6/25/13

From Wolters' Creation Regained, pp. 26, ff.

Creational law speaks so loudly, impresses itself so forcefully on human beings, ... that its normative demands are driven home into their inmost being. . . . This [refers] to the fiinger of the sovereign Creator engraving reminders of his norms upon human sensibilities. . . . 
All of this probably is best illustrated in the Old Testament idea of "wisdom." In a word, "wisdom is ethical conformity to God's creation." . . . [Wisdom is] the attunement or conformity to the creational order. 
[In Proverbs 8,] the poet has Wisdom describer herself as a kind of living blueprint, preceding creation but present at its execution. . . . 
It is this personified Wisdom [that is] the prototype of the [unfallen] universe. . . .  
The conception of wisdom as the normative creation order is not limited to the book of Proverbs, of course. The book of Job is filled with it . . . and so is Ecclesiastes. [Isaiah 28:23-29 is an important passage in this aspect of wisdom as well.] 
Human life in all its aspects is a thoroughly spiritual affair. Christians of all walks of life--business executives, farmers, academics, politicians, educators, homemakers, lawyers--must take to heart, not only in their private but also their professional capacity, the well-known exhortation of the apostle, "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will" (Rom. 12:2). To sum up, the whole world of our experience is constituted by the creative will and wisdom of God, and that will and wisdom--that is, his law--is everywhere in principle knowable by virtue of God's creational revelation. . . . 
We must continue to try to discern, through empirical study and historical experience, what God's specific norms are for areas of human life that the Scriptures do not explicitly address--industrial relations, for example, or the mass media, or literary criticism.