(1) Philosophy and the richness of creation

“And it was good” said God concerning creation six times before concluding on the seventh occasion that it was very good.  Any philosophy that aims to honour God will have to reckon with the goodness of creation.  As Vollenhoven has it, Reformational philosophy takes creation, the cosmos as distinct from God, as its focus.  This is an important difference from other philosophical approaches.  One consequence of this difference is that we honour God by doing justice to the richness of creation.  Much philosophy finds its motivation in trying to explain the whole of reality in terms of a very limited range of features.  Today materialism is very popular.  According to this view everything that exists is just physical stuff arranged in a variety of complex ways.  Materialism may well be very ‘open’ to new evidence and to the further progress of science. However, it is still a ‘closed system’ in the terms of the quote from Vollenhoven since it encloses the richness of creation in only one of its dimensions or aspect (the material), and therefore shuts itself off from the many other dimensions of creation.

An emphasis on doing justice to the richness of creation may cause a positive reaction.  “Good,” some might say, “a philosophy that affirms God’s world in all its variety.  A Christian philosophy that gives a ‘yes’ to being fully human, a Christian philosophy that is not restrictive of human activity out of fear of being too worldly”.  That is a reaction we hope for since we can only be truly human by being in Christ and so being reconciled to God.  Christ came that we should have life, and life in all its fullness.

However, it is quite possible that this talk about the richness of creation might provoke a different reaction.  Others may have had some good experience of philosophy, but mixed in with more disheartening experiences.  Philosophy can be difficult and complicated, full of strange words and abstract distinctions.  Such people may well have read some reformational philosophy and found this to be their experience.  “All this talk of the richness of creation,” they object, “is it not just an excuse to be over complicated?  And after all, what is the practical use of all this theory?  Should we as Christians really spend so much time on obscure philosophy?”

The requirement that philosophy should enrich our lives is a valid one, though we need also to be careful of closing things down by demanding that something have an immediate and obvious practical use.  Leaving that aside for now, since we can agree that the objection does have its validity, let us consider an example of what doing justice to the richness of creation might look like.  Before continuing consider the planning of an event, choose something familiar to you, in my next post I’ll reflect on planning a child’s birthday party.  What things would you need to consider?

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