The Eerdmans Guides to Theology are aimed primarily at
students, but Creation – David Fergusson’s contribution to the series – is likely to appeal even to the
experienced scholar. Most of the themes discussed in the book are familiar and
have been treated elsewhere by others, often at length. But Fergusson condenses
a wealth of research on various aspects of the doctrine of creation into seven
focussed chapters that satisfy the reader’s initial curiosity and whet the
appetite for more.
Fergusson’s opening chapter looks at how ideas of creation pervades
Scripture. The doctrine of creation is concerned with far more than human
origins or cosmogony, and Fergusson explores how Scripture incorporates a range
of issues from animal welfare to social and political order into the motif.
Also important to the doctrine is New Testament Christology: protology and
eschatology are held together in God’s Word incarnate, the man Christ Jesus.
This confidence in the priority of Christology should help shape responses to
literalistic interpretations of Genesis 1–3, substantialist definitions of the imago Dei, and corrupted notions of
‘dominion’ (Gen 1:26) that privilege humanity.
In many respects, the following six chapters expand on the
topics initially raised in the first chapter. Thus in chapter two, Fergusson
explores the concept of creatio ex nihilo,
noting how this teaching serves to maintain the distinction between God and the
world by emphasising the act of creation as a free decision of God; chapter
three examines creation and fall, and includes discussions of original sin, the
nature of evil, and Pelagianism; and chapter four suggests pneumatology as the
important factor to unite accounts of God’s immanence and transcendence in
connection with the doctrine of providence. Fergusson continues his treatment
of creation and providence by attending first to deism and natural theology in
the early modern period (chapter five), and then to Darwinian evolution and modern
cosmology (chapter six); nothing in any of these theories need pose a threat to
orthodox Christian faith, Fergusson avows. The final chapter moves logically
from evolution and cosmology to the investigation of the place of animals and
the environment in God’s creation, and – intriguingly! – the possibility of
extraterrestrial intelligence.
Throughout the volume, Fergusson is overwhelmingly positive
about the goodness of creation and of God’s unceasing relation to that which
God created. Any problems arising from within the related doctrines of creation
and providence are due, Fergusson implies, to poorly constructed theologies
based largely on anthropocentric presuppositions about the superiority of human
beings. But God is not solely concerned with humanity, even though man and
woman together are made in the imago Dei
and have an important role to play within God’s providential design. Though
neither matter is entirely absent, I would have welcomed further engagement
with sociology and politics, and with the eschatological transformation of
creation in the age to come. Such discussion would likely have expanded the
book beyond tolerable limits for the Guides to Theology series, and so the
inclusion of an annotated bibliography, which gives suggestions for further
reading, is of immense value. To summarise, Creation
is a useful and stimulating contribution to introductory, even intermediate,
literature on the subject.
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