50 Key Concepts in Theology
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50 Key Concepts in Theology - Rayment-Pickard
Creation
The view of the world as having been made by God. The very existence of the world provokes an obvious question: ‘Where did all this stuff come from?’ Or, put in its existentialist form: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ The Christian answer to this question is that the world has a benevolent creator who created an orderly world for us to inhabit. This view has been under threat for some time from an atheistic– scientific view that the universe came into existence by itself, unaided by any supernatural being. The Church Fathers, who set out the framework of creation theology, insisted on two key points: (1) Arguing against some classical assumptions about the eternity of the universe, Irenaeus and others made the case that the universe had a datable beginning in God’s act of creation and that God created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo); (2) Arguing against the Gnostic view that there are two types of creation (good and bad) and two types of creator (benevolent and evil), Irenaeus and Augustine made the case that there is only one benevolent creator and that everything he created is good. When we think about it, there is something audacious about the idea that everything has been created good. The world is manifestly imperfect – full of suffering, violence and injustice. But the Church Fathers were insistent that God can only create good things, and that there is only one God. This left the problem of how to explain evil. The solution adopted by Augustine, and later defended by Aquinas, was to offer another audacious argument: that evil does not exist. What we call ‘evil’ is merely the absence of goodness. Since the mid nineteenth century, the literal understanding of the Genesis account of creation has been steadily discredited by scientific theories about the origin of the cosmos and Darwin’s evolutionary theory of the origin of species. By all except Christian fundamentalists, the biblical story of creation is now treated as poetry and myth. Since the late eighteenth century theologians have tried to reconcile the growing body of scientific theory about the beginnings of the cosmos with a Christian understanding of God’s role in creation. The Deists, for example, argued that God was a craftsman who assembled the universe as a giant mechanism that would operate according to scientific laws. This would mean that science is merely uncovering the mind and purposes of God. Process theologians (see separate entry) have argued that God is caught up in the evolutionary processes of creation. Others, such as Arthur Peacock, argue that science and religion offer different but complementary accounts of the same reality. In this way modern science and a theology of creation can both be right, even when they appear to be saying different things. In the twentieth century, under the influence of phenomenology, some theologians have talked about the world – and indeed, God himself – as having the qualities of a ‘gift’. But the givenness of the world does not point in some naïve way to a giver; rather, thinking of God and his creation as ‘gift’ helps us to think about what our response to this givenness should be. Interesting as this is, the theology of ‘gift’ dodges the scientific question of how exactly the world is given to us by God. The doctrine of creation remains one of the most hotly contested in Christian theology, not only because of the issue of science and religion, but also because many other theological arguments and ethical views depend upon how we think about God’s creative action. In the heated Anglican discussions about sexuality, for example, those against homosexuality have argued that God created a world in which sex should take place only within the heterosexual pattern of Adam and Eve. Other theologians have argued that since God made everything ‘good’, this must include lesbians and gay men. The creation story is also at the centre of debates about the ethics of marriage and divorce. THINKERS St Augustine (354–430) argued strongly, against Gnostics such as the Manichaeans, that God was the sole creator and that he had made a good creation. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) followed Augustine in arguing that God created nothing evil, and that evil is the ‘privation of good’. (See entry on ‘The Problem of Evil’.) Jean-Luc Marion (1946– ) puts the concept of ‘givenness’ at the centre of his theology. When we analyse our existence down to its most basic (primordial) foundation, all we can say is that we live in a state of ‘having been given’. This ‘given’ state is, Marion argues, not simple but a complex mixture of both presence and absence. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) argued that the Genesis story is a metaphor for God’s creative action, rather than a literal account. He saw creation as a process unfolding towards an ‘Omega Point’, when the universe would have reached its final state. IDEAS Creation ordinances: the term used to refer to basic regulations which (according to the book of Genesis) were set down by God at the time of creation, such as keeping the Sabbath and the institution of marriage. Download 0.85 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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