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November 4, 2019
Justin Hendrix
Most people in the world wander through life without seeing its full meaning. Christians know its meaning but often miss the embedded meaning in the world all around them.
They miss the glory of the Lord that is all around them—in this world and these heavens—which the seraphim extolled to Isaiah (Isa. 6:3) and the great liturgies proclaim: “Heaven and earth are full of your glory!”
the glory of the Lord is right in front of us, but we usually don’t see it.
And if God was speaking through lilies and sparrows, they surmised, then he was probably also speaking through wine and bread and vines and lights,
in the modern age fewer Christians have been able to see messages like this in the creation. They have been affected by two things: growing secularism, which refuses to acknowledge that we and the world are the creation of God, and certain theologies that discount even believers’ abilities to discern meaning in the creation.
But while Catholics continued to sustain a robust theology of creation, Protestants tended to let their understanding of creation become eclipsed by their overwhelming emphasis on redemption. Some even went so far as to claim that there is no such thing as revelation through the creation.
As Alister McGrath and David Bentley Hart showed, these new skeptics are astonishingly ignorant of basic philosophy and theology.6 For example, they typically treat the Christian God as one more being in a world of beings; such a conception is radically alien to the God and metaphysics of the Bible. Scripture’s God is Being itself and in fact beyond being, so that all beings and all the world are in him.
Christians know there are good replies to these objections. They know that sin started a chain of life and death, so that nature both outside and inside of us is fallen. It groans with us for its redemption one day (Rom. 8:22). So while nature contains immense beauty and grandeur, it is also wracked by what could be called tragedy.
The ironic element is that while the New Atheists and their readers mock Christians for believing that a good God created a good world, they treat that same world with a similar reverence for the spirit that lies in and behind it.
Consider the irony: moderns are proud that they now know that the world is not enchanted. Yet these same moderns—indoctrinated by Darwin, Marx, and Freud—have run to psychiatrists and counselors because of more per capita depression than perhaps in any period of history. The biblical authors, in telling contrast, write of joy to be found amid suffering. At the heart of that joy is a vision of the world as full of the glory of God. As John Calvin put it, the world is a theater of God’s glory.
from Origen and Augustine through John of Damascus to Thomas and Bonaventure—saw the world as a thing of wonder studded with beautiful and mysterious signs pointing beyond themselves.
“In every place, if you look, his [Christ’s] symbol is there, and wherever you read, you will find his types. For in him all creatures were created, and he traced his symbols on his property.”
Ephrem was articulating what most Christians believed for most of the church’s first seventeen centuries—that the universe is an immense trinitarian symbol, with every corner of the cosmos bursting with divinely given meaning.
Two modern Christian theologians teased out the implications of this biblical vision. They accepted the biblical suggestions that all the world is full of types and proceeded to lay out this vision with a clarity and fullness that have not been duplicated. The first was Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), and the second was John Henry Newman (1801–90).
According to Edwards, this counterintuitive story is told by every square inch of the cosmos. To be more precise, a tiny part of the story is told by each tiny part of the cosmos. But if a person does not have what Edwards called the “sense of the heart,” which is given by the Holy Spirit, then that person will never crack the code. He or she will not get that little bit of the story, and probably not the whole story at all. In other words, that person will not be able to read the signs, for they will be in a foreign language.
The last end of all he said and did, in creating and then redeeming, is to bring glory to himself. Eighteenth-century skeptics said that idea sounded selfish. Edwards replied that it was selfish only if bringing joy and beauty and love to his creatures is selfish
