The next chapter of Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture by Christopher Watkin addresses the reality and implications of creation. He focuses on Genesis 1 and the first chapter of Genesis 2. It isn’t as if he could use other texts but is trying to dig deep on the reality of creation by God and what this means for us and how we think about the world we live in.
- Hot Take: Summarize the chapter in 10 words or less.
God makes & gives value to all things for our discovery. I failed. Though I used a symbol for “and”. Maybe that means I succeed. There is an objective reality which God evaluates. We experience the world subjectively and are prone to exalt our interpretation of the world rather than submit it to God’s evaluation. That’s really a mouthful and needs to be unpacked in the rest of the questions.
2. What difference does it make that the world has a beginning?
If it has a beginning it is not necessary. There was “a time” when it wasn’t, and is therefore contingent. The question is “Contingent on what?”. We should try to understand that beginning. Current “myths” have to do with autonomous big bangs. Ancient myths had to do with either sex or violence. Often the earth was made from the carcass of a defeated god, like Tiamat in Mesopotamian creation myths.
The Bible begins with a God who creates. Then comes the war with Satan who is not His equal. A beginning means that someone began it.
Creation becomes gratuitous. It is a product of God’s love and glory. It doesn’t meet a need in Him. It, on the other hand, needs Him to sustain it.
3. Why is the Creator-creature distinction important for a Christian understanding of reality?
Some might think the fundamental distinction in the Bible is that between God and Satan. It isn’t. Satan is not an equal but opposite power, a competing god though called the god of this world. He’s the one worshiped by the world, but is not divine in essence.
The fundamental distinction is between God as Creator and everything else which He created, particularly creatures (see how they are related in English). God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchanging. Creation is material (yes, men have souls), finite, temporal and constantly changing. He is self-existing, and creation depends on Him. These are big distinctions which mean we should not try to make any aspect of creation into a god.
Watkins notes that this all means: there is no demiurge or mediator between God and creation (like in gnostic thought); there are no rival gods; God is not just a bigger, older version of us (similar to Mormonism and sentimentality).
As creatures, we have been designed and made by Him. We are owned and ruled by Him. While we share in His communicable attributes (character) we don’t share in the incommunicable, infinite attributes by virtue of our finitude. Thor is a more powerful, durable human, but not necessarily more knowledgeable, who will die like his father did. The God of the Bible is completely different: all-knowing, all-present, all-powerful …
4. How do biblical ideas of transcendence and immanence differ from their extrabiblical namesakes?
In extrabiblical views, to be transcendent is to operate outside of creation and immanent is to operate within creation. The transcendent is unknowable (being outside creation) and wholly other. The immanent is known through experience. A transcendent god is unknowable and most likely unconcerned with us. He may observe but does not act in creation. The immanent god is often reduced to that better version of ourselves with some of our own weaknesses like the gods of Olympus.
God is transcendent due to His holiness. He is above and beyond our reach. But He can choose to reveal Himself to us by acting in creation. He does so without losing His holiness. He rules over creation sovereignly as Creator, not creature until the Incarnation in which Jesus is both Creator and creature in a different sense as one Person with two united but distinct natures. God is involved with the world but not identified with creation. Because His is immanent, we cannot escape Him.
5. In what ways is the tohu wabohu of Genesis 1 a cultural and natural threat today?
The creation was formless and empty in Genesis 1. God begins to give it form (environments) and fill those environments (heavens, sky, sea & land). The chaos was gone until sin and death (at least death for humans) entered the world through Adam’s sin. It stands at the door and knocks, waiting to pounce on us should we open the door. It wants to rule over us.
Culturally we can see this politically, geographically and morally. Chaos overtakes governments through revolutions, coups and collapse of a society. Borders shift and change based on war, the epitome of chaos. We are witnessing the Western world circling the drain, destroying itself through ideologies that reject creation and traditional norms for gender, sexual and racial chaos. There are places that become unlivable because of toxic cultures.
In the natural world we see the chaos in changes in climate (not a new thing), violent storms, deforestation and strip mining. The world shakes and trembles in earthquakes. The seas cross their boundaries in floods and tsunamis. There are places that become unlivable because of “natural disaster”.
God’s answer to the formless and emptiness was to speak. Some philosphers have seen god as pure thought or rationality. Others as pure action. Either way, god does not speak. Thinking is private, speaking is social.
Our God speaks. He is social (the Trinity is a community) and invites us into relationship. But He speaks form and fullness into being.
Watkins dives into the relationship between language and reality. Language is not a human invention to describe creation. Language is not perfect in its ability to do so. One the other hand, language is not disconnected from creation. He diagonalizes this to “without form and void … and God said”.
God’s language, speech, shapes reality. Ours describes reality. God’s speech gives form to the formless and fills the void. Our language is meaningful to build relationships with one another and God, in part by describing creation including ourselves, others and events occurring in space and time.
6. Describe the significance of the “embodied-enchanted world” of Genesis 1.
Creation was canto: spoken or sung into being. C.S. Lewis portrays this in The Magician’s Nephew as Aslan sings to create Narnia. It is “enchanted”. But is it also material or embodied. God said, and there was.
God has declared creation good. Watkins indicates that God didn’t simply make it and realize it was good. He made it the way He made it because it was good. He isn’t a splatter artist tossing (or speaking) things hoping it all fits together somehow. He had a plan.
This means we reject materialism and gnosticism which are both reductionistic views focused on one part of “embodied-enchanted” to the exclusion of the other. He worked backwards in this case, but to be “embodied-enchanted is the diagonalization of materialism and gnosticism.
7. “The universe is not a slap-dash, careless affair, but neither is it a straightjacketed, regimented geometry of absolute order.” Explain
Absolute order would mean that nothing would change. There would be a rigid hierarchy of species. This has been used to justify rigid social orders like caste systems: this is who your people were, who you are, and your people will forever be.
Creativity requires some order. You have to be able to predict what the change will do: whether in language or chemistry or colors for painting. When I add blue to yellow, I get green, not random colors. Absolute order would mean I couldn’t mix them.
Creativity without order is chaos: “discriminatory and destructive.” Watkins points to the second half of the Judges when “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” We see this now with a shift from social imaginary to a personal imaginary (expressive individualism) where life is not a social construct but a personal construct. “What I think, I am.”
He puts order and creativity on a spectrum with each as the extremes from unchanging necessity to chaos devoid of structure.
God’s world is a “creative order”. His example is snowflakes. They are all snowflakes but unique. There is order in that they share the essential characteristics of snowflakes, but are unique in appearance. Like people. Chairs. Trees even of the same type. We categorize animals. There are about 900,000 types of what we call insects. “(C)reation is a symphony of similarity and difference that is reminiscent of the Trinitarian equal ultimacy of the one and the many.”
It is the same in our creativity as creatures. Students learn the rudimentary orders of language or music or science before they explore what they can do within that structure: poetry, improvisation or a cure for a disease. Random words do not a poem make. Random notes do not a song make (most people find Cage unlistenable, like a child plunking random notes).
8. In what way is sabbath observance a practice of resistance today?
Cultures differ in what they value. Much of the Western world values productivity, engaging in a market economy that produces more in both kind and volume. Consumption keeps the economy going. Other cultures value “rest” or more appropriately family time. The tribe is together and does what it needs to survive, not thrive.
God worked, and rested. Unlike us He didn’t rest of necessity just like He didn’t create of necessity. It was good to create and good to rest. Rest, on the last day, removes us from the most important status of creation. While, as God’s image, we may be the climax, there is also a resolution, something further: rest. We were not made to be slaves, as in some creation myths, but to glorify and enjoy God forever. That is through work AND rest. We are not to ceaselessly work and accumulate, but to also rest and enjoy the fruit of our labor. We are not to ceaselessly rest or we will have nothing to enjoy and poverty will come upon us like a bandit.
I grew up on the border between NH and MA. MA had blue laws, only allowing the purchase of necessities on Sundays. This meant most stores were closed but grocery stores and pharmacies had areas closed off and skeleton crews. The only people working were “essential” workers: police, fire, medical, some repair persons. NH had all kinds of stores open.
What do you think happened? People went north to buy the things they couldn’t at home. They also took advantage of the absence of a sales tax! Yet even in NH life then was quieter than it is now on a Sunday. People went to church, shopped, ate out or watched the Patriots lose (I’m old). You didn’t hear law mowers often. Youth sports didn’t play on Sundays. It was not the seemingly ceaseless pursuit of activity we find today.
In our 24-7 world rest becomes subversive. Sabbath rest sticks out like a sore thumb. When I was in seminary, my first year I rested on Sunday. I went to church, maybe enjoyed lunch with a friend, or prayed with a friend, read for fun and personal growth and listened to music. I rested. The last two years I worked in the evenings at a homeless shelter, a job of necessity since homelessness doesn’t take Sunday off. But my real 6 day a week job was school. I still rested from that labor.
Rest insists that “our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods” (quoting Brueggermann). This isn’t simply resting so we can work better (often an illustration about two lumberjacks is given- one who stops to sharpen the ax and the other doesn’t). This is about trusting God and enjoying the rest He gives by faith. The sabbath commandment includes both work and rest. This is the real world, not the world fashioned by our idolatry and consumption.
Watkins disagrees with Camus’ interpretation of Sisyphus. Camus thinks Sisyphus enjoys his ceaseless, repetitive and futile labor of pushing that rock up the hill only for it to roll back down.
“… if we force ourselves to imagine him happy, it is at the heavy cost of recognizing that his heart, which Camus informs us is filled by his repetitive labor, must be a very small compass indeed.” pp. 81
Jesus offers us a yoke that is light and a burden that is easy. Diagonalization affirms both work and rest instead of seeing them as opposite ways of life. The biblical way subverts both workaholicism and the “retirement” culture or working enough to get by and have fun. Girls don’t just want to have fun.
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