A natural theology so conceived can account for many other things as well, including, as I suggested earlier, the existence of evil, falsehood, and ugliness. These negative realities—linked with Satan and the perversity of men and women—are perceived and experienced against the backdrop of their opposites, i.e., goodness, truth, and beauty, which have their source in God. The economy of salvation, moving from the creation of morally free creatures made in God’s image, through the fall, to incarnation, and finally to Christ’s promised return and eschatological consummation, is the interpretive framework that makes the most sense of the order and splendor as well as the moral ambivalence of the natural world, including human nature as we experience it. The moral, rational, and aesthetic dimensions of reality that find consummate expression in human persons are mysteriously rooted in the physical creation we have been considering, in the order it displays and the unfolding complexity of its material structures.
Let me conclude with a brief comment on beauty. Beauty is inherent in all aspects of reality. It irradiates the universe. It is the aesthetic dimension of cosmological order, yet intimately related to the rational and moral dimensions as well. We speak, for example, of the beauty of a mathematical equation, or of a person who acts in self-sacrificing generosity; and we Christians speak of the beauty of Jesus, who manifests to us inexpressible love. Why is the natural world so beautiful? Why is mankind able to perceive and create beauty? Once again, as with our ability to read the book of the universe, here we find ourselves with the ability to appreciate its beauty. The universe is rationally and aesthetically intelligible to us. We are gifted to understand it and to be moved by its splendor. Perhaps we can call beauty the radiance of cosmic order, the radiance of truth, which itself may be understood as the manifestation of goodness, of the good, which is God. Why do the creatures that emerge through the processes of natural law, information, mutation, and natural selection turn out to be, each in a way quite beyond description, so beautiful? What always strikes me is that even the strangest biological creatures, like the ones discovered in the depths of the ocean, are oddly beautiful, though by some aesthetic criteria one might find them ugly. In themselves they are wondrous, amazing, stunning, and somehow the sheer wondrousness of them makes them beautiful.
It is all mysterious. And that is our final word: mystery. We are surrounded by mystery. And yet that mystery is not alien to us, nor utterly impenetrable. Even for the atheist, the cosmos is intelligible and beautiful. In a profound way, mankind is at home in the universe. And if by divine mercy we have come to know Jesus Christ, and to be in communion with our heavenly Father through the gift of the indwelling Spirit of God, we are filled with gratitude as we behold the natural world and see it as it truly is, God’s splendidly ordered creation, groaning, yes, on account of man’s rebellion, yet radiant still with beauty, and destined, when Christ returns, to be liberated from decay and restored to its full glory.7 Considering all these things, we can confidently affirm that the gift to us of knowledge of the true God—of the Holy Trinity—has explanatory power beyond any competing worldview to make ultimate sense of all that we perceive and experience.
1. Davies, Mind of God, 31.
2. Polkinghorne, Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity, 82–87.
3. Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, 82–85.
4. Pearcey and Thaxton, Soul of Science, 30–34.
5. Staune, Notre Existence a-t-elle un Sens?, 242–66.
6. Staune, Notre Existence a-t-elle un Sens?, 256–60.
7. See Romans 8:18–25.
Resurrection and Life after Death
(Talk at St. Michael’s Anglican Church, Paris)
I
Writing to the gentile Christians in Ephesus, Paul says: “. . . remember that formerly . . . you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:11a–12). Both believing Jews and gentiles consider that the covenants of the promise are fulfilled in the Jewish Messiah, Jesus. Christ redeemed us, Paul wrote to the Galatians, “in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit” (Gal 3:14). Essentially, the covenanted promise is communion with God the Holy Trinity, Creator, and Redeemer. “My dwelling place will be with them,” says the Lord to his people through the prophet Ezekiel (37:27a). And near the end of the book of Revelation, as John sees in a vision the New Jerusalem—the renewed creation—coming down out of heaven from God (it is no man-made construction, no Babel) “as,” he writes, “a bride beautifully dressed for her husband”—at that very moment, writes John, “I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God” (Rev 21:23–24). And the prophet goes on: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev 21:4).
Life. This is what the covenantal promise is all about. God is life. God is life, and the form—the heart—of life is love. “I am come that they may have life, and have it abundantly,” says Jesus (John 10:10b). “For God so loved the world,” writes John, “that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). And to Martha, before raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me shall live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” he asks her (John 11:25–26). And yet another word from the Gospel of John: “I tell you the truth,” says Jesus, “whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:24–26).
“Do you believe this?” Jesus asks Martha. It’s the question we must ask ourselves. It’s the key question. Do we believe that Jesus is the resurrection and the life? In him—in himself, in his being—is life, and as we are in him by grace through faith, and as he is in us, we have life—true life, everlasting life. Herein lies our hope, the hope that the world lacks and cannot give. In him who was raised from the dead, we shall be raised from the dead. This will be the consummate expression of God’s love. “For if the dead are not raised,” writes Paul to some skeptics in Corinth, “then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins . . . If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men . . . If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’” (1 Cor 15:16–17, 19, 32b). But of course Paul, who had encountered the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, and who, later, in Christ, had been caught up to the third heaven (2 Cor 12:2), was utterly convinced that Christ had been raised, and hence that those who belonged to him would be raised too: “With that same spirit of faith,” he writes to the Corinthians, “we also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us