that way of doing theology may give the impression that, as I observe in Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified, “Christianity is a set of ideas that need to be made consistent with one another.”8 I go on to argue in Sanctify Them in the Truth (yet another of my books that, as far as I can tell, fell stillborn from the press) that theology is an intricate web of loci that requires ongoing exploration and repair. Exploration and repair are required because we are tempted to overemphasize one “doctrine” or locus in a manner that distorts what we believe and how we live.9 All of which is to say that the occasional character of my work is at least partly due to my conviction that theology is best understood as an exercise in practical reason.
I should like to think this way of understanding the theological task to be consistent with the way Wilken tells the story of the development of early Christian thought. He observes that the early Christian thinkers were not in the business of “establishing something.” Rather, they understood their task to plumb “the facts of revelation” by employing “the language and imagery of the Bible, and how the life and worship of the Christian community gave Christian thinking a social dimension that was absent from ancient philosophy.”10 Accordingly, Wilken observes by way of commentary on Justin’s conversion that in contrast to the philosophers, who rely on demonstrations, “the Word of God makes its way not by argument but as men and women bear witness to what has happened.”11
Of course, Wilken would be quick to deny that argument is not an essential aspect of Christian witness. Rather, I take his point to be that argument without witness is empty. Even worse, argument without witness threatens to become a coercive ideology. Put even more strongly, witness is a form of argument if we remember — as Wilken, drawing on Origen, argues — that in the Scriptures seeing is never simply a beholding something that makes no difference for how we live, but rather seeing is a “discernment and identification with what is known. What one sees reflects back on the one who sees and transforms the beholder. As Gregory the Great will put it centuries later, ‘We are changed into the one we see.’ ”12
I hope my “method” has been an attempt to display the difference Christian convictions make for how we see the world, and how we see the world shapes how we rightly live. Some may well suspect that makes me a pragmatist. I have no objections to being so labeled as long as pragmatism is properly understood to be an attempt to show the differences necessary for what we claim to be true.13 Interestingly enough, I find myself in deep agreement with Austin Farrer’s way of putting the matter, that is, the necessity of theologians to do their work in such a manner that “the inseparability of real knowledge from activity” is maintained. Farrer elaborates this claim by observing “that to know real beings we must exercise our actual relation with them. No physical science without physical interference; no personal knowledge without personal intercourse; no thought about any reality about which we can do nothing but think.”14
You may well begin to wonder if I have forgotten this is supposed to be an essay on creation. I have not forgotten. Before I am through I hope to make clear how these remarks about method are interrelated with an understanding of creation as an eschatological reality. The methodological remarks, moreover, I hope also help explain why I have seldom written about creation as a topic in and of itself. Rather, I have tried to find contexts to illumine the work an account of creation can and should do to help us understand the way things are.15 For example, I wrote, with Jeff Powell, an article on William Stringfellow’s use of the Book of Revelation to illumine the role of the principalities and powers as perversions of their role in creation.16 I was attracted to Stringfellow because I thought he helps us see how creation understood apocalyptically helps us read our world in a manner not unlike how John of Patmos read his.17
My most extended account of creation, however, was in an article on Iris Murdoch’s work. As someone who had learned much from Ms. Murdoch, I was taken aback by her defense of Plato’s myth of the Demiurge in her book Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. She defended Plato’s understanding of the Demiurge because she thought it a perfect metaphor for how she would have us understand the moral life, that is, as the art of making necessity beautiful. I thought her position to be profoundly wrong in a manner that makes clear why Christians have rightly thought that our understanding of creation necessarily has at its center creation ex nihilo. For if God did not create from nothing, Murdoch is right to suggest that our existence is pointless; but because Christians believe all that is exists by the grace of God, we can have hope that life is not without purpose. This summary does not do justice to Murdoch’s position, but I hope it is sufficient to show how I try to display the work an account of creation does for how we understand the moral life.18
I call attention to how I have tried to position how I think about creation in the past to prepare you for the argument I now want to make. The claim that creation is an eschatological doctrine may seem to have little practical import, but by juxtaposing Barth’s account of the doctrine of creation with Jean Porter’s use of creation to sustain a natural law ethic I hope to show why these matters matter for how we understand how Christians should live and, in particular, how we reason morally. Porter argues with great clarity that the scholastic understanding of natural law is misunderstood if it is divorced, as it often is, from the theological context that makes natural law intelligible. That theological context she identifies with the doctrine of creation. I will argue, however, that her account of creation is insufficiently eschatological, which results in a deficient account of practical reason. Before engaging Porter, I need first to outline Barth’s account of the doctrine of creation.
Barth on Creation
Barth’s most developed account of creation is to be found in volume III of the Church Dogmatics.19 I obviously cannot provide an overview of the thick account of creation in the four volumes. What I can do, however, is direct our attention to his concentrated discussion of creation in Dogmatics in Outline. In Dogmatics in Outline Barth begins to develop his account of creation as the external basis for covenant and the covenant as the internal basis of creation.20 I hope to show how creation so understood requires an eschatological account of creation that makes unavoidable an account of the contingent, that is, the historical character of existence.
In Dogmatics in Outline Barth begins his account of creation, noting that when Christians confess that God is creator they do so only on the basis of God’s revelation. So creation is not a speculative judgment about “the beginning.”21 According to Barth, we are not asked by the Confession, the Apostles’ Creed, to believe in the created world, nor even the work of creation, but we are asked to believe in God the creator. Creation, therefore, is no less a matter of faith than is our belief in the redemption of the world in Christ — a claim that obviously reflects Barth’s fundamental theological method, but that does not mean that the faith necessary to acknowledge God’s creation has no purchase in the world as we know it. We are, after all, creatures bound in space and time. Barth, with characteristic dramatic prose, puts it this way:
What the meaning of God the Creator is and what is involved in the work of creation, is in itself not less hidden from us men than everything else that is contained in the Confession. We are not nearer to believing in God the Creator, than we are to
