target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_4c1dd00c-5dfd-5812-a50f-467f0d6f723d">8. Ibid., 126–27. Emphasis original.
9. Hildebrand, Trinitarian Theology, 115–16.
10. Basil of Caesarea, Hexameron, I.7. Ambrose repeats this idea in Hexameron, I.10. All citations of the Hexameron from both Basil and Ambrose are taken from the translations in the bibliography unless otherwise noted.
11. Costache, “Christian Worldview,” 28.
12. For a discussion of the differences between Basil and Ambrose, see Swift, “Basil and Ambrose on the Six Days of Creation,” 317–28.
13. Richard Lim argues that Basil does not categorically rule out the use of allegory, “but that, instead, he is warning his specific, and largely unsophisticated, audience not to abandon the literal meaning of scriptures in favor of more arcane spiritual meanings” in his “The Politics of Interpretation,” 362. Hildebrand points out that Basil does in fact employ the allegorical method in his commentary on the Psalms; see his Trinitarian Theology, 122–39.
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,
