14. Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, 323.
15. Heintz, “Ambrose of Milan,” 120.
16. McFague, Life Abundant, 11.
17. Ibid., 29.
18. Ibid., 61.
19. Ibid., 29.
20. Ibid., 72.
21. Ibid., 71.
22. Ibid., 40.
23. Ibid., 141.
24. Ibid., 159.
25. Ibid., 169.
26. Ibid., 132.
27. Ibid., 197.
28. Ibid., 145.
29. Ibid., 137.
30. For a discussion of Ambrose’s thought on music, see chapter 7 of Stapert, New Song.
31. Balthasar, Truth is Symphonic, 8.
32. Andrew Young as quoted in the episode, “The Soul of a Nation” in the PBS documentary, “God in America.”
33. Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 39–40.
34. Crawford, Theology as Improvisation, 4.
35. Ibid., 5.
36. Ibid., 148.
37. Brueggemann, Texts Under Negotiation, 29.
Chapter Two: The Second Creation Story
As we move into the second creation and the story of the fall, we delve into a treasure trove of images that have fueled the Christian imagination for two millennia: Adam and Eve, the tree of knowledge, the cunning snake, and the banishment from Eden, to name but a few. Through these powerful and enduring images Christians have understood, among other things, the power of temptation, the relationship between men and women, and the painful riddle of disease and death. Our first thinker, Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335–ca. 395), links our present discussion with the preceding chapter’s discussion of creation. His older brother Basil ended his Hexameron before discussing the creation of humanity (Gen 1:26). Shortly after his brother’s death, Gregory took up the mantle and devoted his energies to a treatise traditionally entitled, On the Making of Man38 dealing with the creation of humanity in the first creation story as well as the creation of Adam and Eve and their fall. The complex dynamic in Christian thought between humans’ exalted status as beings created in the image and likeness of God and their lowly status as fallen sinners informed the autobiographical reflections of our second thinker, the great Puritan sage John Bunyan (1628–88) in his Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. We conclude with a ground-breaking reading of the second creation story in the seminal 1973 piece, “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2–3 Reread” by the feminist biblical scholar Phyllis Trible. Trible’s reading of the Eve and Adam story challenged the centuries-old use of the story as a legitimation of gender discrimination.
Gregory of Nyssa’s Interpretation of the Creation Stories
On the Making of Man falls neatly into two parts: in the first (chapters 1–15), Gregory beautifully describes the spiritual resemblance that exists between the nature of humans and the nature of God as a result of humans’ unique status as beings created in the image of God; in the second part (chapters 16–27), the tone turns more somber as Gregory contrasts humanity’s present state of instability and conflict with its original prelapsarian state of blessedness.39 One of the most distinctive features of Gregory’s theology of the human person appears in the first half of Making. His theory of a “double creation” relies upon the presence of two creation stories in Genesis. In the first story, “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) while in the second story God first creates Adam and then Eve. “Thus the creation of our nature is in a sense twofold: one made like to God, one divided according to this distinction: for something like this the passage darkly conveys by its arrangement, where it first says, ‘God created man, in the image of God created He him,’ and then, adding to what has been said, ‘male and female created He them,’—a thing which is alien to our conceptions of God” (XVI, 8). Gregory further clarifies what this “double creation” means later in Making. “I take up then once more in my argument our first text:—God says, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and God created man, in the image of God created He him.’ Accordingly, the Image of God, which we behold in universal humanity, had its consummation, but Adam as yet was not . . . ” (XXII, 3). The image of God in which humans (“universal humanity”) were created is not gendered. It is incorporeal and the capacities that it imparts to humans apply equally to men and women (XVI, 17).
Royal imagery pervades Gregory’s description of human nature in the opening chapters of Making. Human nature “by its likeness to the King of all” has “a royal and exalted character.” Rather than donning purple robes, humans are “clothed in virtue, which is in truth the most royal of all raiment, and in place of the sceptre, leaning on the bliss of immortality, and instead of the royal diadem, [they are] decked with the crown of righteousness” (Making, IV, 1). This “dignity of royalty” (IV, 1) accords humans a privileged status in God’s created order. To be sure, humans, like all other living things, take in nutrients and grow and, like other animals, have senses that allow them to be keenly aware of their environment, but according to Gregory humans alone have the gift of reason. Along with reason, humans possess the gift of free will, “for the soul immediately shows its royal and exalted character . . . [in that it is] self-governed, swayed autocratically by its own will” (IV, 1). Rationality and freedom, two hallmarks of the soul’s status as bearing the image of God, play a critical role in Gregory’s theology, but so too does love. “Again, God is love, and the fount of love: for