The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy (Academic Paperback)

186 Pages·2004·10.06 MB·English

by  Colin E. Gunton

THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION
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THE DOCTRINE OF
CREATION
Essays in Dogmatics, History
and Philosophy
Edited by
COLIN E. GUNTON
for the
Research Institute in Systematic Theology
King's College, London
T&.T CLARK INTERNATIONAL
A Continuum imprint
LONDON • NEW YORK
Published by T&T Clark International
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Copyright © T&T Clark Ltd 1997
First published 1997
This edition published 2004
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 056708079X (paperback)
Typeset by Waverley Typesetters, Galashiels
Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Limited,
Wiltshire, UK
Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
Colin E. Gunton
1. ASPECTS OF A DOCTRINE OF CREATION 17
Robert W. Jenson, Professor of Religion, St. Olaf
College, Northfield, Minnesota
2. ETERNAL CREATION: THE DOCTRINE OF THE
TWO STANDPOINTS 29
Paul Helm, Professor of the History and
Philosophy of Religion, King's College, London
3. BETWEEN ALLEGORY AND MYTH: THE
LEGACY OF THE SPIRITUALISING OF GENESIS 47
Colin E. Gunton, Professor of Christian Doctrine,
King's College, London
4. THE END OF CAUSALITY? THE REFORMERS
AND THEIR PREDECESSORS 63
Colin E. Gunton, Professor of Christian Doctrine,
King's College, London
5. CREATIO EXNIHILO AND THE SPATIO-
TEMPORAL DIMENSIONS, WITH SPECIAL
REFERENCE TO JÜRGEN MOLTMANN
AND D. C. WILLIAMS 83
Alan J. Torrance, Senior Lecturer in Systematic
Theology, King's College, London
6. CREATION AND ESCHATOLOGY 105
Daniel W. Hardy, formerly Director of the Center of
Theological Inquiry, Princeton
1. DIVINE AND HUMAN CREATIVITY 135
Brian Home, Lecturer in Christian Doctrine,
King's College, London
vi THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION
8. GOD, CREATION AND THE CHRISTIAN
COMMUNITY: THE DOGMATIC BASIS OF
A CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF CREATEDNESS 149
Christoph Schwobel, Professor of Systematic
Theology, University of Kiel
INDEX 177
Introduction
Colin E. Gunton
I Time for Reconsideration?
It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that in the modern
world the doctrine of creation has in many places given way to
discussions of the relation between science and religion. This
is partly the result of the laicisation of the doctrine in the
early modern age,1 partly of an even earlier tendency to restrict
or prepare for its discussion in what is effectively natural
theology. There have been, and increasingly are, exceptions:
notably Earth's rich dogmatic exposition, marred though it
is - as he himself acknowledged - by its almost complete lack
of reference to science; and, more recently, the work of
Moltmann, discussed in chapter 5 below, and Pannenberg's fine
trinitarian construction of the doctrine, which does take
account of science.2 In general, however, properly dogmatic
treatments are few and far between, so that this volume is an
attempt to begin to fill at least some of the gaps. The matter of
science, though not completely absent, is left on one side,
though a companion volume is in preparation which will to
some extent compensate. The centre of this book, however, is
to be found in a range of attempts to state the main features of
the Christian understanding of creation, in both historical and
systematic relations.
In that they are concerned in large measure with divine
action in and towards the world of time and space, the puzzles
of the doctrine of creation are parallel to those of christology,
yet different in important respects. One difference is that
whereas the doctrine of the incarnation speaks of the inter-
action of eternity and time in history, at a time that can be
approximately located, the same can by no means be said of
the doctrine of creation. It is indeed concerned with the
interaction of the eternal God and the world he has made. But
1 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle
Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986).
2 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, translated by Geoffrey
W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994).
1
2 THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION
whereas christology concerns God's involvement in a world
'already' made, creation is to do with the constituting of that
world 'in the beginning'.3 In those latter words, taken as they
are from one translation of the first verse of the book of Genesis,
is to be found the heart of the problem.4 The reason is that one
clue to the nature of a doctrine of creation is the way in which
it conceives the relation between eternity and time. If it is to
be meaningfully described as a doctrine of creation, however
minimal may be the conception, something must be articulated
about the relation between that which precedes the created
world, whether ontologically or in terms of time also, and that
which is in whatever sense caused by it. It might be said,
without much exaggeration, that in recent centuries most
theologians, with some notable exceptions, have handed over
the making of such an account to science, or what is thought
to be science. The result is that when science apparently
requires a deterministic or mechanistic view of the relation
between the eternal and the temporal, Christian theology at
least is hard pressed to maintain its traditional voice which
speaks of the free creation of the world by a personal God. To
be sure, the effect can be exaggerated, and has been, as in John
Dillenberger's characterisation of nineteenth-century disarray:
'the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may have
been one of the rare periods in history in which theology was
virtually impossible, when the crisis of language and imagin-
ation excluded the essential depth of both God and man'.5 It
must be remembered that the nineteenth century was also
that of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, makers of
twentieth-century physics and men who engaged in science
because they believed in the Christian doctrine of creation, not
because they found it an irrelevance or hindrance.
Today, things are much changed, although there is a degree
to which the leading proponents of versions of the doctrine of
creation, whether in generally Christian or Eastern religious
form, are still the scientists. Doctrines of creation in the broad
sense of accounts of the universe which refer its being in some
way or other to persons or forces transcendent of that universe
in however tenuous a sense, abound: almost a case of how many
3 The point of the quotation marks will become evident from the contents of
the essays.
4 'In the beginning' may not be the most accurate translation, but that is not
relevant to the point being made here, which is that historically, discussion
has been dominated by debates about the meaning of this particular form of
words.
5 John Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural Science (London: Collins,
1961), p. 253.
INTRODUCTION 3
cosmologists, so many theologies of creation. Even Hawking's
largely anti-theological account of the origin of the universe
occasionally uses the term 'God' in its speculations.6 And
leading scientists who are Christian believers also often shape
their accounts of creation as a divine act by abstracting from
features of the observed and theorised universe that they
believe to be open to a theological account.7
But so important is this matter that it cannot be left to
the scientists, for if creation is a theological question, then it
is necessary that theologians should offer their relatively in-
dependent account of what it is that they believe the doctrine
to teach. There was a tradition of creation theology before
Newton - indeed, his mechanistic world-view was antici-
pated in the work of mediaeval thinkers centuries before8
- and in the twentieth century there have been, as we have
already noted, at least three original trinitarian dogmatics
of creation, whether or not they are considered to engage
adequately with the characteristic challenges of our scientific-
ally dominated culture. It was with considerations such as
this in mind that the Research Institute in Systematic
Theology called a conference specifically to discuss central
aspects of the dogmatics of creation, widely interpreted to mean
aspects of creation on which Christian theology might be
conceived to have a bearing.
Four aspects came under review. The first is dogmatics
proper: simply attempting to state what it means for Christian
theology to affirm that God is the creator of the universe. Much
time is spent in the papers in discussion of the credal form of
the doctrine — 'I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of
heaven and earth' - and the classical discussions of that in St.
Augustine, the father of all Western theology, in particular.
Readers of this volume will find much criticism of Augustine,
but also some defence, for it is of the essence of this protean
thinker that he reviews a range of positions, not all of them
consistent with one another, so that the dogmatic and
philosophical doctrines which he rejects often form the basis of
different later developments. Not surprisingly, it is his many-
sided reflections on the nature of time and its relation to
eternity that feature in a number of the papers.
6 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time. From the Big Bang to Black
Holes (London: Bantam Press, 1988).
7 Arthur Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1979), is perhaps the finest extended account of such a possibility.
8 The evidence for this can be found in Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern
Science. Islam, China and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), e.g. p. 41.