Christ, Trinity, and Creation

In a previous post, I began to outline some of the reasoning behind my new book on creation, where I bring science into conversation with biblical scholarship over the subject of nature/creation. As I suggested last time, and now explore in more detail, the key to doing this well is to be unashamedly theological and focus on God as Trinity. While the Trinitarian nature of God is probably the most paradoxical and un-scientific of all Christian beliefs, it also encapsulates the reason that science and faith have such a hard time seeing eye to eye. God-as-Trinity, like nature-as-creation, can only be apprehended from the inside, as it were. Let me explain.

Science and faith occupy very different vantage points. The natural sciences, in their commitment to objectivity, seek out the most neutral and distanced viewpoint. Faith, on the other hand, can’t help but see itself as embedded in a created world of wonder standing in praise of its Creator. The long-running debates over the existence of God as Creator, or the case for intelligent design, or creation vs. evolution overlook this point. And yet it’s basic to many of the biblical creation texts outside of Genesis that any distanced consideration of creation automatically becomes an insider perspective, where the only proper response is praise and worship of the Creator. We see this, for instance, in Psalm 148, which calls myriad created things to praise God, regardless of whether they are conscious and rational (e.g. humans), or unconscious and inanimate (e.g. frost and snow). Inanimate creatures feature even more prominently in other texts, such as Psalm 98, where we hear that the floods will “clap their hands”, and the mountains “sing together with joy” in praise to God. Clearly these texts are metaphorical to some degree, but the question is to what degree? It’s one thing to insist that humans should praise God on account of creation, quite another to say that human praise stands alongside the praise of the floods, the mountains, and every other created thing.

One widespread Christian approach to these texts of creation’s praise borrows from the pervasive viewpoint of “deism”, which holds that God’s activity in the material world was confined to its very beginning. In which case, God has been absent ever since, and the natural sciences now hold sway over purpose and meaning. If God can be said to have any influence now, it’s in the spiritual (hidden) dimension. This means that relationship with God (e.g. in worship) must be a purely human activity – cerebral and spiritual – which means in turn that the texts which speak of creation’s praise can only be metaphors of human praise. After all, if in deism God is absent from the physical (non-human) world, then the physical world has no point of contact with the Creator to experience him or praise him. But while this deistic viewpoint may offer the convenience that belief in God has no impact on modern science (and vice versa), it has one great weakness. We may acknowledge the wonders of the non-human world in this perspective, but we must also recognise that we have emptied it of divine meaning except insofar as there might be evidence of “design” (which only humans can appreciate, and that only cerebrally). In fact, the non-human world isn’t even much of a “creation” in this viewpoint; it’s merely the spiritually-featureless expanse in which humans exist. And there’s certainly no sense in which the non-human creation might exist for its own sake to give glory to God, or to be the vehicle of God’s glory (as in the biblical narratives of divine theophany, e.g. the burning bush). Moreover, this anthropocentric approach which arises from deism is deeply problematic in light of the growing ecological awareness of our times, an awareness which is arguably arediscovery of the more holistic picture of nature/creation in biblical texts.

There’s another way of reading these texts. This approach – known as “theism” – recognizes God as the transcendent Creator since the beginning, but also acknowledges his simultaneous presence in the physical world now, working in it and with it, and continually breathing divine life into it. Such an appraisal of God’s creative immanence features in texts such as Psalm 139 (“Where can I go from your spirit?”), but finds its clearest expression in post-biblical times, in early Christianity’s discovery of the doctrine of the Trinity. As I pointed out last time, it’s important not to impose later categories onto the ancient biblical texts when they in fact speak of ancient ways of thinking (e.g. the ancient mythology/science of Genesis 1), but in this instance Trinitarian language can be said to represent a theistic systematisation of what’s already nascent in the biblical texts, namely the work of God’s Spirit. If so, the biblical texts of creation’s praise speak of the whole of creation as imbued with the presence of the Holy Spirit; they give non-human reality a gifted theological significance of its own (a grace) which it can’t have in deism. Realization of this point has led many working in the science-religion field to identify the immanent work of the Spirit with evolutionary sciences, with emergence, complexity, novelty, and chance in nature. If scientific evidence is growing of the richly-indeterminate processes in the natural world, then there exists a ready theological analogy in the creative work of the Holy Spirit. So if deism was inspired by the science of Newton, with its closed, self-sufficient, and determinate universe, then theism is at home alongside the evolutionary (and more open-ended) science of today. Theism – recognizing God’s immanent presence in nature as well as his transcendent presence above and beyond it – has the added advantage that it offers a more authentic model of the biblical God.

So far I’ve only mentioned Old Testament texts. What about the New Testament? The Spirit features in creation here too, but there’s a significant change in focus.

Earlier, I suggested that modern evolutionary science, with its emphasis on complexity and novelty in nature, shares a common perspective with the Holy Spirit on the making of things. It’s particularly clear in the New Testament (where Christ is in view), that the Spirit works to bring all things into newness. It would be too much though, to associate this newness with a specific scientific model like Darwinism (or at least not a model from our current sciences), for the newness is altogether new. No doubt inspired by the important text in Joel 2 which predicts that God’s Spirit will be poured out in the last days (vv.28-32), the New Testament describes how the Spirit works in the Church (Acts 2:17-21), in individuals (Gal.6:15), and fundamentally in the whole cosmos (Rom.8:23), to bring about a new birth. And if we ask what is this new birth, we find that it is beyond our current biological sciences, and even beyond our current physics and mathematics, because it describes a new cosmos, the seeds of which were born in that tomb in Jerusalem, just a few days after the crucifixion of Jesus. In other words, the work of the Spirit is concerned with this creation, but fundamentally drawing it into a new creation about which we know almost nothing at present, except to say that its essence is resurrection.

Resurrection is also the key to understanding the mysterious statements made about Christ and creation in the New Testament. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, written in the early 50s (just a matter of some twenty years after Jesus’ ministry), is especially significant in making this link. Because of his resurrection, Christ is the new Adam – the first human of a new creation – and the sign that “all will be made alive” again one day (1 Cor. 15:20-23). But Jesus is more than just a rerun of the first Adam. Elsewhere in the New Testament, Christ is at the center of this creation as well as the next, and startling claims are made about his divinity, his pre-existence, his role in the making of this creation, and the obligation to worship him in a way that’s reserved for God alone in the Old Testament (e.g. Phil. 2:5-11). This reveals something of deep importance. Quite simply, nature is always “creation” when Christ is in view, because he’s the pattern around which it was made. And so we find the breathtakingly audacious claim made by the early Christians that the humble carpenter from Nazareth was with God “in the beginning” (Jn 1:1). There has been much scholarly ink spilled over how this paradoxical turn of logic must have come about in those crucial early decades of Christianity after the crucifixion of Jesus. By the early 50s Paul could make the astounding statement (again in 1 Corinthians) that “for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for him, and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we exist through him” (1 Cor. 8:6). At some point in these twenty or so years then, the penny must have dropped that the Redeemer must also be the Creator. Hence, written a little later in the first century, John’s Gospel points out that “all things came into being through him [the Word]” (1:3), while the letter to the Colossians tells us that “in him [the Son] all things in heaven and on earth were created…and in him all things hold together” (1:16-17).

The phenomenal events around the first Easter were clearly decisive in inspiring the early Christians to make this link between Jesus and creation, as was the insight that the venerable Wisdom tradition of the Old Testament allowed for a ready connection between Christ and the personification of Wisdom, present with God “at the beginning” (Prov.8:22). In this way, Jesus could be seen to embody the divine principles of organization and law in Scripture (i.e. Torah). Indeed, Matthew’s Jesus makes this very point: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil” (Mt.5:17). It’s then a small step from saying that Jesus embodies scriptural law and prophecy to saying that he embodies all divine Wisdom, including that which we discern in the natural world, i.e. the “laws of nature”. Putting this in contemporary terms, Christ is the reason the natural sciences work: he is the source of the laws of nature, and he contains and underpins the natural sciences. As I put it in my first post, Christ is the pattern for all created things, while the Spirit – his presence in the created world – breathes the divine fire into the equations.

Put in these terms, the paradox underlying the idea of “incarnation” – so familiar that many of us in modern-day Christianity rarely give it a second thought – gains a new lease of life. If it’s true to say that Christ saved the world, then by the inexorable logic above it’s also true to say that he embodies and provides the scientific explanation for the world, in his very human flesh and bones. (And we’re not just talking here of a scientific explanation in terms of human biology, but also the fields of geology, chemistry, particle physics, and mathematics too). If all this appears absurd and nonsensical, then congratulations! – for you have just apprehended the “scandal” of the incarnation.

We have come a long way from Genesis 1. But by considering the creative work of Son and Spirit in biblical texts we’ve started to form the basis for a theology of science within the Christian idea of God as Trinity. It’s often been wondered by the philosophically-minded just why it is that the natural sciences are so successful in describing the physical world. Humanly speaking, this success is something of a mystery; the world need not be so amenable to our rationality, unless there is deep reason behind it all, and that “we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16). The Bible’s creation texts throughout both Old and New Testaments therefore supply us with an explanation for the miracle of modern science, namely its unstoppable success in understanding the physical world: it’s because science taps directly into the mind which made it all.