by Rob and Sim Gregory
The Study Center Perspective
The current year marks the beginning of our 17th year working with students at Bowdoin College, and the 9th year serving these Bowdoin students at the Joseph and Alice McKeen Study Center. The 2022-2023 edition of the Agathos Journal is also the 9th publication of Bowdoin student and Bowdoin community essays reflecting on our weekly study, prayer and devotions on a yearly theme. The theme this year is our creation beginnings.
Our contribution to the journal each year is to reflect on the larger theme of the four-year cycle of first things, middle things, last things, and all things; our way of referring to the simple outline for the Christian ministry at Bowdoin College. We adopted this approach in 2014 when the on-campus ministry relocated across the street to a duplex near the edge of campus, affiliated as a member Study Center with the Coalition of Christian Study Centers. As directors of this Study Center, our mission is to help these students develop an increasing awareness of the coordinates of our earthly existence (the Self, World and Time –Oliver O’Donovan (2014)) that guide their human agency. These include of course the possibilities, the failures as well as the present imperatives to act “while it is still day” according to the faith of Christian teaching and practices. These three temporal horizons of beginning, middle, and end of life are the focus of Jesus’ teaching to his young disciples over a period of ministry similar to the time given to us in the four-year cycle of the student’s life on campus. We accept those horizons as the norm for our program of scripture reading and study during the short season we are with these students during their liminal years. The Beginning as a Very Good Place to Start For the academic year 2022-2023, we take on for the third time questions of creation beginnings. During the first semester our focus was entirely on developing an understanding of the givenness of the order of creation. We began the semester with the early church creeds which assumed the Lord God maker of Heaven and Earth as a creedal confession prerequisite to admission into the church life. The early Christians acknowledged the fact of creation as an article of faith. Hebrews 11:3 By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. (ESV) The foundational creeds put forth creation as a self-evident truth (you know this) and we draw confidence from that position that we may move ahead with a year spent reading the scriptures to understand creation without apologetic attempts to prove what cannot be proven. You know this!
The Apostles Creed begins, I believe in God the Father Almighty maker of heaven and Earth; and the Nicene Creed begins with the words, We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.
The faith premise of Christianity rests on beliefs in the God who is the maker of Heaven and Earth. Against these Christian presuppositions, the college student today must expect the scoffers and critics predicted by the apostle Peter, writing in his second letter to the early church, who will deliberately overlook and deny the creation event, and their creatureliness. 2 Peter 3:5 For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, (ESV).
We then examined the New Testament emphasis on New Creation. The scriptures paradoxically offer special insights about the beginnings at the end in the Book of Revelation and the new heaven, the new earth and a new garden that point to the fulfillment of the promise of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1. Revelation 21:1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. (ESV) and Revelation 22.1 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. The apostle John, writing from the island of Patmos, would go on to say the words he was writing were trustworthy and true, that the God who makes all things new is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Revelation 21. 5-6. It turns out that the end is also a very good place to start.
The premise behind our 4-year catechism for students that opens with “creation beginnings” is that there is on the side of the Christian faith, a deliberate confessional commitment to what we know to be the truth of human origins. We did not make ourselves. We arrived at the moment of our birth in a well-ordered universe. Firstyear students at this highly selective American college undertake a course load that assumes in every academic field that there is an order to be known. That order was there before they arrived and will be there when they leave. Across the street from the Academy in this modest Study Center we assume without apologetic proof that that same ordered universe which students study in their courses at Bowdoin is also a morally ordered universe. These twin assumptions imply that a knowledge of the Creator is essential to understanding our experience of the world in both its order and its disorders. The possibility of shaping moral beliefs about how to live within that world inescapably raises questions about the account we give for our time within it. Hebrews 4.13 And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. The Gospel of Jesus Christ transmitted it to us is good news that God is vindicating and standing by the world He made in Jesus Christ of Nazareth who is also the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of all that is made. On the side of human experience, we are the creatures, the redeemed and those sustained by the providential hand of the Ruler of all nations.
Creation, History and Necessity
The balance of the first semester focused on the nature of the world God made with a particular focus on its goodness. We postponed entirely to the second semester our inquiry into the narrative of human sin; the misadventures and failures of the opportunities to live in a world that is the primordial good gift to be received, where all the good we could know comes from God, and all that God created was good. We looked at God's order of creation that brought the apostle John to tears in the Revelation when he learned from an angelic voice that there were matters that must take place. These are the necessities of human history that point both to order and disorder, and John saw no one in his vision worthy to open the scroll that makes these things intelligible. The Bowdoin student’s academic investigations of the aspects of that world given them to study will reveal to them its good order, and delightfully tell them something about its Maker and our Maker. The longer historic narrative of scripture informs them, however, that God has not only ordered the world in its structure and design with purpose and meaning, but he exercises his providential rule over that world understood as history. The God who made the world is the same God who governs its operations, and neither of these two are clear to us.
At this Study Center we believe that students can benefit from the angel's words to John that dried his tears with a promise of intelligibility about all of the necessities of our creatureliness, both those that are ordered in the nature of things, and those which God orders providentially for his purposes to bless his creation. Revelation 5:5 And one of the elders said to me, Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals (ESV). As the students deepen their convictions about a world created to be inhabited and ordered physically and materially to be known for that purpose, the more they come to appreciate the God who governs that contested space. Psalm 2.1 Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? 2 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed. (ESV)
Prayers and Creation Psalms
During the course of the summer and continuing into the semester our student leaders conducted regular Thursday evening prayer times centering on the many Psalms of the scriptures that point to God's purpose in creation, reminding us that the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Psalm 19. 1. We explored together the question of how much of God's purposes for human life are generally revealed in the creation and how much we are dependent on the specially revealed perfect law of the Lord that revives the soul (19.7). The creation of God is rich with content to tell us how we are to live within it.
Elohim the God of Creation and Yahweh the God of Redemption
After a few weeks walking our way backwards through the scriptures and observing the way the Old Testament writers identified the God of creation (Elohim) as the same God who would redeem a people for himself as their covenant Redeemer (Yahweh) we read extended portions of Isaiah's prophecies from chapter 39 through 45 that left no doubt that the God who was in control of the history of Israel was the God who made them. Thus says God the Lord who created the heavens and stretch them out, who spread out the Earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk in it: I am the Lord; I have called you in righteousness; I will take you by the hand and keep you; I will give you as a covenant for the people, a light for the nations.... Isaiah 42. 5 - 6.
Genesis 1 – The Good of the Beginning
We concluded the semester examining Genesis 1 and 2. Our focus primarily was to examine the question of the good. It is not self-evident these days what is good if we experience good only idiosyncratically as our subjective preference. The scriptures challenge that cultural presupposition. From the very beginning in Genesis 1, God controls the territory that identifies the good. Paul writes to Timothy in 1st Timothy 4.4 For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, 5 for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.
But who can say what is good? Who will arbitrate competing claims to the good? The questions are at once theological and political. The Psalmist acknowledges this broader public anxiety about who and how we might adjust among competing creation-ordered common goods. Psalms 4:6 There are many who say, Who will show us some good? Lift up the light of your face upon us, O LORD! (ESV). We were particularly challenged by a reading of Psalm 119. 65 through 71 to learn about the many ways that we experience the good subjectively, formally, and as a divine command from the Creator who mediates the good to us by the one who is good and does good and teaches us through structures of commands to be obeyed. Psalms 119:68 You are good and do good; teach me your statutes. (ESV) The world that is before the college student to know as good is the world that presupposes in that goodness commands and demands to be obeyed. The Psalmist exclaims the Heavens pours forth speech (Psalm 19.1) and that creation speech is both descriptive of the world and prescriptive about our life within it.
Male and Female, He Created Them – In the Beginning
We closed out the first semester with 5 weeks studying the order of creation as it relates to male and female, the dimorphic structure of human life endorsed throughout the scriptures and by the moral teachings of the early church. We observed how the moral codes of the New Testament teaching the church about what it means to be male and what it means to be female, and about the creation ordered structure of marriage was not reacting to the fall of mankind of Genesis 3. Rather, the texts that we examined from Matthew 19 (Jesus teaching), 1 Corinthians chapters 6 and 11, 1st Timothy chapter 2, 1st Peter chapter 2 and Ephesians chapter 5 were a New Testament discourse on the goodness of Genesis 1 and 2. These New Testament moral guides to life as male and female look to the creation before the fall in Eden, thus grounding the moral life in the creation structures of life.
Questions of Creation Beginnings, Sin and Evil
At the time of writing this article we are about to turn the page at the Study Center to begin to review questions of human sin and its origins. We will explore how evil has only a secondary reality, some have called it a quasi-reality, that only appears as a negation of God's good in the order of creation and of God's good in the providential direction and governance of all that he made. Our hope is to end the semester with a clearer understanding of how our readings from the first semester and the readings of the second semester address that question of Psalm 4: Who will show us the good? We urge our students at the Study Center to be careful about our words. We hope that these students will not think about the good in casual speech without reflecting back on the way God has shown us the good. In a similar way, we ask the students to think about who they are as male and female, created in the image of God, and to try to make the effort to discourse on this question using the same words which scripture offers to us to understand both the structure and the purpose behind it. What God made male and female, endorsed throughout the scripture as the normative shape of our humanity - by Jesus and by the apostolic witness in the New Testament - is the exclusive framework for a Christian understanding of masculinity, femininity, marriage, divorce, and sexual immorality. These same words shape our understanding of it!
Biblical words about male and female run through virtually every page of the scripture and cannot be maintained (and never could it seem) without confronting earthly powers with different answers to the question, who will show us the good. From the perspective of the Biblical prophets, we must assume that these kingdoms, powers and authorities will assume that they, and not the church, possess that privilege exclusively and against all rivals. For that reason, these studies are made available at the Study Center where they cannot be held at other venues at this campus. Such is the nature of the proclamation of the Christian gospel in increasingly contested spaces.
In spite of this, it remains our joy and privilege to help students at Bowdoin College prepare for life in the church when we see them off at the end of their four-year sojourn among the tall pines of Brunswick, Maine.