Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn her seven pillars.
• Proverbs 9:1
Though separated by over two and a half millennia, the authors of ancient Scripture and numerous scientists of today find themselves caught up in a world of abiding astonishment.
• Brown, William P., The Seven Pillars of Creation
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In William P. Brown’s stimulating book, The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder
In order to facilitate this, the author suggests the following:
To recapture something of the awe that fostered the spirit of inquiry among the ancients and today ignites the “vital spark of wonder that drives the best science,” I want to embark on my own tour of sorts, not so much a roller-coaster ride as a leisurely excursion. I propose a tour of the biblical contours of creation conducted in conversation with science, an expedition that boldly charts the now uncommon ground of wonder. (p. 5)
The central aim of The Seven Pillars of Creation is to help readers contemplate “the Bible’s own inexhaustible richness, its profound wonder” in its accounts of creation. Notice, I said accounts (plural). One of this book’s contributions to our creation discussions is to remind us that “the creation story” goes far beyond Genesis 1-2 and weaves its way all throughout the Hebrew Bible. In fact, he notes seven creation accounts, seven separate accounts, none of which tells the complete story in and of itself.
1. Genesis 1:1-2:3
2. Genesis 2:4b-3:24
3. Job 38-41
4. Psalm 104
5. Proverbs 8:22-31
6. Ecclesiastes 1:2-11; 12:1-7
7. Isaiah 40-55 (excerpts)
First, the truth of the Incarnation means that Christians cannot separate their views of the biblical world from what we learn from the natural world.
Theologically, there is no other option: faith in such a God calls people of faith to understand and respect the natural order, the world that God deemed “extremely good” (Gen 1:31) and saw fit to inhabit. The God in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) has all to do with the world in which we do indeed live and move and have our being. The world subsists in God even as God remains present in the world. It is, admittedly, a mystery. But through science we become more literate in the mysteries of creation and, in turn, more trustworthy “stewards” of those mysteries. (p. 7
Second, “Wisdom” may form the bridge we need between matters of science and faith. He observes that the rabbi’s linked “Wisdom’s seven pillars” (Proverbs 9:1) with the seven days of Creation in Genesis 1.
This insight, regardless of its exegetical validity, has inspired the title of this project. Wisdom’s “edifice complex” is, I submit, an appropriate framework for studying biblical creation in conversation with science. Biblical wisdom was nurtured by a spirit of inquiry. It acknowledges creation’s multifaceted integrity, complexity, and mystery. . . . As biblical Wisdom invites her students to enter her spacious home and partake of her varied fare (Prov 9:2-4), so the reader is invited to enter the Bible’s various perspectives on creation, to wander and to wonder, and from wonder to gain wisdom. (p. 8)
Third, though science and theology represent independent realms of inquiry, cross-disciplinary discussions are meaningful and important to both.
Because both seek truth, because each discipline is driven by an “onto-logical thirst, by the thirst to know reality as it is,” each can learn from the other, especially theology from science. If theology is about relating the world to God but does not take into account the world as known through science, then it fails. And such failure strikes at the very heart of the theological task, for among theology’s anathemas is the stigma of irrelevance or “the lack of cultural competence.” (p. 8)
William P. Brown longs for a day when the world is filled with people who are both contemplators and empiricists, sages and psalmists, stewards of the earth and servants of Christ.
This book invites the non-expert who yearns to know more about engaging biblical faith and science in constructive, as opposed to confrontational, ways. This study also welcomes the scientist who desires to know more about what the ancient Scriptures say about cosmology, nature, and humanity’s place. In short, I want to help readers become more literate in Scripture and science, as I have become in the course of my research. Specifically, I want to bring together two distinct disciplines, biblical theology and modern science, and explore points of conversation in ways that I hope generate more synergy than sparks. My conviction is that one cannot adequately interpret the Bible today, particularly the creation traditions, without engaging science. Otherwise, the Bible’s “strange new world” would become an old irrelevant word. (pp. 6-7)
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By William P. Brown
Oxford University Press, Inc. (2010)
William P. Brown is the William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA.
It was still “the Bible alone,” as proclaimed during the Reformation, that American Protestants trusted. But it was also “the Bible alone” of all historic religious authorities that survived the antitraditional tide and then undergirded the remarkable evangelical expansion of the early nineteenth century . By undercutting trust in other traditional authorities , the power-suspecting ideologies of the Revolutionary and constitutional periods had the ironic effect of scripturalizing the United States. Deference to inherited authority of bishops and presbyters was largely gone, obeisance to received creeds was largely gone, willingness to heed the example of the past was largely gone. What remained was the power of intuitive reason, the authority of written documents that the people approved for themselves, and the Bible alone.
In spite of the televangelism scandals and the failed presidential run of Pat Robertson, the evangelical right remained the political and cultural baseline for measuring the status of religion in American public life. The emergence of groups like Moral Majority, wrote theologian Richard John Neuhaus in the mid-1980s, “kicked a tripwire” in the ongoing church-state debate. Perhaps, as wise minds across the political spectrum once again argued, religion was vital to the health of American democracy. In the Age of Evangelicalism, “religion” was often translated, however inaccurately, as “evangelical Christianity.” Yet many evangelical elites saw themselves as an embattled minority even as they sought—and gained— public influence. In the 1990s, the audacious Christian Coalition and other born-again banes of President Bill Clinton shared the stage with a disproportionately prominent group of moderate evangelical scholars and public intellectuals. They, in turn, coexisted with (and chafed at) the booming evangelical music and entertainment market. Two metaphors profoundly informed discussions of faith and public life in the fin de siècle United States: the “naked public square” and the “culture war.”
The widespread growth of Christian bookstores.
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, Horton has been saying that evangelicals are on the verge of theological/ecclesiastical disaster.
We activate Scripture as a weapon in our lives when we speak it. In fact, this is the model Jesus used during His temptation in the wilderness. Three times He countered Satan’s temptations with scripture, responding, “It is written…” In other words, “Shut up, devil!” Scripture silenced Satan and forced him to flee (Matt. 4:1–11).
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