Apart from creation, covenant has no structure, no context, no rootage in experienced reality. Love and virtue, faith and salvation, hope and judgment, though they will come soon enough). This article appeared originally in the TSF Bulletin. He is author of a number of books, including Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Ministry (1980), A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (1980), and Earth and Altar (1985).
Peterson is pastor of the Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, and a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY. It is extremely significant that in the opening sentences of the Bible, God speaks a world of energy and matter into being: light, moon, stars, earth, vegetation, animals, man, woman (notĮugene H. Our Lord left us a command to remember and receive him in bread and wine, in acts of eating and drinking. The Word did not become a good idea, or a numinous feeling, or a moral aspiration the Word became flesh. We are not angels, nor are we to become angels. The task of salvation is not to refine us into pure spirits so that we will not be combered with this too solid flesh. Without a firm rooting in creation, religion is always drifting off into some kind of pious sentimentalism, or sophisticated intellectualism, or snobbish elitism. He was convinced of the wide-ranging theological significance of the doctrine of creation and knew how important the understanding of that doctrine was to protect against the gnosticism and Manichaeism that are ever-present threats to the integrity of the incarnation.
He frequently referred to the world around us as a "theater of God's glory." He wrote of the Creator's dazzling performance in putting together the elements of matter and arranging the components of the cosmos. She reads the book of creation with the care and intensity of a skilled textual critic, probing and questioning, teasing out, with all the tools of mind and spirit at hand, the author's meaning.Ĭalvin was not indifferent to creation. The passion and intelligence Calvin brought to Moses, Isaiah, and Paul, she brings to muskrats, rotifers, and mockingbirds. She gets us into the theater that Calvin told us about, and we find ourselves in the solid biblical companionship of psalmists and prophets who watched the 'hills skip like lambs' and heard the 'trees clap their hands,' alert to God everywhere."ĪNNIE Dillard is an exegete of creation in the same way John Calvin was an exegete of Holy Scripture. She says, Spread out your hands, lift up your head, open your eyes, and we'll pray….
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