The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was much better the second time through, now that I had a basic familiarity with the world Tolkien has created.

The Silmarillion consists of the entire history of the Elves of Tolkien’s world. It shows the vastness of Tolkien’s imagination. The stories are varied: Some are glorious, some are heroic, many are sad . . . I really wish he would have developed them in more detail.

Beyond the stories, the book makes me reflect on the concepts of creation, fall, and redemption.

At first, the world Tolkien has created is beautiful and good in its unfallen glory. Actually, it’s probably similar to what this world would have been had it been developed for hundreds of years. Before the Elves leave Valinor, they have developed a beautiful culture of cities, light, and song. Ages pass, during which the Elves thrive, creating a glorious, peaceful world. Overall, in the first part of The Silmarillion, Tolkien incites our imagination to think of the world we could have had—more glorious than we can comprehend.

But in Tolkien’s world, like ours, there is a Fall. A fallen Vala (the Valar are essentially archangels who are entrusted with the rule of the world) seduces Feanor, an Adam figure, to rebel against the other Valar. Once Feanor rebels, evil begets evil, and it spreads until the whole world is infected. The whole book is really the working out of this Fall. Eventually, most of the Elves leave Valinor, and they build hidden kingdoms in Middle Earth, such as Gondolin and Rivendell. Over the ages, these hidden kingdoms fall or fade away.

The redemption of Tolkien’s world is really unfinished, but it’s interesting that Tolkien emphasizes the working out of Providence in the world’s affairs. In The Silmarillion, it is the will of Providence for the Elves to go back into the West so that the Age of Man will commence. Although the book ends with the same scene as The Lord of the Rings—the White Ship leaving from the Grey Havens—the emphasis is on the fact that this ship is leaving with the last of the Elves. This is because the Elves’ work is finished in Middle Earth, and now the Age of Man has fully come—and again, this is by the will of Providence.

Finally, I enjoyed Tolkien’s clever links to other legends. The Elvish haven of Avollone is a reference to Avalon of the Arthurian tales. Another reference to other myths is Atalante, or the island (continent?) of Numenor. Like Atlantis, Numenor is destroyed in cataclysm and swallowed up by the ocean. And finally, the character of Earendil (Elrond’s father) is an Odysseus figure—a wandering mariner about whom there are many tales.



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For all its greatness (trust me—I am the last man on earth to sell it short), the created order cries out for further greatness still. The most splendid dinner, the most exquisite food, the most gratifying company, arouse more appetites than they satisfy. They do not slake man’s thirst for being; they whet it beyond all bounds. Dogs eat to give their bodies rest; man dines and sets his heart in motion. All tastes fade, of course, but not the taste for greatness they inspire; each love esacpes us, but not the longing it provokes for a better convivium, a higher session. We embrace the world in all its glorious solidity, yet it struggles in our very arms, declares itself a pilgrim world, and, through the lattices and windows of its nature, discloses cities more desirable still. 

You indict me, no doubt, as an incurable romantic. I plead guilty without contest. I see no other explanation of what we are about. Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers, why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry, or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half of earth’s gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become. For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version of itself—and it is our glory to see it so and thirst until Jerusalem comes home at last. We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection

In his book Engaging God's World, Cornelius Plantinga discusses the cultural implications of the Dominion Mandate (Gen. 1:26-28).

God's good creation includes not only earth and its creatures, but also an array of cultural gifts, such as marriage, family, art, language, commerce, and (even in an ideal world) government. The fall into sin has corrupted these gifts but hasn't unlicensed them. The same goes for the cultural initiatives we discover in Genesis 4, that is, urban development, tent-making, musicianship, and metal-working. All of these unfold the built-in potential of God's creation. All reflect the ingenuity of God's human creatures--itself a superb example of likeness to God. After the building trades had been corrupted for millennia (having been used to build Babel and Babylon, for example) Jesus adopted one of them as his own [as a carpenter]. Cities themselves are God's idea. Good urban landscape management is a godly occupation. After centuries of urban crime and decay, the destination of redeemed people is not a return ticket to the garden of Eden, but entry into "the holy city, the new Jerusalem." Because "the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof," all the centuries of human obedience to the cultural mandate will have produced some treasure by the end--trash, too, but also treasure. If this is the "fullness" that belongs to God, then we may think of the holy city as the garden of Eden plus the fullness of the centuries.

To image God, then, human beings are charged not only with care for earth and animals ("subduing" what's already there) but also with developing certain cultural possibilities ("filling out" what is only potentially there). To unfold such possibilities--for example, to speak languages, build tools and dies, enter contracts, organize dance troupes--is to act in character for human beings designed by God. That is, to act in this way is to exhibit some of God's own creativity and dominion in a characteristically human way.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living

We human beings have been created "in the image of God." This famous phrase appears first in the account of creation in Genesis 1, clearly at its climax. The account tells us of rhythmic busts of work in which God creates vegetation, birds, fish, and livestock "according to their kinds." Then, in describing the event of the sixth day, the account shifts into a majestic first-person plural, a cohortative. "Let us create," says God. The narrative signals us that something weighty is about to be created--something created not according to its kind, but almost according to God's kind. It's not as if God procreates as the birds and fish do. And yet at the end of the [creation] week God does create entities that are impressively like himself, a pair of persons who can live in society and who can use their gift to cause others to flourish.

Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion. . . . " So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; mail and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over . . . every living thing that moves upon the earth."

This is the place in the story where activist Christians take a cue to go to work. There's so much to do in the world--so much caretaking and earthkeeping, so much filling and multiplying, so much culture to create. And . . . we'll have occasion to think of wonderful ways for human beings to fill the earth with the fruit of their creativity--wonderful ways to get busy.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Living and Learning

How does the smallest grain of dust exist? How did nothing become Something? One grain of dust should cause us to fall to our knees in wonder. And yet God gives us much more than a handful of dust. He gives us a leaf! We should fall to our knees in thanksgiving at the gift of a leaf! And yet, when I look out of the window, I see a forest of trees, a tsunami of green that towers over me! And that tidal wave of wonder is made of millions of leaves. Only one would be enough – and yet I have been given a gift of millions, all of which can be seen every day from my office window. I am truly a millionaire! 

Above the trees, I see rolling clouds and a blue sky, and above them is the sun, by the light of which I see everything. And yet there is a light in me that is mightier than the sun. This can be seen from the fact that I can see the sun but the sun cannot see me. The sun is massive and mighty and has a physical power that is awe-inspiring but it is an inanimate object. It has no eyes or heart or mind. I am a soul, made in the image of the One who made me, who can look up at the sun and the moon and the stars, and the trees and my neighbours, and, like the One who made me, can see that they are good.

Joseph Pearce, "Reasons to Be Cheerful: Living in the Best of All Impossible Worlds"

Near the end of The Gift of Good Land, Wendell Berry writes, “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.” This quote, perhaps more than any other quotation from his work, gets to the heart of Berry’s vision and the purpose of his writing. Berry’s project for over 50 years has been to argue for the goodness of reverent breaking and to demonstrate its possibility.

But as Berry’s phrasing suggests, reverent breaking is not just about discrete actions, but about the kind of people we are. Most of us who exploit the world, after all, are not so vicious that we willingly do things to desecrate God’s creation. Rather, we do it through our carelessness, laziness, or ignorance, failing to recognize the connection between our actions and the health of creation. And so the real question with Berry isn’t so much how we can break creation reverently, but how we can become the sort of people capable of breaking creation reverently. And this is why Berry’s novels are so vital to understanding his work. For it is in his novels that he shows us how we can go about becoming the sort of person capable of such a relationship to the created order.

Jake Meador, "Wendell Berry's 'Room of Love'"

In Paradise Lost, Book IV, there's an amazing passage in which Milton describes Satan's first look at Adam and Eve in the Garden. Satan cannot speak--he is in awe as he gazes at these two creatures in all their unfallen majesty. In this scene, Milton reminds us that every human being holds a unique place of dignity among all of creation. We are created in the image of God Himself--and this makes all the difference.

     Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,
     Godlike erect, with native honour clad
     In naked majesty, seemed lords of all,
     And worthy seemed; for in their looks divine
     The image of their glorious Maker shon,
     Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure—
     Severe, but in true filial freedom placed,
     Whence true authority in men: . . .
     So hand in hand they passed, the lovliest pair
     That ever since in loves imbraces met,
     Adam the goodliest man of men since borne
     His Sons, the fairest of her Daughters Eve.
     . . . Satan, still in gaze as first he stood,
     Scarce thus at length failed speech recovered sad:—
    “O Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold? 
     Into our room of bliss thus high advanced  
     Creatures of other mould—Earth-born perhaps,
     Not Spirits, yet to Heavenly Spirits bright
     Little inferior—whom my thoughts pursue    
     With wonder, and could love; so lively shines
     In them divine resemblance, and such grace 
     The hand that formed them on their shape hath poured."

This physical, sensible world is good because it proceeds from a divine source. The artist usually knows this by instinct; his senses, which are used to penetrating the concrete, tell him so. When Conrad said that his aim as an artist was to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe, he was speaking with the novelist's surest instinct. The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality. This in no way hinders his perception of evil but rather sharpens it, for only when the natural world is seen as good does evil become intelligible as a destructive force and a necessary result of our freedom.

Flannery O'Connor, "Novelist and Believer"

The biblical prophets dreamed of a new age in which the wilderness would bloom and the mountains would drip with wine. They dreamed of a time when people would convert weapons of war into tools of harvest, of a time when a child could romp with a lion. In this coming time, God would rejoice in his creation all over again. People could work in peace and work to fruitful effect, secure in the knowledge that no one would plunder their houses and vineyards. God's servants would minister justice in the earth, and all the earth would be full of the knowledge of the Lord.

This webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets called shalom. We call it "peace," but it means far more than just peace of mind or cease-fire between enemies. ... In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight--a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, all under the arch of God's love. Shalom, in other words, is the way things are supposed to be.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living

Love is the widest, choicest door into the passion. God saved the world not by sitting up in heaven and issuing antiseptic directives, but by becoming man, and vulnerable, in Jesus. He died, not because He despised the earth, but because He loved it as a man loves it -- out of all proportion and sense. And when He rose again, He stood up like a man indeed: with glorious scars -- and with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man's nature. 

It is through that Sacred Humanity--and through the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things to Himself--that He will, at the last day, change these corruptible bodies of ours, make them like His own glorious Body and, through them, draw all things into the last City of their being. The world will be lifted, as it was always meant to be lifted, by the priestly love of man. What Christ has done is to take our broken priesthood into His and make it strong again. We can, you see, take it with us. It will be precisely because we loved Jerusalem enough to bear it in our bones that its textures will ascend when we rise; it will be because our eyes have relished the earth that the color of its countries will compel our hearts forever. The bread and the pastry, the cheeses, the wine, and the songs go into the Supper of the Lamb because we do: It is our love that brings the City home. 

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb

From Robert Farrar Capon's The Supper of the Lamb (emphasis mine):

[God] creates in a mystery. What He holds intimately and contemporaneously in being, acts, nonetheless, for itself. The secular is not the sacred. Creation exists in its own right, is no parable, no front, no Punch and Judy show in which God plays all the parts, but a vast and raucous meeting where each thing acts out its nature, shouts I am I, as if no other thing had being. The world exists, not for what it means but for what it is. The purpose of mushrooms is to be mushrooms . . .  Things are precious before they are contributory. It is a false piety that walks through creation looking only for lessons which can be applied somewhere else. To be sure, God remains the greatest good, but, for all that, the world is still good in itself. Indeed, since He does not need it, its whole reason for being must lie in its own goodness; He has no use for it; only delight. 

Just think what that means. We were not made in God's image for nothing. The child's preference for sweets over spinach, mankind's universal love of the toothsome rather than the nutritious is the mark of our greatness, the proof that we love the secular as He does--for its secularity. We have eyes which see what He sees, lips which praise what He praises, and mouths which relish things, because He first pronounced them tov. The world is no disposable ladder to heaven. Earth is not convenient, it is good; it is, by God's design, our lawful love.

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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From Albert M. Wolters' Creation Regained, pp. 34-35.

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.

To say this is not to downgrade the authority of Scripture. The recorded explanations are indispensable, not least as an invaluable corrective for those who have their own interpretations of the blueprint. In all disputes of interpretation, the architect's own explanation are  clearly the final authority. The point is that the explanations cannot be fully understood without the blueprint to which they refer, just as the blueprint is in turn largely unintelligible without the explanations. But it is inconceivable that the blueprint should ever be invoked against the architect's own verbal explanations of it. That would be insufferable arrogance on the part of the builder. 

 . . . In Christ we are journeyman builders--still bound to the architect's explicit directions, but with considerable freedom of implementation as new situations arise. 

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.

From Albert M. Wolters' Creation Regained, pp. 37-38:

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.

From Albert M. Wolters' Creation Regained:

There is . . . a crucial difference between the laws of nature and norms. In speaking of the "stormy winds that do his bidding" (Ps. 148:8), the psalmist does not ascribe responsibility to the wind. The wind cannot help but obey. But human beings do have responsibility: we are held to account for the way we execute God's commandments, and we are liable to punishment if we do not execute them all. Norms are complex. They can be violated in any number of ways, and they also leave a good deal to the resourcefulness and responsible imagination of the human being who is called to implement them. The command "Be just" must be applied to many different and complex human situations, nor is it always easy to determine in any given situation what justice requires. Yet it is our uniquely human task to put into concrete practice the requirements of the norm for justice. A falling stone has no comparable task in obeying the law of gravity, nor does an eagle in observing God's ordinances for raising its young. The stone obeys necessarily, the eagle responds instinctively, but a person must exercise personal responsibility: we are called to positivize the norm, to apply it to specific situations in our lives. All of human life, in all its vast array of cultural, societal, and personal relationships, is normed in this sense. The almighty Creator lays claim to all; the universal Sovereign lays down his laws for it all; the absolute King requires his will to be discerned in it all.

From Albert M. Wolters' Creation Regained:

There are two ways in which God imposes his law on the cosmos, two ways in which his will is done on earth as in heaven. He does it either directly, without mediation, or indirectly, through the involvement of human responsibility. Just as a human sovereign does certain things himself, but gives orers to his subordinates for other things, so with God himself. He put the planets in their orbits, makes the seasons come and go at the proper time, makes seeds grow and animals reproduce, but entrusts to mankind the tasks of making tools, doing justice, producing art, and pursuing scholarship. In other words, God's rule of law is immediate in the nonhuman realm but mediate in culture and society. In the human realm men and women become coworkers with God; as creatures made in God's image they too have a kind of lordship over the earth, are God's viceroys in creation.

Much of our theology has been so concentrated on heaven that it invalidates any concern for the earth. Some images in Scripture have even been misconstrued to perpetuate a disregard for the creation, such as the image that in the last days the world will be consumed by fire. But nearly every other time the "consumed by fire" image is evoked in Scripture, it is a fire that purifies rather than burns up, a fire that frees up life rather than destroys it. No doubt, the way we live is shaped by how we imagine the end of the world--whether we think God's final plan is for everything to go up in flames or for everything to be brought back to life.

Creation care is not just about theology. It is about having the creativity to embody our theology imaginatively . . . At its core, creation care is about loving our global neighbor, because the poor suffer the most from the degradation of the earth and the struggle for clean water. For many kids in the concrete jungle of the ghettoes and slums, there can be such a disconnection from creation that they feel disconnected from the Creator.

. . . Part of what we do as we plant urban gardens is reconnect to the beauty of the earth. Kids get to see grass pierce concrete. Their eyes light up as they pull a carrot out of the ground and digging for potatoes can feel like digging for lost treasure. At the heart of it all is a God who so loved the world and who called everything in it good. Our story began in a garden, but it ends in a city--a beautiful restored city the Scriptures describe as the New Jerusalem, coming on earth as it is in heaven.

Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, pp. 302-3

"The world exists not for what it means, but for what it is. . . . It is a false piety that walks through creation looking only for lessons which can be applied somewhere else. . . . We were made in the image of God. We were created to delight, as He does, in the resident goodness of creation. We were not made to sit around mumbling incantations and watching our insides to see what creation will do for us."

Robert Farrar Capon, qtd. in Dreher, Crunchy Cons

"Aesthetic principles, no less than scientific principles, are grounded in the created order and are a manifestation of God's design."

--Gene Veith, Reading Between the Lines