Beware the deist 'god'.

A recent comment on an NT Wright video on his new book The Heart of Romans:

NT talks in many lectures about us having 'platonized' our eschatology, and I guess he's on the money in some areas of church practice; I'm happy to say that I remember from my teenage years a vague belief in the new creation. I think the Apostles creed might have had a part to play in that.

 

But where we have as a church madly platonized is in the creation doctrine. When NT talked about the ease with which the deist caricature of God had headway, it occurs to me that the description of creation in Genesis 1 is from the get go the antidote to deism.

 

Tom talks about God's domain (heaven) and our domain (earth) coming together, but he seems to slip over the fact that the great initial conjunction of heaven and earth is in the creation. Not a platonic or figurative creation, but a real concrete creation. This itself underlines and honours God's creation of a material cosmos with earth in it. In fact, we seem to have an almost Gnostic fear of a concrete creation located in history in connection with our history by the work being done by the Word at a tempo marked by the days which mark our lives.

 

This is perhaps the first move of communion: God shows that he is present and active directly in the world he has made for his creature as the place of communion of they with him and in the concrete terms of the world that he made concretely for that very purpose (concrete as opposed to figurative or conceptual or idealist).

 

The glory of communion of creature and creator comes to its apogee and tragic nadir in Genesis 3:8: God seeking to join communion with his creatures in his image (and thus enabled to commune with propositional content) and finds the opportunity dashed by their rejection of the opportunity.

 

I think this approach to Genesis 1 is not fundamentalist, but the most exciting; spine tinglingly full of joy and the portent of much greater to come. It is consistent with the God who made the material creation to take joy in it and celebrate that by creating in the terms of the creation and by his direct word. Thus, while not fundamentalist, the creation should bear the marks of this creation...as against a deist 'creation' where 'god' is remote, or an evolutionary 'creation' where 'god' is merged into the creation, panentheistically and almost 'paneverytingistly' to use Schaeffer's aptly coined word.

 

Being in his image, we also create by word. Only, as material creatures we use our hands to deliver the idea we have: our word made material while God's word made flesh!

 

Thus the 'days' constitute the frame-of-reference for our concrete congress with God, and his direct (by Christ) participation in his creation. They contextualize all subsequent contact between God and man: the theophanies, the prophets, 'miracles' and the incarnation, in our world marked by a uniformity of natural causes in an **open** system, to again borrow Schaeffer's term.