Abstract
It ought to be said that Ian McFarland has written the most important treatment of the doctrine of creation in recent theology. Creatio ex nihilo has lately suffered the dismal fate of either being attacked as the lynchpin of what is believed to be classical theology’s arbitrary, domineering God or else invoked by its defenders as a panacea for the troubled soul of modern theology. The latter has tended rightly to highlight the former’s failure to grasp the noncompetitive relation enshrined in the teaching, but these claims have been, in the main, philosophical and defensive since they have not resulted in a positive, constructive treatment of the doctrine. Ian A. McFarland, recently appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, has addressed that deficiency with a remarkable work that treats the doctrine as a direct implication of Scripture and firmly inflected in trinitarian and christological terms.
McFarland’s thesis is that creation is “a corollary of the belief that Christ is the one in whom all things were created (Col. 1:16) and apart from whom nothing was made that was made (John 1:3)” (xiii). Though this claim forecloses on the possibility of treating creatio ex nihilo as a general philosophical truth, McFarland deftly evades parochial confessionalism. He combines attentive and compelling readings of Scripture, an impressive knowledge of science and philosophy, and a broadly ecumenical palette of interlocutors to produce a work that is as illuminating as it is creative.
McFarland organized his work into two parts that follow the traditional theme of the overflow (exitus) and return (reeditus). After an introduction of his method of inquiry and its assumptions, he uses the three chapters that constitute the first part to analyze the meaning of the single proposition, “God creates from nothing.” Focused on God, creation, and nothing, respectively, these chapters ground Creation God’s triune life. He argues that the diversity and unity of the created order, as well as the immediate dependence of creation on God alone, must be understood as the reflection in time of the Word’s eternal procession from the Father. In its finite limitations, creation is teleologically directed to achieve the distinctive perfection of union with God through the differentiation from God that defines it. In this respect, McFarland proves to be a follower of Irenaeus and Maximus the Confessor. Many passages in this first section seem to anticipate a companion treatment of redemption, one in which the Word’s incarnation actualizes that perfection in time and is the complete expression of the divine procession, not merely its reflection. The second part treats creation as it is ordered by God to this perfection. Its three chapters are on evil, providence, and glory. The chapter on evil is of special note for its unusual defense of the classical dictum that evil is “nothing” through insightful meditations on Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. Though insightful, the chapters on providence and glory raise a set of interrelated concerns within the volume.
First, like Charles Wood, whom he cites approvingly, McFarland follows Quenstedt (and implicitly Farrer) by placing concursus alongside conservatio and gubernatio in the doctrine of providence, and understanding it to mean “double-agency.” This raises the specter of Molina and the de Auxiliis controversy, and risks controverting McFarland’s otherwise assiduous precautions against any hint of competition between God and creation. That controversy proved that even the best of such precautions are only as good as the account of the union of creation, grace, and human freedom that they nurture. The chapters on providence and glory, then, bear a greater theological burden than it may seem. Thus, McFarland’s declaration that providence “stresses the gracious character of created nature” (137), distinguishing it from grace by the “mode” rather than “degree” of its dependence on “nothing but God” (136), he raises the very tangible concern that, for all its merits, this account of creation may—once again—prove inadequate to the demands of a coherent theology of grace. From Origen to Barth or from Augustine to de Lubac, their theology of grace has always ultimately determined the viability of a theologian’s doctrine of creation.