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Posts tagged Al Wolters
God the law-giver and his creation
Feb 17th
Chapter 2 of Creation Regained covers the first theme of the creation-fall-redemption triad: creation. It's quite a lengthy chapter, so I'll cover it in two parts.
We might talk about "the story of creation" (in the beginning) and "the beauty of creation" (now), but in either case, Christians believe that God is intimately involved. Searching for a word to describe "the totality of God's ordaining acts toward the cosmos" (p.15), Wolters chooses to go with the word law. (I suppose we could also think of God's decrees.) God institutes laws of nature, but also gives laws for culture and society: norms.
Just as a human sovereign does certain things himself, but gives orders to his subordinates for other things, so with God himself. He put the planets in their orbits, makes the seasons come and go at the proper time, makes seeds grow and animals reproduce, but entrusts to mankind the tasks of making tools, doing justice, producing art, and pursuing scholarship. In other words, God's rule of law is immediate in the nonhuman realm but mediate in culture and society. In the human realm men and women become coworkers with God; as creatures made in God's image they too have a kind of lordship over the earth, are God's viceroys in creation (p.16).
In addition to that distinction between laws of nature and norms, we can distinguish between these general laws, and God's particular laws, for specific events to take place, or for specific people to do specific things.
In speaking of "creation" as "the correlation of the sovereign activity of the Creator and the created order" (p.14), the term becomes much broader in scope that what we usually take it to mean.
Usually when we speak of creation we have in mind the realities investigated by the natural sciences—the structure of the atom, the movements of the solar system, the life cycle of a plant, the building instinct of a beaver (p.24).
But, with the broader definition,
We will not make such a distinction if we understand creation in terms of a law-subject correlation. God's ordinances also extend to the structures of society, to the world of art, to business and commerce. Human civilization is normed throughout. Everywhere we discover limits and proprieties, standards and criteria: in every field of human affairs there are right and wrong ways of doing things. There is nothing in human life that does not belong to the created order (p.25).
So when (using God's general revelation and our wisdom) we figure out how best to run a business, we are uncovering something about God's creation, just as much as when we figure out how stars make their light.
An all-encompassing Christian worldview
Jan 26th
I've been reading Creation Regained, a little book (117 pages plus postscript) by Al Wolters. It's really very good. I thought I'd share a few extracts with you (both of you). First, the cover:
After the cover, the first chapter—What Is a Worldview?—introduces the theme of the book, which is "an attempt to spell out the content of a biblical worldview and its significance for our lives" (p.1). A worldview is defined as "the comprehensive framework of one's basic beliefs about things" (p.2). Everyone has a worldview, which emerges "quickly enough when they are faced with practical emergencies, current political issues, or convictions that clash with their own" (p.4), and "our worldview functions as a guide to our life" (p.5). Unpacking that a bit more, Wolters introduces two key terms that will feature throughout the book: structure and direction. Our worldview tells us how everything is structured, and our worldview tells us about the basic direction things are taking through history.
So what might a biblical worldview look like? We could start with
the basic definition of the Christian faith given by Herman Bavinck: "God the Father has reconciled His created but fallen world through the death of His Son, and renews it into a Kingdom of God by His Spirit."
The biblical worldview presented in the book is one which takes
all the key terms in this ecumenical trinitarian confession in a universal, all-encompassing sense. The terms "reconciled," "created," "fallen," "world," "renews," and "Kingdom of God" are held to be cosmic in scope (p.11).
Now, this might not seem particularly out of the ordinary, but many (perhaps most) Christians would, in practice, tend to limit the scope of these terms. There would be a "sacred" realm and a "secular" realm, where the "secular" realm is perhaps not entirely fallen, not entirely reconciled, or destined to be discarded rather than renewed, and where the "sacred" realm is perhaps something over and above what God originally created. So, in order to distinguish this cosmic-in-scope biblical worldview, it is often called the reformational worldview, partly because it builds on some emphases associated with the Protestant Reformation, and partly because this worldview carries within it the hope that nothing of the created order will be rejected or replaced, but that the entire created order will be—and is being—reformed, renewed and restored: creation regained. (Another way of identifying this view of things is to say that "grace restores nature", p.12.)
The next chapters look in more detail at the components of this worldview, looking at the structure and original direction of things (Creation: part 1) and then the story of the shifting direction of things (Fall and Redemption), before unpacking what difference this might make to our lives (Discerning Structure and Direction). The postscript (with Mike Goheen) sets this whole discussion in a broader framework of the biblical narrative.
I live in York and I'm a research fellow in 
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