The other evening I attended a lecture at St. Swithun's Anglican church at Pymble. The lecture was given by Graham Cole and it had the title "The Grandeur of God's Atoning Project.
I'd love to link to the lecture, but unfortunately it hasn't been made available for the web. The number of references that Graham made to God's creation surprised me a little (or maybe it shouldn't have, with the creation-new creation line permeating Paul's theology).
He referred to the basic Christian framing of history: not only salvation history, but history in toto: the sequence of our experience:
Harmony: God created the world
Dis-harmony/rupture: The world goes wrong
Higher harmony: God restores the creation, but better!
He saw creation as a great act of generosity on God's part, an act of love; he didn't 'need' to create, but he did, because it would bring life and greater love-events. The fall, of course changed all that, but God out did the fall in Christ.
But love goes to life, not death; it is the contraversion of love that brings death; this struck me as a great indicator of the basic incompatibility of death and God's very good creation. This leaves heterodox approaches to Genesis 1-3 in a pickle, to my mind.
Man being in God's image also presents a problem for the 'death is basic' crowd. Death is not basic to man, as being in God's image would present a front of incompatibility between God's being and man's reflection of that. The image marred results in God's being spurned and death coming by curse: to the unity of the creation, over which man was God's caretaker. How could death a) not go everywhere in creation at the curse, when the relationship between caretaker and creator was broken: image defaced and life undone; therefore death! and b) preexist the rupture in the creation brought by the primary rupture between image bearer and creator. Pre-fall there is no room for death in the unity of the unruptured creation.
Again, the death is basic crowd has, I think, missed a basic premise of theology and the scriptures.
Interesting to reflect in this connection the historical unity of man's creation and his image-bearing. Genesis 1:26-27 is in mind, along with Genesis 2:7. It seems to leave no room for man to 'emerge' from the creation through a chain of death to be the caretaker of a unified creation giving God pleasure: in that it contains no 'not-God'. The fall turns that around!
The idea that death is the engine of creation (as horrible as this is) comes from within the context of the ruptured world, and so must, I think, but set to one side.
PS
At his lecture on Thursday evening, Graham offered two post scripts. I'll offer one, starting with a quote that unfortunately applies to many conservative evangelicals when it comes to their interpretation of Genesis 1:
In too many quarters we see "sterile supernaturalism" giving rise to "practical deism" working itself out in a "moral stoicism". Or something like that. Its the first two steps that attracted my attention in this connection: denying that God could create as the surface reading of Genesis 1-3 reveals leads quickly to a deistic view of the world and God, which removes God from us and invites in ideas such as theistic evolution, in my view.
