Sabbath command. He does so by observing that the command to keep the Sabbath makes clear that we are creatures of time.45 The command to observe the Sabbath therefore expresses the eschatological character of creation, indicating “the special history of the covenant and salvation in some sense embedded in the course of the general history of nature and the world, hidden but revealed in it, decisively determining its basis and its goal and secretly its way also. The omnipotent grace of God rules all world-occurrence as providence. But it does so from this starting point. It is at work here, in this particular, central sphere of history.”46
Accordingly, Barth argues that the command to keep the Sabbath is the command that explains all the other commandments. It does so because the command to observe the Sabbath is the telos for all God’s commands. For the purpose of all we do is nothing less than the glorification of God. Such an understanding of the commandment to observe the Sabbath might be understood as an expression of natural law, but one must remember that the Sabbath has been reconstituted by the resurrection.47
Given the identification of the Decalogue with natural law in many of the scholastic theologians Porter admires, one might have thought she might have developed an account of our obligation to worship God.48 That no such account is forthcoming I think reflects what I take to be the formal character of her understanding of natural law. Ironically, Porter’s account of creation and correlative understanding of natural law in comparison to Barth is surprisingly a-historical. Porter insists that creation is a theological necessity for the intelligibility of a natural law ethic, but I remain unconvinced that she has shown that to be the case. I take that, moreover, to be the result of a deficient account of creation.
One Last Attempt to Say What Is at Stake
As a way to make as concrete as I can the significance of the eschatological account of creation, I think it is useful to call attention to the other Niebuhr, and in particular his influential book Christ and Culture. H. Richard Niebuhr argued in Christ and Culture that the great problem with the “Christ against culture” type was how advocates of that type understood the “relation of Jesus Christ to the Creator of nature and Governor of history as well as to the Spirit immanent in creation and in the Christian community.”49 According to Niebuhr, the over-concentration of radical Christians (Tolstoy is his primary example) on the lordship of Christ results in an ontological bifurcation of reality. Their rejection of culture is joined to a suspicion of nature and nature’s God in a manner that obscures the goodness of God’s creation.
Niebuhr observes that, for Tolstoy, the Trinity had no ethical meaning, with the result that the God who creates cannot be identified with the God who redeems. Niebuhr’s appeal to the Trinity, however, as John Howard Yoder points out, is odd, because Niebuhr’s understanding of the Trinity is arguably modalist. In particular, Niebuhr used an appeal to the Trinity to underwrite an affirmative attitude toward nature and culture as manifestations of God the Father. Yoder argues that this emphasis results in creating a tension between God the Father and God the Son just to the extent that the former is used to underwrite moral knowledge that may contradict that determined by the teaching and example of Christ.50
Yet, according to Yoder, the intention of the post-Nicene doctrine of the Trinity was to deny that different revelations come to us through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “The entire point of the debate around the nature of the Trinity was the concern of the church to say just the opposite, namely that in the Incarnation and in the continuing life of the church under the Spirit there is but one God.”51 Niebuhr’s very presumption that a balance must be maintained between the doctrines of creation and redemption reflects an understanding of creation not unlike that of Porter.
I have introduced Niebuhr into this discussion not only because his habits of thought are replicated in how many today think about these matters but also because an engagement with his position helps us see the interrelation of the doctrine of the Trinity and an eschatological understanding of creation.52 I may not do systematic theology, but I do understand that, theologically, everything we believe is interconnected with everything we believe. That is why theology can never be finished, requiring as it does constant reconnections.
I want to end, therefore, by making candid one agenda I hope this essay serves. I hope many of those who read this essay will be in sympathy with the emphasis on the eschatological character of the doctrine of creation. They will not, I suspect, be sympathetic with the kind of Christological pacifism I represent. An eschatological account of creation does not necessarily commit one to nonviolence, but it at least puts one in that ballpark. It does so because creation was, after all, God’s determinative act of peace.53 If, therefore, the end is in the beginning, at the very least Christians who justify the Christian participation in war bear the burden of proof.
1. Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006), pp. 23-25.
2. Robert Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 136-61.
3. Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, p. 155.
4. John Webster suggests systematic theology names the attempt “to present Christian teaching as a unified whole; even though particular exercises in the genre may restrict themselves to only one or other element of Christian doctrine, they have their place in the entire corpus.” “Introduction: Systematic Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, ed. John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 2. I, of course, have no reason to call into question systematic theology so understood, though I worry that theology so understood tempts theologians to present what Webster identifies as “Christian reality claims” as “symbolic” representations of some anterior experience. Webster is, of course, a representative of the alternative view, that is, that Christian reality claims are irreducible, which means they cannot be translated into other conceptual schemes without loss. Webster provides an exceptionally clear account of these alternatives on pp. 10-11.
5. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1: The Triune God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
6. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2: The Works of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
7. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, p. 27.
8. Stanley Hauerwas, Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), p. 2.
9. For example, the stress on so-called doctrines of atonement in some Protestant traditions often betrays an attenuated Christology and an ecclesiology in which the church is but a collection of individuals. As a result “the politics of Jesus” is lost.
