Christ, Creation, and the Fall: Discerning Human Purpose from an Evolving Nature

Simon R. Watson

doi:10.5771/9781978710931

Summary

If the Christian God is creator of all things and revealed in Christ to be compassionate love, then how can divine agency in creation be understood considering the Darwinian assertion that biological warfare undergirds natural selection? The implications are significant for understanding Christian discipleship and ethics if indeed the human is made in God’s image with the capacity for creative or destructive “dominion” over earthly life (Gen. 1:26). To approach this challenge, Simon R. Watson turns to Philip Hefner’s The Human Factor (1993), which identifies the human as created co-creator to investigate themes of freedom and determinism in light of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Hefner’s argument exploring human purpose from a beneficence discernible in creation invites a re-examination of Victorian preoccupations with natural teleology. Inspired by Hefner’s work, Watson places Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) in conversation with historical and contemporary sources, from William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) to twenty-first century articulations of Wisdom Christology by Denis Edwards and Elizabeth Johnson, to argue that theology can offer a framework of meaning to interpret an evolving nature as revelatory of a Christian God when considered through the lens of a suffering Christ and an existentially fallen creation.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2021
Copyright year: 2021
ISBN-Print: 978-1-9787-1092-4
ISBN-Online: 978-1-9787-1093-1
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 156
Product type: Book Titles

1. Contents No access
2. Acknowledgments No access
3. Introduction No access
1. Introduction No access
2. An Ethics of the Cross and a Suffering Creation No access
3. Paley’s Natural Theology as Theologia Gloriae No access
4. The Argument Cumulative No access
5. Evidence and the Emerging Awareness of Inference and Interpretation No access
6. Paley’s Natural Theology as Theologia Crucis No access
7. The “Newtonian Synthesis” as Anglican Apologetic No access
8. Reason and Revelation in Creation No access
9. Conclusion No access
10. Notes No access
1. Introduction No access
2. Darwin and the Natural History of the Moral Sense or Conscience No access
3. Darwin’s Hope and Faith in Progress No access
4. Darwin’s Theory as a Call for Social Justice No access
5. Natural Selection and the Question of Human Freedom No access
6. A Wider Teleology and the Emergence of the Human as “word of the Word” No access
7. Asa Gray on Natural Selection and Divine Design No access
8. Aubrey Moore on the Facts of Nature as the Acts of God No access
9. Conclusion No access
10. Notes No access
1. Introduction No access
2. Sacrificial Love and Natural Selection No access
3. Feminist Criticism of Sacrificial Motif No access
4. Irenaean Type of Theodicy: John H. Hick No access
5. Natural Selection as Insurmountable Challenge? No access
6. The Value of a Figurative and Existential Fall No access
7. Conclusion No access
8. Notes No access
1. Introduction No access
2. Sophia as Emancipatory God-Language for Women and Nature No access
3. Wisdom Christology as Ecological Theology No access
4. Deification of the Flesh No access
5. Divine Immanence as Trinitarian Love of Mutual Relations No access
6. Creaturely Participation in Sophia’s Goodness, Being, and Agency No access
7. Evolution as the Autonomous “Self-transcendence” of Creation No access
8. Limitations of “Free Process Defence” with Thomistic Notion of Participation No access
9. “New Earth” as Realization or Interruption of Natural Law No access
10. Conclusion No access
11. Notes No access
1. Notes No access
Bibliography No access Pages 137 - 144
Index No access Pages 145 - 154
About the Author No access Pages 155 - 156