concluding remarks in this paper speak again of beauty as the radiance of truth, a radiance that glorifies forms but also points beyond them to their Source, the Creator God who is love. A short disquisition on art and light closes the essay.
The autobiographical talk that follows examines the subject of poetry and art from the perspective of my own experience as a poet who, as a Christian, is faced with the challenge of communicating with a largely secular audience that is increasingly ignorant of and often hostile toward the Christian gospel. Moreover, regardless of the audience that he/she is addressing, writers who are new creations in Christ cannot write as they did before they were born again. My reflections on what I call true art are an effort to respond to these challenges.
Finally, a concluding short talk gathers together in summary form many of the points made earlier about the imago Dei and aesthetics in a final effort to show how, at a practical level, it is the truth of the imago Dei that inspires and makes possible the human quest, in particular through the arts, to express and give form to what is experienced—by all peoples everywhere—as beauty.
My hope is that the range and variety of the texts in this book will incite renewed reflection on the anthropological revelation in Genesis of the imago Dei, man/woman as created in the image of God. In our age of transhumanist ambition, which is rooted in the hubristic denial of a Creator God and in a corresponding refusal of the notion of a created and good God-given human nature—twisted because of the Fall, yes, but good in its created essence—it is of the greatest importance for the future of the church and for the well-being of our society to develop and defend this biblical revelation. The core of the modern project, as it takes ultimate shape in our technological age, is auto-salvation. For the transhumanist, though he/she wouldn’t use salvation language, this objective is explicit and deliberate. The aim is not so much to augment the human being as to replace him/her with a technologically engineered, new and better model. This delusory enterprise—the definitive tower of Babel—is clearly a counterfeit of God’s redemptive action through Christ to set right his sin-marred creation by opening for us the possibility of becoming new creations. There is no fixed, divinely created human nature, we are told. Man is a faulty organism and must be reconceived and reconstituted by himself. Such an objective is perceived to be the fulfillment of the process of evolutionary/historical progress, culminating in the kingdom of man, a simulacrum of the kingdom of God.
In the face of gnostic ambitions of this kind that both mock and mimic the creation and redemption of mankind through the Word of God, Jesus Christ, the truth of the imago Dei, in all its dimensions, is a tremendously powerful weapon in the hands of the church. As an anthropological principle, it is pertinent at every level of human reflection and action, in response to the moral and spiritual cacophony of modern life. My wish is that these texts, bouncing off each other in multiple directions, may illuminate for readers the truth and vital significance of this biblical revelation, by which is established ontologically and forever the true relation of human beings both to God their Creator and to the world—God’s good creation—that they inhabit.
Part I
The Explanatory Power of a Trinitarian Natural Theology
(Talk at the American Church, Paris)
I
The practice of natural theology has traditionally been an effort to prove or demonstrate the existence of God by arguing from observed phenomena in nature on the basis of universal rational principles. It has been conducted separately from theological discussion of the God of revelation, the God revealed through the incarnation to be triune: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The perception that there is order within nature has always led to a felt need to explain this order. The classical Christian response shows the influence of the Greek notion of a universal logos, or cosmic order, and of Aristotelian cosmology, combined with Paul’s insight in Romans 1:20 that God’s power and nature have been understood and seen through the visible creation. Up until the twentieth century, this Christian response has been the rationalistic one of inference from nature to a first cause, on the assumption that God’s existence is universally perceptible and philosophically demonstrable.
Let me describe briefly two quite different examples of this traditional approach to natural theology. In the thirteenth century, which saw the rise of scholasticism and an intense stress on reason, Thomas Aquinas set out his Five Ways, or Proofs, of God’s existence, which involve tracing back to a First Principle the existence of motion, causality, contingency, degree of value—implying an ultimate perfection—and design or purpose. The basic argument for all Five Ways is that an infinite regress in any of these instances is rationally incoherent, and that in every case a First Cause, an Absolute Source, must be predicated. The existence of motion, for example, implies a Prime Mover; or, what exists might not have existed, so a Necessary Being must be predicated beyond the reach of contingency; or, directionality—what appears to be purposefulness—is to be observed in nature, in organic growth and in human action, so an Original Designer must be inferred or deducted; or, at the ethical level, the existence of natural law and the human conscience which constrains us and yet which is clearly not the result of our own will or reason, points to a metaphysical source beyond ourselves. This kind of approach to the question of the existence of God, while strong philosophically and persuasive to a believer, is vulnerable to the criticism (in my view weak, but the determined unbeliever can make anything count as an objection) that it involves what critics call flat assertion on the basis of ignorance, and that the inference in each case to a personal primary being called God is arbitrary.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing within the mechanistic cosmological framework of Newtonian thought as it had developed in the eighteenth century, William Paley saw the universe, and this world in particular, as a watch—that is, as a mechanism—from which he logically inferred a Watchmaker. He lived in the period of early industrialism and saw the apologetic potential of a mechanistic analogy to demonstrate the necessary existence of God. Paley adduced many other natural features to support his basic argument that contrivances in nature are inexplicable without reference to a Designer, but his mechanistic approach, in keeping with the tenor of his age, was vulnerable to the same criticism as Aquinas’s arguments; moreover, with respect to the specific watch analogy, the atheist philosopher David Hume pointed out that the world could just as well be compared with a plant or some living organism for which a strict design argument was philosophically untenable. This last criticism became even more forceful later in the century when Darwin observed that an appearance of design arises naturally in the course of evolution.
In the twentieth century, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth objected strongly to the independent aspect of traditional natural theology, by which he meant the development of arguments for the existence and nature of God separately from the biblical revelation of God the Trinity. Not only could natural theology, so conceived, not give knowledge of the Trinitarian God, but it split discussion of the knowledge of God into two parts—the first concerned with the one God that reason was supposed to be able to demonstrate, and the other concerned with the triune God revealed through Jesus Christ. Barth perceived that this was theologically and methodologically unacceptable. It was not that Barth ruled out the possibility of seeing traces of the Creator God within nature, or that he saw no place for rational structure in our knowledge of God, but he insisted that such a structure must be coordinated with revelation if it was not to be misleading abstraction.
The approach to natural theology—to the question of how a Christian is to consider the relation of nature to God—depends on one’s point of view, on what one sees. The modern world is very conscious of perspective, of point of view. It is evident that the fact that all human beings are rational does not mean we all see nature—the world out there—in the same way. Cultural context and religious experience fundamentally influence what and how we see. A converted Christian person will see evidence of God in nature, because he or she believes God is the Creator. A nonbeliever is not likely to see the same
