The Act of Creation Will Be Your Salvation by Scifigrl47

And they will help because they put Jesus Christ at the centre of their thinking. Irenaeus and Athanasius are going to help us massively. In view of this, the proper co-ordination of creation and redemption (and its attendant co-ordinations of body and soul, time and eternity, etc, etc) is a vital task for us all. In reaction, some cut loose creation from salvation with an anti-physical gospel and an escapist eschatology. And theologically, as we consider the relationship of creation and redemption, some mistake political harmony, social justice or economic liberation for salvation. In worship there are the ritualists who consider their sacramental practice to work ex opere operato and there are the low church minimalists running scared from anything physical. In the realm of the environment, we see the extremes of those who simply consume the earth and those who worship it. We seem deeply uncomfortable with our bodily existence. These are problems commonly found in the world but also in our churches.

In the realm of the body, we see self-harm and eating disorders, promiscuity and confusion over sexual identity, compulsive dieting and body-building, cosmetic surgery and gender re-assignment. Because we too find it completely obvious to fall for the old dualisms. In our own day we would do well to hear their voices. And from there flowed a unified account of all reality. In Jesus Christ they saw creation and salvation held together as one work performed by one Word.

There they found the Fountainhead of those unities which escaped the philosophers of this age. In their day they resisted ‘the Greek spirit’ and called the church back to the fertile soil of the gospel. When this spirit meets this gospel – and Harnack was right, this is a perennial danger – it always yields bad fruit.īut in this article I want to look at two towering exceptions in the history of theology – Irenaeus and Athanasius. On the other we have a Hellenizing spirit which pits body and soul, earth and heaven, time and eternity against each other. On the one hand we have the Scriptures beginning with a very good creation, full of promises of land and seed and a Saviour taking flesh to renew heaven and earth.

Famously Adolf Von Harnack asserted in the History of Dogma that much of Christian theology betrayed the 'work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the gospel.' Now to be fair, the old liberal didn’t have much gospel himself but the observation has something to it.

The Act of Creation Will Be Your Salvation by Scifigrl47