Self-Identity #5 - A liturgical creation; faith and works

Essay #5 on Self-Identity

God’s Liturgical Relationship to His Creation

Liturgical Implications for the Relationship of Faith and Good Works

Written by Dan McDonald

 

          I have long believed that some portions of the modern debate, especially in the United States, between evolution and creation, needed re-focusing.  Before I became a Christian I treated the teaching of creation as a myth.  After I became a Christian I largely learned to accept a “creationist” viewpoint.  My view was similar to what was believed in the most fundamentalist of circles.  The earth was very young, and that any changes within a given species, was quite small.  More often than not I felt no need for scientific support to my theological viewpoint drawn from the Scriptures.  The first crack in my armor was reading E. J. Young’s work on the first three chapters of Genesis.  Young was a recognized expert on Hebrew and he painstakingly pointed out how several uses of the Hebrew word for “day” were used in the first three chapters of Genesis.  He had no difficulty accepting the possibility of a figurative use of days in the creation account.  Let it be said, that acceptance of the possibility of the use of figurative days in the creation account does not mean that the days were or were not figurative in the account.  I have no basis for declaring either the literalist or figurative view as the truth of the matter.  I look forward to seeing these things discussed and debated in a healthy matter.

          The second consideration to become foremost in my mind as I dealt with the creation account was God’s dealing with Job and his friends.  God treated Job and his friends as if they were not privileged to know how God did the work of his creation.  He treated them as if they needed to realize that God’s work both in creating and governing the universe was beyond the expertise of man’s attempts to understand in fullness.  That led me to believe that the study of creation should lead us to humility and guarded comments regarding what we believe was the method of how God created the earth.

I work within a refinery and it gradually seemed to be somewhat clear that the Genesis account of creation, while being a true account given to man by God, was a sort of newsprint public account of a great event and not a fully scientific or technical account.  I respect and to some degree agree with those who will respond, “Yes but the Bible is correct when it touches on matters dealt with by science.”  I believe as a Christian that the Scriptures are inspired by God in every word and therefore accurate in that which they seek to explain.  But here is where we must be careful and I will illustrate the need for care by distinguishing the difference between a refinery’s newsprint explaining of an event, with a more technical explanation.  If an explosion occurs, resulting in public interest, the company will issue a report of what took place.  The public audience will have only a few people who are technically expert in regards to the operations of a refinery.  The report will therefore be not extremely technical but accurate in its expression with an emphasis on explaining in a simple manner so the public could understand necessary facts of what happened.  There will be other reports where engineers and manufacturers and construction experts describe the same event, but they will focus on the technical aspects.  There is enough of a difference between the two different reports of the same event that even if the first report was accurate it cannot be used to extrapolate what happened.  Imagine a refinery manager asking a group of engineers and refinery experts to give a report to corporate headquarters on what happened and how steps might be taken to assure that this might be avoided in the future.  What would you think of an engineer who said in reply to the refinery manager’s request for a new report, “We have the public report given to the newspapers, it is an honest report, why don’t we just extrapolate what happened from that report and send it on to headquarters, wouldn’t that suffice?  We could finish the report much more quickly.”  I don’t know about you, but if the engineer worked for a company I owned that engineer would probably be looking for a new job.  The newsprint variety of the report simply would not suffice to establish a foundation for the technical report.

I believe that the agenda between well-meaning Biblical theologians and well-meaning scientists have the same sort of issues separating them.  The Bible gives us an account of creation less than five pages long.  We can accept it as an honest document without concluding that it is sufficient for a scientist’s desire to understand the complete technical explanation of the creation.  From a theological perspective we might even conclude that an entire technical explanation is not possible because God alone is privileged to know exactly how he created the various aspects of creation.  There remains however the human curiosity to try to figure things out, and this is as much an interest for the scientist as the theologian and it would be all the better if the two camps were in dialogue rather than acting as sworn enemies.  But the first step towards such a dialogue would be to accept humbly that there are many variables known to neither the theologian nor the scientist.  Both the theologian and the scientist works using hypothetical theories they feel fit within their considerations.  Scientists and theologians both should be sensitive to the realization that sometimes hypotheses that are followed at first with great promise later have to be discarded because they fail to allow for circumstances that fail to be explained by the scientific or theological expectations.  So the scientist or the theologian has to go back to the creation of a new hypothesis to explain an event.  Whether we are working from a scientific or theological angle, our understanding of life and the explanations we derive from our considerations are always presented with an understanding that if too much of life supposedly explained by our hypothesis isn’t explained by it, then there is likely something wrong with our hypothesis and no matter how much work has been done pursuing the hypothesis honesty demands that the hypothesis be critiqued as either insufficient or as a failure.  That will be discouraging but it is as much a gain in understanding as the proving of a hypothesis would be a gain in knowledge.

Then one day as I read the Genesis account of creation I noticed something that it did not seem was hardly ever discussed in the creation versus evolution debates with which I had familiarized myself.  It was how on each day of the work of creation, God spoke to the creation, and the creation responded in accord with God’s call, and then God evaluated that response.  You could miss it, because it wasn’t always evident in each day’s work of creation, but the universe responded to God’s spoken word.  The universe was not just matter being acted upon, but was matter responding actively to the calling forth of God’s word.  This was especially described in Genesis 1:11-12 when God spoke to the earth to bring forth vegetation and the earth brought forth vegetation.  This shows a liturgical relationship between God and his creation.  God speaks and directs the work of creation in what he speaks; the universe responds to what God has spoken and brings forth what God has directed in his word.  God then evaluates what creation has done, and throughout the six days of creation God speaks of what has happened and gives his benediction that this was “good.”  It is not until man violates the commandment of God given to him in the Garden that there is no benediction describing the response to God’s work as “good.”

If we accept that the creation involves a liturgical relationship between God and his creation, then we can begin to see important implications for how we as human beings relate to God.  For we, as human beings, are not separate from the general work of creation, but are rather distinct members of the creation intended to stand as representatives of God to the creation and as representatives of creation to God.  We are created especially in God’s image and as such are given dominion over creation.  We are given the capacity to create, to investigate, explore, and explain.  There is no other creature on earth capable of being scientist, philosopher, theologian, writer, sage, or prophet capable of understanding the future based on the present and the past.  We are a unique creature within the creation, an animal yes, but the only animal bearing in his being the unique image of God.  The importance of the emphasis of the creation account on how God relates to his creation liturgically is therefore also and uniquely even more essential to be understood in God’s relationship to mankind.  God speaks, creation responds, and at the end of the day God evaluates.  Man as creation created in God’s image is capable of responding for both good and ill to God’s call.  I find the words of Sophie Scholl, not a great theologian, but just a young woman grieved in her soul at events around her to describe the human situation so well when she wrote to a friend.  She imagined the whole of creation singing a beautiful hymn to its creator, but then of man she said, “Only man can be truly ugly, because he has the free will to estrange himself from this song of praise.” (Taken from Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, page 19, written by Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn)

Here then is perhaps one of the most important lessons of the creation account to aid modern man’s search for meaning and self-identity.  God deals with the creation liturgically.  He deals with humankind liturgically.  God speaks and calls, creation and also man within creation responds, and God evaluates the response.

There are few Biblical instructions more essential for you and me to begin to understand our own self-identities from a Biblical perspective, than that we live in a creation where God speaks, we respond, and God evaluates.  There are few things more important to be understood of this liturgical relationship than that our response is active and not merely passive.  We are not merely direct objects being acted upon by the Word of God as if the Word of God is meant to absorb us intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and in the exercise of our wills all as if by osmosis.  Rather, we are created and called to respond actively in a process of creation; and of call and response, a process that is intended to lead to the implementation of God’s will.  But this is not done in a fatalistic manner by a sovereign God without human activity.  Rather we, as human beings, are both the objects addressed by the Word of God, and the subjects who then actively make a reply to the Word of God’s instruction.

Such a view of the work of creation and the relationship between God and man will have a great impact on how we understand the Biblical relationship of faith and works.  As a Protestant Christian, one hypothesis which seems to have failed in theological understandings of an issue is how we Protestants tend to explain the relationship of faith and works.  All too often the Protestant yearning to say that we are saved by faith, and not by works, imagines that it is not biblical to insist that faith must be set forth in human experience by works that express that faith.  Many Protestants regard a statement declaring that faith must be expressed through works to be heretical.  But if we look at the creation account we can begin to understand how faith is the basis for a right relationship to God, and also how faith can and must be expressed by works one does by faith.  The relationship between God and his creation is liturgical.  That liturgy is characterized both by men being called as objects to hear the Word of God, and being called as subjects who must actively respond to the Word of God.  All that is accomplished in God’s creation revolves around God’s speaking of his word into the creation and the creation responding to his word thus moving the whole of creation from darkness, and chaos without life to light and order, beauty and life.  In the Christian this is not essentially different from what took place in the rest of the created order.  God speaks, and when man believes he responds with faith and the result is that man is drawn into the power of the word to transform life through an active faith.

We will explain the relationship of faith and works to the word of God by considering various expressions of the relationship of faith and works spoken of in the New Testament.  First there is nothing accomplished apart from the word of God.  Paul writes “So then faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God (some translations, Christ).”  God speaks in his word with directives.  The faith with which we believe the word of God is not something wholly independent of the word of God.  The Word of God informs and instructs man so that the faith with which men respond to the Word of God is itself a faith energized and brought to life by the precepts of the word of God.  No one would think of believing on Christ for salvation except the word of God had shown those hearing the word of God that Christ’s life, death, burial, and resurrection was unique from other lives, deaths, and burials.  The Word of God instructs us that Christ died for our sins and rose from death for our justification and salvation.  We are called to believe and respond to this message of the word of God.  We as such do not bring our works to add to Christ to make his life, death, burial, and resurrection satisfactory for salvation.  Our works add nothing to the finished work of Christ.  When we consider ourselves before God, we can be saved only because the works of Christ have sufficed to remove the burden of our debt unto God.  No amount of good works done by us could atone for our works of sin and unbelief that had created a barrier between us and God.  God however provided the cure and the way of salvation for us to enter into a life of faith and salvation.  God has placed his promise of life and offer of salvation into the call of his gospel and there is ultimately nothing we can add to what Christ has done to grant us the entrance into that life of faith and salvation.

So faith comes by hearing.  Faith is directed, informed, instructed and takes shape as the Word of God is spoken to us and directs our understanding leading to the issuing of a call to respond through the faith into which we have been instructed by the Word of God.  All of that is caused by the word of God.  But that doesn’t mean there is not an active response to be done by man.  The Word of God calls upon us and by faith we respond.  We hear the duties of man according to the word of God in a manner that is in accord with faith.  We are brought by the redemptive work of Christ into a new relationship with the laws and commandments of God.  The sinner, apart from the redemptive message of the Gospel, is reminded by the law that he has sinned and broken the law of God.  His sin has created an unresolved enmity between God and man.  That enmity can only be resolved in what Christ came to do on our behalf.  Because Christ has died for our sins and has been raised for our justification, we have the basis for understanding our relationship to God’s commandments differently.  No longer do they simply describe the nature of our enmity as transgressors.  Rather the commandments of God now can be understood to be an expression of a Father’s love guiding his children into good behavior while teaching them to avoid wrong behavior.

Thus writes St. John to the Christian of his day, “But this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments.  For this is the love of God: that we keep his commandments, and his commandments are not grievous.”  (I John 5:2-3)  When the commandments of God are no longer showing our enmity against God, but are expressing the will of God who has forgiven our sins through the work of Christ, then God’s commandments are no longer grievous.  The commandments of God are instead the directives of a loving Father to his children, and wise informed children will gradually hopefully come to realize that his father’s commands are meant to protect the child from harm and not to limit the child's freedom to do that which is good or wonderful.  That was the great the issue which the serpent used to create a wedge between God and our first parents in the Garden.  God had told them not to eat of a certain tree for it would bring death upon them.  The Serpent told them they would not die, that God was just trying to withhold something good from them.  Through faith we recognize that God’s commands are not given with the intention of limiting our freedoms but of keeping us out of harm.  As our faith and trust of God grows in our lives, we begin to grow aware that God’s commands are not grievous.  God does not prohibit us from freedom of spirit but rather from harmful behavior that leads to ill consequences.  We begin to understand that God’s law is intended to lead us into a true spirit of liberty, and to preserve us from a misuse of liberty that leads only to our harm and destruction.

So faith which comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God ultimately leads to faithful obedience to the commands of God.  The Word of God comes into our lives and redirects our thoughts and tends towards faith as men receive this word and begin to believe upon it and then reshape their actions by that word.  So faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God; and faith is shown forth in our learning to see that God’s commandments are good and not grievous.

To a large degree the Christian develops his life in conjunction with what the Word of God tells him of life.  This word of God comes to us in our varied life situations and as it instructs us it shapes our perspectives about life, our self-perceptions, our goals, our ways of dealing with others.  The Word of God does this by entering our minds, shaping our passions, and instructing us in the goals we will by our own individual natures be pursuing.  The Apostle James in the New Testament Book of James described the word of God as a mirror into which we look and see ourselves and by which upon seeing ourselves in relationship to the Word of God we move towards a life more guided by the Word of God.  This is all related to the fact that we as human beings live in a creation where God speaks to his creation, his creation responds to the Word of God, and God evaluates the response which is made.