In what I thought was the most controversial post I have written this year, but that generated no comments, I suggested that without the word of the Gospel creation just communicates the law. I explained that while creation can witness to its creator, it cannot witness to how we are to relate to him (through Christ) and so only condemns. I didn't really explain how if functions as law even if you do not see the witness to God in it. Oswald Bayer describes how:
If the world is not believed as that which is promised, then it will be experienced as a "fearful natural realm" [Arnold Gehlen], as a relentlessly necessary, oppressive law, which says: you must squeeze some sense out of this chaos, this fearful natural realm in all its uncertainty; you have to be in charge of making sense in this and out of this chaotic world; you yourself have to establish its order! If the world is not believed to be that which is promised, then it becomes, as Nietzsche aptly observed, "a thousand deserts, mute and cold." In such muteness and such coldness I experience God's wrath - admittedly so anonymously that I simply cannot even identify it as God's wrath.
(p. 102, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)
I guess every gospel presentation is experienced as law apart from faith. Therefore even the gospel presentation of creation (Col 1:23) can be experienced as law. Is that the sort of thing you mean?
ReplyDeleteI sometimes reflect on how Psalm 19 proclaims the word of Christ in creation (Rom 10:17f) - the Champion, Bridegroom, Light of the world - but that same creation is seen in Ecclesiastes as a meaningless, closed circle.
Gospel is in the eye of the beholder sort of thing.
I like it. Yes. I like the eye of the beholder comment.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it comes back to our understanding of faith we were talking about the other day. If faith is assurance that God promises good to me, then it is the eye through which we view any 'gospel' presentation. If we do not see promise in something then by definition we will only experience the law of death, because apart from God's promise to me that is what everything is (even if initially we think we can 'create' or 'work' something good for ourselves only to be disappointed).
Seeing the promise to us is what faith is. So apart from faith there is only law by definition.
Remind you of Calvin? :)
For the benefit of any readers who have not read Calvin's Institutes...
ReplyDeleteCalvin is not saying the same thing as I am in my comment. I'm not even sure whether he would agree. But he does talk about the scripture as 'spectacles' that enable us bring the witness of creation to God into focus in 1.6.1.