Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview by Albert M. Wolters
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have been blessed with three awesome brothers, each of whom God is using greatly. They all have wonderful families, and they are clearly doing what God has called them to do with their lives. Two of my brothers are pastors in the Midwest, and my other brother is in Nairobi, Kenya, starting a seminary.

I, on the other hand, am not a pastor or theologian. I am a teacher. And not a teacher of theology, but of English. I grade a lot of papers and try to get 19-year-olds enthusiastic about iambic pentameter.

At times, I have been tempted to feel like my vocation is somehow second-class to my brothers’. But books like Creation Regained have helped me to see that what I do is absolutely meaningful, and that it is the work that God has called me to do. Teaching English is a sacred calling.

I was encouraged to read this book by Dr. Bryan Smith, who conducted a seminar on worldview in 2003 (or so) at BJU Press. In discussions with Dr. Smith during that seminar, he directed me to this book and to Cornelius Plantinga’s Engaging God’s World, which doesn’t go into as much depth but is also helpful in laying out a biblical view of vocation.

In this book, Wolters sets forth the concepts of creation, fall, and redemption and discusses their implications for how Christians work in the world today. I have found it enormously helpful. I’m not going to summarize all of it here, but here are some aspects of the book that resonated with me.

Creation: God’s Blueprint for All We Do
After a brief overview of the concept of worldview, Wolters begins by discussing the doctrine of creation. The term “creation” doesn’t just mean the physical world God created. It’s much more than that. Basically, it’s God’s blueprint for the way everything should be—and that means everything, including industry, government, computer programming, the family, literary criticism, healthcare, and carpentry. The concept of creation involves all aspects of culture, and it shows us that God isn’t concerned only with spiritual things, but with everything we do with His world.

As Wolters shows, God has designed what Wolters calls “creational norms” for all that we do as His creatures. And the dominion mandate in Genesis calls us to figure out how endeavors like art, education, and business should be done to His glory. In other words, God has made the world, including all cultural activities, with a “way things are designed to be,” and believers are called to discover these norms with guidance from the Word of God and through studying His works.

God Cares about Farming
For example, God seems to see farming as a sacred activity. Wolters points us to Isaiah 28:24-29, where the farmer must learn from God (through creation) how to farm according to God’s will.

Doth the plowman plow all day to sow? 
Doth he open and break the clods of his ground?
When he hath made plain the face thereof, 
doth he not cast abroad the fitches,
and scatter the cummin, 
and cast in the principal wheat and the appointed barley
and the rye in their place?
For his God doth instruct him to discretion,
and doth teach him.
For the fitches are not threshed with a threshing instrument,
neither is a cart wheel turned about upon the cummin;
but the fitches are beaten out with a staff, 
and the cummin with a rod.
Bread corn is bruised; 
because he will not ever be threshing it,
nor break it with the wheel of his cart,
nor bruise it with his horsemen.
This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts,
which is wonderful in counsel,
and excellent in working.

This is absolutely amazing to me. According to God, there is a right way and a wrong way to farm certain crops, and they are all different, and we need to study creation to figure it out, and when we do so, we are studying the ways of God -- because He designed the way things are. And this illustration with farming could be replicated in any field, because God’s creation includes a design for not just farming, but for education, for the family, for business, and for government.

As Wolters shows,

Creation is not something that, once made, remains a static quantity. There is, as it were, a growing up (though not in a biological sense), an unfolding of creation. This takes place through the task that people have been given of bringing to fruition the possibilities of development implicit in the work of God's hands. The given reality of the created order is such that it is possible to have schools and industry, printing and rocketry, needlepoint and chess. The creational law is crying out to be positivized in new and amazing ways. The whole vast range of human civilization is neither the spectacle of the arbitrary aberrations of an evolutionary freak nor the inspiring panorama of the creative achievements of the autonomous Self; it is rather a display of the marvelous wisdom of God in creation and the profound meaningfulness of our task in the world. We are called to participate in the ongoing creational work of God, to be God's helper in executing to the end the blueprint for his masterpiece.

These truths make our day-to-day work much more meaningful. For example, part of what I do as an English teacher is to figure out how God’s design relates to my teaching. It motivates me to explore ways that young people learn, ways I can talk with my students about what they are supposed to do with the skills they are gaining in my classes, and reasons for the endeavor of education itself.

Dualism: The Sacred vs. the Secular
On another note, I also appreciated Wolters’ discussion of the problem of dualism. In some Christian circles, there is a two-level way of thinking in which full-time ministry is considered to be a higher calling than a (so-called) secular vocation. For example, some believers consider it more spiritual for a Christian college student to major in Bible than to major in education. When I was in high school, it was considered more spiritual to sing in the choir than to play on a sports team.

Part of the problem with this idea is a wrong understanding of the word “world” in Scripture. Wolters points out that usually, the words “earth,” and “world” in the New Testament do not mean physical creation (which God declared “very good”), but only to its fallen aspects. Wolters shows this clearly from John 12, Colossians 3, and Philipians 3. Wolters says,

Christians of virtually every persuasion have tended to understand "world" to refer to a delimited area of the created order, an area that is usually called "worldly" or "secular" (from saeculum, the Latin rendering of aion), which includes such fields as art, politics, scholarship (excluding theology), journalism, sports, business, and so on. In fact, to this way of thinking, the "world" includes everything outside the realm of the "sacred," which consists basically of the church, personal piety, and "sacred theology." Creation is therefore divided up neatly (although the dividing line may be defined differently by different Christians) into two realms: the secular and the sacred.

This compartmentalization is a very great error. It implies that there is no "worldliness" in the church, for example, and that no holiness is possible in politics, say, or journalism. It defines what is secular not by its religious orientation or direction (obedience or disobedience to God's ordinances) but by the creational neighborhood it occupies. Once again, it falls prey to that deep-rooted Gnostic tendency to depreciate one realm of creation (virtually all of society and culture) with respect to another, to dismiss the former as inherently inferior to the latter.

The tendency is a serious matter and has far-reaching consequences. Consider how it affects our reading of Scripture. When we read Christ's words "my kingdom is not of this world," many of us are inclined to understand it as an argument against Christian involvement in politics, for example. Instead, Jesus was saying that his kingship does not arise out of (Greek: ek) the perverted earth but derives from heaven. When James says that pure religion is to keep oneself unspotted from the world, we too easily read this as a warning against dancing or card playing or involvement in the dramatic arts on the grounds that they are simply "worldly amusements." But James is warning against worldliness wherever it is found, certainly in the church, and he is emphasizing here precisely the importance of Christian involvement in social issues. Regrettably, we tend to read the Scriptures as though their rejection of a "worldly" life-style entails a recommendation of an "otherworldly" one.

This approach has led many Christians to abandon the "secular" realm to the trends and forces of secularism. Indeed, because of their two-realm theory, to a large degree, Christians have themselves to blame for the rapid secularization of the West. If political, industrial, artistic, and journalistic life, to mention only these areas, are branded as essentially "worldly," "secular," "profane," and part of the "natural domain of creaturely life," then is it surprising that Christians have not more effectively stemmed the tide of humanism in our culture?

This dualism leads to the error of pietism, which sees God’s work in the world as restricted “to the sphere of personal piety, the inner life of the soul.” God cares about a lot more than the inner life of our souls.

These concepts from Wolters’ discussion of Creation are very helpful. Wolters also discusses the implications of the fall and redemption in depth, but I am trying to keep this review, which is too long already, from being even longer. (Brian Collins has written an excellent summary and critique here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/....)

Here are some other quotations from the book that I found helpful:

On the biblical concept of wisdom:

“Wisdom is ethical conformity to God's creation.” [James Fleming] . . . [Wisdom is] the attunement or conformity to the creational order. [In Proverbs 8,] the poet has Wisdom describes 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 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. [Wolters goes on to discuss Isaiah 28:23-29, the passage I shared above, as an important passage in this aspect of wisdom as well.]

On the need to seek God’s plan for all realms of creation:

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.

On the dualism in Christianity today:

Our understanding of creation is usually restricted to the physical realm . . . [and we assume creation does not involve] the disciplines of sociology, aesthetics, political science, and economics. . . . We will not make such a distinction if we understand creation in terms of a law-subject correlation. God's ordinances also extend to the structures of society, to the world of art, to business and commerce. Human civilization is normed throughout. Everywhere we discover limits and proprieties, standards and criteria: in every field of human affairs there are right and wrong ways of doing things. There is nothing in human life that does not belong to the created order.

On the need to apply Biblical principles to government, family, church, business, education, etc.:

[God's creational design applies to government.] The same holds true for such structures as the family and the church and for such modern institutions as businesses and schools. They too are grounded in the realities of God's world order and are therefore not arbitrary in their configuration. All schools and businesses have certain constant features that distinguish them from other institutions. The constancy of these distinguishing features must be referred to the nature of reality as given by God. Educators, for example, develop an intuitive sense for the distinctive structure of a school; if school board members try to run it like a business, they recognize that violence is being done to the nature of an educational institution. They are attuned to its normative structure, to the law that holds for it. Similarly, business executives know that a cannot be treated like a family. Relations in a firm have to be "businesslike" to be normative. . . .

What is true for societal life is also true of culture. The worlds of art and pedagogy are bound to given standards. . . . Both artists and aestheticians are called, each in their own ways, to discern the criteria that define good art--criteria that are not arbitrary but rooted in a given order of things that must be honored. Things are no different in the field of pedagogy and child rearing. There are stages of emotional and intellectual maturity in the child's development that must be respected by the educator. The teacher cannot afford to ignore a child's natural curiosity or spontaneous playfulness. A pedagogy that ignores these given realities is antinormative; it flies in the face of the law of creation.

And so we could go on. Human emotionality and sexuality, for example, are not normless. Our reasoning is subject to the laws of thought, our speech to semantic principles. Everything is subject to the given laws of God: everything is creational.... [All aspects of human life] are appointed and ordained by God as provinces of the earthly realm he created.

All in all, this is a great book that every Christian should read and think through.


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