Creation 3: The search for order

15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

(Colossians 1:15-20)

Perhaps we could understand human life best as the struggle to bring order out of chaos. Something deep in us predisposes us to like pattern, regularity, measure and coherence. We classify and designate as a way of holding back the encroaching and baffling complexity of the world. It makes the limitless universe of things containable in our limited minds. It makes it possible to ‘Get Things Done’. We are like trains needing tracks to run on.

The television show ‘Hoarders’ has been one of those great things that having extra channels has brought to Australian TV. In that show, the cameras visit a person suffering from the complete inability to deal with stuff in their life – someone whose house in filled to the brim with junk. Magazines, old tins of food, newspapers, unworn clothes, sentimental items, long dead pets and even used adult diapers fill the house to shoulder level. People haven’t slept on their beds for years because of the junk that is there. The fascination of this appalling show is that the mental illness in these people has led to a complete loss of the ability to order their domestic lives to the point at which it becomes completely overwhelming. I do somewhat suspect that my wife believes this is what I would become if I were to live on my own.

In this quest for order, we are like the God and Father of Jesus Christ. God is a God who not only brings something from nothing: he brings order from chaos. This is quite the opposite of the polytheistic worldview, in which the world around us is the result of the struggle between competing deities for supremacy. If you read Homer’s fabulous Iliad, that tale of human savagery and conflict, you cannot but fail to notice that the uncontrolled rage of the human beings at one other is mirrored by the heavenly wrestle of the Gods with one another. For Homer, human chaos and divine chaos are profoundly linked to one another.

The Bible’s version of things couldn’t be more different. Psalm 74, for example, which is a prayer from the ruins and devastating of fallen Jerusalem, presumes to remind God of his ordering activity in the creation of the world – it was he who ‘set all the boundaries of the earth’.

And of course, you can’t read the Genesis 1 account of creation and fail to be impressed by the way in which the creative activity of God is a movement from chaos to order. As a piece of writing, the opening chapter of the Bible exhibits an extraordinary order which is intended to mirror the ordering of God in the work of creation. The six days of creation are beautifully balanced, with the first three days providing the arena which is then successively filled in the next three days. God orders by acts of separation – light from darkness, water above from water below, land from sea. At the same time, the narrative builds so that the empty stage is increasingly filled with an abundance of life, leading up to the climax – the creation of the man and woman as creatures in God’s image.

The creatures are then created to order, ‘according to their kind’ – a strange phrase that must mean that the creatures that God makes are placed in the right place for them and together with others of their own kindred. There is we might say a generic order to the creatures of the earth. There is an affinity of the animals for each other – a likeness to each other and an individuality, in that a giraffe is not much like a lion. A giraffe is like a giraffe is like a giraffe.

The only creatures not so made are the human beings. They are not made ‘according to their kind’ but according to God’s kind – in his image and likeness, that is to say. Human beings resemble not only each other, but the divine being – and are given capacities to complete God’s task of bringing order to the creation, by tilling and filling, and naming and claiming. And so, unlike the animals, they share in God’s ordering of the world not just by organising it, but by bringing out its divinely-given purpose.

This is us at our best, isn’t it: with our minds, human beings can, through study and observation, find the order hidden in even chaotic things. We can study the apparent randomness of splash patterns. We can predict the movements of the stars. We can describe the mathematics of neutrinos, those mysterious sub-sub atomic particles.

This is the essence of wisdom, isn’t it? We see Solomon, the Bible’s byword for wisdom, as a collector and classifier of the things of the natural world in 1 Kings 4:29ff – ‘He described plant life, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls. He also taught about animals and birds, reptiles and fish’ (vs 33). Interestingly, this was God-given wisdom and insight: yet it was learnt through observation and study.

Recently I have been reading about the man who was arguably the greatest experimental scientist of the nineteenth century, Michael Faraday. A committed if slightly unusual Protestant Christian, it was Faraday who once said ‘the book of nature which we have to read is written by the finger of God.’

Faraday’s practice as a scientist was founded on his firm convictions as to the physical world created by God. He was convinced that the divine author had ordered the world according to certain laws that it was subsequently given to human beings to discover and of which they had a duty to make use.

Furthermore, the various powers which God had placed in the universe were part of a connected whole. Proceeding on this presupposition, Faraday was able to discover the remarkable connection between electricity and magnetism.

In a private lecture to Prince Albert in 1849, Faraday described how the whole universe seems to be shot through with the force of magnetism. He then said ‘What its great purpose is, seems to be looming in the distance before us… and I cannot doubt that a glorious discovery in natural knowledge, and of the wisdom and power of God in the creation, is awaiting our age.’ Here we see how Faraday thought of his science as an activity of faith. Each new discovery did not roll back or reduce the power of God, but rather expanded the realm of his glory and praise. As one of his biographers has said: ‘he conceived science to be closely akin to true Christianity, since order and peace were to be found in both.’

In our age of relentless ‘science vs religion’ debates, we have forgotten Faraday’s extraordinary, Solomon-like example. It is especially difficult for Christians who work in science and science-related professions to see how their work and their faith are intimately connected.

But sometimes our ordering cuts against the grain of the created order rather than running with it. Over-ordering can produce its own chaos, as we know when we try to turn animals into machines. Projecting a mechanical view of order onto an organism is a failure to reckon with the fact that there a different types of order, according to the things that need ordering. Order is not simply good in and of itself. We too readily superimpose the order that we find in one system on top of the order in another – or, we simplify, when complexity is needed.

One of the silliest things I have ever heard is that because God is a God of order this must mean that human babies ought to be fed on a four-hour routine. Routine feeding of babies may or may not be wise and practical, but it is an application of our modern, technological, human-perspective order to divine order, rather than the other way around. It claims to know too much about God’s ordering of the universe – more than is revealed to us. It is a confusion of types of order – the order of the clock with the order of the baby. Babies are not born with wrist-watches, strange to say; and yet (though they bring chaos to a household!) they are very much part of and a reflection of the divine ordering of things.

But there is another kind of ‘order’ that God brings to the world. It is more than simply ‘organisation’. As we discover in the New Testament, God has created the world with a purpose in mind. He has arranged it, but he has also purposed it.

We see this in the confession of the Colossian hymn (Col 1:15-20). It is a little statement filled to overflowing with rich theological meaning, isn’t it? The hymn doesn’t distinguish between the pre-incarnate Eternal Son who God loves and the incarnate Christ who dies on the cross – it unselfconsciously encompasses both. The beloved Son fulfills the destiny of humanity in that he is the ‘firstborn’ over all creation in that he is the heir of all things – the creation naturally falls to his possession and rule. It is he who is the true image of the invisible God, after all. And he is the agent of the creation of all things – they are created ‘by him’- and he is the sustaining power of all things: ‘in him all things hold together’. And things were created ‘for him’. He will encompass all things, and have the supremacy in all things.

And, such is Christ’s central role in accomplishing God’s purposes, that it is he who is the means of God reconciling all things to himself by making peace through his blood shed on the cross. The death of Christ ensures that creation fulfills its intended purpose.

We shouldn’t be surprised to see the themes of creation and redemption being interwoven in this passage. In fact, the Old Testament characteristically develops its theology of creation out of the experience of redemption in history (see Isaiah 40-55 for just one example). And this is a theological habit we should learn: the best view we have of the divine ordering of the universe is the view from 2Golgotha and the empty tomb – where we see the fulfillment of all God’s promises to Abraham and to Israel. This Christ is the logos, the wisdom by who the world was created and for who it was intended. It runs to his time.

And that is why we need to tell not only of the orderedness and coherence of the universe as a physical system to the glory of God but of his bring it to another kind of order by setting under the feet of his beloved Son, Jesus Christ. The human work of ordering the world is not only in sensing the inner order of things according to their kinds. It is also the work of bringing things to order under the rule of the creator and redeemer.

This may indeed lead us to a proper theology of church rosters. Church rosters of course are not commanded anywhere that I can see in Scripture (other than the widow’s list in 1 Timothy perhaps?). They are simply part of the ordering and patterning of community life according to the created givens of time, space, material resources and the human body. And yet, because these rosters hopefully serve in the building up of the people of God, they are playing a part in ordering all things according to their purpose.

Far-fetched? Not at all: it seems that Paul is making exactly this move when he reminds the Corinthians to clean up their liturgy in 1 Corinthians 14:33 on the basis that ‘God is not a God of disorder but of peace’. I am struck by the contrast here: disorder is matched not with order but with the deliberate choice of the word ‘peace’ – a word suggesting not merely pattern but purpose. The church’s life is to reflect the character of the God it serves not only by being organized, but by being marked by relationships of love for one another. Things are to be done in a fitting and orderly way in church not just because church is a place for people with obsessive compulsive disorder but because we are in the middle of God’s plan to bring his peaceful, redemptive order to the world.

Submission to the Inquiry on SRE and Ethics

Submission

to the Inquiry

into the

Education Amendment (Ethics Classes Repeal) Bill 2011

by

The General Purpose Standing Committee No. 2

of the

Legislative Council

BY

Rev Dr Michael P Jensen

Lecturer in Theology

Moore Theological College

Newtown

The Author

The author of this submission, Rev Dr Michael P. Jensen, lectures in theology at Moore Theological College in the Anglican diocese of Sydney. During the debate about ‘Special Education in Ethics’ in 2009-10, he contributed a number of written pieces to the media on the subject. His doctorate, from the University of Oxford, is in the area of Theological Ethics.

Summary

· My opinion is that there is no need to repeal the 2010 amendment to the Education Act at this time.

· The Education Act should be amended to specify a minimum time for SRE.

· Assurances should be given to SRE providers that the SRE ‘slot’ is not under threat.

· Future proposed syllabuses for Special Education in Ethics should be made available for discussion ahead of time.

1. The debate about the introduction of SEE (‘Ethics’) that took place over 2009-10 was not an edifying spectacle. On the one hand, it was clear from the many letters to newspapers, the comments on talk-back radio and the heated debates at local P&C meetings that there was a concerted campaign by some to push Ethics as a Trojan Horse against SRE (though this was not the intention of the St James Ethics Centre).

2. Likewise, there was a defensive reaction by SRE providers, who saw the proposed ‘Ethics’ programme as a hostile move against the longstanding friendly agreement between churches and the NSW government for the teaching of ‘Scripture’ in public schools.

3. This unnecessarily acrimonious debate was not helped by the unwillingness of those proposing the SEE programme to offer their syllabuses to scrutiny and public comment. The syllabuses were not revealed until the very last moment. It was very unclear to many people what was meant by ‘Ethics’.

4. The primary and most reasonable argument offered for the introduction of SEE was the need to provide a meaningful alternative to SRE for those children who opted out, as a matter of justice. Anecdotal (and sometimes lurid) evidence about children watching DVDs and collecting rubbish was put forward. However, the introduction of SEE does not necessarily solve the alleged problem at all. It is still possible for a child to opt out of both SRE and SEE. These children are still not catered for.

5. Despite the grandiose claims made for it by both sides, the Ethics syllabus is simply a course in philosophical reasoning which deliberately attempts to be as neutral as possible. One of the difficulties is that Dr Simon Longstaff from the St James Ethics Centre uses the term ‘Ethics’ in a quite a narrow, technical sense to mean ‘the process of moral reasoning’. The person-in-the-street meaning of the word suggests a more developed system or ideology of morality. From my point of view as a Christian theologian and ethicist, what the SEE course offers is just as likely to prompt religious exploration as it is to shut it down. It could easily be incorporated into a Christian world-view.

6. The longstanding provision for the teaching of SRE in NSW is an indication that the shape that secular education has always taken in our state is very different to that which exists in the USA or in France. Australia has no state church; but the government and religious organisations have a long tradition of friendly co-operation at a number of levels. ‘Secular’ does not mean ‘freedom from religion’ in Australia but rather ‘freedom of religion’. Nonetheless, SRE providers should regard their access to public schools as a privilege and not a right.

7. SRE was provided in the first instance so that religious communities would not feel compelled to educate their children in a ghetto but alongside children of other faiths and none. It contributes to the peaceable relations that exist amongst the religious (and the non-religious) in our state.

8. SRE was also provided in order to provide the wider populace with the opportunity for exposure to the religious point of view within the education. One oft-overlooked fact is that many non-religious parents happily send their children to SRE. While some SRE providers see themselves as primarily serving their own (often ethno-religious) communities, Anglican providers of SRE see themselves as offering a choice to the whole community, whether identifying as Anglican or not.

9. As things stand, the legislation hastily introduced by the outgoing Labor government in 2010 in all likelihood secures the future of the provision of SRE as well as introducing the potential for SEE. There is no need for SRE providers to seek to have the SEE provision repealed at the present time.

10. However, there are still ways in which the SRE/SEE ‘slot’ could be strengthened in the Act. At present, there is no recommended minimum time for SRE specified in the Act – only a maximum. A specified minimum of half an hour would help both school principals and SRE providers negotiate the provision of SRE (and indeed SEE) with clarity.

11. As much reassurance should be given to providers of SRE as practically possible that there is no move afoot to obliterate the provision of SRE. At the same time, SRE providers should welcome scrutiny of their programmes – their syllabuses and the training of their volunteer teachers. There should be equity between SEE and SRE providers as to the level of expected training for teachers.

Michael P Jensen

Moore Theological College

Creation 2: From Nothing

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

If there’s one thing we might say about we human beings it is that we are extraordinarily creative beings.

I was reminded of this recently when I watched on YouTube the video of Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone at the 2007 Macworld conference. The iPhone is simply a piece of technology from the pages of science-fiction. I remember when the idea of a hand-held multi-function communication device was something that might belong to Batman.

But here, in our lifetimes, dreams have become reality; fiction has become fact. And how is it done? Well of course, as Steve Jobs brilliantly explains, the device hasn’t appeared out of thin air. It has evolved from the technology that came before it. The brilliance of the iPhone as a human invention is the way in which it brings together its different elements and combines them. It is a consummate human creation – bringing together the raw material of the earth and the ideas that have gone before it – the work of Faraday, and Bell, and Babbage, and Jack Kilby the inventor of the silicon chip - and yoking it all together to create a new vision and new possibilities.

But still: the humanity of this creation is that it is created from stuff that already exists. It is created by creatures who themselves are anchored in the material world. We are composed of stuff ourselves.

This is not the testimony of the Christian faith about the way God creates. From the earliest times, Christians have understood that God creates ‘ex nihilo’ – from nothing. It is a doctrine more inferred from a number of texts than taught explicitly in any of them. A number of passages affirm the comprehensiveness of God’s creative act – he created all things: Romans 11: 36 – from him and through him and to him are all things; 1 Corinthians 8:6 – there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things; Ephesians 3:9 God who created all things; Colossians 1:16 for in him all things heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible. ‘All things’ is the refrain: God created all things, and there is nothing created that he did not create.

And so, when we turn to the first 2 verses of Genesis and we come across the strange words...the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters… we must not understand this as a kind of pre-existent eternal matter that exists alongside God, though the NRSV tried to make it sound as it was. If we are to read this text theologically and biblically, we must understand this void, the formlessness, this shapeless darkness, as a way of speaking of nothing at all.

Nothing. And it’s nothing that we have a problem with really. No human analogy exists for creating something from nothing. As Shakespeare’s King Lear said to his daughter Cordelia: ‘Nothing? Nothing will come of nothing!’ This was actually taken straight from the old Greek philosopher Aristotle, being one of his fixed laws of the universe. And that’s right: something must be composed of something else which is composed in its turn of something else. Whenever we find this ‘nothing’ we want to make it a something. It’s an old habit.

One terrible mistake we may then make is to depict this ‘nothing’ as a chaotic darkness, a force of negation something like the creeping darkness of Mordor that needs to be rolled back, tamed and even overthrown for there to be order and peace. In the ancient mythologies of Babylon, the earth was depicted as formed from the slain body of the sea monster Tiamat who was killed by Marduk.

Now, we do hear Scripture using this language sometimes to speak about Yahweh’s creative prowess – for example, in Psalm 74:

You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters.

You crushed the heads of Leviathan; you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.

Or in Job 26:

By his power he stilled the Sea; by his understanding he struck down Rahab.

By his wind the heavens were made fair; his hand pierced the fleeing serpent.

But we need to read these passages in the light of the basic theological truth of the absoluteness of the creative activity of the Triune God. My colleague in Old Testament George Athas said to me: The use of the sea-monsters is merely a mythological motif that's aiming to depict Yahweh as the supreme, powerful deity who is worth believing in. ‘If we begin to extract more than that from these texts, we're treating them as something other than mythological, and that would be an error of genre. We would need to start proposing that there are real fanged monsters 'out there'. That's an illegitimate move. If there are no real fanged monsters out there, then we can't conclude evil/chaos is eternal.’

God’s act of creation is not an act of taming the unruly and menacing force of nothingness. To think of it this way would be to give evil too much permanence – to give Satan a toehold in eternity which he does not deserve. As unthinkable as it is, nothing is, in theological terms, simply nothing.

What that ‘nothing’ means is that creation is not caused by anything except for the will of God. As the creatures around the throne say in Revelation 4:11: For you created all things and by your will all things were created and have their being. Creation therefore has no necessity as far as existence goes. It didn’t have to be here. Nothing in it compelled God or moved God to make it, because there was literally nothing in it. Nothing twisted his arm, or made the appearance of things inevitable. There was no pure logic that drove him to create. He just might not have done it. The only necessary thing that exists is God himself.

And so, that’s what we see in the opening chapter of Genesis: that God creates simply by his command. What’s the significance of him using his words to create? It’s that his words do not come from somewhere else, or have an existence other than God. They come from within him, representing and signifying his intentions for the world. They have no other source of existence than him.

We need to draw three important points from this thought about nothing. The first is that because creation is not necessary, it has the force of a gift. The American theologian David Bentley Hart puts it this way: The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo speaks of a God who gives of his bounty, not a God at war with darkness. From the very beginning, in the very beginning, the creative act of God is marked by grace and generosity. It needn’t be so. But it is: and so, being is a blessing. It’s an excessively generous gift, a plentiful, delightful gift. It sure exceeds nothing.

Have you considered how blessed you are in your very existence? There was nothing inevitable about you other than in the plans of God. You yourself are entirely the handiwork of the divine creator. He needn’t have made you – he was under no compulsion to do so. But he did. He involved the bodies of your parents in your conception, of course, and their affections for one another, and their plans for a family such as they were. But the way he has made the creation to run reminds us just who is doing the creating. Mum and Dad had so little control over what you became, didn’t they – your eye colour, your gender, your personality. They had to create from the raw material they had. But not God: God knitted you together in your mother’s womb, as the expression in flesh of an idea that came from nowhere. And here you are, a possibility made actual, in possession of the precious and gracious gift of existence.

The main alternative to this is the lottery of chance and genes that is materialistic evolution – luck, in other words. If luck is the only force bringing us into being, you cannot say anything much about you existence other than it is what it is. But the verdict of God on his creation is that it is good.

The second thing that creation from nothing teaches us is that, if creation has an absolute beginning, in also must have an end. It has time, in other words, because there was not, and then there was. It has an Alpha, and so it must have an Omega. We are right, therefore, to seek a purpose in things. Things look like they have a purpose – and so they do. The world of things is not going around in endless circles. Nor is it on an endless bungy of expansion and contraction.

But the third important point that God’s creation from nothing teaches us is spelt out for us in Scripture, and it is this: the only cause for God’s creation is the Son of God. Nothing less than God gives creation its purpose. It is love for the Son that brings the Father to create. Hear Colossians 1:16: all things have been created through him and for him. And John 1:3: All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. In Heb 1:2, we hear of God’s Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. The Son of God was the agent, instrument, plan and purpose of creation, and him alone.

Now this sounds like a very abstract thought. But what it does is very concrete. As we seek for purpose and cause and meaning in the unbelievably complex world we inhabit, we are turned by Scripture to focus on the events of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Instead of speculating about what God may or may not be doing in the world, we have before us the life and death of the incarnate Son of God, which gives us a great clarity about what God is doing. What these statements about the pre-existent Son of God are telling us is that if we want to grasp the essence of all things we need to study the Jesus of history. And what God was doing there? Colossians 1:20 puts it this way:

…through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

The death of Jesus Christ was at the heart of God’s plan for all things – all the things that were created through and for the Son. The Son’s mission of reconciliation, which led to the cross, brings to pass the Creator’s plan for his creation.

That God creates ex nihilo, from nothing, is a help to us in two specific ways. First, it helps us to see the human limitations of our own creative activity. It helps us feel unembarrassed by our need to build on the work of those who have gone before, since we are not God. Our culture prizes originality – but originality is an enormous pressure for human creators to bear. Only this week, I was talking to someone in fourth year about their project and we together observed that it is necessary as human beings to build on the work of others. Human creativity will always involve the bringing to together of things that already exist, since only God delivers pure ideas without origin. This is tremendously liberating for us in many of the things we seek to do; but also a rebuke to the vanity that has us sometimes imagining we are creative geniuses.

But second, the creation from nothing gives us great hope in the face of our slide into non-existence. If God can create worlds from nothing, then he is powerful to make good on his promises. If he is the God of his Word – that powerfully creative Word – than we need not fear that his promises will not come to pass. Sin and evil have no permanence. Only the God of Jesus Christ brackets human existence The connection is made for us almost in passing, in a single part-verse – Romans 4:17. Paul is rehearsing the story of Abraham and his faith which was credited to him as righteousness - a faith in God’s promises which meant denying the evidence of his body ‘which was as good as dead’ and not much use for the business of human reproduction by this stage. But Abraham believed, because the God in whom he believed was the one who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. That the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ is the one who in his free act of grace and by his Word alone calls things into being and raises the crucified Messiah from the dead shows him to be master of all reality, worthy of all glory and honour and praise, and one in whom we might find genuine, remarkable hope.