A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology

  • Animal cloning and "granting things their space"

    I don’t suppose it’ll come as a surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I think that cloning animals for meat and milk is a bad idea. Leaving aside the health considerations, what bothers me is that it’s one more step in reducing animals (and, by implication, the rest of nature) to the status of commodities or resources which are entirely at our disposal. Animals are viewed as raw material to whom anything can be done in order to increase their productivity (and the profits that generates). Cloning is one more step away from the semi-mythical idyllic family farm toward the complete mechanization and industrialization of animal husbandry.

    In his interesting book Animals Like Us, philosopher Mark Rowlands argues that this instrumentalist view of animals (and nature) has implications in the way we treat other human beings. Seeing the world around us as fundamentally a resource for our use has a “spillover” effect in our perceptions of the value of persons. “This is the logical culmination of the resource-based view of nature: humans are part of nature, and therefore humans are resources too. And whenever something – human or otherwise – is viewed primarily as a resource, things generally don’t go well for it” (p. 196)

    It’s hard not to see similarities in the application of cloning to the meat industry and the application of similar technologies to human beings. Embryos – i.e. nascent human life – are turned into a commodity to be used either for reproductive technologies or for scientific research. Lauadable as the goals of some of these enterprises may be, the instrumentalization of human life is disturbing. And one of the reasons it’s so disturbing is that we have a hard time articulating why we find these sorts of things disturbing. Our public language of costs and benefits doesn’t incorporate values that may transcend the starkly utilitarian. Satifsying people’s felt needs (e.g. for cheaper meat; or, perhaps more accurately, for greater meat industry profits) without creating tangible harm to people’s health is all the government spokesmen permit themselves to be concerned with.

    This doesn’t mean that I think we should embrace the views of some extreme environmentalists that human beings have no special worth, or that it’s wrong for us to use nature for our benefit. I think a recovery of the sense of the natural world as God’s good creation would, if taken seriously, go a long way toward creating a more humble approach to our dealings with nature. For instance, we might come to see animals as having their own role in God’s providential ordering of the world, beyond being things which exist solely for our use. There are tantalizing hints in the Bible of God having a covenant, not just with human beings, but with all flesh (cf. Genesis 9)

    Expanding on this in his article “The Covenant with all Living Creatures,” philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark (about whose political philosophy I blogged a bit the other day) argues for taking the idea of just such a covenant seriously. Clark concludes:

    The covenant God made, we are told, in the beginning and affirmed since then, is to grant all things their space. `The mere fact that we exist proves his infinite and eternal love, for from all eternity he chose us from among an infinite number of possible beings’. Every thing we meet is also chosen: that is a good enough reason not to despise or hurt it.

    By “grant[ing] all things their space,” Clark means, among other things, allowing them to live “according to their kind.” This requires us to recognize that animals have their own telos, under God, that may be quite independent of our interests. To clone animals in order to make them “better” from the point of view of our purposes is, it seems to me, a pretty clear example of refusing to grant them their space.

  • Stephen R.L. Clark’s "anarcho-conservatism"

    I’m on vacation, visiting the wife’s ancestral homeland of Indiana. Blessedly free of online distractions for the most part. Hence the relative dearth of posting.

    But I have been reading a really interesting book by philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark called The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics, and Politics. Clark has written on a variety of topics, from animal rights to natural theology. He seems to be a Christian Platonist of some sort, but also with a strong bent toward understanding human beings as parts of nature and continuous in a strong sense with other animals.

    The present work attempts to look at political and ethical issues in light of seeing human beings as quite literally political animals. Clark arrives at what he calls “Aristotelian anarchism.” Contrary to the Hobbesian view that posits the necessity of a strong state to keep us from a perpetual state of war, Clark’s Aristotelianism sees humans as social animals who naturally form communities.

    Hobbesians, including most modern liberals, justify the state on the ground that it is what ideally stiuated rational agents would choose. But this, Clark thinks, masks the fact that the state is essentially brigandage writ large. No one actually consents to the existence of rule by the few over the many, in any sense that would seem to be morally significant. And when political philosophers argue that they would choose it if they were “truly rational,” what they often seem to mean by “rational” is “good liberals like us.”

    Of course, even if the state isn’t legitimate in the sense that any of us have ever actually consented to being ruled by other men, the ever-present fear is that it’s the only thing that stands between us and social chaos. Besides the obvious point that, given the historical record of governments in terms of murder, theft, and oppression, the cure may well be worse than the disease, Clark points out that state power may yet be intrinsically wrong:

    No one is to enslave anyone, nor coerce anyone except to prevent such enslavement or absolute coercion. No one, in particular, is to force another to do what he/she does not him/herself consider right: that is, to treat another source of action merely as material. … State power is born in conquest, not in free contract, and has no more right to its prey than any other robber band. (p. 33)

    The statist assumption is that top-down control is the only means of establishing social harmony, but the anarchist’s claim is that the “peace” provided by coercion is actually just war in another form, and that, moreover, there are other means by which social order arises.

    Like other anarchists, Clark distinguishes two means of securing social cooperation: the military (or political) means, and the economic means. The former uses coercion to compel behavior and its use tends to result in a caste of rulers who lord it over the rest of us. The latter includes free exchange, gift-giving, and other positive-sum forms of social interaction. The anarchist’s political agenda, Clark says, is not to impose some utopian blueprint for the perfect society, but to replace the military means of civil association with non-coercive methods.

    Non-coercive anarchism (which is to say, just anarchism) rests … upon a method of civil association, not on a perceived goal. That method, the organization of the civil means, has no one obvious outcome, and to that extent the critics are correct to see that anarchists have no definite political goal, no ‘good society’ the far side of catastrophe. Certain possible futures are rejected (as imperial consolidation, bureaucratic world state, military nationalism), but the anarchist methodology is compatible with as many more, including the free market, communitarian federalism and even ‘fractured feudalism’ [i.e. competing and partly overlapping sources of authority]…. (p. 86)

    Following Jefferson and Kropotkin, Clark seems to favor a decentralization of political power to the most local feasible level. He rejects, however, revolution as a means to replacing the military or political form of association with peaceful and non-coercive methods. Even Gandhi’s “non-violent” revolution, he points out, resulted in no small amount of bloodshed, and the Indian state that replaced British colonialism arguably suppressed liberty in a number of ways, not the least of which being the incorporation of unwilling minorities into the Indian state.

    Instead, Clark adopts what he calls “anarcho-conservatism,” an anti-revolutionary commitment to expanding the organization of the civil or economic means of social cooperation, side-by-side with, and gradually replacing coercive means. He concedes that such a conservative stance risks being insufficiently sensitive to present injustice, but argues that change which grows organically out of a people’s past is preferable to the kind of sharp break with it that revolution often brings.
    Nevertheless, he admits that the anarcho-conservative requires a certain kind of patience:

    and that may be easiest for those who can trust in God. If the God of justice will bring the Empire down, and we, God’s people, will be there to see it fall (even if I, in this mortal body, never do), we can afford to wait, and not attempt to rule the world by force. (p. 90)

    This last quote reminds me of John Howard Yoder’s argument that Christians aren’t called to make sure that history comes out right. That’s God’s business. The job of Christians is to be faithful to a certain way of life in the midst of the dawning of the new creation and the death-throes of the old. And certainly non-coercion looms large in Yoder’s vision of what the Christian life is about.

    Clark does recognize that there can be a just war, but he sees this as essentially a defensive action, and not one that should be resorted to in order to bring in some glorious new social order. And, in fact, the support of wars or revolutions is so inherently dangerous to the preservation of the civil means of order, they require a very high degree of justification:

    Just revolutions, in sum, are theoretically possible, on the same terms as just wars. But there is very strong reason to be suspicious of any candidates for that high status. Certainly neither war nor revolution can be just that does not revert as soon as possible to the civil means, to peace. Certainly the very establishment of a war machine will almost always make that return less likely. The means constitute and modify the end, as Gandhi saw. All would-be revolutionaries need to ask themselves which programme is likelier to succeed: armed revolution, with its ensuing injuries to innocents, its creation of another brigand power, or else some unsung, unrebellious organisation of the civil and economic means alongside or out of the way of politics? (p.88)

    I think this is key to the argument. Attending to the means, not just the ends, however laudable, we’re seeking to realize, is necessary for any just social order. Politics often adverts to ends-justifies-the means reasoning. But the anarchist, like the pacifist, is the fly in the ointment, reminding us to scrutinize the means we choose. It’s much easier, in some ways, to coerce people than to earn their free consent. But treating them as ends in themselves, rather than material for our schemes, demands it.

  • Liberation theology for animals

    Andrew Linzey has a nice piece in the London Times. Nothing really new if you’ve read any of his books, but a good concise case for an “animal inclusive” Christianity. (via Thinking Anglicans)

    I’m intrigued by the idea that the scope of Christ’s redemptive life and death extends to all creation and not just human beings, or, in Linzey’s words, that the “scope of salvation is cosmic.” We say that as a matter of course, but most of our theology and worship remains steadfastly centered on human beings. If we took the idea of cosmic salvation seriously how would that, for instance, require us to re-think traditional ideas of atonement? Or eschatology?

  • NT Wright and the nature of apologetics

    The Christian Century reviews two recent books by that one-man publishing house N.T. Wright.

    Our parish curate warmly recommended Simply Christian, the Mere Christianity of the 21st century if reports are to be believed. Of course, Wright and Lewis are very different thinkers speaking to very different audiences.

    The reviewer, Samuel Wells, writes:

    I’m generally wary of apologetics because it tends to portray a faith rather different from the life actually lived by Christians and often implies that one can have Jesus without church. I’m largely persuaded by Karl Barth’s claim that the best apologetics is good dogmatics. Wright, however, uses his opening themes as appetizers, rather than as interrogators whose demands must be met. He allows Christianity to speak for itself rather than forcing it to address issues that have a supposedly more significant or comprehensive origin, such as “the human condition.” This is stylistically impressive and disarmingly persuasive.

    This description seems to position Wright in a broadly “post-liberal,” “post-modern,” “ecclesial” stream of Christianity. Lewis, meanwhile, was attempting to argue on modern atheism’s own turf of rationalism, at least in some of his apologetic works. I’m not as convinced as some that the modern Enlightenment moment has passed, so there may still be a need for that kind of apologetics (though not one that simply repeats Lewis’s arguments).

  • Mouw on evangelicalism

    Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, is interviewed in the LA Times on what it means to be an evangelical. Nothing really new there, but he does highlight a kind of “broad tent” evangelicalism that seems to be gaining more notice.

    I read Mouw’s Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport and He Shines in All That’s Fair. The first is a remarkably gentle and irenic commendation of Calvinism, and the latter explores the Calvinist concept of common grace. Both were very enjoyable and worthy reads, though Mouw didn’t make a Calvinist out of me. (Sorry, Dan!)

  • The Zwingli-Clinton axis

    I was reading an article from a back issue of the Lutheran journal dialog and came across this amusing line: “This something could on that basis be regarded, alongside with the scriptures, as also normative as a sign of unity, even if not recognized by all the Lutheran Confessions, provided that ‘is’ does not really mean ‘is’ in the Zwinglian-Clintonian line of argumentation.”

  • Animals, nature, and Christian ethics

    Stephen Webb, theologian and author of On God and Dogs and Good Eating, has an intriguing article at The Other Journal called “Theology from the Pet Side Up: A Christian Agenda for NOT Saving the World” which combines two of my pet interests (pardon the pun), Christian concern for animals and the theology of nature. In it he argues that Christians should not sentimentalize “unspoilt nature” and ecosystems which routinely sacrifice, often in brutal and painful ways, individual creatures for the sake of the integrity of the whole. Rather, he says, we should see pets as in some ways the paradigm for what God intends for animals. They are to be brought into the circle of communion and companionship which God has established. Consequently, he suggests that Christian concern for “the environment” should properly begin with attention to particular creatures:

    [T]heologians are often in too much of a hurry to talk about nature these days, and thus they do not take the time to reflect about the nature that is closest to them—their pets. Environmentalists lift up the values of interdependence and holism, which they adopt from ecology, but these principles are another way of saying that eco-systems do not care about individuals. Rather than interdependence, I would want to emphasize relationships. Interdependence suggests that nature works quite well on its own accord, and human intervention inevitably upsets the balance. When I think of interdependence, I think of a spider’s web, not a mutual affirmation of difference and dignity.

    Christians have no business promulgating the aesthetic appreciation of coherence—a part of the whole is good as long as it contributes something to that whole—which reflects the old idea that this is the best of all possible worlds. The world is fallen, and nature is not what God intended it to be. The violence of nature is not all our fault, either, because the world into which Adam and Eve were expelled was already at odds with the peaceable harmony of Eden. If nature is fallen and its fall preceded our own, then there is little we can do to change nature in any dramatic way. Yet we can, like Noah with his ark, save a few fellow creatures from suffering as we try to warn others about God’s impending judgment.

    […]

    Beginning a theology of the environment by reflecting on pets will lead to a very different place than beginning with nature in general or wild animals with their freedom threatened by human population growth. The nature that God pronounced good in the Genesis creation account was not the nature that forced humans to toil for their food and animals to fight each other. Animals were named by Adam, which suggests that the authority of humanity over animals is not incompatible with intimacy and friendship. Animals are meant to stand in relation with God by being in relation with humanity. In his science fiction novel, Perelandra, C. S. Lewis describes a planet where the fall has not (yet) occurred. He portrays the animals as both mysterious and gentle, living according to their own laws but also welcoming human company.

    Traditionally, Christian theology portrays heaven as a garden, not a wild jungle, a place, like the original Garden of Eden, where God allows life to grow without the countless sacrifices of violent death. It is thus possible to argue that pets are the paradigm for the destiny of all animal life. In other words, according to the Christian myth, animals were originally domesticated, in the sense of being nonviolent and being in a positive relationship with us, and they will be again.

    I think Webb is right to resist turning nature as we find it into something that is normative for our attitudes toward the natural world. Nature is red in tooth and claw, and it’s proper for humans to alleviate (or at least not exacerbate) the suffering that seems endemic to our fallen world.

    But I also think Webb is a bit dismissive of legitimate environmental concerns. Granted that nature is “fallen” or, at the very least, not what God ultimately intends her to be, and granted further that we shouldn’t idealize “wild” nature, does it follow that we shouldn’t be concerned with fostering what integrity and beauty she displays? Webb is right that environmentalism can take on religious overtones, but this argument is often used by conservatives to shrug off environmental issues. Just because some people make an ersatz religion out of environmental concern doesn’t mean that there aren’t real problems that need attending to, for our own sake if for no other reason. The need to adress environmental problems arises quite naturally from the concern for the well-being of individuals (including our animal friends) that Webb places at the center of the Christian ethos.

  • Evangelism in the mainline and the loss of transcendence

    Chris at Even the Devils Believe has a good post on birth rates and evangelism in mainline Protestantism, jumping off from the recent comments from Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori about how Episcopalians aren’t incresing their numbers due to the low birth rates among “better-educated” people who care about preserving the earth.

    Leaving aside the condescending tone of those remarks toward our Catholic and Mormon friends, Chris correctly points out the whistling-past-the-graveyard nature of this attitude. He also notes that Christianity is not exclusively, or even primarily, a religion that propagates itself by inheritance, but by evangelism, which is where mainline Protestantism has been falling down on the job. And it needn’t be a matter of “liberalism,” narrowly defined as churches who have centrist-to-liberal stances on the usual litany of issues.

    While I try to resist sweeping generalization about “postmodernism” or what “postmodern” people are supposedly like, I think that one thing that can be said is that postmodern people, outside of a relatively small band of committed secularists, are open to an experience of the transcendent. The closed clockwork universe of high modernism probably never had much of a hold on most people’s minds, but it’s also lost much of whatever intellectual justification it once had. I’ve argued before that “supernaturalism” is not what keeps people away from religion. When theologians decry rampant “secularism” I sometimes think that’s because they are taking their academic colleagues as representative of the population as a whole.

    But, however important it may be to engage secularist or hard-core “naturalist” thought, that’s simply not where most people are coming from (the same might be said of “postmodern” thought, which is still largely confined to the academy, but that’s a topic for another day). So, if there is a “liberalism” (or maybe “modernism” is a better word) that’s at fault here, I think it might be the variety which downplays the transcendent, or “vertical,” aspect of faith in an attempt to appeal to “modern” people.

  • Moral diversity in the church

    I recently picked up a collection of essays from the library called Gays and the Future of Anglicanism, edited by Andrew Linzey and Richard Kirker. The essays cover a broad range of topics responding to the Church of England’s Windsor Report, which censured the American Episcopal Church and a diocese within the Canadian Anglican church for proceeding with the consecration of an openly gay bishop and the blessing of same-sex unions respectively.

    Among the essays that I found most helpful were those addressing the question of what constitutes legitimate diversity in the church on moral issues, in particular, essays by Keith Ward, Rowan Greer, and Linzey himself.

    Ward argues that Anglicanism, unlike, say, Roman Catholicism, doesn’t have a mechanism for pronouncing definitively on contested moral questions. He then takes the Fourth Commandment (Sabbath observance) as an example of where the church has allowed widely divergent interpretations to exist side-by-side. What constitutes adherence to the Fourth Commandment is determined by context as well as reading the intention of “spirit” of the law. Hardly anyone would insist that Christians not “work, leave home, gather wood, or light a fire” on the Sabbath. Alternatively, one could follow Calvin and (arguably) St. Paul and say that for Christians there is no specially mandated day for observing it, since the law has been abrogated for them. However, Ward says, what you often end up with in practice is a kind of hodge-podge or halfway observance, where Christians are discouraged from working but not required to fulfill the other parts of the commandment. At the end of the day, he says, how we observe the Sabbath should be determined by the intent of the commandment, namely, to honor and remember God in all we do.

    Analogously, Ward contends that the apparent biblical prohibitions on sexual relations between members of the same sex likewise have to be judged both in their original context and in light of the fact that Christ is “the end of the law.” Appealing to the OT prohibitions, for instance, is undermined by the fact that Christians (and Jews) routinely mitigate or outright ignore parts of the law. Likewise, he argues, for some of St. Paul’s statements. To take them as legalistic commands is to misunderstand the teaching of the gospel. “If Paul teaches that the whole law has been set aside by Christ, then appeal to the law to back up a moral view has been rendered impossible. To appeal to the moral beliefs of Paul, who taught that we should not be bound by any written words, would hardly make sense” (p. 25).

    But lest this lead to relativism, Ward says that we have been given a way of testing our actions: “That criterion is love of neighbor, concern for their wellbeing. Such neighbor-love is to be modelled on the example of Jesus, which asks for self-giving, humble, unreserved and unlimited concern for the good of others” (p. 25). Ward concludes, then, that “when safeguarded by a stress on the need for loyalty and total commitment in relationships, and by an insistence that sexual practice should express and be subordinated to mutual personal love, a sexual relation between two people of the same sex who are by nature attracted to one another is acceptable and natural” (p. 26).

    Nevertheless, Ward allows that Christians can in good faith disagree about this. Interpreting and applying the Bible is a complex matter over which sincere and well-informed Christans can and will disagree. He proposes that a diverstiy of viewpoints existing in one church has been, and should continue to be, a hallmark of Anglicanism. He suggests that one way of embodying that diversity is the existence of inclusive churches “whose vision of human relationships as related in Christ includes those living in same-sex partnerships” (p. 29), and that there is no reason that pastors or bishops likewise situated shouldn’t minister to such churches.

    Rowan Greer looks at the diversity of viewpoints in light of traditional Anglican views on the authority of the Bible and church polity. He begins his essay by noting two opinions he holds with confidence:

    First, what could be called the traditional view [of sexuality] no longer compels widespread assent, not only with respect to homosexuality, but also in reference to issues such as the remarriage of divorced persons, heterosexual cohabitation outside marriage, and childless marriages of those capable of bearing children. It does not seem to me reasonable to treat the gay issue in isolation of other aspects of human sexuality. Second, granted that moral norms should not be severed from doctrinal considerations, I find it difficult to think of them as quite the same, and remain unconvinced that a particular view of human sexuality must be held necessary to salvation. (p. 101)

    Greer goes on to consider how the appeal to “scriptural authority” can be misleading because Anglicanism at least has never had a settled view of how scriptural authority functions. He canvasses the views of early Anglican divines like Richard Hooker, Joseph Hall, and William Chillingworth and notes that “even in early Anglicanism it is impossible any one clear understanding of biblical authority” (p. 105). Similarly with the other two legs of what he calls “that shibboleth of contemporary Anglicanism, ‘scripture, tradition, and reason” (p. 105).

    He then discusses what he considers to be a fairly persuasive view of biblical authority – that of an inspired witness or response to revelation – which he associates with figures like S.T. Coleridge, F.D. Maurice, Charles Gore, and William Temple. The upshot is that “the repudiation of infallibility is characteristic of Anglicanism and that this carries with it the conclusion that all human authority is fallible” (p. 109). Consequently, Greer argues that proposals to create a more centralized Anglican communion with quasi-legal mechanisms for enforcing unanimity on controversial issues is a mistake and constitutes taking the easy way out.

    Andrew Linzey’s essay “In Defense of Diversity” makes the point that it’s inconsistent to demand uniformity on one moral issue like homosexuality, while allowing for wide diversity on issues of at least as great, if not greater, moral import:

    Like many church reports, [the Windsor Report] likes to think that there is greater uniformity than acutally exists. It scolds ECUSA and the Diocese of New Westminster for failing to observe the “standard” of Anglican teaching, but omits to mention that it is, like all such “teaching,” based on Lambeth resolutions, wholly advisory at best. Nowhere is this clearer than on the issue of war and violence. Successive Lambeth Conferences of 1930, 1948, 1968, and 1978 declared that “war as a method of settling international disputes is incompatible with the teaching and example of Our Lord Jesus.” But this hasn’t stopped individual churches authorizing priests to serve in the armed forces as chaplains, even though they are required to wear military uniform and are subject to service discipline. And neither has it stopped individual Christians and ordained ministers making up their own minds about the rights and wrongs of particular wars, and participating in the ones they believe to be just. (pp. 176-7)

    Linzey’s point is not that any moral position is as good as any other, but rather that sincere Christians can legitimately reach different conclusions on particular issues in good faith. “We must give up as infantile the notion that all Christians have to morally agree on every issue. … Unity and communion would have been better served by a frank and honest recognition that disagreement is not in itself a sign of infidelity to Christ, or the demands of truth, or the fellowship that Anglicans can, at best, have within the church” (p. 178).

    Indeed, Linzey says, though some may dream of a “pure” church where everyone agrees on all moral issues of importance, such a church would in fact be a sect. And, whatever the value of sects, that isn’t historically what Anglican churches have tried to be. The “Elizabethan settlement” that gave rise to Anglicanism as we know it was in part a reaction against the sectarianism of the Puritans, who sought just such a “pure” church.

    I’m not sure how persuasive these arguments would be to someone who wasn’t already at least sympathetic to the “liberal” view on same-sex relationships in the church (though I think a case could be made that it’s also a deeply “conservative” view, but that’s a topic for another post…). However, it seems to me that a diversity of opinion on important issues isn’t going away and I’m convinced that it’s a mistake to make one’s position on this particular issue the litmus test for “genuine” Christianity.

    For better or worse, there is no unified Christian view on many of the perplexing issues of the day. One unfortunate tendency of Protestantism has been to splinter in the face of disagreement, whereas Catholicism has tended to try and enforce unity from the top down. But, as Keith Ward puts it, “If there is to be any hope of Christian unity in the world, Christians will have to learn to embrace diversity of interpretations, doctrines and ways of life, while always seeking to relate those diverse patterns to the disclosure of the divine nature in the biblical records of the person of Jesus, and in the creative power of the Holy Spirit” (p. 29).

    There are other essays in this volume worth discussing, which I may get to in future posts, but as a whole I think it’s a worthwhile read for Christians, not just Anglicans or pseudo-Anglicans like me, concerned with the splintering of our churches.

  • Death, where is thy sting?

    Thomas at Without Authority writes on death and whether we should consider it natural and/or evil in itself. I think he’s on the right track there (and I’m not just saying that because he had nice things to say about a few of my posts).

    I’m intrigued by his last paragraph where he says:

    So, in my estimation, the evolutionary biologists are right when they say that death is a necessary part of nature. But are they also correct in concluding that the world is not good, as the book of Genesis would have us believe? I think the answer depends on how one interprets the biblical statements concering the goodness of creation. Are these meant to imply that the world is intrinsically good, that is, good in-and-of-itself? Or do they mean that creation is only good when it’s in communion with its Creator? I think the latter answer is correct, which means that only a redeemed creation is truly “good”. We should never draw too sharp a distinction between God’s roles as Creator and Redeemer, as if He first made a supposedly good creation and then had to save it when all hell broke loose. Creation always involves redemption, and redemption always involves a new creation. Thus, it’s not surprising that a purely atheistic worldview like neo-Darwinism is incapable of seeing the inherent goodness of creation, since it cuts itself off from the salvation that redeems and restores this fractured world.

    I take this to mean that creation is always in “process” toward the final consummation. This seems at odds with the traditional notion that creation “at the beginning” was finished and perfect as it was, and only later fell into sin and disharmony. Maybe this is more consonant with the somewhat popular “Irenaean” (after Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons and scourge of gnostics) account of the fall that sees creation and humanity as progressing from a state of relative immaturity to one of perfect communion with God. On this view, the fall was more like a detour from this intended path than a cataclysmic rupture from a state of perfect bliss.