Gerald Hiestand - Creation and Doxology: The Beginning and End of Gods Good World

InterVarsity Press
P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426
ivpress.com

2018 by Gerald L. Hiestand and Todd A. Wilson

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All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.

Cover design: David Fassett
Interior design: Beth McGill
Image: The Creation, from Luther Bible, German School / Bible Society, London, UK / Bridgeman Images

ISBN 978-0-8308-7403-3 (digital)

ISBN 978-0-8308-5386-1 (print)

This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

To the Fellows of the St. Anselm Fellowship,

who have been with us since the beginning.

P LATO ONCE ASKED, Isnt this dreaming: whether asleep or awake, to think that a likeness is not a likeness but rather the thing itself that it is like? But someone who, to take the opposite case, believes in the beautiful itself, can see both it and the things that participates in it.... He is very much awake.

Even the pagans get it right sometimes. Plato rightly saw that beautiful things are beautiful precisely because they participate in Beauty itself. Of course, not everyone sees beyond the beautiful things to Beauty itself. Such people, Plato tells us, are asleep to reality. The awake ones are those who properly recognize that the beautiful things are but shades of a higher and truer Good.

In his own limited and prescient way Plato is affirming Saint Pauls seminal insight (found in the opening chapter of Romans) that humanity has fallen under the judgment of God because it has severed the connection between the Creator and the creation. The created world reveals the beauty, power, and glory of the uncreated God. But humanity has confused the beautiful things with Beauty itself. We have chosen to live our lives willfully asleep to the reality of God; we have fallen in love with the beautiful things and have abandoned the Beautiful One. In a deep and tragic irony, the very things that were intended to point us to God have obscured our knowledge of him. The beautiful things are blessings when we receive them with thanks. But they are false gods when we worship them in place of the Creator. We have made the means an end, and the beautiful things, rather than leading us to God, have led us only to ourselves.

It is easy to see why humanity is so easily seduced by the beautiful things. The beautiful things make no demands on us. They are gods that we can control, that bow before us. But the Beautiful One transcends us. He is not at our beck and call, bending himself to our will. Beauty, in the Person of God himself, calls us to allegiance and submission. When we acknowledge the existence of the Beautiful One, we are compelled to acknowledge that we are mere creatures, finite, subordinate. Beauty calls us to acknowledge, in our recognition of God as Creator, that we are beautiful only insofar as we surrender ourselves to one who is Beauty himself.

This is why Paul will go on to state that a posture of thanksgiving renders idolatry nearly impossible. To give genuine thanks for creation is to acknowledge that there is One above and beyond humanity who has given it. To give thanks for the world and our very selves necessarily compels us to acknowledge that the Lord is, and that he is good, and that he gives. It reminds us that we ourselves are not the good God, but that we stand in a posture of humility and needthat we are recipients of grace. Thankfulness rightly orders human self-understanding with respect to the creation of which we are a part, and with respect to the God who made and gave it to us. This is why a refusal to give thanks to God for the good world he has given and a refusal to acknowledge the iconic nature of creation go hand in hand. To thankfully acknowledge creation as a beautiful