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Category Archive: Theology - Creation

God's Whimsy - July 09, 2007
Wiker and Witt suggest that God created pandas as "comic relief" in a blessed fit of "divine whimsy." The suggestion is troubling even for Christians who defend creation, because, being engineers, they have swallowed the reductive notion that creation must...

Denying the gospel - May 20, 2007
Every week, I confess the Nicene Creed, and I actually believe it. I also confess that sinners are saved by trusting in Jesus, God's Son, who saves out of sheer grace. Yet I, with many of my friends who confess...

Prayer and Secondary causes - August 06, 2006
Prayer has an effect in the same way that all other causes have their effect. Prayer is just as much a cause as any other secondary causes in creation. Do you believe that hitting a ball with a bat causes...

Nyssa on perfection - July 31, 2006
Gregory of Nyssa writes in his Life of Moses: "one limit of perfection is the fact that it has no limit....Why? Because no good has any limit." And in his treatise on perfection, he's more expansive: "one ought not to...

Dual creation - July 10, 2006
Assuming Gen 1:1 describes an act of creation and is not a title: It's striking that the Gen account begins with the creation of two realms rather than a single entity or realm. Hesiod says that there was one reality,...

Philip the Chancellor - May 26, 2006
According to Stephen Duffy, Philip, Chancellor of the University of Paris, was responsible for elaborating the theorem of the supernatural. He claims that during the Pelagian controversy Augustine had left various problems hanging: "How can one be bound to do...

Surnaturel - May 25, 2006
In his 1993 book, The Dynamics of Grace, Stephen J. Duffy offers a superb brief summary of de Lubac's thesis in Surnaturel. According to de Lubac's history, "Neither the Fathers nor the great schoolmen ever considered a purely natural human...

Natural gifts of Adam - May 23, 2006
A few quotations on Adam's "natural" capacities culled from Heppe: Polanus: "The original wisdom in man's soul was that excellence and perfection of knowledge, by which unimpaired man rightly knew God and God's work and himself and wisely understood all...

Turretin and Pure Nature - May 22, 2006
Thanks to Joel Garver for pointing me to a couple of passages in Turretin's Institutes where he explicitly discusses and rejects the idea of "pure nature." A brief summary follows of Turretin's discussion from the Fifth Topic, Question 9 follows:...

Homo Creator - December 22, 2005
In his 1607 treatise, Idea of Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, the painter Federigo Zuccaro claimed that human being was creative being: "Because of His goodness and to show in a small replica the excellence of his divine art, [God] having...

Hart on creation - November 19, 2005
Reviewing David Hart's recent book on the tsunami in The Christian Century, Willis Jenkins writes, "Curiously underplaying the resources of his own Eastern Orthodox tradition, Hart only vaguely affirms that creation must be an 'ecstasy of spiritual intelligence and desire.'...

Basil on diversity - November 08, 2005
Basil of Caesarea has this to say about the variety of plant life: "What a variety in the disposition of their several parts. And yet, how difficult is it to find the distinctive property of each of them, and to...

Gunton on Genesis 1 - November 01, 2005
In his Triune Creator, Colin Gunton offers this "argument" against reading Gen 1 as an account of six literal days of divine activity: "the sophistication and complexity of the writings make it clear that the authors, and that includes those...

Modernity thesis revisited - June 29, 2005
I have been deeply skeptical about the arguments of Jacques Ellul and others concerning our enslavement to technology, as well as the arguments of Peter Berger about the "heretical imperative" that modernity imposes on us. Technological modernity tempts us, as...

It was good - May 08, 2005
"Good" is God's original evaluation of creation (Gen 1), and it will be the last (Rom 8:28). "Good" is the first and the last word. Goodness is the alpha and omega of creation....

Creation and Decree - February 02, 2005
In creating the world, Isaiah 48:13 tells us, God "laid the foundations of the earth." In the context, this not only refers to Yahweh's place at the origin of all things but His place at the end of all things:...

Tragedy of Finitude - March 01, 2004
Jos de Mul, professor of Philosophical Anthropology at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, has produced a fascinating book on Wilhelm Dilthey, just released from Yale. The title The Tragedy of Finitude captures the essence of the work. He traces Dilthey's...

Pre-Fall Death - December 11, 2003
Some speculations on death in the original creation, inspired by Jim Jordan's lecture on Daniel 4 and by discussion with a colleague at NSA. As usual, anytime I write about the Trinity, Jeff Meyers is also lurking in the background....

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