Chapter Ten
1. What John has to say
concerns eternal truth, which is embedded and expressed in historical events.
The Prologue (John 1) speaks of the union of the eternal with the temporal. For
John, the incarnate Word is the true form of the divine presence with
humanity.
- How do you imagine
this union of the eternal with the temporal?
- What are the
consequences of this union for believers?
2. To the modern reader,
John’s use of ‘Word’ (in Greek, Logos) may, at first sight, seem strange and
puzzling. Its aptness for John’s purpose lies in the double reference that it
makes to both Greek and Hebrew thinking.
The fusion of the ideas of
enabling order and unfolding dynamic process, suggested by the double
linguistic reference of John’s use of Word, is highly consonant with science’s
understanding of cosmic history.
- How do you respond
to Polkinghorne’s scientific explanation and integration of the Greek &
Hebrew interpretations of “Word?”
3. This
extraordinary passage (Colossians 1:15-20) is claiming a cosmic significance
for Jesus Christ, an assertion that is being made about a person who had been
crucified perhaps thirty years before the epistle was written. As in the
Prologue to John, it is stated that Christ truly makes known the divine nature
as ‘the image of the invisible God’.
What interests me especially in this passage is the last verse,
which says that Christ reconciles all things by ‘making peace through the blood
of his cross’. Notice that it is ‘all things’, not simply all people.
Redemption is proclaimed to be cosmic in scope.”
- What are the many ramifications of such cosmic redemption?
4. Polkinghorne’s
third biblical reference is Romans 8:19–23. Why should God have subjected the
creation to futility? There is a resonance here, not only with modern
scientific predictions of eventual cosmic futility, but also with the
inescapable cost of evolutionary natural
process. There has to be enough genetic mutation to produce new forms of life, but not
so much mutation that these new forms do not get established as species on
which the sifting effects of natural selection can act. Creative processes of
this kind will necessarily generate ragged edges and blind alleys as well as
extraordinary fruitfulness. In this insight there is some help for theology as
it wrestles with the problems of disease and disaster in the divine creation.
They are not something gratuitous, that a God who was a bit more competent or a
bit less callous could easily have eliminated. They are the inescapable cost of
the good of a world in which creatures are allowed to make
themselves.
-
In light of this explanation, what is God’s will for creation?
5. The
costliness of evolutionary process means that the creation has indeed been
‘groaning in labour pains until now’. However, the last word does not lie with
death and futility, but with God. It is the Christian hope and belief that the
divine faithfulness will not allow anything of good eventually to be lost, but
God will give to all creatures an appropriate destiny beyond their deaths, as
the old creation is ultimately transformed in Christ into the new creation.
Christians believe that this process
has, in fact, already begun in the seed event of the resurrection of Jesus.
Paul sets before us the hope and promise ‘that the creation itself will be set
free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the
children of God’. Ultimate cosmic destiny and ultimate human destiny lie
together in the One who redeems all things by the blood of his cross.
Romans 8 is one of the most profound
and hopeful chapters in the New Testament and reading it in the light of modern
scientific understanding helps us to find new levels of profundity in
it.
-
How has Romans 8 given you insight to and appreciation of the grand scope of
redemption and renewal in Christ for the cosmos?
-
What does this divine agenda, already active since the resurrection of Jesus,
give you hope beyond this life?
