1. Farrer, Rebirth of Images, 14.
2. Ibid., 16.
3. Farrer, Glass of Vision, 43–44.
4. Ibid., 44.
5. See Davis and Hays, Art of Reading Scripture.
6. Farrer, Glass of Vision, 51.
7. Ibid., 114.
Chapter One: The First Creation Story
We begin our study of how both past and present Christian thinkers incorporate some of the most enduring biblical images into their descriptions of the Christian life, fittingly, “In the beginning . . .” The opening chapter of Genesis presents the progressive unfolding of God’s creation of the world and all the living creatures that inhabit it. This first of two creation stories in the Bible captures the theological and pastoral imaginations of two of the most influential figures in the fourth-century Christian church: Basil of Caesarea and Ambrose of Milan. Both bishops devoted a series of homilies to the Hexaemeron, the six days of creation. Their works demonstrate how they approach the biblical narrative and discern a spiritual meaning in the most minute detail in the text. The six-day creation story also illustrates the challenges that contemporary Christian thinkers, such as the theologian Sallie McFague, face when seeking to employ that classic image in their own theology. Can the image of the six-day creation still inform the theology, spirituality, and morality of a Christian community that no longer shares Basil and Ambrose’s understanding of the universe, their theory of the origins of species, or their acceptance of the Mosaic authorship of the text? Can the six-day creation story still speak to Christians who are deeply troubled about the state of the environment and the role that humans have played in disturbing it? Is it possible to ground a theological position in Scripture, to critically engage the work of esteemed thinkers within the Christian tradition, and to respond in a way that is credible and meaningful to contemporary Christians? Before we turn our attention to Basil and Ambrose, we need to survey our options for how best to answer these difficult questions.
Spectrum of Theological Approaches
As we survey the contemporary theological landscape, we discover a wide range of possible strategies for the dealing with the gap between the world of Basil and Ambrose and our own. The spectrum runs from traditional orthodoxy to liberalism, postliberalism, and postmodernism. Each of the four brings its own set of theological and philosophical convictions to bear on the problem. As a result, each has its own particular concerns and points of emphasis. At times many of the approaches share a common point of view, while at other times their differences are irreconcilable. We will draw upon all four perspectives as we approach the question of the ongoing vitality of the image of the six-day creation story for the life of the church.
In the approach that emerged in the early orthodox theology of the church, all Scripture is ultimately interpreted in light of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. As divinely inspired texts, the Old Testament contained “types” or foreshadowings of Christ. Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale, for example, prefigured Christ’s three days in the tomb (Matt 12:40). Augustine expressed the logic of this approach to the Bible succinctly when he stated that, “in the Old Testament is concealed the New, and in the New Testament is revealed the Old.”1 Theologies centered on the concept of Logos were especially marked by this sense of continuity. The Logos (the Word) that became incarnate in Christ Jesus was also the same Logos by which the world was created. All of creation, especially human reason, therefore, participated in the rationality of the Creator. The second-century Christian theologian Justin Martyr spoke of the seeds of the Word scattered throughout the teachings of Greek philosophers. At its deepest level, the Logos theology of the early church rested on a deep continuity between creation and redemption, and therefore rejected any system of thought, such as that found in the various forms of Gnosticism, that saw the material world as a creation of an evil principle and the salvation wrought by Christ as a freedom from the confines of darkness and materiality.
The drawback of the orthodox position was later codified in the principle, “Error has no rights.” Armed with the objective truth that all rational human beings should embrace, orthodox Christians at various times in history have subjected those in error to scorn, “correction,” or worse. The Christian truth-claims stood in judgment of other tradition’s claims, but orthodoxy provided little insight on how to judge the Christian tradition itself. Abolitionists, for example, challenged orthodox Christians citing biblical verses on slavery. Similar episodes can be found throughout the Christian tradition involving the treatment of indigenous peoples by Christian missionaries to condemnations of various scientific theories that today we accept without question. For this reason, many thinkers in the Christian tradition have been drawn to our second approach.
The liberal tradition accepted the orthodox belief that truth is universal, but did not regard the Christian tradition as its sole repository. This approach identified an “essence” of Christianity within the vast plurality of the biblical writings. This essence formed the kernel—to use one of the most common images in the liberal tradition—that could be separated from the husk of culturally bound and theologically dispensable framework in which it was presented. For example, the twentieth-century biblical theologian Rudolf Bultmann pursued a project of “demythologizing” the New Testament so that the original kerygma or proclamation (God’s offer of authentic human existence to the individual in the present moment) could be recovered without asking modern Christians to accept the outdated three-tiered view of the universe (heaven above, earth in the middle, and hell below) assumed by the biblical writers. Christians could then incorporate truths uncovered by physicists, geologists, and biologists within their religious beliefs. Christian belief could be revised in ways that are responsive to the developments in all areas of human inquiry without sacrificing what is essential to the gospel message.
The critics of liberalism saw in its attempt to reshape Christian belief a dangerous inclination to accommodate the church to the prevailing beliefs and attitudes of the wider culture. The line between Christian commitment and national pride, for example, could be blurred and one mistaken for the other. When the young Swiss pastor, Karl Barth, read a letter in 1914 supporting Kaiser Wilhelm II’s war policies signed by many of the liberal professors he revered, he feared that liberal theology had led Christian thinkers down a dangerous road from which it must urgently retreat. Among his many concerns, Barth believed that Christians should not feel compelled to revise their theological claims according to the canons of modern rationality. Such a policy endangered Christian identity and weakened the ability of the church to witness to the truth. Barth’s theology was a repudiation of the working assumption underlying much of Christian thought since the Enlightenment that human knowledge could be secured on an indubitable foundational principle, thus guaranteeing that certain canons of reasonableness would prevail across all communities of rational human beings.
Whereas the liberals stress the universality of reason, postliberals emphasize the particularity of the Christian narrative. Human understanding is inextricably bound with the narratives by which humans view the world and their place in it. The task of Christian theology is not a matter of correlating its truths with those discovered in other disciplines. Rather, it involves Christian self-description. The Christian narrative, stretching from the beginning of creation to