A New Creation?

As mentioned yesterday, I recently read a book called Surprised by Hope, although I don't recall why. Probably just the usual cosmic randomness. Dávila says something to the effect that chance determines most of what we read, while we can choose only what is worthy of rereading, the latter constituting a fraction of the former.

While I won't be rereading this one, it did touch on a subject worthy of some head-scratching, although we won't know if it's deserving of a post until the post is written. Or ends in a train wreck. All aboard!

For Dávila,

Only ancient writings have a cure for the modern itch.

I don't go quite that far, so long as the modern writer is mindful of the ancient, which is to say, the perennial and timeless.

Anyway, this book got me thinking about the whole subject of creation, which is not a one-and-done matter, rather, a temporal unfolding of the timeless principle of creation. 

For example, in my book I highlighted several abrupt and discontinuous events of irreducible creativity, the first being existence itself. Science, of course, traces the universe back to the Big Bang, but the creativity hardly ends there. The next bang occurs with the emergence of the animate from the inanimate, and then the "special creation" of human persons from the matrix of pre-personal life.

We concluded -- spoiler alert -- that the principle of mind, life, and being must be located above, not below. Each of these is at once distinct, but a kind of fractal of the creative principle itself, which operates in a top-down manner.  

Today we shall explore the proposition that Christianity represents another distinct and discontinuous bang, which is to say, a new creation amidst the existing one. It is not only related to the earlier ones (existence, life, and mind) but their consummation. In this regard, it is a much more radical metaphysic than the one to which I was exposed in Sunday school. Which was no metaphysic at all. 

Rather, it was something that was true on Sunday but impossible to reconcile with the Monday-through Saturday-metaphysic of rationalistic scientism. 

I should emphasize that there have been any number of smaller creative bangs within the bigger ones -- for example, from single celled prokaryotes to nucleated eucaryotes, or reptiles to mammals. There were also many subdivisions of the big bang itself, in which the universe took on new properties.

Regarding the human dimension, we could point to the emergence of Neolithic peoples out of the Paleolithic, or to the Axial Age, when Here Comes Everybody rather suddenly discovered the (or a) nonlocal principle of everything:

The Axial Age is the period when, roughly at the same time around most of the inhabited world, the great intellectual, philosophical, and religious systems that came to shape subsequent human society and culture emerged.... during this period there was a shift away from more predominantly localized concerns and toward transcendence.

Say what you want about the Axial Age, but Christianity represents a new creation out of this prior development. In one sense this is obvious, i.e. Christianity emerges out of its Jewish matrix, but it is also something much more radical and discontinuous than that.

Which is one reason why, when he walked the earth, it was impossible to understand Christ within the existing framework. Indeed, his closest disciples hadn't a clue, and one of Wright's central themes is that most of the restavus still don't get it.

What part of Creation do you not understand?

Something like that, for it is indeed a question of an entirely novel development:

Jesus of Nazereth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation (Wright). 

That's pretty radical -- not just another charter member of the Axial Club, but something that emerges out of it: "If a new creation is really on the loose, the historian wouldn't have any analogies for it..." 

In other words, radically new, not assimilable to existing categories. Is this a problem? Yes and no. No, in the sense that everything that happens has never happened before. History is full of unlikely events, from the calling of Abraham to the Annunciation to the American Revolution, and that's just some of the A's.

Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable.... History is full of unlikely things that happened once and once only, with the result that the analogies are often at best partial.

Sometimes humans are confronted with something that "if they accept it, will demand the remaking of their worldview." For example, physicists were initially quite reluctant to accept evidence of the Big Bang, because it implied things they didn't wish to entertain. Christianity "poses that kind of challenge to the larger worldview of both the historian and the scientist":

The challenge is in fact the challenge of new creation.

The resurrection "is not an absurd event within the old world but the symbol and starting point of the new world." It remains to us to "lay out the worldview within which it makes sense." A new paradigm for a new ontology, which is what science does when confronted with anomalous facts that don't fit into the old one.

Again, the anomalous fact of the Resurrection is not "a highly peculiar event within the present world... it is, principally, the defining event of the new creation, the world that is being born with Jesus."

Now, the early Christians "believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter." Which is a rather wild claim, but there it is. "The coming of Jesus emerges as the moment all creation had been waiting for." "Progress, left to itself, could never have brought it about," for 

This is no smooth evolutionary transition, in which creation simply moves up another gear into a higher mode of life.

Rather, it is a "transformation of the whole cosmos."

Now, I surely don't know what to make of that, but let's try to figure out what's going on here. In order to do so, we need a more capacious framework in which to situate it. Like so:

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. 

It will have to wait until tomorrow, as this post has gone on long enough. However, this might be a clue:

Creation is the nexus between eternity and history.