A quick wrap of my reading of God in Creation by Moltmann
Moltmann wonders around the topic in his ‘true-to-form’ fashion: its entertaining, but can catch the reader off guard, as he appears to head first in one direction, then in another.
His views on the biblical doctrine of creation are no different.
Reading earlier chapters, he sounds like a biblical literalist, for all the reasons that biblical literalists are convinced by: the simple meaning of the words used in their grammatical context. No surprise there! Moltmann doesn’t try to kid us with pointless arguments about ‘literary form’ or insult our intelligence by proposing that he doesn’t take a literal, but a literary view of the Genesis creation account (he thinks, of course, that there are two accounts). What he does is to effectively put the biblical account in a different world from this one, yet seeks to make the intersection between revelation (I’m not quite sure if he thinks it is revelation or by using the word ‘myth’ if he thinks its more like crafted stories that attempt to convey something other than what they appear to convey) and the world we live in.
He does this more in the chapter ‘The Evolution of Creation’ than any other. In this chapter he is clearly influenced by contemporary rhetoric about origins; and adopts the scientistic/materialist frame of reference in both an uncritical and unfounded manner.
Uncritical because he neglects the history of ideas of evolution, being rooted in religious view that axiomatically excludes both revelation and a divine revealer, and unfounded because he appears to be informed more by the static Aristotelian conception of the physical world (he calls it ‘nature’ giving away the pagan game) than the creation as provided for in the Bible, and as conceptualised by modern ‘creationists’.
So, for example, he seems to believe the Bible requires a level of ‘fixity’, perhaps of species, that it actually does not. Then argues against this pointing to the ‘openness’ that is shown by evolution. However, the openness to the future he seeks is in the Bible comprehensively, as the creation is a field of interplay between its own variations: such as within ‘kinds’ of organisms and human custodianship. But the variation within the creation has no discernable teleological import in and of itself, the only ‘openness’ to the future, to God’s life related to ours, is in that very arena of relationship; and in our fallen world, of our movement toward and away from God: toward in repentance, and away in pride!
The basic failing of his theology of creation, seems to me to be that he operates his theology on two planes: the plane of the idealist and the realist. The Bible consistently paints a realist picture of the world and events; it is only what happens that is important. What does not actually happen is of no value. Yet Moltmann must hold that the creation did not actually happen as accounted in the Bible, but evolution did and does, and the one can inform the other. But this is equivalent to claiming that a mere story that one is wealthy will influence a statement from one’s bank! Try using that approach when you go to buy a Lear Jet.
Not so, of course. If something has no reality, then it has no substance! The ‘didn’t happen’ cannot inform the ‘did happen’ in the same world conception; and the world conception of the Bible is of a physical (embodied) creation from the word of God to form the field where the relationship between God and man; his image-like-him, is made. Because our total experience is circumscribed by the real world of event and consequence delimited by space and time in an absolutist manner, and God’s revelation of creation is to link his word to that world, it is difficult to give any credibility to a conceptualisation of the revelation that disconnects it from the very structure that it is causally of a family with.
It might be argued that mediatorial mechanisms do not threaten disconnection, but I think that if any but the mediatorial role of Christ is given a place, they do. They immediately undo the relationship between God and his creation/God and humanity founded in the history between them; particularly where the idea of evolution is concerned as in recognition of the formulation of this idea, it runs a materialist view, not a personalist/supernatural one, and requires an uncomfortable and indeterminate grafting of the world of love, relationship and hope on to the world of value-free material randomness whose only teleological target is the heat death of the universe. The notion of evolution is not merely mediatorial between God’s speaking and the world we live in coming into being; rather, it re-founds the basis for thought and life; removing it from the personal, and replacing it with the material. It thusly provides an interpretive framework that turns its back on a personal creator (creator who is a person; person-ness and not material being basically real), leaving us with a dead-end explanation that dissipates the personal in material, reifying the reduction.
It thus says that there are two histories with which we contend and that impose their utterly different coordinate systems on our conceptualisation of the world. But, again, the very purpose of the creation account is to give us the coordinate system by which we can understand our relationship with our creator, and the place of the world as product of his loving word, albeit fallen as we have rejected that relationship. The world God made in history by his word is our world, the world in which we either seek him or not, and the world that he will redeem in re-creation! It is not another world that just happened over vast periods of de-personalising time by random processes.
But did God put in train the random processes? Of course, but they are processes of degradation, not creation!
