Monday dawned and the rain (largely) stayed away. At least for long enough for me to walk down through Keswick Main St, past the end of Stanger St (where a bunch of us stayed in the early 80’s), past the Crosthwaite Parish Room (where 10ofThose have their second-hand book sale) and round the corner, on to the not-quite-so-new Convention site. I was heading to the “Pencil Factory”, the permanent bit of the site, for Matthew Mason's (see his details on London Seminary's staff list) seminar series: “On Being Creatures”. I confess I have given (as well as attended) Monday morning seminars, and not always with unalloyed joy. But this I was looking forward to. There’s always that anticipation at the beginning of any big convention or series. This morning what was being anticipated turned out not to be a disappointment.
If you wanted to label the subject matter, and wanted to be pretentious about it, you’d call it metaphysical and theological anthropology. Matthew left off the anthropology and started with a significantly better (and for our purposes more useful) theological topic. He started with God. As he fairly pointed out, if we get God wrong, then not much of anything useful will follow. And of course this meant he started where Scripture starts, with God, in the beginning. Although, as he also pointed out, there is more than a hint of what came before the beginning – ie God Himself, who has no beginning. And from the outset it is therefore clear (both in Scripture and in this seminar series) that with God we are not just talking about a bigger, stronger, longer-lived, cleverer version of ourselves. This is what all of our “gods-in-our-own” image (idols) inevitably are, that is why they are so seductively comforting rather than challenging. But this is to get things exactly back to front, and another reason why to understand ourselves, we need to start with God as He is. He is a completely different order of being, and if we get this wrong there’s little chance we’ll get back on track.
In His being He is immeasurably different to us, and the
same is true of His doing. And a dramatic demonstration of this is what He did
when He created. Human beings are of course a creative bunch. We can create
pictures, sculpture, recipes, poetry, words (frebunctiousness – has that ever
been written before?) and of course chaos. But all of this creative activity
shares the same property. There was stuff before the human creative step to
which, when we’re being really creative, we add something genuinely new. But we
don’t (and indeed can’t) create something out of nothing. And yet, that is exactly
what God has done. And here there is a dramatic difference between God and the
idols that we occasionally allow to usurp His rightful position. Not only can they
not create from nothing, they themselves are never created from nothing; they
are always created (by us) out of pre-existing stuff (wood, stone, heavenly
objects, football teams, Tik-Tok performers). As Matthew hinted, Christians may
disagree about how God created, but not that He created from nothing everything
that there is.
And in one of his most telling comments, he also reminded us
all that this means God is central to everything and its continued existence. Indeed
we probably don’t think about God as sustainer enough. Wherever you happen to
be right now, right there and then God is acting to sustain you and all that
you can see. But what happens if we attempt to leave God out of the account? Practically,
humanity has been doing this since shortly after then events recorded in
Genesis 3. Intellectually (at least in our corner of the universe) there’s been
a determined effort to claim that we can leave God out of the account, and then
do actually attempt to do it, since the “enlightenment”. Matthew quoted Kant on
human autonomy. Kant made autonomy part of the foundation for human dignity. Well
it turns out that leaving God out of the equation is tantamount to trying to
undo what He has done, to 'decreate' humanity and everything else. Things just don’t
work without Him. In part this is what we see around us in the culture. Without
God as foundation and centre, things are inevitably confused. It has taken a
while, but it is perhaps in our day that is becoming drastically clear. We live
in a culture that has difficulty deciding when (and which) human life should be
defended and even defining what a woman is. There’s no evidence that the culture
will be able to think its way to a better place while it continues to sideline the
One who made everything and continues to sustain it in the teeth of denials of
His existence. And as we are seeing, this is not mere abstract, angels on the
head of a pin stuff. Very quickly this issue of God’s centrality and His
importance for human dignity begins to impact on vital, practical, issues like
the beginnings and endings of life and much else in between.
Not bad for a kick-off, with parts II to IV to come.
Hopefully Tuesday morning’s feeling will be just as good as Monday’s turned out
to be.
