Creation and Redemption |
top page 1. Creation 2. Human Freedom 3. The Fall 4. Redemption 5. The One Story of Creation and Redemption 6. Multiplicity and Extension: Space Time Will 7. Genesis 1-11 |
Multiplicity and Extension 2: TimeTime is materiality's companion. Neither is
the human problem; neither is an enemy of or the
reason for redemption. They are, rather, the arena in which
redemption occurs. Without them we would cease to be what God
intended in created us. Just as God has created multiplicity, so he
has created time. Time must exist because of human will and sin
and because of redemption. But Christians have found a number of ways to dislike time.
Time for Creation Augustine held that creation was instantaneous,1 that actions taking time is an indication of fallenness, and that God has no real involvement with time.2 Creation was complete and perfect, and nothing further was needed until the fall occurred. But creation was not complete initially because human freedom had not yet been exercised. If it had been immediately complete, the first humans' freedom and the whole tale of God's love, call, patience, and wrath would be a sham. God's close involvement in Israel's story on every page of the Old Testament would be merely something to be explained away, along with the seven days in Genesis 1 and the stages in time in Genesis 2, which, even if not "literal," indicate a closer involvement than instantaneous creation would allow to God. What was created was all "good" (perfect in that sense), but not complete (that is, not perfect in that other sense). It was created in order to be eschatologically complete. "The perfection of beginning is not the perfection of the completed...."3 The eschaton is not a return to conditions as they were before the fall (recapitulation thus understood, as in Origen) but the completion of creation. Adam was the perfect beginning, and Christ is the perfected goal (1 Corinthians 15:49). Time for Creation/Redemption A similar set of problems comes if the emphasis on redemption as the remedy for the fallen creation's woes is carried so far that redemption becomes, in effect, God's "Plan B." Creation was complete, it is held, but the fall broke it. Here again, the distinction of perfections is neglected, and God is made to look foolish. But redemption is God's original intention in creating, not a salvage operation.4 Sin is a step off course, but this does not mean that God was surprised by it. We can say that "redemption or salvation is that divine action which returns the creation to its proper direction, its orientation to its eschatological destiny, which is to be perfected in due course of time by God's enabling it to be that which it was created to be,"5 but only if we also say that this redemption was intended in the original creation, that it is how creation reaches its goal. But Not Time for God Process theology points in an opposite direction by placing God in time, thus making time something outside of or prior to God. And with or without process theology, some have thought of God as existing in time.6 But if we place the proper emphasis on human freedom, there is no need to have a fumbling God in time as a basis for apologetics. The story of creation and redemption is God's story in that he is the one who initiates and owns the story. It is not a story about him, which is what process theology wants to make of it. To have a story about oneself, one needs the divine image: without freedom and relationship, there can be no story, so humanity alone among God's creatures has a story. And to have a story, one also needs to undergo change, to need things, and to come into being in a world that already exists, none of which God has done. So we have history, but God, pigs, and pigeons do not. God is certainly "in time" insofar as we know him through his freely-chosen participation in the creation-redemption story. God identifies himself to his people by reciting a narrative--at the beginning of the ten commandments, and, indeed, in Scripture as a whole. That is how we know God. Theology must deal with that kind of knowledge, not with any speculation about God's self-knowledge of himself. The creation-redemption story is not a story about God. Setting God outside time does not necessarily result in determinism, even if God is held to have complete foreknowledge,7 because the transcendent God has created wills outside himself. | 1. Gunton, Triune
Creator, 77. 2. So Augustine: Gunton, Triune Creator, 83f. 3. Gunton, Triune Creator, 183. Perhaps some of the fundamentalist discomfort with biological evolution arises from a belief that creation was complete at the beginning. This understanding of creation ultimately arises from Plato's idea of a fixed and unchanging number of "forms" (Gunton, 185f.). 4. K. Barth. 5. Gunton, Triune Creator, 56. 7. Hauerwas, Better Hope, 121, quoting Jenson, Systematic Theology, 215, 217: ...the God who is the subject of Christian theology is not timeless. The God of Israel and Jesus, the God we find in Scripture, is a storied God. That we learn of God, or more exactly, that we learn who God is through a narrative is not accidental but rather indicative of God's nature. God's storied character expresses, as Aquinas maintained that "God's act of being is constrained by no form other than itself." Accordingly the biblical God's eternity is not immunity to time but faithfulness. "God is not eternal in that he is faithful to his commitments with time. At the great turning, Israel's God is eternal in that he is faithful to the death, and then yet again faithful." See further Gunton, Triune Creator, 82f. on God's creation of time. |