In Michael Jensen's blog, he announced recently his plan for a book on anthropology: interesting project; he also commented on the connection points with the doctrine of creation. I commented as follows:
Michael,
Sounds like a fabulous project; although I don't know that the doctrine of creation can be set as you've suggested: as more eclectic than the Doctrine of God, or as being integrative rather than comprehensive. If these poles determine your analysis, then I think that other than the polarities you have selected might be considered. For example, I don't think that the doctrine of creation is up for grabs in the eclectic manner you suggest here. The scriptures set it as definitive and determinative of the identity of God and the parameters of our relationship with God and each other. Therefore I think that some of your themes may need to be cast in a less individualistic, atomistic manner, and more in terms of the cluster of relationships which make the setting and sense of questions 1 and 6, particularly, but all as they hang off question 4.
I think Calvin brought creation and his doctrine of God into a close coupled arrangement, and indeed, it would be hard to see anything else in the scriptures, I would think; God provides the creation as his chief identifying element, and his credential for our worship of him; collecting other perspectives in an integrative manner, rather than for prophetic analysis, seems at odds with this.
However, it will be interesting to read your handling of literature in this context, particularly as most, particularly more modern works, seem to share with ancient pagan creation myths (and encapsulate it in the modern myth to which they implicitly refer and give credence: the idea of evolution) a conception of the totality of the material world, the 'given-ness' of the cosmos as a complete basis for our life and the reality in which we are embedded. Then going on to capture any conceptualisation of the divine as a comparative triviality completely captured by the over-arching material world, expressed in some sort of man-glorifying way as either unknowable or not worth really knowing, being merely some sort of cultural fabrication borne of ignorance, or at best, a folorn protest at the ultimate lonliness of persons in a cosmos which is finally impersonal.
However, knowing your acceptance that the idea of evolution is genuinely explanatory, and this cannot be prevented from being explanatory at all levels (contrary to the oxymoronic 'theistic-evolution'), I would fear that your project will more than tip its hat to the nostrums of materialism/naturalism and capture God to a human intellectual-aesthetic (not to say political) construction to remove him from his place as creator, in real terms. I would hope that it holds up the teleological barrenness that literature leaves man in when it denies God as real, or God as creator as he discloses in the early chapters of Genesis, then unfolds to provide the contraverting frame for the news of the new creation.
I touch on some of these issues in my blogs:
http://anglicanoriginsdiscussion.blogspot.com/2011/12/de-godding-creation.html
And also in Four Moves.
