The March edition of Comment magazine—yes, I'm a little late in picking up on this—has three articles dealing with each aspect of the biblical story: creation, fall, and redemption. Understanding the biblical narrative in this way is characteristic of the school of thought known as neocalvinism, which Comment roots itself in. All the pieces in this three-part series are excellent, and all worth your time (as is Comment as a whole—incidentally, Comment publishes five times more material online than in print if you wanted to read it on a regular basis). A taste of each piece follows.

First, Al Wolters writes on a biblical view of creation:

The first thing most people think of in connection with creation is the so-called 'natural world'—that is, the physical and biological world. We think of stars and galaxies as well as molecules and atoms, of trees and flowers as well as birds and beasts. But that is a very limited view of creation. In the biblical view, creation is everything which God has ordained to exist, what he has put in place as part of his creative workmanship. To be sure, this includes the great variety of physical entities and processes, and the enormous diversity of flora and fauna that God has created 'according to their kind,' but it also encompasses much more. Creation includes such human realities as families and other social institutions, the presence of beauty in the world, the ability to appreciate that beauty, the phenomena of tenderness and laughter, the capacity to conceptualize and reason, the experience of joy and the sense of justice. An almost unimaginable variety of objects, institutions, relationships and phenomena are part of the rich texture of God's creation.

Then David Naugle addresses the consequences of the fall:

[The fall] is the second 'act' in the overall narrative of the Scriptures, the next major theme in a biblical view of life and the world. First, there is the good news of creation, but now we have the bad news of the fall. It introduces fundamental conflict into the biblical drama, which must be resolved before God's story ends. It shows, contrary to other worldviews, that evil is not rooted in creation itself, but in the moral rebellion of the human race against the divine authority of the holy God. I sometimes call this episode the 'uncreation' because of the damage it did to God's very good world: how it twisted his intentions for humanity, for our knowing and loving and culture-making, and for all the earth.

And finally Jamie Smith paints a wonderful portrait of God's all-encompassing redemption:

Our good Creator has not left us to our own devices. While we ruptured the plenitude of creative love, our condescending God has also ruptured our brass heaven, along with our desire to enclose ourselves in immanence, appearing in the flesh—our flesh—as the image of the invisible God. Jesus of Nazareth appears as the second Adam who models for us what it looks like to carry out that original mission of image-bearing and cultivation. The Word became flesh, not to save our souls from this fallen world, but in order to restore us as lovers of this world—to (re)enable us to carry out that creative commission. Indeed, God saves us so that—once again, in a kind of divine madness—we can save the world, can (re)make the world aright. And God's redemptive love spills over in its cosmic effects, giving hope to this groaning creation.

So our redemption is not some supplement to being human; it's what makes it possible to be really human, to take up the mission that marks us as God's image bearers. Saint Irenaeus captures this succinctly: 'The glory of God is a human being fully alive.' Redemption doesn't tack on some spiritual appendage, nor does it liberate us from being human in order to achieve some sort of angelhood. Rather, redemption is the restoration of our humanity, and our humanity is bound up with our mission of being God's co-creative culture-makers.

Be sure to read all of the articles in their entirety. It is this three-part framework (alternatively construed as wonder, heartbreak, and hope) that forms the point of view from which Comment looks at the world, a point of view which, my friend and the magazine's editor Gideon Strauss writes, manifestly reveals the love of the triune God. This love "evokes—from our whole person and in unity with the whole people of God—a life of worship, a love of our neighbours, and a respectful caring and disclosure of all of creation. Lives ordered by the love of God are ordered well, and can be lived well."

Abraham Kuyper, in that oft-quoted dictum, rightly declares that all of life is to be lived under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Our worldview needs this truth as its foundation. We do not begin to live our lives well, to borrow Gideon's words, unless we begin with the recognition of His total claim over all of creation and His holistic work of redemption. Indeed, as Cornelius Van Til once said, "Man cannot be man unless God is God."

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Among the most significant things that distinguish Christianity from the other religions of the world is that we have hope. This is not an anxious hope that constantly has us questioning if we have done enough to satisfy God's demands, but a secure hope that rests on the knowledge that God in Christ has redeemed us and called us to be His people. It is a hope that eagerly anticipates the establishment of God's kingdom in fullness. Willem VanGemeren, in The Progress of Redemption, says it like this:

The goal of God's kingdom is the establishment of God's absolute sovereignty over heaven and earth. From the expulsion from the garden till the glorious coming of the Messiah, God prepares a people to himself. This people desires to do his will on earth and awaits with hope the transformation of this world. The present world is scarred by the effects of sin and judgment, but the restoration of the world inaugurates the consummation of God's purposes...

Hope is a most vital element in the kingdom. It calls the subjects of the kingdom to theocentric living and keeps the present enjoyment of the kingdom of God and the future unfolding of its glory in dynamic tension. The children of the kingdom enjoy a foretaste of the future, but their lives are still in the shadow of the eschaton. Jesus has inaugurated the final stage in the history of redemption. Moreover, newness of life, sealed by the Spirit of God, is a token of the future restoration. The Spirit works in individuals and corporately in the church. The church is the messianic assembly instituted by Jesus Christ for the purpose of calling others to faith in himself and for adorning its members with the hope of his glorious coming...

Hope in the kingdom lies at the center of Christ's teaching, ministry, and kingdom (Matt. 6:10; 25:1-13). The proclamation of the Good News—that the kingdom is here in the Christ who gave himself a ransom—is incomplete unless it has the corollary preaching of the glorious coming of the Messiah...Peter admonishes the churches to wait and to encourage one another with the hope of the inheritance prepared for the saints at Jesus' coming (1 Peter 1:3-4, 8). The elements of that hope include the glorious appearing of our Lord, the resurrection of the body, the glorification of the people of God, the vengeance on the enemies of God's Messiah, the fullness of Jews and Gentiles in the church of Christ in accordance with God's promises and purpose in Christ, the presence of the triune God, and the renewal of heaven and earth (470-471).

That is hope. That is the hope that we as Christians live with, and can rejoice in. To be sure, this hope creates a tension right now—the kingdom has already come, but it is not yet fully established—and we live in this tension each day as we seek to make known the sovereign reign of God over all of creation, all the while struggling against the kingdom of the world as Satan attempts to subvert the rule of God. But our hope is rooted in the knowledge that this tension will be overcome with the return of Christ. And so we pray, "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!" (Rev. 22:20).

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The attitude that the physical or material is somehow "bad" or "evil" and will eventually be destroyed is a common one, even among Christians, as I've been discussing here recently. Perceptions like this lead to the belief that the creation will one day be destroyed altogether in favour of something spiritual and otherworldly.

Because our bodies are physical, this also leads to what is essentially a glorying in death. To be sure, we mourn the loss of our loved ones, but we celebrate the fact that they have passed through this earth and reached their destination. They have reached their goal. Certainly, there are benefits that the believer receives in death, but this is not the end of the story. I will leave it to John Murray, again from the final chapter of his book, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, to offer the critique and biblical corrective to this error. An extended quote, once more:

Glorification does not refer to the blessedness upon which the spirits of believers enter at death. It is true that then the saints, as respects their disembodied spirits, are made perfect in holiness and pass immediately into the presence of Christ...Yet, however glorious is the transformation of the people of God at death and however much they may be disposed to say with the apostle that to depart and to be with Christ is far better (cf. Phil. 1:23), this is not their glorification. It is not the goal of the believer's hope and expectation. The redemption which Christ has secured for his people is redemption not only from sin but also from all its consequences. Death is the wages of sin and the death of believers does not deliver them from death. The last enemy, death, has not yet been destroyed; it has not yet been swallowed up in victory. Hence glorification has in view the destruction of death itself. It is to dishonour Christ and to undermine the nature of the Christian hope to substitute the blessedness upon which believers enter at death for the glory that is to be revealed when "this corruptible will put on incorruption and this mortal will put on immortality" (1 Cor. 15:54). Preoccupation with the event of death indicates a deflection of faith, of love, and of hope. We who have the firstfruits of the Spirit 'groan within ourselves,' the apostle reminds us, 'waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body' (Rom. 8:23). That is the glorification. It is the complete and final redemption of the whole person when in the integrity of body and spirit the people of God will be conformed to the image of the risen, exalted, and glorified Redeemer, when the very body of their humiliation will be conformed to the body of Christ's glory (cf. Phil. 3:21). God is not the God of the dead but of the living and therefore nothing short of resurrection to the full enjoyment of God can constitute the glory to which the living God will lead his redeemed.

Now that is hope!

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While the whole of John Murray's little book, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, could be considered a gold mine (I heard today that one of our professors, Steve Childers, calls it a "little stick of dynamite"), his final seven-page chapter on glorification is on its own worth the price of the book. There are two things from this chapter I want to discuss, which I will do in the reverse order of Murray's discussion, partly because some of my more recent posts (see here and here) have carried a theme that he addresses as well.

The first, then, is the problem of not acknowledging the goodness and value of creation. Murray pulls no punches when he calls this a heresy. An extended quotation:

One of the heresies which has afflicted the Christian church and has been successful in polluting the stream of Christian thought from the first century to our era to the present is the heresy of regarding matter, that is, material substance, as the source of evil. It has appeared in numerous forms. The apostles had to combat it in their day and the evidence of this appears quite plainly in the New Testament, especially in the epistles. John, for example, had to combat it in the peculiarly aggravated form of denying the reality of Christ's body as one of flesh...

Another form in which this heresy appeared is to regard salvation as consisting of the emancipation of the soul or spirit of man from the impediments and entanglements of association with the body. Salvation and sanctification progress to the extent to which the immaterial soul overcomes the degrading influences emanating from the material and fleshly. This conception can be made to appear very beautiful and 'spiritual,' but it is just 'beautiful paganism.' It is a straight thrust at the biblical doctrine that God created man with body and soul and that he was very good. It is also aimed at the biblical doctrine of sin which teaches that sin has its origin and seat in the spirit of man, not in the material and fleshly.

This heresy has appeared in a very subtle form in connection with the subject of glorification. The direction it has taken in this case is to play on the chord of the immortality of the soul. This seems a very innocent and proper emphasis and, of course, there is some truth in the contention that the soul is immortal. But whenever the focus of interest and emphasis becomes the immortality of the soul, then there is a grave deflection from the biblical doctrine of immortal life and bliss. The biblical doctrine of 'immortality,' if we may use that term, is the doctrine of glorification. And glorification is resurrection. Without resurrection of the body from the grave and the restoration of human nature to its completeness after the pattern of Christ's resurrection on the third day and according to the likeness of the glorified human nature in which he will appear on the clouds of heaven with great power and glory there is no glorification. It is not the vague sentimentality and idealism so characteristic of those whose interest is merely the immortality of the soul. Here we have the concreteness and realism of the Christian hope epitomized in the resurrection to life everlasting...

In like manner the Christian's hope is not indifferent to the material universe around us, the cosmos of God's creation. It was subjected to vanity not willingly; it was cursed for man's sin; it was marred by human apostasy. But it is going to be delivered from the bondage to corruption, and its deliverance will be coincident with the consummation of God's people's redemption. The two are not only coincident as events but they are correlative in hope. Glorification has cosmic purposes...(2 Pet. 3:13; 1 Cor. 15:24, 28).

Forceful as it may sound, that Murray calls this heresy is not an embellishment or exaggeration. He is calling it as it is. When a belief causes you to implicitly deny some of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, it needs to be eradicated.

Look for part two tomorrow.

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Regeneration, for Herman Bavinck, is not a matter of something entirely new being created within us, but instead is a re-formation of human nature to what it was originally intended to be. There is no new substance added to what is already there, he writes in the first chapter of volume four of his Reformed Dogmatics. He then extends the discussion to creation, and makes this profoundly important point:

Finally also the re-creation that will take place in the renewal of heaven and earth (Matt. 19:28) is not the destruction of this world and the subsequent creation out of nothing of another world but the liberation of the creature that is now subject to futility. Nor can it be otherwise, for God's honor as Savior hinges precisely on his reconquest from the power of Satan of this human race and this world. Christ, accordingly, is not a second Creator, but the Redeemer and Savior of this fallen creation, the Reformer of all things that have been ruined and corrupted by sin. Neither, for that matter, is sin a substance, but consists in lawlessness (άνομια); it is an actualized privation (privatio actuosa) that has indeed violated the form (forma) of the entire created world but did not and could not destroy its substance or essence. Hence, when the re-creation removes sin from creation, it does not deprive it of anything essential, nothing that was essentially and originally characteristic of it (though it was "by nature") and belonged to its essence. For sin is not part of the essence of creation; it pushed its way in later, as something unnatural and contrary to nature. Sin is deformity. When re-creation removes sin, it does not violate and suppress nature, but restores it.

This point cannot be made strongly enough, especially in evangelical circles where creation is often not of great concern. But the fact is, as Bavinck so clearly states, that if creation is not restored, sin gains victory and the Lordship of Christ is rendered null and void.

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