing, and yet white light itself is not found in the refracted Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

The Marvel and Mystery of Man

colors. The non-refracted white light represents a totality to which all the aspects point.

God’s creation law-word is the totality of meaning behind the diversity of aspects in creation.

God’s decree for creation is refracted into a multiplicity of binding and authoritative words for all the spheres of reality. From the invisible cellular structure of the human body and the binding laws obeyed by numerous microscopic machines in those cells every moment of each day, to Christ’s creational norms for sexuality, marriage, family, work, learning and rest; from the physiological structure of the blue whale to abstract mathematical and logical laws and the invisible laws of aesthetic value; from the structure of spiritual principalities and angelic beings, to the law-order for the state, Christ’s Word created, sustains and governs it all (Eph. 1:7-23).

All the varied laws and structures of his creation hold firm despite the death and decay present in the world due to sin, and the norms established for creation (which can be violated by man) are unchanged (cf. Gen. 8:21-22). Without a foundational religious commitment to a scriptural view of creation as God’s law-order, there can be no ultimate meaning in anything, and the human personality disappears into nothingness. This is what we can affirm of creation in general from a scriptural standpoint. Now I want to focus in on man as the pinnacle and king of God’s creation.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

A central theme in Scripture is the privileged place of human beings within creation, beginning with our first parents, set in the garden of God as vicegerents6 over the created order. The wonder of man is that he occupies a kingly position as the religious centre of the temporal cosmos.

Remember, Christ the king and creator is himself made man, the last Adam, establishing continuity between creation and redemption (1 Cor. 15:45).

We therefore see in the Bible that everything in the universe, by God’s creational purpose, is specifically related to human beings. So much so that our Fall into sin impacted all of creation; the cosmos itself now awaits our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies, before it will be reEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

leased from its bondage to decay (Rom. 8:19-23).

The significance of the human person is truly a marvel, and yet the question ‘what is man’ is by no means simple to answer.

THE MYSTERY OF THE SELF

The question who and what is man as God’s “...from the image-bearer, in his selfhood, that is, in the structure unity of his existence, is a profound one that involves a mystery. The embodied of spiritual person, the unity you know as ‘I,’ the one principalities and who thinks, feels, hears, imagines, believes angelic beings, to and acts, somehow transcends (cannot be the law-order for reduced to) the functions of thinking, feelthe state, Christ’s ing, acting, knowing, and believing. In Word created, other words, ‘I’ experience these various sustains and act structures of my existence within the various aspects of created reality. The selfgoverns it all.” hood is the central point of reference of all this concrete functioning but is itself not defined or qualified by thinking or believing or willing.

Put simply, “I” cannot be reduced to or simply identified with any of these various acts.

Our very bodies find their unity in the ‘I-ness’ which somehow transcends creational structures.

The inner selfhood and our outer physicality are bound so closely together as a whole that we experience our physical presence as our body, not a body. And yet we cannot be reduced to the physical chemistry of the brain or biological functions of our bodily make-up. Our bodies are accessible to various types of scientific analysis because of their physical composite character, but as Kalsbeek has pointed out: The human I is not a composite or configuration of elements. For this reason, the human I is and remains the great mystery for a philosophical anthropology; its simple, singular nature is not accessible to analysis. We cannot form a theoretic concept of the human selfhood.7

We cannot know what a human being is simply by analysis of her physical components, nor can we know what a human person is simply by the “I-thou” relationship we sustain to our fellow human beings – for there we are confronted with FALL 2018

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the same problem of identity. We can only know what a human being is when related back to our origin in God who made man in his image. This image is expressed in our ability to know and worship God and our response-ability (which is different from animals) to re-present God in creation. It is from this religious relation to God that our relationship to the rest of creation and our fellow man finds its meaning.

THE MAKE-UP OF MAN

From ancient times till now thinkers investigating creation have distinguished various realms or dimensions of cosmic reality. “ A vital distinction Generally, we recognise the following in Scripture is that distinctions in creation: An inorganic the only creature in dimension – stones, mountains, hyheaven or earth made drogen molecules; an organic or biotic in the image of God, dimension – plant life etc.; a psychical after his likeness, is dimension – the realm of animals posman, made male and sessing some form of consciousness and feeling – lower groups have perceptions female.” or sensations because of sense organs, while higher groups (like birds and mammals) have not only instincts and reflexes but feelings of a sort and various drives; and finally we have the spiritive dimension of human beings who have, on top of all these other things, a richly developed thought and cultural life, making knowledge-based decisions of will. So, we can readily identify inanimate things, plants, lower animals, higher animals and man.

We observe in Genesis 1 the formation of these basic realms. In verse one we have the appearance of material things on the first day of creation – heaven and earth, or cosmic reality, is spoken into being giving us the inanimate world. In verse twelve, on the third day, plant life, or the biotic and organic order is created. In verse twenty-one, on the fifth day, we read of the creation of lower animals, so that the psychical world of sensation comes into being. In verse twenty-five, on the sixth day, the higher animals are created. This is a richer psychical realm that includes feeling or basic emotion. Then in verse twenty-seven, on the sixth day, we read of the special creation of man and the introduction of the spiritive element into creation in addition to everything else.

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Clearly then there are very different structures within the rich diversity of creation. These are not just differences of degree, but of kind. Not all of it is of the same nature and so these distinct realms cannot be reduced to one another.

Though clearly not aiming at an exact scientific categorization, the apostle Paul affirms as much in 1 Cor. 15:39-41: Not all flesh is the same flesh; there is one flesh for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish.

There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is different from that of the earthly ones. There is a splendor of the sun, another of the moon, and another of the stars; for one star differs from another star in splendor.

A vital distinction in Scripture is that the only creature in heaven or earth made in the image of God, after his likeness, is man, made male and female. Accordingly, he has a particular kind of splendor as the head of creation. The whole cosmos finds its centre in man – the raison d’etre of creation.8 Christ Jesus emphasized the central place of man clearly, not only by his own incarnation, but by the relative value he placed on human beings. He cursed a fruitless tree and it withered, but healed the lepers, the blind and deaf wherever he found them.

When delivering the man possessed by a legion of devils at Gennesaret, he permitted them to go into a herd of pigs which ran off a cliff to their deaths. He even taught that the seventh day (the sabbath) was made for man, not man for the sabbath (Mark 2:27).

Two outstanding Christian philosophers in the last century, Herman Dooyeweerd and D. H. Vollenhoven, identified five structural layers to the human person, forming an intricate complex of functions.9 Their framework provides a very helpful insight for resisting the reduction of human beings to less than they are, which leads to all manner of marring God’s image, including anthropomorphizing animals and zoomorphizing man. This framework is laid out in the following chart: Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

The Marvel and Mystery of Man

Now what is critical to note in terms of combating humanistic conceptions of the human person within the church is that each new layer presupposes all those below, but the new structure cannot be derived from or reduced to the previous layer.

If either the various aspects of created reality or the distinct structural layers of man are reduced to each other, then we are confronted with the essence of paganism and monism – that all distinctions are unreal and at best illusory. In other words, the physical structural facet of man cannot produce the biotic or mental layers. As Willem Ouweneel explains: We cannot construe here some evolutionary process in which higher forms of life gradually acquire a new structural layer, which supposedly sprouts from the previous structural layers … each structural layer represents an essentially new and different mode of existence, a new level of organization, irreducible to previous structural layers. There is no developmental process involved.10

The notion of abiogenesis followed by gradual development is essentially a form of evolutionary animism because it denies the irreducibility of one aspect of the created order and one layer of man’s being to another so that everything is viewed as essentially ‘alive’ in a continuity of being. If this is not resisted, all the distinctions within creation begin to fall, not only between male and female but between man, animal and inanimate things.

THE REDUCTION OF MAN

Scriptural faith teaches that man is truly distinct from the animals and all other forms of life, deEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

spite being made from similar stuff. Human beings have a mental or spiritive structural layer that makes us stand at an infinite distance from even the higher animals. A chimp, for example, cannot play chess, read a novel, develop a mathematical equation, play the piano, paint a picture or build a space craft! Chimps do not develop culture and so have no cultural history. Something as simple as showing embarrassment is beyond a chimpanzee. Although a chimpanzee has all the physiology necessary to blush, it never blushes (even after flinging poo!), because it lacks the spiritive/ mental structural life of a human being.

It is true that we share the first four structural layers identified by Dooyeweerd and Vol“Scriptural faith lenhoven with higher animals, but even teaches that man is then, man’s flesh, as St. Paul teaches, is distruly distinct from tinct from that of the animals. This is made clear by the fact that the physico-chemical the animals and all matter in humans must be capable of “carother forms of life, rying” not only the physiological processes despite being made (life), the perceptive and sensitive processes from similar stuff.” (as also seen in animals), but also the mental life of humans with our complex thoughts, deliberations, decisions, imagination and creative genius. As such, the physical structural layer in humans, not just the mental structure, is totally unique and capable of doing things that the physical structure in animals cannot do.

Most importantly, this uniqueness is why man is responsible for his actions. Because he is also a thinking, deliberating and moral being, man has response-ability! An animal does not. Ouweneel reinforces this point: The important conclusion from this is that the creation of humans required not only FALL 2018

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the special creation of the mental structural layer but also the special creation of the previous (physical, biotic, perceptive and sensitive) structural layers. In other words, human beings differ from plants and animals not only because people have a mental structural layer which animals do not, but also because humans have different physical, biotic, perceptive and sensitive structural layers than animals.11

The effort to minimize the uniqueness of humanity began early, revived with the Enlightenment, and has continued in a variety of ways which distort the marvel and mystery of man.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle sought to absolutize (that is, deify) the life-aspect of creation; his position is what philosophers later called vitalism. Later, other forms of animism (i.e. materialism) emerged which reduced “ The effort to man and all life to the physical, denyminimize the ing the distinct reality of the mental or spiritive life of persons. This view was uniqueness of reinforced and advanced by Darwinhumanity began early, ism. The noted Russian materialist and revived with the biochemist Alexander Oparin, famous Enlightenment, and for his ‘primordial soup’ theory of the has continued in a origins of life, regarded the difference variety of ways which between actual life and other forms of matter as simply one of organisation distort the marvel and quality, “which obliges us to regard and mystery of man.” life as a special form of the motion of matter.”12 Here the substitute divinity concept is matter in motion. The unbeliever of necessity has to invent substitute gods to explain the development of everything.

In contrast to the materialist, the spiritualists (not spiritists) claim that matter is compressed energy – which is another word for mind – so that matter is actually spiritive in nature. In human beings, the spiritive (conscious mind) is said to have come to its fullest development. Both find the ground and explanation of all things inside tangible reality itself. Which is to say both look within creation for the origin of everything, nullifying the reality of man as God’s unique imagebearer and so destroying man as man.

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The consequences of this are far-reaching. Because of a denial of the scriptural perspective of man’s unique position in creation, man being reduced to one or other of the aspects in which he functions, we are faced today with an identity crisis for human beings.13 Where human beings are variously reduced to misunderstood aspects of created reality, where the origin and meaning of all things is sought completely within that aspect, is there any hope of locating the true meaning-fulness and unity of man?

THE UNITY OF MAN

Thankfully, in the Word of God human beings are not redacted to one of their parts but viewed holistically. For example, the emotional life of human beings cannot be isolated from everything else and then used as the source of all explanation (the same could be said for our physical, cultural and faith life). Rather, our emotions in the Bible are often associated with the heart, the kidneys and the bowels – physical organs. All parts of the human person are involved with each other in all human thoughts and actions.

According to Scripture, from the heart (as religious centre) spring the issues of life (Prov. 4:23).

The Word of God resists the Greek pagan view that divides the human person into parts as separate ‘substances’ (like physical substance and immortal soul substance) and instead teaches us that the whole person is a unity directed toward God, so that the body is devoted to God (Rom. 12:1) and the flesh yearns for God (Ps. 63:1).

We are not a “soul thing” inside another “body thing.” Certainly, my heart (as the unity of my person) is not physical, but neither is it a “thing” that can be simply distinguished from the body.

As human beings we do not think, feel, desire, or believe without a body. To imagine otherwise would be like speaking of a pianist without a piano. As for the question of life after death prior to the resurrection at the consummation of all things, the Christian is with Christ, but the Bible tells us next to nothing about it. It is only in resurrection that pianist and piano are restored to one another and redemption fully made maniEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

The Marvel and Mystery of Man

fest. Prior to this, the human person in death is radically broken.

The unity of the whole person is referred to in Scripture as the image of God, with the heart (or soul) as the centre and point of concentration of the human being. The Greek word for heart in Colossians 3:15 is kardia, where we get the English word ‘cardiac’. The term stands for our entire mental, emotional and moral activity. It is a figure for the hidden springs of one’s life denoting the center of inward life which either defiles our action or is renewed in righteousness. Thus 1 Peter 3:4 speaks of the hidden person of the heart.

Like the centre of a circle in relation to its circumference, or like rays of light coming through a lens converge in a focal point, so all the aspects of reality and all the layers of our functioning converge in the heart. It is in the heart that we find the indissoluble unity that is the human person. Scripture therefore identifies the heart as the origin of human thought and action, of conscience and moral awareness and as the organ of faith (see, e.g. Gen. 6:5; Ezek. 11:19; Matt.

5:19; Rom. 10:10). Most fundamentally the heart refers to the deepest creaturely orientation of human beings to our creator. This is why the heart is not accessible to the sciences, because it goes before and brings together temporal functions and structure – it is known only by divine revelation. This is the mystery of man.

This is the reason we can only find our rest in God. We are both immanent and transcendent beings. Immanent in that we are totally bound to creation as creatures; transcendent in that God has set eternity in our hearts. We were made for eternal fellowship with the triune God, and in the root of our being (the heart) we are turned toward our maker who is truly transcendent. As Augustine famously put it, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.”14 It should be no surprise that we cannot be reduced to one of our temporal functions like logical thinking, which arbitrarily abstracts one function as the ‘essence’ of man and denies the rest. There is no such thing as “man in himself,” Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

there are only human beings in religious relation to God. There is no true understanding of man without the truth of man as a holistic unity, as God’s creature made for relationship with him, and called to serve him in the cosmos.

THE CALLING OF MAN

So where does the rubber meet the road in the Christian vision of humanity? If man is not “...the heart is not a dualistic being consisting of two or more accessible to the things, a higher and lower part, material sciences, because substance and soul substance; if he is in it goes before and fact a unity, with all his functions coming to focus in the heart, then every aspect of brings together life and culture matters. Creation is meantemporal functions ing. We cannot focus solely on a so-called and structure – it spiritual life. Our bodies, relationships, is known only by sexual life, vocational life, family life, and divine revelation.” everything we do in all God’s cosmos really counts. There is no part of creation ‘lesser’ or ‘evil’ in itself. There is no such thing as a sacred/ secular, higher/lower, spiritual/material division in creation. Redemption is for the whole person and every aspect of creation. What someone does in the body, they do with the whole person. It is in this depth dimension that we can understand man as created for fellowship with God and loving service to God, directing all things for his glory – though now we are fallen in every part of our being and in need of redemption.

We have talked about the structure of things in creation which refers to its orderliness as it was originally, and as God’s Word in his Son still impinges upon it, calling it back to what it is still meant to be and to what it will one day become. This structure is held together at every moment by God’s gracious Word. But direction concerns the orientation of those aspects of life – to creational life as it is now distorted and misdirected through our fall into sin. All creation has been affected by it.

However, in Christ’s reconciling work, all things are in principle renewed and being directed toward obedience to Christ – made subject to him (Heb. 5:5-8). The structures for creation stand forever, whilst the structures of creation are fallen in Adam. Because of his faithfulness to his promFALL 2018

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ise, God upholds and maintains those orders for creation, but apart from Christ, our life within them remains misdirected. In him, we experience the restoration of our lives, beginning with our hearts, and the power to redirect those structures towards obedient service to Christ.

It is for this reason that we need deliverance from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light.

It is for this reason that a religious antithesis runs through the hearts and lives of all people and the totality of life. Yet the cosmic order of creation that Christ sustains is the pattern for redemption; the renewing impact of the cross and resurrection enters into the fabric of creation, including us, “for if any man be in Christ he is a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). This means the image of God is being restored in us by the One who is the “...the one “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15).

who is the image of the invisible God, by his Spirit dwells in us and is restoring us to that image.”

As a people renewed in Christ we have a calling to bring the order of our life in the world, whether in the pulpit, politics, pasture or policing; in the classroom, the marketplace and in the home, into conformity with God’s order for life in the world.

In another mystery, as his body, we are assured that, “As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” (1 Cor. 15:48-49).

The practical result in our everyday lives is that the one who is the image of the invisible God, by his Spirit dwells in us and is restoring us to that image – fully realized in the fullness of our inheritance in the resurrection.

This restoration occurs in our daily tasks. Christ’s authority as the image of God becomes ours as we are renewed in him, reflecting his glory and re-presenting him on earth by our total physical presence – in short, we make Christ visible as his body. What we do here and now has eternal value and significance.

that life is to participate in the reconciliation of all things to God. The mystery of life is that when the dead in Christ are raised as whole persons, the land and sea shall give up their dead, and God will make his dwelling with us in a renewed earth and heaven so that we can say with Job, “in my flesh shall I see God” (Job 19:26).

1 2 3

The Music of Silence, 2018, Picomedia.

The unguided origin of life from non-life.

That is, an impersonal vital agent or force directing growth and life.

4 Gordon Spykman, Reformational Theology: A New Paradigm for doing Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

5 See Magnus Verbrugge, Alive: An Enquiry into the Origin and Meaning of Life, (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1984), 131.

6 A vicegerent is a person appointed by a ruler or sovereign to act as an administrative deputy 7 Kalsbeek, Contours of a Christian Philosophy (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2002), 293.

8 This literally means the reason for its existence.

9 This is explained well by Willem Ouweneel in his book Searching the Soul (Jordan Station, ON: Paideia Press, 2014).

10 Willem J. Ouweneel, Adam Where are You and Why this Matters: A Theological Evaluation of the Evolutionist hermeneutic? (Jordan Station, ON: Paideia Press, 2018), 178-179.

11 Ouweneel, Adam, 181.

12 Verbrugge, Alive, 147.

13 Spykman identifies several common views that result from this effort to absolutize any aspect of the created world. For a more detailed discussion of some of these ideas see, Spykman, Reformational Theology.

14 Augustine, Confessions Book 1, New Advent, last modified 2017, http://www.newadvent. org/fathers/110101.htm.

The gift of life is a marvel. The glory of life is that we have been redeemed. The opportunity of FALL 2018

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