Creatio ex nihilo. ‘Creation out of nothing’ is an important concept when it comes to a doctrine of creation for the Christian; TF Torrance, along with the Patristic tradition, made this a staple of his theological outworking. Colin Gunton offers a look at Irenaeus’, among others, doctrine of creation and brings to attention the central role that Christology and the economy of God’s Triune life plays in his theology of creation and redemption. What I want to focus on, through Gunton, is how eschatology functioned in Irenaeus’ conception of creation, and the role the ‘perfecting’ of creation played therein. It is interesting, as Gunton highlights, that for Irenaeus in-built into creation’s “perfection” there is an “imperfection” or a latency or potentiality within creation wherein it is originally created, out of nothing, with a pregnancy that can only come to term through an experiential maturation and growth process that finally comes to fruition and ultimacy only insofar as that is realized (recapitulated) in and through Jesus Christ.

We will hear from Gunton, and then I am going to try and draw out some implications of this Irenaean teaching for us in the 21^st century church. I want to emphasize how thinking reality from this sort of Christ-centric creatio ex nihilo is significant for understanding our purpose and place in the world coram Deo; and how it ought to clear away for us so much of the cultural accretions that we allow to artificially build up around us based upon our own pseudo-creating as human animals.

Eschatology is important because it enables us to engage with what is both a crux of interpretation of the thought of Irenaeus and a major problem in the doctrine of creation. Irenaeus has been accused of inconsistency in his doctrine of creation in teaching both that creation is perfect and that it is imperfect:

In his protracted rebuttal of gnostic sects, Irenaeus repeatedly emphasises the unqualified goodness of creation. But in iv, 38 he springs upon the reader the surprising contention that Adam, as first created by God, was imperfect.

Although, however, Irenaeus may appear sometimes to say that Adam was created perfect, sometimes not, there is a contradiction only on a rather static understanding of perfection. As we shall see when we come to treat them meaning of creation ‘in the beginning’, the doctrine of creation out of nothing does imply that creation in one sense indeed complete. But it does not follow that it is perfect in the sense that it does not have to be perfected. The creation is, we might say, perfect in that it is destined for perfection. That is, it is relatively perfect: created for an eschatological perfecting. It is the eschatological destiny of finite creation that makes a fall possible; in that sense, the creation is imperfect. As Douglas Farrow has argued, with particular reference to the passage on the basis of which Irenaeus is accused of contradiction, this theologian does apparently teach the imperfection of creation; but it is an imperfection which:

makes the fall possible,  not inevitable. The ‘imperfection’ is this: The love for God which is the life of man cannot emerge ex nihilo in full bloom; it requires to grow with experience. But that in turn is what makes the fall, however unsurprising, such a devastating affair. In the fall man is ‘turned backwards.’ He does not grow up in the love of God as he intended to. The course of his time, his so-called progress, is set in the wrong direction.

For Irenaeus, ‘good’ means precisely that which is destined for perfection. On such an eschatological understanding, the relation of creation and redemption according to Irenaeus is clear in its basic outline, though complex in its outworking, because we are here concerned with the relation of time and eternity. Redemption or salvation is that divine action which returns the creation to its proper direction, its orientation to its eschatological destiny, which is to be perfected in due course of time by God’s enabling it to be that which it was created to be. By virtue of their trinitarian mediation, both creation and its restoration in redemption are acts of the one God in and towards the whole created order. In turn, that means that Irenaeus must not be thought to operate with a naively linear conception of time. As Dr Farrow has shown, for Irenaeus the world is to be understood as process, but it is not – as in the contemporary process theologians – linear process.

[I]t is one of Irenaeus’ great strengths to have incorporated process as a positive . . . feature of his world-view. But the process in question is not a straightforward, linear one. Rather it involves a fraction, a breaking up. Worldly reality in all its aspects, the material and the immaterial, enters into a situation of fructification and endless bounty precisely by way of participation in the descent and ascent of Jesus.[1]

That is an interesting discussion to me. It notes what Matthew Levering might call the ‘participatory’ nature of history and eschatology. Creation itself has a primacy, as the Scotist thesis understands, and its primacy is grounded in its experience with the Christ; with its originally intended ‘elevation’ to something greater than what it seemingly originally came with. Irenaeus was attuned to this early on, and I think it is something we ought to become attuned to ourselves. Beyond the technical critique of “inconsistency,” as Gunton has shown through Farrow, there is a depth dimension to what Irenaeus was thinking in regard to creation and recreation. That creation itself has always already been tensed by its prior reality given to it in and by the reality of God in Christ for the world.

Let me make what will seem like an abrupt turn at this point. What theology like this does for me, from a doxological perspective, is that it takes me deeper than the normal church sub-cultures allow me to go. It takes me into an orientation where so much of the hubris generated by the superficialities we experience in the church, as we allow the culture at large to shape the church culture, to be cut away. What we are left with as we reflect on these deeper creational and primal realities is that God is God and we are not; that the world we live in is his and its shape, whether we are saturated in its reality or not, is that Jesus is King. What thinking at these levels does for me is to ground me in the fact that almost all of what counts as reality and culture in the broader societies is chaff. So this gives me a substantial hope and orientation; one that is grounded in the reality that the Word of the LORD will endure forever whereas what the World says is reality will simply fade away as the grass withers and blows away.

[1] Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical And Systematic Study (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), Loc 812, 819, 825, 831 kindle.